Lessons Unlearned: Taxes Raised for Big Projects & No Public Involvement

City council and manager repeat pattern of making proposals without public negotiation … and enact worse plan for new police station…

By Chris Chisholm, PV4I Treasurer

Last week, I read through the Puyallup City Manager’s website page about the new police station that city council apparently approved in the summer of 2024 while most city residents were on vacation. This summer, again in August, the city filmed a “ribbon cutting” promoting city council members using sledgehammers to break walls in a building they’re apparently having us (city taxpayers) rent for 30 years for a new police station. They look very happy to be wearing hard hats. I wasn’t happy when I read the details on the website, many of which were false.

The first bit of misinformation the city manager included was a claim that “54.5%” of residents voted in favor of the 2023 bond to build a jail along with what would have been an otherwise affordable police station on land we own. As you can see in the screenshots from Pierce County Elections we included in our final blog post after the 2023 election, only 47.49% of residents voted in favor. I immediately called the city’s Public Affairs Officer, then cc’d an email to him and the city manager to request a correction. The Public Affairs Officer corrected it within an hour. But anyone who read that website page over the past few months were mislead. It’s suspicious they would make a mistake of that magnitude.

The other point I included in my email to the city manager and public affairs officer was to correct their false claim that they are saving us “millions of dollars” by renovating and renting an out-of-the-way building in the Benaroya Business Park on South Hill instead of building a police station on that land we still own adjacent to the new Central Pierce Fire & Rescue Station 72.

Not surprisingly (due to what it reveals) they don’t do the math for us on their project website page, leaving off a final cost for the new police station. It takes a minute to figure out which items are being paid now versus later, and what’s being paid by city taxpayers or otherwise, but when I added things up I was stunned: the project – just a rented police station – is projected to cost city taxpayers $73.5 million over 30 years. The cost of the 2023 bond measure was projected to cost $75 million over 30 years for a police station plus 56 cell jail … or just $44 million for a police station (on land we would own) as you can see below.

The cost breakdown for that 2023 bond project was not information the city shared publicly either. Back in 2023, it took a while to get my former city council representative to find and share with me the cost breakdown: it was a projected $35 million for the police station, plus a projected $31 million for the jail, plus a projected $9 million in shared groundbreaking costs. Some may think it’s a bit much to say it would have cost $9 million in groundbreaking if they had just built the police station, but with cost overruns I think we can safely say the police station with groundbreaking would have cost $44 million … and we would have owned a valuable piece of real estate.

But wait, there’s more. If it’s not enough that the new police station will cost 70% more than the 2023 police station portion of the bond including groundbreaking, the Puyallup City Council just authorized the city manager to send out an RFQ (Request For Qualification) last month to find a contractor to renovate our old city jail and downtown police station. This after claiming throughout the three failed bond measures in 2021-23 that the jail cannot be renovated.

Last night, during what was supposed to be 3 nights of city council budget sessions, District 1 council member Jim Kastama (currently serving a 2 year stint as council’s mayor) affirmed that the jail renovation costs are baked into next year’s budget, but no details were provided. For a couple reasons, it’s not surprising he would make that claim while providing no details. For one, PV4I launched it’s website yesterday before their budget session, revealing all of city council’s tax increases and staffing cuts made for the new rented police station, so it’s going to be politically unpopular to admit either 1) they raised taxes so high that revenues are aplenty to renovate a jail they always claimed can’t be renovated, or 2) they are going to cut more staff from departments citywide, and cancel public works projects such as sidewalks and roads to pay for a jail we don’t even need. But we can’t ask city council members tonight, because they just canceled the 2nd of what was supposed to be 3 budget sessions this week.

I was already frustrated with several decisions the Puyallup City Council made over the past couple of years, but when I realized last week how they completely ignored the lessons learned during 2023 campaign season, I knew I had to drop everything else and reactivate the PV4I website, at least to spread the word about all their tax and fee increases, plus staffing cuts to departments like the Senior Center and Puyallup Library, Economic Development and more, in order to renovate and rent a building to house the police department for 30 years. Where does the city council and manager come up with these proposals? I think their process may be the fundamental problem: they don’t bother going out to neighborhoods asking people what we want, and instead just send out a Request for Qualification (RFQ), choose a contractor they know and like, and give them exclusive reign to charge whatever they want to build what just a couple powerful people in city hall already decided.

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