Twenty years ago, crime and decay in Tacoma inspired downtown property owners to do something wholly distasteful – tax themselves.
Their pooled money would pay for a bicycle security patrol, a clean-up crew with leaf blowers and a mini-street sweeper, some beauty banners and other measures. All for two goals – drive out ne’er-do-wells and improve downtown’s downtrodden image.
This week property owners vote whether to continue that tax for another 10 years or proclaim victory and let it expire in 2008.
Which suggests the question: Has the $9,750,000 spent so far over the years worked?
To begin, how can I describe – especially for you Gen Xers, Gen Yers and newcomers – how bad off Tacoma was?
Journalists, like cops, often see and probe the worst of human nature. Consequently, we can get sucked deep into a twisted perspective.
In that spirit, I can say, Tacoma’s crime wave of the mid-1980s was very, very good to me. As a cub reporter for this newspaper assigned to the police beat from a downtown bureau, a lot of crime meant a lot of front-page bylines.
Good for me. Bad for Tacoma.
One day Denny Rowley, then the general manager for downtown’s last big store, Schoenfelds Furniture, invited me to one of the upper floors of the iconic landmark on Pacific Avenue at South 15th Street. He wanted me to witness the brazen drug market going gangbusters across the street.
Roughly 30 mostly young men crowded the sidewalk. Cars would drive up, pause to pass cash out the passenger window and accept small packets of various illegal drugs. On this day, mostly black-tar heroin.
The cops called this the Marielito Market. Because, in short, an estimated 125,000 refugees came to the U.S. by boat in 1980 from the port city of Mariel, Cuba.
Into the mix of refugees, Cuba reportedly had released large numbers from its prisons and mental health facilities. A small but formidable portion of those refugees ended up in Tacoma.
Tacoma’s Marielito Market roughed people up and moved around downtown’s blocks – just one of Tacoma’s many emerging threats.
Business at Schoenfelds suffered. Folks shopping for a black leather sofa and matching love seat didn’t want them bad enough to endure a fear-induced adrenaline rush just to get into the store, Rowley complained.
Simply walking anywhere downtown during daylight didn’t always feel safe.
No wonder property owners, many with buildings occupied only by the ghosts of retailers past, opted to tax themselves.
Bill Riley, president of his own real estate company, Wm. Riley & Co., served for 18 years on the board that oversees how the 84-square-block Business Improvement Area spends its levy money. He resigned last year to lobby his fellow property owners to end the tax.
When property owners originally approved the tax, “the Tacoma City Council, the then-City Manager (Erling Mork) and the Tacoma Police Department all said that they were unable to protect the citizens of downtown Tacoma without monetary support,” Riley wrote in letters to other property owners.
“I contend that all functions currently performed by the BIA are normal functions of City government and could and should be accomplished at City government. We are currently double taxing ourselves and this burden should be removed or reduced.”
That makes some sense. Security and street maintenance count as two of the most significant basic services for any city government.
But what if a business district like downtown Tacoma wants a much higher level of those services than its city normally provides?
Do the residents of the whole city think their tax money should pay downtown-only premium benefits such as street banners, graffiti removal, pressure-washing high-traffic locations, private security bicycle patrols and co-sponsoring promotional events, such as the Tour of Urban Living?
I don’t think so. Neither do I think the City Council would vote to absorb all the functions of the BIA at an estimated $1 million a year.
The sole remaining argument for discontinuing the BIA, then, hinges on whether life downtown has become so safe, so consistently clean, so gloriously attractive to outsiders as a vibrant shopping and entertainment destination that it no longer needs the BIA’s extra boost.
True, no one could say, with a straight face, that downtown today is worse than 1987. You could argue only over how much it has improved – 10 times? 20 times? 100?
Twenty years ago, I couldn’t have sat here, across the street from the former Schoenfelds building, outside at Starbucks with a $4 latte, watched a security patrol pedal by and typed these words – without worrying whether I’d live to see it printed.
Maybe the day will come when downtown Tacoma can brush the dust off her hands, sit back on her ample laurels and rest like God on the seventh day.
Today isn’t it.
This week nearly 500 visitors from across the state are meeting in Tacoma for the annual conference of the Association of Washington Cities.
Fewer have registered, however, than attended last year’s conference in Spokane. While the association won’t acknowledge a Tacoma fear factor among its member cities, the folks at Tacoma City Hall have heard it.
Rob McNair-Huff, city spokesman, said he wrote a video script, narrated by Mayor Bill Baarsma, produced by TV Tacoma and posted on the AWC Web site in part to show off the amenities – and safety – that come with a convention in downtown Tacoma.
“We wanted to show there’s been a lot of progress, that Tacoma’s renaissance has changed the city for the better in the last few years,” McNair-Huff said.
The BIA’s contribution, while far from the primary reason for Tacoma’s renaissance, deserves an award for best factor in a supporting role. A role that should continue for at least another 10 years.
Dan Voelpel: 253-597-8785
dan.voelpel@thenewstribune.com
Downtown Tacoma’s Business Improvement Area
Originated: 1988, requires renewal by member vote every 10 years
Location: 84 blocks, generally from South Seventh Street to South 21st Street, and from A Street to Court D
Members: Property owners within the boundary
Governance: Ratepayer board
Administration: Tacoma-Pierce County Chamber of Commerce
2007 tax rate: 10.42 cents per square foot for occupied space; 5 cents per square foot for parking lots, vacant and warehouse space and housing
2007 estimated budget: $750,000
Proposed new tax rate: Range of 10.5 to 16.5 cents per square foot for improved properties containing offices, retail and residential uses; 5.5 to 9.5 cents for unimproved land, parking lots and garages, nonprofit buildings and rundown vacant buildings
Services: Security, maintenance, marketing
Voting deadline: Friday
Other cities with business improvement areas: Poulsbo, Richland, Leavenworth, Yakima, Spokane, Kelso, Seattle, Everett
