Plan for higher caps in Broadway Business Improvement Area moves forward

With the Seattle City Council still in the midst of its summer legislative recess, the city’s lawmakers will have an important piece of Capitol Hill business to addend to when they return to chambers.

Legislation modernizing the assessment structure for the Broadway Business Improvement Area for the first time in over two decades to fund neighborhood clean-up, public safety, and promotion initaitives is planned to come in front of the full council September 15th.

A council committee approved the legislation earlier this month. CHS examined the proposal here. The plan will raise the district’s maximum annual rate from $3,500 to $5,000, expanding its current approximate $200,000 a year budget before adding a recurring $200 annual increase starting in 2032.

During the session, the BBIA’s longtime administrator Egan Orion told the council’s Human Services, Labor, and Economic Development Committee chair Alexis Mercedes Rinck that the change is much needed — and could be the next step in an even more impactful upgrade to the neighborhood clean-up and promotion organization’s finances.

“The costs for garbage pickup and graffiti abatement have increased with inflation, and yet our assessments, especially from our max payers, have remained relatively flat,” Orion told the committee. “So this creates a more equitable assessment for all and it allows the BIA to continue at current service levels plus add back promotion, beautification budgets, event sponsorship, and more.”

Orion said more may be needed and that the BBIA and officials are exploring “a property-based model or establishing a brand-new BIA and sunsetting this particular model”, as property-based assessments “are more sustainable than B&O-based assessments.”

The Broadway BIA was established decades ago as a business-tenant levy. The assessment formula is levied directly on the commercial tenants and operators within the BIA boundary. The typical small-to-midsize business currently pays between $400 and $1,500 annually, depending on its size and reported gross revenue.

A proposed Pike/Pine BIA in the works for years would be property-based. Its formation would give the neighborhood three. The 15th Ave E BIA provides similar services from assessments collected along a core stretch of Capitol Hill’s 15th Ave E.

It is unclear at this point if officials would have the stomach for trying to include the current Broadway BIA zone in a larger IA including Pike/Pine.

A decade ago, the Capitol Hill Chamber of Commerce backed down after a years-long fight against smaller Capitol Hill property owners over a planned expansion of the 1986-born Broadway BIA that would have grown the area to cover most of the Hill including the neighborhoods around Summit/Bellevue, Olive and Denny, Pike/Pine, 12th Ave, 15th Ave, and 19th Ave. The expended energy and flagging membership contributed to the chamber’s shutdown months later.

Some of Broadway’s largest voices are supporting the currently proposed growth for the BIA.

Under the legislation headed for final approval by the full council in September, anchor institutions like Seattle Central College and neighborhood bank branches would become standard maximum-rate payers to reinforce basic maintenance services managed by the BIA across more than 150 businesses along the Broadway commercial corridor.

“We have underpaid for 25 years, and we are probably the largest footprint in the Broadway neighborhood association,” a Seattle Central official said before the August committee vote. “We find it to be absolutely equitable for us to have our limit increased… the value that we receive is massive.”

Committee member, council president, and District 3 representative Joy Hollingsworth did not address the potential larger changes around the Broadway BIA surfaced by Orion but did emphasize the organization’s focus beyond Pike/Pine.

“I think oftentimes North Broadway, the area that you cover, kind of gets left out of the mix,” Hollingsworth said, “because we get so focused on Pike/Pine corridor that we forget that there’s a large part of Capitol Hill that extends to North Broadway and then the area that the BIA covers.”

For now, the Broadway BIA as it stands from E Pike to E Roy is set for a financial boost and any larger changes are being debated outside of City Hall.