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SNOHOMISH COUNTY—In a 3-2 vote, the Snohomish County Council adopts the $3.37 billion biennium 2027-2028 county budget with councilmen Sam Low (R-Lake Stevens) and Nate Nehring (R-Arlington) dissenting.

The budget passed by the council is a 4.66% increase to the previous 2025-26 budget and when normalized for rough annualized comparison, a 33.7% increase since 2022. The population of Snohomish County from 2022 to 2027 is estimated to have increased about 5.8% from 841,000 to 890,000 residents.

Below are the annualized equivalent of adopted budgets from 2022 through current:
• 2027–28 ≈ $1.685B/year
• 2025–26 ≈ $1.61B/year
• 2024 = $1.662B
• 2023 ≈ $1.536B
• 2022 ≈ $1.26B

“Throughout this budget process, I have consistently advocated for reducing unnecessary spending before asking taxpayers to contribute more,” Councilman Nate Nehring (R) said. “Unfortunately, the Council chose to approve more than $24 million in additional property taxes, $10 million in increased Surface Water Management fees, and $2.6 million in additional Conservation District charges for the 2027-28 biennium. These increases come on top of the $25 million per year in new annual sales taxes and $6 million per year in additional annual vehicle registration fees approved earlier this year (also on 3-2 votes). Even with all of these new taxes, the adopted budget puts the county on an unsustainable financial trajectory that will require us to borrow to pay our bills within the next three years.”

Vice Chair Sam Low (R) said: “I do not support this budget as it prioritizes significant property tax increases and fees with minimal cuts, which will in turn hurt our seniors, families, and most vulnerable. Property taxes are pricing people out of their homes.”

“I’m cautiously optimistic about the budget that we’re hopefully going to be approving. I’m going to support this budget. I said at the beginning of this hearing that I engaged in this budget process a couple of months ago with a couple of goals in mind,” Jared Mead (D) said. “One was to correct the trajectory that I thought we were spiraling down based on our six-year forecast. Second, to preserve core functions and essential services in our county, make sure that our residents and our taxpayers were not negatively impacted by too deep of cuts or irresponsible cuts. And then to try to avoid using additional banks capacity property tax increases. I think that this budget gets way closer than the originally proposed budget to those goals. You know, this is just the 1% inflationary property tax included. It is not relying on any banked capacity, which was one of my intentions going into this. We made millions, to Council Member Nearing’s point, millions of additional cuts in addition to what the executive proposed. I think those were extremely targeted. We polished those rocks through the tumbler that is the legislative process with the county council. I deeply appreciate the work that the council has done”

“I’ll be supporting this budget. I do have concerns that we’re not making some key investments that we could make that would actually pay dividends,” Strom Peterson (D) said. “I know those are always tough arguments to make when you’re facing tough budget times, but that still leaves me wanting a little bit more, I think, especially in our reentry and community safety services. We can do a lot more to make sure that we’re reducing costs down the road, and I think some of those costs would even be rather immediate if we made some better investments.”

“The executive reduced spending by $22 million, they cut 90 positions, and we had the sustainability task force that went through looking at a meaningful look that looked at the costs and the revenues that was the most robust public input process to date for budgets at least in my time on council,” Chair Megan Dunn (D) said, “So, it really helped for me to have those prioritizations in my vote. I’m very glad we could find common ground for everything from a new FTE for helping seniors who are dealing with tax increases and live on a fixed income, and also common ground for OPD and for some of those, or for the CPOs. So, we made further cuts today. Without the revenue, we would have had to cut hundreds of positions, most from the general fund. And if 75% of our general fund is public safety, today we’re saving hundreds of positions potentially from the general fund and from public safety. So really appreciate all of the efforts we did not take all the revenue options that were possible including an STI levy bank capacity and also the minimum levy amounts with this but we are looking at Funding our core mandated services, cutting as much as possible, and in my opinion, raising as little as possible on the revenue side.”

Author: Mario Lotmore