By Erica C. Barnett

On Friday, Mayor Bruce Harrell instituted a hiring freeze across all city departments except police, fire, and the 911 response division, now known as the CARE Department. PubliCola broke the news on social media Monday morning. The hiring freeze will include exceptions, on a case-by-case basis, for “employees providing essential public services and employees backfilling for those using the City’s Paid Parental Leave or Paid Family Care Leave,” mayoral spokesman Jamie Housen told PubliCola on Monday.

Housen said the city “faces more significant fiscal challenges in 2024 than were previously known when the 2024 Budget was adopted, requiring immediate action to lessen the impact of increasing costs.”

The freeze, which applies to all vacant positions except those that were already in the hiring process as of Friday, is an attempt to save money in advance of this year’s budget process, when the city will need to a 2025 budget gap currently estimated at $229 million, with a larger shortfall projected in 2026.

While hardly unprecedented, the hiring freeze could serve as a preview for more dramatic cuts in the future.

In 2009, when the city faced a revenue shortfall of more than $70 million, then-mayor Greg Nickels announced hundreds of layoffs and imposed mandatory furloughs on many city workers who survived the cuts, slashing two weeks’ pay from their annual pay. In 2010, and again in 2011, then-mayor Mike McGinn prolonged the carnage, cutting jobs and putting employees on furlough until the financial crisis started to recede. The situation was so bad that McGinn actually broached the idea of imposing a hiring freeze on the police department, something that would be anathema today.

The cuts, though arguably necessary, led to a long-term brain drain in departments like the Department of Planning and Development (now divided into separate planning and permitting departments), which eventually lost around 40 percent of its staff.

While the city has gone more than a decade without mass layoffs or furloughs, the issues causing the “structural” budget gap are arguably more daunting than those the city faced during the Great Recession. While the city is subject to the same uncontrollable economic factors as any business, including higher labor and construction costs, city officials made the problem worse by deciding, year after year, to address long-term needs with short-term resources.

Specifically, since 2021, the mayor and city council have used time-limited funds or one-time, such as federal relief dollars and repurposed revenues from the JumpStart tax, to kick-start new program or pay for ongoing needs—like the six-person CARE Team, which responds to low-acuity 911 calls, and wage increases for human services providers. This year’s budget also includes funding for the police surveillance program Shotspotter, which—while funded on a one-time basis with unspent SPD dollars—will almost certainly become an ongoing budget obligation.

How well is the new council positioned to address these complex issues? During the campaign, many of the newly elected mebers said they wouldn’t consider raising taxes under any circumstances, or at least until the city agrees to “audit the budget” to find out where the city’s money is going.

During a public forum on Tuesday, all but one of the eight finalists for the open city council seat expressed support for such an “audit,” although none elaborated on what they thought such an audit would look like. (Only Vivian Song resisted the audit’s siren song, noting that an audit is a review of financial processes and transparency and the city is doing pretty good on both counts.)

Many of the finalists likened the city budget to household or business spending choices like a “cable package” (West Precinct Police Captain Steve Strand) or toilet handles in hotel rooms (Civic Hotel owner Neha Nariya, who said the city should “dig a little deeper” to cut costs). And Tanya Woo, the council’s presumptive choice, said “no” when Councilmember Cathy Moore asked the candidates if they’d support progressive taxes after a “careful review, and/or audit,” because, Woo said, “we just can’t keep taxing [and] asking for more money from small businesses.”

While there is certainly waste and redundancy in the city’s budget, particularly in city contracts (the mayor, for instance, has two Sound Transit liaisons, a city employee and a high-priced consultant, Tim Ceis), there probably isn’t $229 million of waste and redundancy, an amount that represents around 15 percent of the general fund.

During comments addressed to the council finalists, Council President Sara Nelson accused “the media” of spinning up “guilt by manufactured association” around Woo—an apparent reference to the fact that Harrell consultant Ceis wrote a letter encouraging business leaders who funded an unsuccessful pro-Woo campaign to help ensure her appointment. The “association” between Ceis, businesses, and the candidate businesses spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to elect, was not manufactured, but factual; you can read Ceis’ full letter in our post.