By Paul Kiefer

During the City Council’s budget deliberations over the past two weeks, dozens of public commenters have urged the council to adopt something called the “Solidarity Budget.”

So what is the Solidarity Budget, and who’s behind it?

“We’re the convergence of labor, environmental, racial, transit and housing justice organizations,” Jonathan Fikru, one of the organizers behind the Solidarity Budget, told PubliCola. The Solidarity Budget’s list of more than 100 endorsing organizations include prominent grassroots groups like King County Equity Now and the Transit Riders’ Union as well as longer-established nonprofits like East African Community Services. “Our role is to organize and present a list of the budget priorities of this broad swath of groups to elected officials,” Fikru added.

The coalition transmitted a letter to the offices of Mayor Jenny Durkan and the members of the Seattle City Council two weeks ago outlining a familiar set of six budget priorities, including the expansion of affordable housing and emergency shelters, the preservation of funding for transit projects, and the reallocation of 50 percent of the Seattle Police Department’s budget to “Black communities [and] community-led health and safety systems” through a participatory budgeting process in 2021.

Practically all of the budget priorities are directly tied to legislative proposals brought forward by council members in the past week: for instance, the coalition expressly supports a proposal sponsored by council member Lisa Herbold to create a “duress” defense for people accused of misdemeanor charges. Some of those amendments reflect pressure and requests on councilmembers from organizations that signed the Solidarity Budget letter; others were developed through collaboration between councilmembers and those groups. But some of the policy proposals within the Solidarity Budget — namely divestment from SPD and preserving city services — go further than councilmembers’ proposals. 

The title of the “Solidarity Budget” is similar in concept to the “People’s Budget” that council member Kshama Sawant and her supporters have championed year after year, but according to Katie Wilson, a representative of the Transit Riders’ Union who also spoke to PubliCola, the two are not entirely identical. “We don’t see ourselves as competing one another,” Wilson said, “but we have a few differences of opinion when it comes to strategy.”

The strategic disagreements largely boil down to visions for police abolition. “For example, [the People’s Budget] folks have continued to show interest in a civilian oversight board for SPD,” Wilson said, “but we want to move towards a future entirely without SPD; we want to focus energy elsewhere.” Although the Solidarity Budget appears to have eclipsed Sawant’s People’s Budget this year, Sawant has continued to champion the People’s Budget while dropping references to the Solidarity Budget during council budget meetings.