Tacoma is seeking to improve connections across the city with repairs to sidewalks, pedestrian crossings and other improvements to arterials. City leaders are asking voters to support this with their tax dollars.
Kurtis Kingsolver is the city’s interim public works director. The city hopes to raise $320 million over 10 years for the projects. About $200 million of that would come from the levy. Kingsolver said $90 million will come from grants and $30 million from partnerships.
On Tuesday, the city council approved a ballot measure that will ask Tacoma residents to vote on the tax. Voters will decide on the measure in August. This would include a 1.5% gross earnings tax on utilities, and a property tax of 20 cents per $1,000 of assessed value. The proposed tax would expire after a decade.
In a city survey, a majority of Tacoma residents rated the quality of the roads negatively.
“What we're hearing now from voters pretty clearly is that arterials are the problem, spend the resources on arterials,” Kingsolver said.
The funds would go toward repairs for things like sidewalks, speed bumps and pedestrian crossings to make busier streets safer.
“ We wanna be able to maximize our investment,” Kingsolver said. “But we also know this is a heavy lift for voters.”
In April 2025, voters did not approve a similar ballot measure. Kingsolver attributed this to a higher cost for voters with no expiration date on the tax.
“ It was too big. We were asking for too much,” he said.
Now, the proposed levy is the same as what Tacoma asked for in 2015. Money from the 10-year tax focused on improvements to residential streets. The goal was to improve 5,600 blocks, about 70% of the city’s residential street system. Kingsolver said the city actually went further and improved about 6,000. The city was also able to raise about $3 for every $1 from taxes through grants and partnerships.
But the focus on that set of projects was narrow.
“ We weren't doing sidewalk, we weren't doing traffic calming, speed humps, traffic circles, safety improvements,” Kingsolver said.
At the time that levy was passed, Kingsolver said the city knew that the arterial roads were also in poor condition.
During the public comment period at Tuesday’s council meeting, Tyler Daniels, a civil engineer, spoke about noticing the city’s lack of further street infrastructure investments.
“ The past actions that public works has done has fallen short of installing any sort of vegetation or street trees along residential blocks, creating significant increases in heat islands and impacting those who are in the minority groups who are suffering from health conditions,” Daniels said.
The city wants to broaden efforts to plant trees, fix sidewalks, improve accessibility and make other modes of transportation easier. In addition, at the time the 2015 levy was passed, Kingsolver said the city knew that the arterial roads were also in poor condition.
There is also now the Vision Zero framework, which guides street improvements to eliminate traffic fatalities and serious injuries from accidents by 2035.
“ We're gonna work on streets that had that history, but also trying to build streets in a different way to help prevent accidents from occurring in the future,” Kingsolver said.
City council members spoke in favor of the measure, including council member Sandesh Sadalge, who wants Tacoma voters to support it in order to continue the work.
“ We've used money over 10 years to hire really, really talented individuals who understand our streets, who understand our infrastructures, who work really hard to put those grants together. And I would hate to lose that talent because that's an investment we made,” Sadalge said.
