Best legal help your tax dollar can buy

By Meg Olson

The Point Roberts hospital district is getting its unwieldy wheels rolling after commissioners have spent months tinkering with everything from bylaws to budgets.

At their October 17 meeting commissioners Victor Riley, Margery Biery and Barbara Bradstock scheduled a public hearing for November 7 at 5:30 p.m. to get public input on the district’s budget for next year, and the new 68 cents per thousand dollars of assessed valuation taxpayers will be paying to fulfill the district’s mandate: Keep the local clinic operating.

Biery, who prepared the 2006 budget for the district, is recommending to commissioners they not take the full 75 cents per thousand dollars of assessed valuation the new district is legally allowed to levy. “You don’t want to inflate your budget and there’s no way we could spend that much money,” she said. “This is not intended to run the clinic, it’s a supplement.”

With the number of bureaucratic hurdles and financial grey areas facing the district, Bradstock wondered if they weren’t limiting themselves by not taking the full amount now and adjusting the levy later. “We could be shooting ourselves in the foot,” she said. She said she wanted confirmation from the county assessor that the district could still access the additional taxing capacity beyond the allowed one percent annual increase allowed under state law, which Biery said would be available as “banked capacity.”

One issue facing the hospital district and all other local junior taxing districts in the current budget season will be how much taxing capacity local districts have left before more junior districts, like the parks and recreation district, will have to give up some of their slice of the tax pie to what are deemed essential services like fire and hospital districts. According to county assessor Keith Wilnauer, Point Roberts has 79 cents left under the state tax cap. The hospital district could legally take 75 cents.

The 2005 budget for the district was only $7,187 for legal and election expenses. Next year when the district takes over operation of the Wellness Clinic they are anticipating a $241,695 budget and they are counting on tax revenues for 73 percent, the rest coming from fees for service. The budget includes just under $170,000 for a contract with Interfaith Family Health Center to operate the facility, and $18,2000 for a local superintendent to manage both district and clinic affairs.

Legal expenses are anticipated at over $15,000 next year, paying $450 per hour for the services of Bradley J. Berg of the Seattle firm of Foster, Pepper and Schefelman. “He’s got more experience in this area than anyone else in the state,” Riley said of the district’s choice of legal counsel. The first task is finding a legal way to transfer the clinic’s funds and assets from the fire district, which administers the grant that got the clinic started, to the hospital district elected to operate it.