Bellingham mayor urges tax to fund climate change programs
Bellingham Mayor Seth Fleetwood asked the City Council to consider asking voters to approve a tax to pay for citywide programs aimed at reducing the city’s carbon footprint and helping the effort to fight global climate change.
Fleetwood compared such a climate-change initiative to special taxes that Bellingham voters have approved to fund affordable housing, transportation projects and the city’s Greenways program that established its network of bicycling and walking trails.
“We need to do our part in Bellingham and hopefully be a model for other communities — and show the way, if you will,” Fleetwood said during a City Council committee session Monday, Nov. 8.
Bellingham, through its Climate Action Plan, is among the first cities in the nation to address its impact on the environment and lower its carbon footprint.
A handful of other states and cities have approved taxes to fund climate programs, including Boulder, Colorado; Albany and Long Beach, California; and Portland, Oregon, according to the World Resources Institute.
“This is an opportunity to put something on the ballot that citizens could consider,” Fleetwood said.
Fleetwood didn’t provide any details, but said that it likely would be a property tax.
He suggested that funds raised through such a tax could help homeowners switch from natural gas to less-polluting electricity for their stoves, washers and dryers, water heaters and furnaces.
“Just as one example,” Fleetwood said, “there’s 16,000 private homes in the city of Bellingham and the retrofitting of them off of natural gas costs in the neighborhood of $17,000, so there’s just enormous amounts of money.”
He said such a tax is of “profound importance” to Bellingham as it works to meet its goal of using 100% renewable energy by 2035.
“We need to do our bit, just like governments at every level in every part of the globe, to reduce emission so that we can stay below 1.5 degrees warming,” Fleetwood said. “This of course underscores the need to take serious climate action in our community in this profoundly important consequential decade.”
Fleetwood said he would ask the council for funds to draft a ballot measure at its Nov. 22 meeting.
“We need to dramatically increase the rate at which we reach our climate ambitions” as described in a 2019 report for the Climate Action Task Force, Fleetwood said.
“There’s all kinds of work to do in this area around efficiencies, around commercial buildings, residential buildings, transportation — the list goes on,” he said.
