Car tab relief debate heating up in Legislature

The battle over ST3 car tab relief and I-976 is heating up in Olympia, as lawmakers look for ways to help taxpayers without gutting Sound Transit.

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Voters overwhelmingly approved I-976 in November, asking to restore $30 car tabs. For voters in parts of King, Snohomish, and Pierce Counties, I-976 provided significant relief from over-inflated car values from Sound Transit. I-976 requires that Sound Transit use a more accurate valuation, Kelley Blue Book, to determine their values, not a 1999 legislative valuation that isn’t even close.

I-976, the car tab bill, will have an eventual date with the Supreme Court, and in the meantime Sound Transit has asked the Legislature for a way to get the car values a little closer to market value.

Democrat Senator Marko Liias has introduced a bill that would base our car values on a 2006 legislative schedule, which still over-inflates values, but it’s closer to Kelley Blue Book.

“We grab the average of Kelley Blue Book, what does it look like over time, and when you compare it to what’s in the law, it is basically as close as we can get to Kelley Blue Book within the constraints that we have,” Senator Liias said.

He also said he doesn’t want to rely on a private valuation company for making laws.

“We want this schedule to be in effect until 2041, when the bonds are expected to be paid-off,” Liias said. “There’s no guarantee that the Kelley Company will still be producing a blue book between now and 2041. We wanted to get something that we could count on for the long term.”

Liias said his bill would likely lower car tabs by $30-40 in the Sound Transit taxing district.

Republican Senator Steve O’Ban said Liias is just doing Sound Transit’s bidding and not representing his constituents in Snohomish County.

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“To me, he’s getting the opposite message of what voters told us,” Senator O’Ban said.

He has a competing bill that would require Sound Transit to use the Kelley Blue Book value and not a legislative schedule.

“They (the voters) didn’t vote for the 2006 schedule or some hybrid of it,” O’Ban said. “They voted for a market-based valuation system, Kelley Blue Book.”

Neither bill has had a hearing yet.

Senator O’Ban also has a bill that would backfill any lost money from I-976, if it is upheld by the Supreme Court. He wants the sales tax from car purchases to be earmarked for transportation and not just dumped into the general fund.

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