In my column this week, I talk to King County Executive candidates Fred Jarrett and Ross Hunter, two Eastside Democrats who serve in the state Senate and House, respectively. (Longer Q&As with each candidate, as well as a report from last night's executive forum in Renton, will be posted on the Stranger's web site shortly). In our conversations, both candidates told me that the one percent cap on property taxes (passed by voters as Tim Eyman's Initiative 747, overturned by the state supreme court, and subsequently reinstated, at Gov. Christine Gregoire's request, by a special session of the state legislature) was one of the biggest problems facing the county: Because the county relies primarily on property taxes, and because one percent is lower than the rate of inflation, the cap means county government has to make deeper cuts every year.

Hunter: [The county has] a structural revenue problem. They get 60 percent of their revenue from property tax and that only grows one percent a year, and inflation is just bigger than that. Over time, they have to keep doing less and less as a county. And if the county’s doing things that you think are really important to quality of life, like public health or putting miscreants in jail, then that’s bad news.

Jarrett: There are some structural problems around their revenue sources, but there are solutions to those that the county council and executive have decided not to take. While they are limited to 1 percent property tax growth [each year], they’re able to go out and ask the voters if the voters will want those services. They haven’t done that because they know they’ll lose. They haven’t made the case to the voters that those services are important.

However, both men voted to reinstate the one percent cap on property taxes in their roles as state legislators in 2007.

I called Hunter and Jarrett to see why they voted to put the cap back in place, whether they stood by their votes, and whether, in light of massive recent budget cuts at the county, they thought voters were prepared to raise their taxes to protect county services.

Hunter paused for a long time, then he said:

Why'd I vote that way in the first place? I voted that way because that's what the [House Democratic] caucus decided to do on that issue. ... I'm finance chair and to some degree I follow the lead of my caucus. ... I don't think it works, but I think it's what the people want. One of the things I tried to do this year was make corrections to the county's tax structure. And what I found is that there is immense resistance to doing that within the caucus. I was surprised by that, because we're looking at some pretty devastating cuts at the county... The members are concerned, but they also have concern that the county has a spending problem. ... I don't thing King County is going to be able to get its voters or the legislature to vote for more revenue authority until they convince both the voters and the legislators that they're spending what they have in a reasonable way. ... I think you've got to come back and convince the voters that you have a real issue and they actually want the services you provide. ... Until people can understand what the county spends its money on, I don't think they do they aren't going to vote to raise their taxes. ... Is one percent the right number? No, it's not. We should probably use a number that's closer to some measure of inflation. Every year they do less. Maybe that's what you want, but it's not what I want.

Jarrett , similarly, said the county hasn't made the case that it deserves more tax revenue:

One of the county's big problems is that it hasn't built the public support for the programs, and that's why you have things like the one percent cap. My view is generally, I don't want to overturn decisions that the public made. I dislike the way that Tim approaches politics and the way that he tries to make public policy without understanding what the consequences of it are, but by the same token, one of the things that I have learned over the years is that when people don't get to have the consequences of a vote they don't learn that they have to be a little bit more careful when they're doing their analysis of a vote. ... Notice that what i said last night is not that you do away with the property tax cap. I said, you work with the law as it is. You can go above one percent—you just have to have a vote of the people. The county has not been able to demonstrate the need to the people to do that. ... If you look at the rhetoric that comes out of Eyman and his ilk, what they talk about is how much property taxes are rising. Well, the reason they're going up is voter-approved levies. ... When it's a specific thing and people see value in it, they're willing to vote for taxes.