Kent Mayor Suzette Cooke says she refused to sign the City Council’s recently adopted 2017-2018 budget ordinance because it uses reserve funds rather than higher taxes or new fees to help pay for services.
Cooke’s refusal to sign the city budget won’t change anything. She needed to veto the budget measure in order to try to change it.
But the mayor criticized the budget decisions during a personal note at Tuesday night’s council meeting when she first revealed she hadn’t signed the document. The council voted 5-2 on Dec. 13 to adopt the budget. The council can overturn a mayor’s veto with five votes.
“The two-year budget is now law, but it is law without my signature,” Cooke said. “I did not veto the budget, but I could not sign it for the basic reason the budget expenditures exceed the projected revenues coming in for the next two-year period. So, in my mind, that is not operationally balanced.
“The budget funds our operations by taking $2 million from our general fund reserves, which thankfully have grown to a level we can consider fairly healthy. And the next year it takes another $2 million from our capital reserve fund, a fund that we have struggled over these last few years to rebuild because it was not only decimated but we were running in the negative in this fund.
“Clearly for me, having to manage this city through the recession and eliminate more than 100 positions in this city, finding us already dipping into those reserves, I couldn’t accept it.”
Capital reserve funds are used to help pay for parks, streets, facilities and other projects.
Council President Bill Boyce said during a phone interview on Wednesday that he respects the mayor’s decision about whether or not to sign the budget. But he’s confident the council passed a good budget.
When the council passed the budget, it decided to use reserve funds rather than raise property taxes as Cooke proposed to provide about $2 million per year to renovate several parks. Council members Dana Ralph and Les Thomas voted against the budget. Ralph raised many of the same reasons as Cooke for her no vote.
“She (Cooke) said it’s a unbalanced budget and I disagree with that,” Boyce said. “We decided to use our reserves to help with parks. Our policy says to keep reserves at 10 percent of our budget and it’s at about 18 percent.
“I have a hard time to ask taxpayers to put more burden on them to pay extra when we have money in the bank.”
Cooke is in her 12th and final year as mayor as she decided not to run for re-election this year. The council also shut down her budget proposal last fall to charge residents a vehicle license tab fee of $20 to help pay for street repairs.
“I don’t understand why we can’t ask our own residents for car tabs of $20 when here they are going to be paying much more than that to Sound Transit,” Cooke said about the agency’s tab fee approved in November by voters in three counties. “Is Sound Transit more worthy than serving our own residents with our local needs?”
The mayor said she favored using banked property tax capacity to raise taxes or using the business and occupation tax for other services, in addition to street repairs. Cooke has used her veto power just once during her three terms when in 2015 she vetoed how the council planned to spend B&O tax revenue on just street projects rather than additional services. The council overturned her veto with a 5-2 vote.
Cooke also rarely decides not to sign ordinances, although last year she refused to sign an ordinance adopted by the council to ban medical marijuana patient cooperatives in the city. The city already bans recreational marijuana businesses.
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