By Erica C. Barnett
Last year’s city budget process was one of the most transparent in history, thanks in huge part to an interactive budget tool, created by (now-former) City Council communications staffer Joseph Peha, that provided in-depth information about the council’s budget proposals as they went through every stage of the process. The tracker included different versions of each amendment proposal, time-stamped links to videos of the council’s discussion of each proposal, and information not just about how much each council amendment would cost but how its sponsors planned to pay for it.
You could search to see which proposals each council member was sponsoring, filter amendments by how much they would cost and which departments they would impact, and get real-time updates on committee votes as they were happening.
It was awesome. It won a national award. And now it’s gone.
This year, under new Council President Sara Nelson, the council not only isn’t reviving the budget tool, they’ve actually removed the 2023 version from the city’s website, replacing it with a static page describing the tool as if it still existed.
In lieu of the user-friendly, custom app, the council’s website now includes a link to its (currently unsecured) budget tracker—a high-level budget spreadsheet rife with unexplained jargon, acronyms, and Excel-style bar charts describing fund sources that the tracker never bothers to define. It’s a tool for people already familiar with the arcane details of how the city budget works, and it screams “not for you!” to any ordinary person trying to decipher a complex, $8.3 billion budget with many moving parts.
Brad Harwood, the council’s communications director, told us that “due to a variety of factors including staffing bandwidth and technical concerns, the decision was made among departmental leadership to no longer support it. However, we’re exploring a potential page to augment what is (and will be) publicly available.”
Asked when the 2023 budget tracker was taken down and by whom, Harwood said, “It was likely taken down in September when we updated the budget site for the 2024 process, to avoid confusion.” Dan Strauss, who is leading the budget process, told PubliCola,” I wish we still had the tracker. It would have made committee last week run more smoothly and would have increased councilmember participation.”
We asked Harwood if council president Sara Nelson had directed the communications staff to remove the tool. He responded: “[T]his issue was discussed with a handful of senior staff members in the department. Again, mainly due to staffing bandwidth and technical concerns, we decided to no longer feature the tracker.”
Peha left the communications office earlier this year. Updating the budget tool would probably require at least a small contract to get the council’s IT and communications staff up to speed on how it works and how to update it, both in real time and on the back end, but there appears to be no appetite to do so this year.
Harwood noted that the council’s budget amendments are “publicly available to view on the council’s Legistar site”—a tool that’s familiar to people who routinely search council agendas, but which isn’t a particularly user-friendly way to search for the latest budget amendments.
As long as the “normies” keep their street parking and don’t have to share public spaces with pedestrians or cyclists — you know, fellow human taxpayers — they don’t care.
Let me get this straight.
In an orgy of spending, Seattle “moderates” mechanically react to “defund the police” by vastly overfunding the police (because paying the salaries of cop positions that were never filled is exactly what that is) and ultimately pushing the budget deficit up to 250 million.
Now, deeply unpopular, they want to hide the extent to which they are tying the city budget in knots. But it is already public knowledge they are pulling money out of JumpStart to fund things such as these empty police positions, as if we live in some banana republic where officials fill their pockets with the salaries from fake city jobs.
The level of horror this council (and mayor!) has brought to this city will take years to unwind. I mean really, by nixing such a multi-million dollar boondoggle as ShotSpotter, if the mayor is the sane one out of this bunch we are in serious trouble. I ask this honestly, was this the whole idea behind their appointment by the business lobby?
Is this what that one poster here on Publicola who wants to chop off the hands of graffiti artists thinks is the the best, the most moderate, and “normie”?