The council approved budget adds from the centrist majority—including $1.5 million to turf a field where Rob Saka coaches Little League, directly outside to his kids’ elementary school—while rejecting much smaller proposals from Tammy Morales for a tenant work group and workplace equity.

By Erica C. Barnett

[UPDATE: After this post went up, council budget committee chair Dan Strauss added a final public comment period to the agenda for tomorrow’s budget committee meeting at 9:30 am, which will be the last opportunity to give feedback on the budget before council members vote this week, first as the budget committee on Tuesday, then as the full council on Thursday.]

The Seattle city council, which now includes five people with little or no direct experience in city government, spent the past week in a mad rush to finalize a 2025-2026 budget for the city, in a process that was among the least transparent and most chaotic in recent history.

Ordinarily, the council takes up the mayor’s budget by proposing amendments, getting cosponsors, and discussing each substantive amendment in public before passing or rejecting it, giving members of the public adequate (if not ample) time to see each proposal and give feedback. This year, parts of that standard framework appeared to be holding on by a thread.

At several points, council members proposed making significant changes to the budget on the fly, distributing hot-off-the-printer amendments that had never been distributed publicly (and are still not available online). At others, council members’ amendments met technical deadlines but weren’t up the city’s website (and still aren’t), so that anyone wanting to know what the council was discussing had to be in chambers, in person, to get a copy.

For more than a week, an online document that shows how much money goes into each spending category consisted of 50 blank pages—an oversight that wasn’t fixed until late Thursday or early Friday, long after the last opportunity for public comment on the budget.

Frequently, council members seemed unfamiliar with the basic concepts underlying the amendments they were voting on.  Tanya Woo, for instance, said she opposed a proposal from the council’s lone progressive,  Tammy Morales, for the city to do a Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) on anti-displacement measures for at-risk homeowners as part of the city’s comprehensive plan—a common practice during citywide zoning changes.

Woo said she opposed Morales’ proposal because an EIS is “environment impact study that will help look at the environment as it is, as well as how we do we look at zoning. … It will help inform, but not do what we think it’s going to do, based on what I’ve been hearing recently.” She understood what an EIS is, she continued, but asked a staffer, “can you tell us what the EIS does and is?”

An EIS, in reality, looks at many different impacts of zoning changes; the scope of the comprehensive plan EIS includes residential and commercial displacement, housing costs, and tree impacts, along with standard “environmental” factors.

Woo will leave the council on November 26, when Alexis Mercedes Rinck, who defeated her in November, takes over the citywide council position to which the council appointed Woo in January after she lost to Morales in District 2. If the general sense of confusion among the new council members was confined to her, it might be less notable. But the new councilmembers repeatedly expressed their “confusion” or desire to have staff produce new reports informing then about items that have already been studied—for example, why Seattle residents sometimes can’t afford to pay their rent.

During a discussion of Cathy Moore’s capital gains tax proposal, which would pay for rent and food assistance, for example, Councilmember Maritza Rivera said, “I have not seen any data points to suggest the need” for either priority, adding that “we don’t know the level of those needs until we get these data points and information from departments.” In fact, Moore noted, the city does know that about 90,000 people in Seattle are rent-burdened, along with the length of current wait lists for rent assistance in Seattle and many other data points that are mentioned in the capital gains tax legislation itself.

Also unconvinced that rent assistance should be a priority, Woo—whose family owns the Louisa Hotel apartment building—suggested “possibly having social workers inside buildings or resident advisors inside these buildings to help people get to the root cause” of why they can’t pay their bills. Moore, defending her proposal, said she agreed that it was important to get to root causes, but noted that “one of the root causes is that people’s income is not keeping up with the cost of living.”

This is exasperating stuff—especially, I have to imagine, to the council staffers who have spent most of the last year trying to explain how the city works to council members who frequently demonstrate more confidence than curiosity. But it also has a direct impact on the city, because the budget isn’t just a “moral document,” as elected officials like to say—it’s also, and primarily a document that dictates how the city spends its residents’ tax dollars, and it’s important for the city council to understand what’s in it and why.

Dan Strauss, the budget chair, shares some of the blame for this year’s truncated, confusing budget cycle. By shortening the budget timeline (ordinarily, the budget wraps up the week of Thanksgiving) for a brand-new council unfamiliar with the process, Strauss left little room for discussion or error, and made it even more difficult for the public to understand what the council was doing, at a time when the council’s communications department eliminated a critical transparency tool.

Strauss also failed to maintain discipline among council members who wanted to put last-minute amendments forward, resorting to public admonishments that had no practical effect because in most cases, council members who broke Strauss’ budget rules had a majority of the council behind them.

