The Greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce may be near the ending of its useful life as an advocacy organization for business in Seattle. Taken together, minimum wage increases, paid leave, and meddling with employee schedules have all added to making Seattle an increasingly difficult place to run a small or medium sized business. This doesn’t include Mandatory Inclusionary Zoning (MIZ) which the City calls Mandatory Housing Affordability (MHA), a tax on the production of all new housing; I’ve talked about the unsustainable math on MHA already. Far from being a voice and force against all this overreach, the Chamber has made things worse, actually supporting all these things.

During their efforts to get Jenny Durkan elected, the Chamber spend at least $500,000 and endorsed many of the sitting City Council members, including Lorena Gonzalez who’s promised to act quickly to impost the tax on jobs. The Chamber ran an ad during the election touting Durkan and saying she’d “hold developers accountable” and make them pay fees and taxes for creating housing.

The Chamber bought this ad pushing for more taxes on housing on it’s own membership or at least people it should have been representing, completely disregarding the math. And on all the other issues they’ve been a non-entity and ineffective while at the same time spending money to elect the very Councilmembers that are now proposing a tax on jobs in Seattle.

To oppose that tax, the Chamber has written a letter to the City Council urging them to “reconsider” and “slow down” on the tax on jobs being proposed. As I’ve pointed out, there isn’t really a coherent plan with what to do with all the money raised and there is serious questions about whether the money would produce much of a solution to housing issues or homelessness specifically. The letter seems to be begging and pleading and even touting all the bad ideas it has already supported as the basis for backing off the jobs tax.

In the past three years, Seattle employers supported a progressive increased minimum wage (still an ongoing increase for many of us), mandated paid sick and safe time, a secure scheduling ordinance, and the most progressive Paid Family and Medical Leave program in the nation. A significant increase in B & O taxes and business license fees were imposed.

Actually, the Chamber supported these things. Business across the city did not; they’re just paying the tab. And it’s the Chambers docility that has emboldened the Council now to impose a tax on jobs along with the onerous MHA program which will add as much as $14,000 per unit in additional costs once it is passed. Nobody on Council has anything to fear from the Chamber.

Does anyone take the Chamber seriously, especially the City Council? What kind of an organization claims to represent business while advocating for policy that make it harder to do business in the city and supports candidates that openly support anti business policies, taxes, and fees? Furthermore, the Chamber has done nothing to oppose egregious overreach on regulation impacting rental housing.

Why am I hitting the Chamber so hard? Because they’re making things worse and spending lots of resources doing it. Seattle’s business community needs leadership and it’s getting the opposite from the Chamber. It’s time for business to take their money out of the organization and fund efforts at the state and local level to get a handle on the anti-growth drumbeat and push back. We’re going to keep building relationships statewide to try to do this, especially in the 2019 session. And we’re going to point out that all this cash won’t help but only make the problems worse. I don’t expect any help from the Chamber. But perhaps business could redirect their Chamber dues to something that is actually pro-business like these statewide efforts.