A week after the City Council passed a series of tax hikes, Mayor Don Gough has vetoed two of them.
At Wednesday night’s meeting, council members learned that Mayor Gough nixed the higher utility and property taxes.
He said the utility tax increase from four to six percent should have a mechanism to lower it back down when the economy improves.
“Our residents and business deserve to know that at a definable and definite point the City Council will address some tax relief from utility tax increases that today we believe are necessary,” he wrote in a memo to the Council. “However, I don’t believe that our city should raise all the utility taxes, then take in millions of rebounding sales tax revenues and yet ignore and provide no basis or opportunity for future reductions of utility taxes.”
Mayor Gough also said the property tax increase of 35 cents per $1,000 of assessed value (about 11.5 percent) is too high. He had pushed for a three percent increase.
“The property tax passed by the council levies a real out of pocket increase in money to each resident (both home owners and to renters via landlord rent increases), and to each business in new increased property taxes of 11.5 percent. That increase is not acceptable,” he wrote.
Those two measures will come back to the Council this Monday night for reconsideration.
We’re awaiting comment from Council President Mark Smith and Vice President Kerri Lonergan-Dreke to find out what impact this will have on the budget talks and departmental cuts.
On the surface, I think I agree with the mayor on this one. With that said, It will be interesting to see how this shakes out in the end as most things politically aren’t as they seem…I hope in the end there can be a balance between cost containment and increased revenue. We will see…
Its time Lynnwood adopted a City Manager/ City Council for of Government. The City of Lynnwood will continue to suffer from poor Judgement as long as it continues to pull from its voters base to find a Mayor. Everyone know the best and brightest leave Lynnwood at 5 PM Monday-Friday. Wake up Voters. Its time to hire a City Manager that knows how to Manage a Budget and a City and can be fired for poor performance mid term!
Ah, I see. So the residents of Lynnwood are a bunch of drooling, low-IQ retards, among whom there is not a single person fit to be mayor. Nice to see you think so highly of us.
Do you apply the same criteria to the City Council, I wonder? By your definition, they would have to be every bit as second rate and incompetent.
In any event, the move to change to a city manager is a naked power grab by the city council and the civil servants who have bought and paid for that council.
A city manager will be the equivalent of a sock puppet with the collective arm of council and the unions jammed up its ass to animate it, and the citizens and businesses of this town will be further fleeced for taxes galore — just like they were last week — but this time unencumbered by a Mayor.
It has been obvious — screamingly obvious — from the beginning that the Mayor had to go because he was not on board with subsidizing the civil service no matter what the cost — to the REST of us. It’s why they stripped him of his ability to downsize the rampant dead wood amid the ranks of city employees, and it’s why they want to get rid of the Mayor’s office entirely in favor of a bought-and-paid-for rubberstamping yes man.