And as much as the centrist council majority has portrayed this as a new era of good feelings and civility, they made plenty of exceptions when faced with progressive opposition to their priorities. Councilmember Bob Kettle, for example, went “over the edge” at Morales, as he put it, after she proposed taking $500,000 away from a CCTV surveillance to pay for tenant services on Friday, seething, “It is unconscionable that you created a situation and now you want to take out the fix for that situation!” (It was not the first time Kettle lost his temper during the budget process.) Kettle’s outburst came after Moore added $400,000 over the biennium to the surveillance program, bringing the two-year cost to more than $6.5 million.

I’ve been covering city budgets for a long time, and this year’s budget was almost uniquely hard to follow; had I known everything was going to fly by so fast, and be documented so inadequately, I would have reverted to the old-school practice of marking up the hundreds of budget amendments by hand as they passed or failed, along with vote counts. As of today, there’s still no online record of the votes on Friday; I know staff is taxed by the last-minute changes and shortened timeline, but the public deserves to know how their representatives voted on important budget priorities without watching an all-day meeting, and certainly sooner than the day before the final vote.

If you follow me on Bluesky, you saw my almost-live posts about this week’s discussions, which give a detailed account of what was happening in the room as the council voted on hundreds of amendments. Here, I’m going to focus on the big picture—revenue and spending—before telling you about a few important, telling, or otherwise noteworthy small-picture items that emerged in the past few days.

If you want an overview of what’s in Mayor Bruce Harrell’s budget proposal, from what it will fund to how it’s funded, I did that here, here, and here; if you want a look at the council’s initial proposed changes, you can read that here; and if you want to read more followup coverage, that’s here, here, here, here, and here. I won’t be revisiting everything I’ve covered before (although I can’t resist just one more look at Rob Saka’s amendment committing up to $2 million to take out a traffic safety barrier that prevents illegal left turns at the preschool his kids attended), so please go back and read my previous coverage to catch up before the final votes this week.

JumpStart Up for Grabs, Capital Gains On the Defensive

As I’ve reported, this year’s budget will address a long-anticipated structural deficit by eliminating the city’s legal commitment to use the JumpStart payroll tax to fund housing, equitable development, and student mental health; it will also eliminate a committee—established as part of the 2019 JumpStart legislation but never convened—that was supposed to provide oversight and transparency into how the tax is being used.

The council has known for years that they would face a large, structural budget deficit starting this year, thanks largely to decisions made during COVID to use temporary federal dollars to pay for programs that ended up being ongoing. When the city started looking at solutions, centrist councilmember (now Council President) Sara Nelson said it was important to “live within our means“—a sentiment most of the new councilmembers echoed on the campaign trail. Now that the budget deficit is here, however, the council is retconning a different story: One where no one could have seen this coming.

Strauss, the budget chair, ascribed the need to turn JumpStart into a permanent all-purpose funding source to an economic downturn that went on longer than anticipated. “I really wish that we had been correct that in 2025 we would be past the downstream economic issues,” Strauss said, but “we aren’t out of the woods,” so the JumpStart spending commitments have to go.

Both Moore and Morales urged caution about that strategy, proposing amendments that would require at least some JumpStart revenues to go to at least some of its initial spending categories. Morales’ would set aside 70 percent of revenues for the original spending plan, and Moore would put 55 percent of the reserves toward housing programs. The council will vote on both of those proposals tomorrow, along with the rest of the budget.

Moore also, as we reported last week, proposed a capital gains tax of 2 percent on investment income above $267,000 a year, to pay for rental assistance, food assistance, and homeownership programs. In an interview, she said she proposed the tax—despite running as one of those “fiscal conservatives”—because “we need a lot more money for rental assistance, we need to be supporting more homeownership opportunities for people who are low-income and moderate income… and we are looking at a food crisis, a silent crisis. Those are all areas where, while there is funding in the budget, there is insufficient funding.”

Most of her council colleagues appeared to disagree, and the tax looks unlikely to pass. In addition to Rivera’s call for more “data” to demonstrate the need for rent and food assistance, Saka—a cosponsor of the legislation—said he didn’t want to raise taxes until the city has addressed the public’s sense that “they are not getting a return on investment” in general.

“Some in our city would argue that we have a revenue problem. Others would say, ‘No, no, we actually have a spending problem.’ And I happen to find elements of both of those arguments compelling, and I personally feel I was elected to specifically reject the false choice narrative and framing and clap back against the either/or, divisive kind of rhetoric and champion what Mayor Harrell calls the politics of A. N. D.,” Saka said.

Saka added that “as someone who strongly supports infrastructure, getting hammers in hands, shovels in grounds,” he couldn’t support any kind of new revenue unless it included funding for “generic infrastructure.”

There are good reasons to use caution when allocating revenues from both JumpStart (a payroll tax whose revenues come mostly from a few huge  businesses) and a potential capital gains tax (a tax on the investment gains whose revenues would come mostly from a few very wealthy people.) Both taxes are potentially very volatile, which suggests the city should be conservative in using them to pay for programs that need consistent funding from year to year, and assume revenues on the low end of estimates.

