By Erica C. Barnett

In planning for a potential $260 million budget shortfall this year, Mayor Bruce Harrell asked most city departments to come up with potential cuts of 8 percent—a worst-case scenario the mayor’s office avoided by using about half the funds from the JumpStart payroll tax to pay for staff and services that are usually funded through the city’s general fund.

One department that did get gutted—not cut by 8 or 10 percent, but slashed in half—is the Seattle Channel, the city’s award-winning source for arts coverage, interviews with elected officials, campaign debates, and other original programming.

Harrell’s budget proposal would eliminate the jobs of three videographers who film, produce and edit programs and meetings, two half-time web positions, a senior producer, and the channel’s  operations manager. The cuts would mean the end of all original Seattle Channel programming, leaving only city council meetings and mayoral events.

During a recent presentation to the City Council, City Budget Office director Dan Eder that with the decline in cable subscriptions, the cable fees that help fund Seattle Channel are no longer enough to keep it going. “At this point, we just didn’t have enough money available to us… to continue that program,” Eder said.

In an email, a spokesperson for the mayor’s office, Callie Craighead, made a distinction between “primary programming of government affairs” and “supplementary” or “additional” programming like the original work that has been the Seattle Channel’s mainstay for the past two decades. “Should the revenue forecast improve or if the City can arrange for other funding solutions, we would be supportive of restoring this additional programming,” Craighead said.

The cuts would save about $1.6 million—about 0.085 percent (0.008) of a $1.9 billion general-fund budget that includes tens of millions of dollars in new spending on police overtime, planning for the 2026 FIFA World Cup (which will include six matches in Seattle), and downtown beautification projects such as removing the fountain in Westlake Park.

The city has known about the decline in cable revenues for many years; last year, Harrell’s budget suggested using new tax revenues, based on the recommendations of the city’s Revenue Stabilization Work Group, to sustain the Seattle Channel and other programs with dwindling or unstable revenues. After voters elected a new, anti-tax city council last. year, Harrell changed his tune, issuing what amounted to a no-new-taxes pledge.

Shows that Harrell’s budget would eliminate immediately include “City Inside/Out,” a public affairs hosted by broadcasting veteran Brian Callanan; Art Zone, a “weekly love letter” to local arts and culture hosted by Nancy Guppy; and BookLust, a popular interview show hosted by Nancy Pearl, along with 20 other shows. Callanan, along with longtime producer Susan Han, has a year-to-year contract with the channel; both will lose their jobs if the cuts go through.

Gary Gibson, who managed the Seattle Channel from 2002 to 2007, recalled that the city set up a commission in 2001 to help revitalize the city’s cable-access channel, then called TV SEA, which only aired city council meetings and mayoral press conferences.

“It was a vehicle for putting out council meetings and the mayor’s press conferences—that’s all they did. There was no original programming and there was no enterprise reporting or any kind of content creation.” The commission said the channel should create engaging shows that would have an audience beyond meeting watchers, and put those shows online so people could watch them any time. “They had this idea to create a democracy portal—a two-way communication between government and the citizens,” Gibson said.

Now retired from broadcasting, Gibson led the channel through its transition in the early 2000s, from a standard public-access cable channel (called TV-SEA) that aired mayoral press conferences and council meetings, into a unique online resource offering original shows like “City Inside/Out,” “Ask the Mayor,” and election debates.

Under Harrell’s plan, the Seattle Channel would once again be little more than a portal for council meetings and press events.

Han, who has been with Seattle Channel for 17 years, said she “did expect some belt-tightening” this year, but was surprised that Harrell proposed eliminating all of the channel’s award-winning programs. “We’re just going to have to really fight to try and save the show,” she said, referring to “City Inside/Out.” “I don’t know if we have the ability to save the station.”

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Harrell’s cuts would eliminate coverage that no one else in the city is providing—coverage that’s made possible, in part, because Seattle Channel is part of the city itself and has spent decades building trust with city leaders. The tone of its coverage is genuinely fair and balanced, and producers go out of their way to give both sides of an issue or campaign an opportunity to make their best case.

