Comments on: City of Kirkland releases Economic Sustainability Study

By: Michelle Goerdel

Michelle Goerdel — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 20:13:00 +0000

My understanding is that they are also using this to determine what the tax increase will be for businesses in the city. They are currently looking at a $90 per head head tax for all businesses in Kirkland to replace the current business tax format. While it will decrease taxes to the smallest business, businesses like Google will increase from $2,500 to $90,000 (est). While for the large businesses it is not as much of an issue, the big losers will be the businesses in the middle that have a lot of employees but low margins such as restaurants and car dealerships. Assuming the tax increase goes through as is we could see less of both, which are also our major sales tax generators in the city, especially the car dealers. For example, the loss of Toyota of Kirkland this year (they moved their sales lot across the street to unincorporated King County) will decrease sales tax revenue by an estimated $500,000 annually.

By: Gail

Gail — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 22:01:46 +0000

I am looking forward to reading this. I found the online survey questions to be really interesting and I have been curious to see where the city goes with this information. I think maybe it is used to estimate retail needs for park place mall.

By: Michelle Goerdel

Michelle Goerdel — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 17:56:43 +0000

Wow, I never saw anything that complicated during my time completing my BS (yes an appropriate acronym) in Economics and that required a few years of calculus… Thank you for the link to the download. My professors always said if its a big complicated chart its hiding something you probably want to know about and that you definitely won’t like(well perhaps not so polite as that!) Looks like some of us have our weekend reading to do in order to comment clearly on the spin that the city will take on this issue.