“The city doesn’t have good outcomes,” however, isn’t a reason but an excuse, and diverting a highly variable new tax to infrastructure would carry obvious risks, since capital projects require stable, ongoing funding.

A few more quick hits from this week, including notable budget items I haven’t covered:

Most renters will no longer have the right to an attorney if they’re evicted

Moore, whose capital gains tax proposal would provide badly needed rent assistance to tenants at risk of eviction, proposed (and passed) another budget bill that will negatively impact those same tenants by taking away the right to free legal counsel from all but the most impoverished Seattle renters. Her amendment, which passed, will restrict the right to legal council to tenants making 200 percent or less of the federal poverty level, or a little over $30,000 a year—almost $11,000 a year less than a full-time minimum wage worker earns in Seattle.

In our interview, Moore noted that her amendment puts the city in line with the federal definition of “indigent,” which “the state and county both use… so I just think it should be consistent with those standards.” But, as Morales pointed out last week, the reason Seattle did not adopt the state and federal definition is that Seattle is much more expensive than other parts of the state; people making less than a full-time minimum wage income tend to be severely rent burdened, and certainly can’t afford to hire a lawyer. Only Morales and Strauss opposed Moore’s amendment—in Strauss’ case, because “I need more data.”

Tammy Morales Really Is on the Outs

Morales, for now the council’s lone progressive, had trouble getting any amendments through this year, including the ones she identified as her top priorities, which Strauss included in his “consent package”—a list of amendments that were supposed to pass as one item, and which included the top priorities of every council member. Not only did several of Morales’ amendments get pulled out of this consensus package for greater scrutiny, the council majority rejected most of them, including a request for just $50,000 to convene a tenant work group to propose strategies to help Seattle renters stay housed.

The council majority also used this process to kill a Morales proposal that would have restored the city’s recently established Workforce Equity division, a centralized effort to help departments hire and retain diverse workforces and combat workplace discrimination. Despite their stated commitment to “efficiency,” council members insisted it would be more effective for the city to returned to a siloed system in which every department is responsible for creating a bespoke equity plan and policing itself for compliance.

“Every manager, including ourselves, has the responsibility to carry out this workforce equity work in everything we do and that includes hiring and retention, with our [Race and Social Justice Initiative] lens and workforce equity policies that already exist,” Woo said.

Morales did manage to get support for her EIS on homeownership and displacement after Joy Hollingsworth voted for it, with Nelson and the four other new council members voting no.

Saka’s priorities pass, including two that hit (ahem) close to home

Rob Saka, in contrast, received funding for two much more expensive priorities in West Seattle—removing the traffic safety barrier in front of the preschool his kids attended, for up to $2 million, and converting the softball infield at Fairmount Park, next to the elementary school his kids attend, from grass to turf, at a cost of $1.5 million. Saka, who coaches Little League at the park and was “leading the effort” to convert the field, according to the West Seattle Little League, has framed left turns into the parking lot and turf conversions as a matter of equity.

Last week, he lashed out at critics who opposed removing the left-turn barrier, accusing them of engaging in “false choice, false dichotomy-type narratives.” He also spoke at length about the pro bono legal work he did for the preschool (prior to joining the council, Saka was a corporate attorney for Facebook), and claimed to be uniquely unbothered by criticism and “attacks.”

“I’m thick-skinned. I’m built a little differently than every other elected official,” Saka said.

The $1.5 million for the new turf field, funded by the real estate excise tax, will come from the Seattle Parks Department’s budget. During a public hearing on the budget last week, Parks employees asked the council to restore the department’s environmental programs, which are being cut in half, but the council declined to do so. As a result, the Parks Department will lose $1 million and nine positions, and environmental programming at Discovery and Carkeek Parks will be privatized through future “public-private partnerships.”

Saka also won support for a request that the Seattle Police Department study the possibility of implementing acoustic vehicle noise surveillance systems with the ability to issue tickets automatically to cars that make too much noise, and possibly to people playing “loud music in parks or beaches,” according to the proposal. Saka said the proposal is a part of his effort to reduce illegal racing on Alki and Harbor Avenues in West Seattle.

Saka did not, however, prevail in his effort to start the process of shutting down the South Lake Union streetcar, even after he proposed a last-minute amendment saying the trolley would continue operating through the FIFA World Cup in 2026. At the end of a 12-minute speech about the proposal, Saka concluded: “Shooters shoot, players play, and leaders lead. I humbly ask and urge you to join me in leading a plan to require a thoughtful transition to reimagine and enhance transit service in the area.” His amendment failed 5-3, with Kettle and Moore voting “yes.”