Warning: fragmentation, more taxes ahead

Scott Noble, the King County assessor who watches our taxes roll through his offices by the dump-truck load, knows a thing or two about how things work, and he sees so much regional fragmentation it's no wonder our precious process rarely processes a decision.

Writing in The Economist, Noble sketches out in a few words the sum of our ills:

"... [In] King County alone there are 166 taxing districts that overlap in 550 different ways, creating 247 property-tax rates. The Seattle metropolitan area has one taxing district for every 6,600 people, a ratio similar to the Chicago metro area but one that is five times worse than greater Los Angeles.

"Citizens find this fragmentation extremely complex and confusing. I find it appalling; a vicious cycle of intergovernmental cannibalism." (The Economist, March 29, 2008)

Boy, that's on the money. New taxing districts are the latest form of zoning. They create overlays that sometimes have little to do with real life. That's why the highest parts of King County are now in a flood-control district, or why the county suddenly needs a ferry district and the city needs micro-taxing districts for trolleys and other accouterments.

Noble suggests that the merger of Louisville, Ky., with its suburban towns is a welcome development, and, in fact, metro government in Florida and Toronto variously has been examined over the years.

But Louisville does not have a Lake Washington splitting it and it lacks our history as a state of not having anything named towns — or a common Midwest device, the township — for local government.

Recently, I heard again a suggestion that Seattle be divided into councilmanic districts, so that neighborhoods could each find their representative, instead of a mayor and council elected at large.

But we need fewer districts of government, not more.

By Noble's measurement, even a small city of 15,000 people would have at least two different taxing districts. In reality, we have many more. Each household is below a stack of districts that goes from the local library to the Port of Seattle, from the neighborhood school to the enormous intake of Sound Transit.

Recently on these pages, our editorial opinion was skeptical of Seattle's penchant to turn a one-time levy into a levy for life — in this case, city parks. County parks made the similar transition from an emergency levy for park-maintenance money to a regular renewal. These "renewals" often come at higher rates, adding to the stack, and those pennies become pounds.

"Governmental cannibalism," asNoble describes it, is the result of extreme fragmentation of power, resulting often in the headless serpent. Government is so diffused and decentralized that it must forever negotiate with itself. People, including me, often call this a lack of leadership, but, in fact, Noble's calculations show that there cannot be leadership, only consensus.

Reached by telephone Friday,Noble described a system that can only crash if a deep recession comes.

"That's because in our system of hundreds of layers of government, there are inevitably winners and losers," he said. "Washington state has a pecking order of taxation. For example, last year the idea of a new hospital taxing district would have deprived the new flood control district of every penny.

"We know that fragmentation of government leads to sprawl; it has to. The average number of governments in a metropolitan area for the U.S. is 117. In King County, we have 540.

"The icon of local control also prevents some efficiencies of government. Suppose we had a single list of approved providers to government, that could mean we'd all have the same kind of fire trucks."

Now, wouldn't that be something new?

James F. Vesely's column appears Sunday on editorial pages of The Times. His e-mail address is: jvesely@seattletimes.com; for a podcast Q&A with the author, go to Opinion at seattletimes.com