Bob Kettle accused Tammy Morales of failing to do due diligence before proposing legislation to release funds collected from a payroll tax increase this year.
By Erica C. Barnett
The Seattle City Council narrowly rejected a proposal from Councilmember Tammy Morales to release the full $20 million that’s supposed to be collected this year to fund youth mental health services. The previous council voted 6-3 to approve an increase in the JumpStart payroll tax for this purpose.
Dan Strauss, who voted with Sara Nelson, Maritza Rivera, Cathy Moore, and Bob Kettle against Morales’ proposal, then introduced an amendment that added $2.25 million for gun violence prevention to the $10 million the council has agreed to spend this year; the remaining funds will go back into the city’s JumpStart fund and can be used to address the city’s $260 million budget deficit.
The vote was virtually identical to the one the council, convened as the nine-member budget committee, took last week. What was different was the level of vitriol council members directed at both the original tax increase, adopted by a previous council that the new council has turned into a synecdoche for government waste.
Rivera kicked things off by asking Deputy Mayor Tiffany Washington a series of leading questions about the actions of the previous council in order to establish that that council, unlike this one, “didn’t do the research,” chose $20 million as “an arbitrary figure that was not actually needed,” and “did not get guidance from mental health professionals.”
Saka (who ultimately voted for the proposal) piled on, saying there had been “no rational basis” for increasing the JumpStart tax to fund programs to improve student mental health, a comment that prompted astonished looks from some of the kids who had just testified about how such programs had benefited them.
Then Kettle jumped in, saying the previous council (which also included Lisa Herbold, Alex Pedersen, Debora Juarez, and Teresa Mosqueda, now on the King County Council) had shown an “absolute lack of good governance… lack of coordination, lack of anything, really.” Kettle then launched into a little interrogative exercise with Washington and Human Services Department director Tanya Kim, who were both on hand to answer questions.
Speaking about Morales as if she was not sitting right there, Kettle asked both executive staffers to confirm that Morales had not coordinated with the mayor or HSD when drafting her legislation to release the $10 million to the Department of Education and Early Learning. (Council members are part of the legislative branch, and are not required to seek approval from the executive branch before proposing legislation). Then, he turned to Council Central Staff director Ben Noble, who contradicted him—saying that “yes,” Morales did work with Central Staff on the legislation.
Kettle didn’t appear to like that answer, and corrected Noble, saying he clearly only meant yes “in the sense of getting the amendment into the system, calendaring, you know, into the system.” Noble responded that in fact, central staff put the same work into Morales’ amendment that they would put into any amendment, including an analysis of the underlying policy. Kettle switched tacks again, summarizing for Noble: “So, clearly, not with the executive, the people who have to carry out what needs to be done.”
It was a weird moment, made weirder by all the leading questions that gave the mayor’s office an opening to talk about how personally insulted and hurt Harrell and his staff were by the suggestion that the mayor would use mental health funding to close the budget gap.
“The mayor cares about this issue very greatly,” Washington said, “and so to just hear it put out there like he’s just going to take this money for mental health and [use it to] close the deficit gap was hard for me to hear, and very untrue, because he doesn’t have the power to do that.”
As the central staff analysis of the underlying legislation notes, in the absence of explicit action by the council to spend the full $20 million, “the remaining $10 million in appropriation authority will go unused, and the funds will either remain in the JumpStart Payroll Expense Tax Fund balance and be available for spending in 2025 or future years, or the appropriation could be abandoned, and the monies diverted to other eligible purposes in 2024.”