Policy Council gears up for election, 2025 legislative session
The Chamber’s Policy Council met in early October, and during its meeting, heard from voter behavior experts, City officials, and our very own advocacy leaders as we gear up for the election and upcoming legislative session.
Kicking things off was Tony Williams and Jeff Bjornstad with W2A — Washington 2 Advocates — as they ran through the key races on the ballot this November, detailing their predictions (which we won’t be sharing here 😉) and explaining why toss-up voters and regions are, in fact, toss-ups.
We then turned things over to John Resha, director of the City of Bellevue’s Finance & Asset Management Department, and Director of Development Services, Rebecca Horner, for them to present the City’s 2025-2026 Preliminary Budget.
The pair shared the breakdown of the $1.7 billion preliminary budget — $792 million for General Fund, $497 million for Utilities Operations & Capital Funds, $315 million for General Capital & Equipment Rental Funds, $94 million for Other Funds, and $60 million for Debt Services — which is down from the previous biennium’s $2.2 billion budget.
As for funding, the largest revenues for the City remain to be utility rates and fees (approximately $500 million) and various taxes (approximately $800 million), and the only new revenue increase proposed is a 1% tax adjustment, per council policy.
The process for formulating the budget is changing, though, as the City is moving toward a more “transparent” and “relatable” budget presentation. Beginning 2025, they even plan to publish regular financial and performance dashboards so the public can engage as they please.
“For those of you who have seen the City’s budgets before, there's a little bit of a different look and feel to it, [as] we're in the process of trying to increase that transparency and the relatability of it, to really share a better view of what we have happening across the board and get a longer term look at our finances,” said Resha. “One of the things that's really big difference is we're appropriating only the expenditures, but not our reserves or fund balance. The City has a long history of appropriating all of our cash, [but] we just don't need it appropriated. It is available, should we need to use it.”
On a similar but different note, Resha and Horner also said that the City is conducting a deep-dive into the Capital Investment Program (CIP) to improve the delivery and prioritization of projects, with a specific emphasis on fire station replacements, utility infrastructure upgrades, and investments in multimodal transportation.
This goes hand-in-hand with the City’s continued efforts to streamline the permitting and inspection process, and plans to add a dedicated small business permitting liaison to City staff.
“If you look into the electronic resources, we actually have a really cool CIP viewer where you can hone in on different parts of the City and see all of the individual projects where they are from a map base, and [we] have project pages on all of those from a transportation perspective,” said Resha.
Before heading their separate ways, the Policy Council then did a final review of our East King Chambers Coalition’s policy position papers, covering the topics of Budget & Economic Vitality, Energy, Public Safety, and Transportation for the 2025 session. Stay tuned for these published papers in coming weeks.