Tacoma City Council renews sales tax to support arts and cultural funding
The Tacoma City Council has voted to maintain a sales-and-use tax that helps fund nonprofits that provide arts and cultural programming.
The council unanimously reauthorized the tax for another seven years at its Oct. 7 meeting, resulting in a rare council-permitted round of applause from the audience. Called Tacoma Creates, voters first approved the measure in 2018 to collect an extra one-tenth of one percent sales tax for seven years.
Tacoma Creates is a “cultural access program” – a funding mechanism that the state Legislature authorized through a series of bills in 2015 that allows local jurisdictions to raise money through a tax to distribute to nonprofit arts and culture organizations. The measure, which first passed in Tacoma with about 67% of the vote, is set to expire in the beginning of 2026.
A more recent piece of legislation approved in 2023 now allows cities and municipalities to reimpose a sales tax for cultural access programs with the approval of the City Council – eliminating the need to put such a measure to the voters again, according to the city. Given what the resolution approving the reauthorized tax calls “robust citywide support” for the arts, the council chose to approve the reauthorization directly instead of calling for another vote.
The city has touted Tacoma as the first city in Washington to approve a cultural-access program and to reimpose it through councilmanic means – by the authority of the City Council.
Organizations like the Asia Pacific Cultural Center and the Hilltop Artists benefit from grants funded by the tax, which in 2024 raised about $7.5 million. City officials estimate that the tax would generate about $7 to $7.5 million each year it remains in place, according to a recent memorandum to the council.
All nine members of Tacoma’s city council expressed excitement about the reauthorization and gratitude to the staff and advisory board who manage Tacoma Creates that worked to make it happen.
“I love that we were the first ones to do this by a vote of the people, and I love that we’re the first ones to do it councilmanicly, it just really shows how much this community appreciates the arts,” council member Kristina Walker said at the meeting.
Since voters approved the tax in 2018, about 78% of the revenue has gone to cultural-organization funding. Under the proposal for the reauthorized tax that council first discussed last month, the number would have dropped to 76%, which translates to a loss of about $150,000 that would have been directed to administration and program management costs.
The original proposal also set aside 6% of the revenue raised from Tacoma Creates for capital expenditures for cultural organizations, but after organizations pushed back, the council amended the ordinance to state that Tacoma Creates funding could be used for capital expenditures if organizations needed it.
“While capital investments may sound appealing, they were never part of the original voter mandate,” David Fischer and Lance Kagey wrote in an editorial for The News Tribune last month. The two were involved in the campaign that led to the 2018 voter approval of Tacoma Creates.
After organizations that receive funding from Tacoma Creates spoke out against the proposal and the loss that would result, the council approved an amendment that upped the number back to 78%. They also adjusted the language in the ordinance to clarify that organizations can use funding from Tacoma Creates for capital projects if they want to without mandating a 6% bucket for capital projects, to “keep this language as flexible as possible,” Mayor Victoria Woodards said on Oct. 7.
“We are proud to bring these changes forward and believe that these changes address the concerns voiced by the community and by our council colleagues,” Woodards said at the meeting.
Several organizations that receive funding under Tacoma Creates turned out to speak at the council’s Oct. 7 meeting in support of the reauthorization.
Courtenay Chamberlin, a project manager with the Arts & Culture Coalition of Pierce County, thanked the council for its work on the reauthorization at the meeting.
“You all are definitely precedent-setting for the reauthorization of cultural access programming in the state, so thank you,” Chamberlin said.