For example, during the heated debate over a proposal to recall then-council member Kshama Sawant in 2021, Han was able to convince Sawant to appear on a panel, moderated by Callanan, with representatives from the “Recall Sawant” campaign. It was the only time Sawant and her opponents sat down for a debate.

“I tried to get her own the show from April until November, and she finally said yes,” Han recalled. “That’s the thing with producing our show—you make a lot of phone calls before you hone into the right balance. And it’s not like we’re being paid hourly. We just really care that we have the best version of that show.”

Later this week, Callanan said, the Seattle Channel will hold another debate between proponents and opponents of the $1.55 billion transportation levy—a measure that has received little recent coverage from the shrinking local press corps or campaign reporters, who are largely focused on  national and state races.

“It’s going to be half hour, we’re going to have opposing sides, and we’re going to present some pretty comprehensive coverage on an issues that’s huge” to the city, Callanan said. “Here are the pros,  here are the cons, here is what both sides say. It’s that type of reporting” that will be lost if Harrell’s cuts go through, he said.

Beyond election debates, the Seattle Channel provides ongoing coverage about the details of what the city council, mayor, and city departments are up to—everything from profiles of department leaders to half-hour sit-down interviews with council members. “I think this is something city should be really proud of,” Callanan said. “For me, it’s the idea of the city standing behind this ethic of preserving quality journalism that provides transparency into what they’re doing.”

While the Seattle Channel serves as a forum for elected officials, it isn’t a mouthpiece—which is one reason many mayors and council members have complained about the channel’s coverage over the years. Common complaints include charges that the channel gives too much time to opposing views; that its reporters should be producing promo pieces for elected officials, not journalism; and that it’s unreasonable to expect officials to sit down and answer questions.

Callanan said his goal has always been “talking to local officials in the best way possible. I want to make sure we’re doing everything we can to provide those avenues for local officials to be in front of people, have people ask questions, and have the officials respond.” However, he added, “It has been more and more challenging to get public officials to commit to interviews.”

Sometimes, this pushback has led to involuntary programming changes; for example, former mayor Ed Murray ended “Ask the Mayor,” a show where the mayor responded to viewer questions, by refusing to appear on it, and no subsequent mayor has revived the show.

Harrell has also reportedly groused about the channel’s coverage, along with the fact that its camera operators can’t always drop what they’re doing to cover his events; however, he’s the first mayor to propose eliminating 100 percent of its original programming and its two-person web team.

The mayor’s office insists that its decision to eliminate the Seattle Channel’s programming is a matter of simple budget math, not a response to its coverage. “We looked at other comparable cities with an active government-access television channel and the proposed 2025 Seattle Channel budget of $1.7 M is more in line with those cities.” Craighead said.

Harrell’s budget assumes that council meetings and his own press events will go up online without the two people who currently make that happen, which Han calls unrealistic. “Our web team is fantastic, and they’re also the ones that do the live stream and put the show on all these different platforms,” Han said. “When the mayor says we’re still going to be able to put all this stuff out and do livestreams and all that, I think he’s mistaken.”

Gibson, the former Seattle Channel general manager, said he doesn’t “really get the calculus” that led Harrell to propose eliminating everything that makes Seattle Channel unique among municipal TV stations. “It just doesn’t seem like that much to pay for that kind of transparency into government activities.”

City council members Sara Nelson and Dan Strauss have both publicly expressed their support for Seattle Channel since the mayor released his budget, and Nelson told a constituent she plans to introduce a budget amendment that would restore at least some funding this week. Neither Nelson nor council spokesperson Brad Harwood responded to PubliCola’s questions about the Seattle Channel or Nelson’s amendment.

Editor’s note: After we posted this story, Nelson put out a press release saying she was “working to preserve funding for the city’s Seattle Channel.” The announcement did not include any other details.