The levy renewal, like the original, lays out spending priorities largely by age, with 39% of funding dedicated to serving kids up to age 5, and 29% for youth between ages 5 and 24. It has since given grants to more than 400 health clinics, nonprofits, community organizations and school districts, most of which work with children. The levy passed with 56% of the vote in 2015 despite what critics said was a vague description of what it would do. The 2015 levy represented $440 million in tax money the 2021 levy would be $811 million, Constantine said, due to both the higher tax rate and inflation.Ĭonstantine’s proposal, if approved by the Metropolitan King County Council, would go to voters on the August primary ballot. That’s an increase from $0.14 approved in 2015 and would represent $114 per year for the median King County home, Constantine’s office said. The new six-year levy proposal is $0.19 per $1,000 of assessed property value. “It is so enormously expensive to get someone out of homelessness once they fall into it,” Constantine said He credited the levy’s homelessness prevention initiatives with helping keep 9,200 families housed. Smaller amounts of funding have also gone to organizations involved in political advocacy and lobbying. “It’s too expensive for the parents, it doesn’t pay well enough to retain the employees.”Ĭonstantine’s office says that the previous levy, since 2015, served more than 500,000 youth and families, with a focus on preventing homelessness, funding health centers in schools and providing in-home services for new parents. “There is just not enough supply of child care,” Constantine said. It would provide child care for about 3,000 kids per year, Constantine said through subsidies for families and for child care workers. The new funding, Constantine said, would reduce by two-thirds the number of children under 5 who have no access to child care because their parents can’t afford it. “The avoidance of adverse childhood experiences on the physical development of a child’s brain,” Constantine said, “this is where we as a country, as well as a community, were falling down.” The levy, Constantine said, seeks to head off those bad outcomes. The new proposal, which represents a 35% increase on the expiring 2015 property tax levy rate, would continue past funding priorities and add a focus on improving access to child care throughout the county.Ĭonstantine called the existing levy, “the most extensive program of its kind in America.”Īs a government, he said, “we spend most of our time trying to figure out ways to deal with, react to, bad outcomes,” things like homelessness, addiction, domestic violence and incarceration. King County Executive Dow Constantine is seeking to renew the county’s Best Starts for Kids levy, which has doled out millions of dollars to more than 400 organizations over the last five years, in an effort to foster children’s development by supporting wide-ranging early-intervention programs.
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