The Seattle P-I veers into C is for Crank territory today, with an outright editorial from city hall reporter Chris Grygiel. Grygiel’s piece (righteously; I’ll get back to that) takes on the Seattle Times’ editorial today, which calls on Mayor Mike McGinn to come up with a way to hire 20 new police officers next year despite facing, at minimum, a $56 million budget shortfall.
What’s unusual about the piece is that it’s written not by one of the P-I’s editorial columnists, like Joel Connelly, but by a straight-news reporter for a site that fashions itself a straight-news site, not a blog.
Is the P-I veering into Horsesass territory? Grygiel points to several other editorial pieces he’s written over the months, including one inveighing against the Times for supporting some corporate taxes while benefiting from a generous state tax break themselves. That’s great, and I’d love to see more editorializing, not less, at the P-I. But in the future, it might benefit readers to mark editorials clearly as such.
As for the content of Grygiel’s editorial: The longtime city hall reporter gets right at the essential problem of city budgets—when revenues fall short of expectations, it’s time for cuts not new expenditures. The Times says the city should spend money on 20 new officers, but it doesn’t identify any cuts. Suggesting governments should “cut the fat” is a trope among armchair budget watchers, but, as Grygiel sensibly notes, “The City will [already] have to make significant reductions that would be made even worse by hiring additional police.” He concludes: “If The Times wants to forcefully advocate for hiring more police, fine. But it should get out its own budget knife and tell readers which specific programs or personnel should be let go to accomplish that.”
This issue actually came up during my recent appearance with Times editorial writer Joni Balter on KUOW’s Weekday. Balter said the city should prioritize hiring 20 new cops above all other city services. I asked, “Where are they going to get the money?”
Her response was a bit of a non sequitur. “I don’t have the specific cuts, but I just want to point this out, that the county, which has way fewer sources of revenue, has cut something like that for the last five or six years … I don’t have the specific cuts in the city budget, but if public safety were the priority that it should be” the city would add 20 officers.
I’m with Chris on this one. Twenty new officers (21, actually) would cost the city more than $2 million. That’s the equivalent of the annual operating budget for three neighborhood libraries. Half the city’s entire budget for domestic violence and sexual assault prevention. The city’s entire annual budget for sidewalk maintenance. And so on. So the question, What would you cut? is a relevant one, and one the Times and Balter can’t just avoid by saying, “Not our job.”
