By Erica C. Barnett

In September, Mayor Bruce Harrell boasted that his proposed 2025-2026 budget would not cause any “noticeable impacts to public-facing city services,” because it only cut positions and services that are “internally facing,” like information technology and other departments that serve city employees directly.

As we’ve reported, that claim wasn’t really true to begin with: The cuts to the city’s IT department, for example, included eliminating all original programming at the Seattle Channel, which provides independent coverage of local issues—an entirely public-facing service. And the implication that “internal” cuts will have no impact on the city as a whole is dubious, particularly when applied to programs designed to improve recruitment and retention of a diverse workforce, including workforce equity trainings.

Under Harrell’s budget, the city will lose its the Learning and Development Division, the Workforce Development Unit, and the Equity Performance Management Program, all housed in the Seattle Department of Human Resources. These divisions provide, among other things, equity and racial and social justice trainings, internship and mentorship programs, and workforce development for employees who come from historically marginalized communities.

One of the specific programs Harrell’s budget will eliminate is a brand-new Tribal Nations Training Program, established earlier this year with what seemed like vocal  support from the mayor. The program, run by former Muckleshoot Tribe curriculum developer Rita Gray, sprung out of efforts to adopt a single, culturally informed land acknowledgement for the city.

“I was watching a lot of predominately white folks thinking they were doing good work, but some were mentioning the Umatilla tribe, which is not in Seattle,” Gray, a member of the Turtle Mountain Chippewa Tribe, recalled. “Or there was a total lack” of kind of statement at all. After the 2023 Tribal Relations Summit, the city’s tribal relations director asked Gray to come up with a curriculum to train city employees on tribal history and sovereignty, as well as “how to partner and engage with the tribes and urban Native organizations,” Gray said, “because right now they don’t know how to do the good work, and it ends up being really transactional.”

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The Tribal Relations division had just done a presentation for the council’s tribal relations committee about the program two weeks before Gray learned her entire division was being eliminated. “When I received the news that I was being laid off, it was shocking, because this is a major project” that was just getting started, Gray said. “I left [my previous job at the Muckleshoot Tribe] in May of 2023 to come to the city of Seattle … [because] I was looking tp indigenize non- Indigenous spaces. I felt like there was a lot of work that needed to be done in the public sector.”

When it was finished, the training would have included a sequence of nine modules, starting with “Tribal History 101,” followed by the history of treaties and tribal sovereignty in the region. The final module, Gray said, would have been “how to partner and collaborate—when do you partner with the tribes and when do you go the urban Native organizations.”

Asked about the decision to eliminate the training program, a spokesperson for the mayor’s office insisted that they aren’t eliminating it—they’re just devolving it, along with all the city’s other equity-focused programs, to the various city departments, which are supposed to come up with their own internal programs, using existing staff, in collaboration with HR.

“Many of these responsibilities will transfer to individual departments with SDHR serving in an advisory role and providing support when needed.” New employee trainings will be done through an “online course” rather than in-person classes, the spokesperson added.

Cutting the city’s equity and workforce development programs, the mayor’s spokesperson said, will allow SDHR to refocus on “essential” tasks like payroll, legal compliance, and labor relations.” SDHR will transition to an advisory role in this space by helping departments identify training needs, recommending resources, and maintaining SharePoint with resources for best practices.”

Harrell’s office also noted that SDHR, not the mayor, proposed the specific cuts.

Gray said SDHR’s Workforce Equity division—which Councilmember Tammy Morales has proposed an amendment to restore in full—is supposed to improve hiring and retention of women and people of color, yet Harrell’s budget eliminates a division that consists of three women of color (plus a white manager who will retain their job.) “Yes, it’s about me—I’m a person with a family, I have a child with special needs, I need medical—but this is also really important, groundbreaking work. It’s never been done,” Gray said. And under the mayor’s budget proposal, it won’t be.