Hey, Eastern WA: Take the money from King County millionaires and run

Our democracy, take it or leave it, is famously a winner-take-all enterprise. Coming close doesn’t count.

Nor do you get bonus points if the rules happen to be tilted against you. All you might win is a demeaning booby prize from bad-faith naysayers.

Nobody is feeling all this more acutely right now than the schools just outside of Wenatchee, in Central Washington, in what’s called the Eastmont School District.

The district of 6,000 students, like many, is trying to rebuild its schools, some of which are more than 60 years old. Even some of its portable classrooms have been in place for more than three decades. (Which makes them, what, “permanentables?”)

So the district last month floated a construction bond proposal to local taxpayers. But in what’s becoming a yearly futility-fest for many schools around the state, especially in Eastern and Central Washington, it won 59.65% of the vote.

Say what? Yes, that 19-percentage-point margin — more than any governor candidate here has won by in nearly 40 years — was actually a loss, due to state rules that say bonds require 60% approval to pass.

The district fell 34 votes short, out of nearly 8,000 cast.

A similar fate befell 11 out of the 14 school districts statewide that saw their school reconstruction plans go down in flames. They got more than a majority of the taxpayers’ votes, but less than a supermajority.

In all, 18 of 21 school bond proposals got more than 50% of the vote. But only seven passed.

On this, the right-leaning, anti-tax think tank the Washington Policy Center pounced. It called the votes “the latest sign of declining public confidence in the education system.”

“The failure of so many school bonds is a warning sign that many voters are no longer willing to pay high taxes for a public education system they no longer believe in,” the center summed up.

See how that works? In no way does a 59% vote, or 57% or 55% as some other districts earned, suggest voters no longer believe in public schools. These are landslide numbers in any other election. What they indicate is that our state has an anti-democratic rule on the books — one that is then perversely employed to argue that the schools themselves are broken.

It’s like the filibuster in the U.S. Senate. The filibuster can be used both to block all progress and then, when nothing works, as proof that government is dysfunctional. Just as the filibusterers had been saying all along!

Setting aside this contrived demonization, the reality is that school districts in more rural parts of the state are struggling to advance. They have smaller tax bases than the urban areas, and also more tax-averse voters. Combined with the 60% rule, it’s a triple whammy that can leave kids in 30-year-old portables or classrooms with collapsing ceilings. (See my column on this conundrum from last year, “What’s The Matter with Wahkiakum?”)

But there’s an answer for all this, at least a partial one. You out there in the hinterlands? You can just take the money from King County and run.

Seriously: This past year, the state’s new capital gains tax on windfall profits from stocks and other assets poured $396 million into school construction projects, the state Department of Revenue reported in January. Many of the school projects given money in the just-ended session of the Legislature were in far-flung districts outside the urban core.

The state also reported the following astonishing figure: 84% of all the capital gains tax money was raised from a single county: King. The 20 counties east of the mountains contributed just 3%, combined.

It suggests the capital gains tax is a huge money transfer from blue Seattle and King County out to red Eastern Washington, and other mostly rural areas. It’s possibly the most tilted blue-to-red program ever enacted in the state.

Example: The Eastmont School District is projected to get a $5 million sweetener from this year’s state school construction pot for its bond proposal, which it is putting back on the local ballot in April. Meanwhile taxpayers where it’s located, Douglas County, contributed less than $100,000 to the capital gains schools fund, according to the state.

Schools everywhere can benefit from this — for now. A Republican-backed initiative to repeal the capital gains tax has qualified for the fall ballot. If the tax goes down, the Legislature noted, the school-construction plan would lose a major source of revenue. So the plan “does not assume capital gains revenues beyond 2024.”

Why would voters do this to themselves? It’s a tax almost entirely on the richest people in one place: King County. Why not hit King County’s millionaires to help defray the costs of your school buildings, Eastern Washington? The money to replace those old portables has to come from somewhere.

Don’t be surprised, though, if the red counties vote to repeal this tax on King County’s millionaires. Because we are just that polarized.

I also bet it’ll be the bad-faith actors, the same ones using all this to deride the public schools, who will be leading the charge.