Spokane, SREC board point fingers as fight over 911 dispatch funding heats up

Yahoo

31-01-2025

Jan. 30—Spokane Mayor Lisa Brown on Thursday justified a push by two political allies in Olympia to claw back tax dollars from the regional 911 dispatch operator that two weeks ago booted the city of Spokane from its coalition.
Every police and fire jurisdiction in Spokane County, except for the Spokane Police Department, is a member of Spokane Regional Emergency Communications, or SREC. After years of negotiations to bring the city police department into the fold, which dragged on due to disputes about board representation and user fees, the proposal collapsed earlier this month as the SREC board voted to end negotiations and kick out the city fire department.
The city wants its money back, but now both sides accuse the other of not just asking for their fair share but of trying to take the other's tax dollars. On Wednesday, the rest of the coalition held a press conference arguing the bill, sponsored by Democratic Spokane state Reps. Timm Ormsby and Natasha Hill, would give the city more money from the regional 911 dispatcher than it deserves.
The regional dispatcher is funded through three sources: a sales tax, an excise tax on phone bills and a user fee each jurisdiction must pay on top of the taxes proportional to their demand on the system. The sales tax is already apportioned by law and will return to the city upon their full exit from the SREC system, according to city officials.
The former partners are fighting, instead, over the roughly $5 million of excise tax dollars generated per year in the county. About 55% of the 911 calls in Spokane County last year came from within Spokane city limits, and city leadership and their allies in the legislature argue the city should receive roughly that large a slice of the pie. HB 1258, which is narrowly tailored so that it only applies to Spokane and SREC, would give the city excise tax funds based on this demand-based principle.
In the bill's first committee hearing Thursday, Ormsby said he wants to make sure his constituents "get what they pay for."
"And they currently are not," Ormsby argued.
But the rest of SREC's leadership believes that the city is only owed the tax dollars generated within its own borders, which they estimate at closer to 42% based on the city's population, implicitly arguing the city should not receive funding to compensate for its higher per-capita need, including due to the disproportionate share of people commuting into the city for work.
During Thursday's press conference, Brown said she believed a demand-based tax sharing proposal was fair and necessary to fully implement a city 911 dispatch service by January 2026, when the fire department will be officially booted from SREC. However, she agreed that the funding formula could be modified before the bill makes its way to a floor vote in the legislature, though she argued the share of excise tax funds generated within the city is more complicated to calculate than the SREC board has claimed.
In any case, Brown said, "we still need a bill, because absent that, all of the excise tax revenue is kept by... SREC."
While the city has argued that SREC has been rash to end negotiations and begin to kick out the city fire department, Brown also signaled Thursday that the city had already come to the conclusion that it would prefer to operate its own standalone 911 dispatch service, claiming the SREC system had not met certain standards.
Notably, a variation of HB 1258 was introduced in 2023 but not advanced through the process after its sponsors, acknowledging it would likely disrupt negotiations, decided to stall to give the city and SREC breathing room to continue bargaining. The bill was reintroduced this year with Ormsby as the prime sponsor, but this time it was advanced — a renewed effort Brown claimed to have not had a hand in, though she noted the Spokane City Council had listed it as a legislative priority this year — which SREC leadership listed as a final straw ending negotiations.
The bill, which only has a practical effect if the city of Spokane wasn't inside the SREC system, appears to have been seen by SREC leadership as a tacit threat: agree to the city's terms, or the city will come after the rest of the system's money.
SREC officials argue the city has been the primary beneficiary of the partnership all along, claiming the city is already being subsidized to the tune of roughly $750,000 per year because the city's 911 demand is proportionally larger than its tax contributions into the system's funding. This figure does not appear to include the considerable user fees the city also pays, which are proportionate to their demand on the dispatch system.
The bill's intentionally narrow scope, which means it will only apply to the current dispute in Spokane, was noted by several of those who testified Thursday.
"My name is Frank Soto Jr., and I'm the fire chief of the Spokane Valley Fire Department," Soto said. "If you don't know where that is, we are in a county located east of the crest of the Cascade Mountains with a population between 530,000 and 1.5 million people receiving tax revenues for a regional 911 emergency system," he added, referencing the bill's obtuse way of only applying to Spokane and SREC without simply saying so.
Soto noted that several of the committee members smirked at his description.
It's unclear how eager the rest of the legislature will be to weigh in on a local dispute.
Rep. April Berg, D-Mill Creek, Chair of the House Finance Committee, noted that most other jurisdictions have managed to come to agreements to form their regional dispatch system, while "...Spokane has decided to ask this august body to adjudicate said dispute."
Regardless of how this specific issue is resolved in the legislature, it appears unlikely to be the only time the city goes to war with the rest of SREC over what it says is its fair share of money. The agency is sitting on roughly $30 million in reserves, a lot of which comes from user fees, which SREC intends to spend on a new dispatch center — Brown says that the city wants its portion of those reserves back and is willing to go to court to get it .
Reporter Mitchell Roland contributed to this article.