About half the $39 million in funding from the sales tax increase would backfill spending on existing programs; the rest would shore up the city’s crisis response system and fund new treatment beds.
By Erica C. Barnett
Mayor Bruce Harrell announced his plans to allocate a new 0.1-cent sales tax to a slate of non-police public safety programs yesterday, including programs that might otherwise face budget cuts as well as an expansion of existing programs such as Health 99 and the CARE team, which responds alongside police to low-risk 911 calls.
Standing inside Fire Station 10 a few blocks from City Hall on Thursday afternoon, Harrell called the new tax plan part of a “comprehensive approach to investing in both quality, safety and public health as two sides of the same coin and interconnected and not in conflict.” The city council has to approve the tax before it can go into effect.
In all, Harrell announced, the city would be investing $39 million from the new sales tax on non-police public safety investments. Governor Bob Ferguson’s budget, passed earlier this year, authorizes local jurisdictions to pass a 0.1-cent sales tax to pay for public safety.
King County just passed its own 0.1-cent sales tax increase to help fund the county’s public-safety budget; assuming the Seattle tax increases passes, the combined sales tax in Seattle will total nearly 10.6 percent.
Only about half of the funding Harrell announced yesterday will be new. Of the $39 million, $15 million will supplant existing general-fund spending for the city’s CARE Team, a group of 24 civilian first responders who respond alongside police to certain 911 calls—freeing up general fund dollars to fund other city priorities.
Another $5 million will replace one-time federal funding (from several sources) for LEAD, whose operator, Purpose Dignity Action, was facing a budget cliff for the nationally recognized diversion program. Last year, in response to a new law that made simple drug possession and use a misdemeanor, LEAD started taking referrals exclusively from police, rather than community members; the new funding, according to PDA co-director Lisa Daugaard, will allow the group to help about 100 more people next year.
The remaining $19 million will including funding to:
- Add 20 new fighter recruits in 2026 ($2 million);
- Expand the Downtown Emergency Service Center’s “field-based” work to provide opioid treatment and medicine to people living in shelters and permanent supportive housing, among other locations ($1.2 million);
- Expand the fire department’s Health 99 response team, including two new case managers and new vehicles ($1.6 million);
- Add funding for the Seattle Indian Health Board’s Thunderbird Treatment Center, a rehab center that was previously located in Rainier Beach that’s reopening on Vashon ($1.8 million);
- Add funding for future detox and inpatient treatment beds through a competitive bidding process ($2.8 million);
- Hire 12 new 911 call takers, plus three trainers and three administrative staff—an investment that will offset current overtime spending at the city’s 911 call center ($2.6 million);
- Double the CARE team from 24 to 48 responders, a change CARE Department director Amy Barden said will allow them to respond to calls across the city for about 20 hours every day ($6.9 million).
Council president Sara Nelson, who proposed dedicating 25 percent of the new tax to treatment earlier this year, said she was not “going to split hairs” about how much of the funding in the new plan will go to fund new treatment beds (in all, the treatment portion of the proposal amounts to about 16 percent of the overall proposal).
“Because of my subject [expertise], my personal experience, because I see such a great need—throw all the money at this,” Nelson continued. Nelson has talked publicly about her own experience going to treatment for alcohol addiction and has frequently advocated for more direct city funding for rehab, which has not traditionally been under the city’s purview.
The CARE team is currently under a memorandum of agreement that restricts its size to 24 responders, does not allow CARE to go out on calls without police, and restricts the kind of calls CARE can respond to. This has limited the team’s ability to do what it was established to do: Respond to calls that are more appropriate for social workers than police.
Additionally, because police officers can choose whether to respond to calls themselves or hand them off to CARE, the volume of calls CARE can respond to has fluctuated fairly dramatically over time.
According to Barden, a city analysis of more than 50,000 calls the CARE team believes they can respond to, but can’t because of the MOU, that only 300 included any kind of police action, such as a citation.
PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you.
CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.
The MOU expires at the end of the year, and any new agreement with CARE will be part of the next contract between the city and the Seattle Police Officers Guild (SPOG). Ordinarily, SPOG contract negotiations tend to drag out for months or years, but the union is reportedly amenable to reaching an agreement quickly now that it appears likely that Katie Wilson, not Bruce Harrell, will be mayor next year. It now appears likely that the new contract will allow CARE to respond to more types of calls, expand to 48 members, and respond to calls without police in tow—a huge turnaround from the extremely restrictive MOU.
Harrell said he couldn’t comment on the MOU because the negotiations with SPOG are ongoing. But Barden, who is not a party to the negotiations, said she was optimistic. “I get along with [SPOG president] Mike Solan personally and I feel his support is genuine.”
If the city doesn’t manage to reach a contract with the police union that gives CARE more freedom to respond to calls, Barden continued, she has about “47 contingency plans,” such as working with King County to direct the CARE team to respond to calls to 988, the mental-health crisis line. Because 988 isn’t a city system, responding to those calls wouldn’t require negotiations with Seattle police. But that’s the nuclear option. Reading through the lines of Harrell’s and Barden’s comments Thursday, the city appears to believe SPOG will work with them to let CARE’s responders actually perform the jobs they were hired to do.
I don’t care how small this may look, an increase in the poor tax in this environment is a criminal hardship.
Um, let’s see. Shall we throw some more good money after bad? How about some shiny SUVs to tool around in until that day in some ultimate future where ya money is spent on promised purposes?
How nutty are these people? And Katie Wilson? No thanks
Oh, and let’s buy the druggos some drugs, too
This has all failed before and it’s failing now and we want to spend some more on shiny things to distract from thee abject failures? No.
Hi Pat, the idea is actually to send first responders out who can divert people into treatment to break the cycles of addiction. I run Seattle 911, and the CARE responders cost about half of what police cost, and we need to free police up to do the work that only law enforcement can do. We are one of only three cities in the country to attempt to scale a third public safety department co-equal with police and fire — in Albuquerque, they have done so and seen property crime cut in half in the first 2 years, and violent crime drop significantly because APD does police work while ACS focuses on the 911 calls that are more appropriate for mental health professionals (we started with only 6 CARE responders, Albuquerque Community Safety has 96 who work 24/7 citywide).
Failure is not an option. We must break down bureaucratic siloes, understand that public health and public safety are the fundamentally the same thing, and invest differently. We can and should interrupt the destructive and self-destructive behaviors we see on our streets — this would save the budget, but more significantly it would save a lot of lives.
Thank you for the work you do. If Seattle could see property crime cut by half that would be amazing.
Thanks for your thoughtful reply, but I don’t agree. We’ve been supposedly doing what you advocate for close to 5 years now, and IMHO if there are any results to note, they are the enormous amounts of money, particularly that spent on so-called leaders of various entities, and how they have failed parlously to achieve much of anything beyond purchasing the trappings to identify the various groups.
Downtown and much elsewhere remain filthy messes few want to encounter. We no longer have police responses to most of the crime citizens encounter daily; we’re stuck phoning and possibly speaking with a civilian call taker, or not, and endless recordings of where we can do self help.
People that I know are sick and tired of this. Failure is what we’re seeing now, and the solution proposed? Hmmm, let’s see: more taxes. No thanks