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Tuesday,
November 4, 2003
Seattle
Post-Intelligencer
Proposed alarm tax is misguided
By WES UHLMAN
FORMER SEATTLE MAYOR
It's time to sound the alarm on a misguided proposed city tax that
threatens to undermine our public safety and security. In a scramble to
fill a budget gap, some at City Hall want to tack on new taxes that would,
in some cases, almost double the cost of having alarm protection.
What sense is that? At a time when security concerns have become a part
of our daily lives, city officials are proposing taxes to discourage
people from taking greater individual steps to safeguard their families,
their employees and their businesses.
It's wrong, and the Seattle City Council ought to scrap it totally or
significantly revise the entire proposal. This is no way to balance the
city books.
If you have a residential alarm, the company that provides that service
will be slapped with an annual $40 fee, which undoubtedly will be passed
on to you. Your home monitoring bill could go up by 25 percent or more.
If your business has monitored fire protection, the city tax collectors
could be coming after you, too. Under the proposed ordinance, the city
would levy a $320 annual fee for every fire protection system. Given the
average fire alarm monitoring fee runs about $360, the city is just about
doubling the cost.
The city says it needs the new taxes to help cope with the growing
problem and cost of false alarms. But the city's own statistics don't bear
out that this is a growing problem -- or that taxing private alarm
monitoring is good public policy to protect our loved ones, coworkers or
workplaces.
Over the past 12 years, the number of fire and burglar alarm systems
has doubled while the number of false alarms has decreased -- that's
right, gone down -- by 24 percent. New technology, improved installations
and better training of the end-users have all cut down the number of false
alarms even while the number of alarms has been increasing dramatically.
In 1993, working with the alarm industry, Seattle passed a model false
alarms ordinance. If an alarm user has more than six false alarms within a
12-month period, the city had the ability to put him on a "suspended
response" list so police and fire personnel weren't endlessly being called
back to the same repeat offender.
False alarms already carry a $125 per occurrence fine. In 2002, the
city reported 24,505 false alarms. If the city fined false alarm
offenders, it would generate more than $3 million compared with the
estimated response cost of $1.4 million. Those who cause the problem pay
for the cost of response. Isn't that fundamentally more fair?
In the commercial sector, city building codes often require
installation of alarm and sprinkler systems. We know those requirements
save lives, provide immediate response to fire and ultimately reduce the
cost to all city taxpayers. Last year, estimated fire loss dropped to $27
million citywide from $54 million in 2001.
For some, the added tax will be just enough to prompt them to forgo or
cancel alarm monitoring. For others, it's one more cost of business and
perhaps another reason to move out of town. But most troubling is the
message it sends to citizens of Seattle -- replenishing city coffers is
more important than public safety.
It shouldn't be. It's just the wrong message to Seattle's businesses
and homeowners.
NEW TAX AT STAKE
A public hearing on the city budget, which includes this tax proposal,
will be held at 5:30 p.m. Thursday at City Hall.
Wes Uhlman is a local businessman and attorney.
Click her to go to the Seattle PI article |
