Earlier this week, The Chronicle published an article online about yet one another reason for us to lose sleep at night.
If it's not the end of the world due to global climate change, now we have to worry about the demise of something cute called a Crater Lake newt. Thankfully, though, help is on the way. And just in time, too.
This “cute little newt” has an ally, the Center of Biological Diversity, which is filing a lawsuit to save this little rascal, which is not to be confused with its subspecies the rough-skinned newt. Only federal money can save it.
And, so, we lie awake at night worrying what can be done if cuts are being made in Washington, D.C. The cute newt is “the canary in the coal mine,” screaming for help from the apex predator crawfish, and it's only chance of survival is borrowing more money from China, because we don’t have any.
This is just one reason why we are $36 trillion in debt.
Both parties have spent too much and, knowing that, promised to fix it if elected for years, but then don’t even try.
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Meanwhile, closer to home and in a related endangered species story, it appears taxpayers may have dodged a bullet — for now — on property taxes. The endangered are those who could be taxed out of their homes due to Democrats — and it was only Democrats — in Olympia salivating for more of our money to spend.
We just paid our property taxes and it gave me a reason to look at my assessments since 2020. Thank goodness my taxes — absent a local vote — could not go up more than 1% a year. Just my property — not my old house — has skyrocketed in assessed value. In 2020, it was $31,800. But today it’s $94,500. In just one year, from 2022 to 2023, it went from $41,800 to $94,500.
That seemed a bit much to me.
Had the property tax legislation Democrats wanted actually passed, as much as I’ve planned for retirement, I’m pretty sure my taxes would make living in my own home more difficult.
Last year, I reached out to the Lewis County Assessor’s Office about how on earth my assessed value was determined. The assessor did respond. I received a list of properties I couldn’t really make sense of, which really didn’t help that much.
But let's review a couple historical points about taxes that even I can recall.
Voters passed a $30 license fee because Olympia was charging too much for them. Reasoning with them made no difference, so voters acted, capping the license fee at $30. If you have a car, you also know that didn’t last.
Property taxes were going up at crazy rates and voters did the same thing, capping it at 1% a year unless voters approved an increase beyond that. Sometimes, voters passed taxes beyond 1%, and sometimes they said no with their vote. Now, however, voter-approved initiatives are overturned by our state Supreme Court — or as I refer to them, another liberal branch of our state government.
Supporting this proposal to increase the annual rate of property taxes were local governments and their lobbyists. Local taxpayers, however, have to work and don’t have a lobbyist, so all they could do was call and complain.
Perhaps the biggest surprise of this session and the budget process is the apparent objection by the new governor, Bob Ferguson, to so many new taxes. But I doubt he’ll push for the 6% cut he suggested earlier either.
Sen. John Braun, R-Centralia, was quoted recently saying in part: “In any other year, if we had a billion in new taxes, it would be considered a huge deal, and now we are 10 to 20 times bigger than that.”
In this story, we the taxpayers are the canaries in the coal mine, but Olympia really isn’t interested in saving us.
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John McCroskey was Lewis County sheriff from 1995 to 2005. He lives outside Chehalis and can be contacted at musingsonthemiddlefork@gmail.com.
