Car tab fees will help SnoCo roads, but budget issues remain

Published 1:30 am Friday, September 11, 2026

SNOHOMISH — Extra funding from a recent increase in car tab fees will help Snohomish County maintain a number of grant-funded repair projects that were in danger of losing their matching funds, officials said at a press conference Wednesday.

Snohomish County Executive Dave Somers’ proposed biennial budget includes some funding to restore maintenance and operations projects for the county’s public works department, but it will still face financial challenges amid rapidly rising costs and largely stagnant revenues.

The budget difficulties stem mostly from a combination of lower gas tax revenue and the county’s yearly 1% property tax levy increase not keeping up with construction-specific inflation, which has increased by about 30-40% annually in recent years, Public Works Director Kelly Snyder previously said.

Public works officials said during a Wednesday press conference in Snohomish that there are millions of dollars’ worth of repair and upkeep projects they have identified as necessary, but don’t currently have the funding to complete. Tom Teigen, an executive director at Snohomish County, said that 40 construction or maintenance projects have been reduced or deferred recently, some a decade or longer into the future, due to rising costs.

Teigen said at the press conference Wednesday that it’s not always easy for the public to see the impacts of deferred maintenance.

“If it’s not broken, then it can be delayed,” Teigen said. “But that creates problems down the road — pun intended — as we’ve seen over the last couple of decades across the county. This is why it’s important to include funding in the proposed county budget to invest in transportation infrastructure.”

The press conference was held near the Snohomish River Bridge, a bridge that is about to go through repairs and upgrades in order to protect its piers from erosion, thanks largely to a federal grant. That bridge was directly in the path of record flooding in December 2025, as water levels in the Snohomish River climbed 9 feet above major flood stage. The repairs, expected to cost $8.2 million, are set to be complete by 2028.

The $5 million-plus per year that will come from the new car tab fees helped maintain matching grant funds for that project, and numerous others, that are set to begin construction in the coming years. The new fees served as a “Band-Aid” to help the public works department keep those grant-funded projects in the pipeline, said Kira Cox, a public works spokesperson.

“If we didn’t have the TBD [Transportation Benefit District], we would have had to wrap up any of our grant-funded projects because we were going to have to take those matching funds and use them for maintenance and operations instead,” Cox said Wednesday.

Snohomish County Council member and state Representative Sam Low, a Republican, said Wednesday the county needs to find ways to address the structural deficit. One way he hopes to address it includes utilizing a new state grant program known as the Local Road Program that will help provide additional funding to counties across Washington that are in need of road repairs.

“We’ve cut back on as many employees as we can, cut back to save costs as much as we can,” Low said. “But you can only squeeze back so far before you put the safety of the public at risk.”

Will Geschke: 425-339-3443; william.geschke@heraldnet.com; X: @willgeschke.