BELLEVUE, Wash. – The basic pieces that hold a city together for economic success are well established: an educated workforce, research institutions, infrastructure including ports and public transport, supply chains and strong corporate and community anchors.
Seattle has it all, says Joe Nguyen, CEO of the Seattle Metro Chamber. “We’ve done the hard part.”
But public policies — namely Washington’s city-state approach to taxation — threaten to undermine the growth and job creation the foundation has supported, Nguyen and other panelists warned at a Thursday luncheon — not in Seattle, but across Lake Washington at an event organized by the Bellevue Chamber.
It was a very notable conversation as Bellevue and Seattle have long been competing for companies and workers that bolster the region’s economy.
And the discussion joined a growing group of concerns about the recession that have dominated public discourse in recent months, appearing in opinion pieces from GeekWire to the Wall Street Journal and at conferences around the region.
While those concerns extend to Washington state, Bellevue still enjoys a reputation as a business-friendly location and a popular destination for tech companies — including Amazon, which although founded in Seattle has slowly built its Eastside workforce.
Event organizer Jon Scholes, longtime president and CEO of the Downtown Seattle Association, noted the excitement from the neighborhood’s tech scene.
“I don’t think I was invited here back in 2017 or ’18 when the Amazon jobs fell from the sky in downtown Seattle and we had 79 (construction) cranes in the air to talk about the good times,” Scholes joked.
The speakers, who included Tiffini Connell, president of West Coast Commercial Realty, identified certain taxes they see as threats to Seattle’s economy: the city’s JumpStart tax, which targets several of the city’s largest employers including Amazon; Seattle’s business and occupation (B&O) tax was recently increased for large corporations and reduced for small ones; and a new state income tax benefiting high earners.
Focusing the tax burden on a very small group of businesses and citizens is “the worst possible idea,” said Nguyen, a former Democratic congressman. Targeting a small tax base also creates an unreliable revenue stream, he added.
Scholes was particularly pointed at JumpStart’s impact on Seattle. Since the tax went into effect in 2021, “we’ve lost nearly 40,000 jobs. We’ve lost $10 billion worth of commercial office space in the city of Seattle,” he said.
Taxes take much of the criticism, but other forces are also shaping the landscape. Nationally, companies are cutting headcount as AI tools replace certain roles and as tech firms look to shed billions being poured into data centers. And while commercial space remains a stubborn problem in Seattle, downtown residential numbers have reached record highs.
Business leaders say they have been working with Seattle officials and remain hopeful that the city’s strained relationship with large employers can improve — and that taxes and spending can be tightened, as other metro areas have done. They also pointed to significant progress, including improved public safety, a revitalized waterfront and new public transportation.
One looming test will be a big one: Seattle’s chance as a host city for the 2026 FIFA World Cup, which will be played next month.
Connell compared the opportunity to a pop-up store that gives the city a chance to show what it can do.
“Pop-ups tend to tell the story of a place over a long period of time,” says Connell. “So this is like a pop-up – can we do this? Can we really move people into the city? Can we handle the safety issues that are very common, and can we support and show and prove that this is a community that can have these world-class events?”
