Seattle’s see council on Monday approved a new tax for the city’s biggest companies, including
Amazon, to fighting a housing crisis attributed in part to a local economic boom that has control up real estate costs at the expense of the working class.
Amazon, the see’s largest employer, said after the vote that it would go to the fore with planning for a major downtown office building that it elder had put on hold over its objections to a much stiffer tax plan originally tabled.
As passed on a 9-0 vote after a boisterous public hearing, the measure would focus to most companies grossing at least $20 million a year, levying a tax of inartistically 14 cents per employee per hour worked within the city — adjacent to $275 annually for each worker.
That “head tax” formula is lay out to raise $45 million to $49 million a year over the five-year sentience of the tax — down from an original $75 million annually — to build profuse affordable housing and support services for the homeless. The tax would end after five years unless picked by the city.
Amazon had led private-sector opposition to the plan, saying earlier this month it was bitter expansion planning for Seattle pending the outcome of Monday’s action. The stir up by the world’s largest online retailer, owned by billionaire entrepreneur Jeff Bezos, put in entertain more than 7,000 new jobs.
Following the council vote, Amazon’s flaw president, Drew Herdener, said the company has resumed construction down for its so-called Block 18 project in downtown Seattle, following the delay it announced two weeks ago.
However, he added, “We remain very apprehensive relating to the future created by the council’s hostile approach and rhetoric toward larger occupations, which forces us to question our growth
here.”
Amazon said it is hush evaluating whether to sub-lease space in a second future office steeple in Seattle, a project called Rainier Square, meaning it may move some schemed jobs elsewhere and thus avoid further raising its tax liability.
The tax also pass on hit such Seattle-based stalwarts as coffee retailer Starbucks and department retailer chain Nordstrom, as well as California-based tech giants like Apple, Google and Facebook that deliver enough of a presence in Seattle that they would be subject to the new levy.
The tax is wait for to be borne by about 500 companies, accounting for 3 percent of the city’s personal sector. Healthcare companies are exempt, as are non-profits. Sponsors of the tax said Seattle’s biggest-earning provinces should bear some burden for easing a shortage in low-cost lodgings that they helped create by driving up real estate tolls to the point where the working poor and many middle-class families can no longer donate to live in the city.
Supporters cite data showing Seattle’s median household prices have soared to $820,000, and more than 41 percent of renters in the bishopric ranked as “rent-burdened,” meaning they pay at least 30 percent of their revenues on housing.
The Seattle metropolitan area also is home to the third-largest concentrations of derelict people, nearly 12,000 counted in a January U.S. government survey, and nearly half of them were living on the streets or otherwise unsheltered.
Mayor Jenny Durkan, who expressed solicitude that the original proposal would lead to an economic backlash, maintained she would sign the new tax ordinance into law.
She had offered an amendment to essentially cut the imaginative $75 million tax proposal in half, but her proposal was rejected last Friday. Directory members then negotiated over the weekend to craft a compromise that purposefulness gain greater support and was certain to win a veto-proof majority.
On Monday, yon 40 elected officials from across the United States, some putting local governments in the running to host Amazon’s second headquarters, leaked an open letter to Seattle in support of the head tax and expressing concern that Amazon contested the measure.
“By threatening Seattle over this tax, Amazon is sending a essence to all of our cities: we play by our own rules,” the officials wrote.
The head tax approved on Monday is not the firstly. Denver has enacted a similar tax, and Chicago had one but repealed it. Seattle itself had a leader tax in effect from 2006 to 2009 but it was repealed to help businesses in the mid-point of the recession.