By Erica C. Barnett
Gearing up for Seattle’s 2025 budget season on the latest episode of Seattle Nice, we discussed Mayor Bruce Harrell’s proposal to increase the local sales tax rate by 0.1 cent to pay for an expansion of the city’s CARE Team and 911 department, backfill $20 million in spending that currently comes from other sources, and add funding for firefighters, addiction treatment, and the fire department’s Health 99 overdose response team.
Governor Bob Ferguson gave cities and counties the authority to hike sales taxes to pay for public safety programs in his budget last year, effectively punting his promise to spend $100 million on police to local jurisdictions and forcing cities and counties to use a regressive sales tax increase if they wanted more public safety funding. King County already passed its 0.1-cent tax in June; assuming Harrell’s proposal passes, the total sales tax in Seattle will rise to nearly 10.6 percent.
We dug into what the new tax will pay for, as well as why CARE Team expansion is happening now, after a lengthy stalemate between the Seattle Police Officers Guild and CARE over what responsibilities SPD is willing to hand over to unarmed social workers.
Since 2023, a memorandum of understanding between CARE and the police department requires cops to go out with CARE on every call, limits the kind of calls CARE’s first responders are allowed to respond to, and restricts the size of the team to 24 people. That MOU expires at the end of the year.
Although new SPOG contracts typically drag on for years (the most recent contract, covering the years 2021 through 2023, passed in April 2024), that may not be the case this time, as we discussed, thanks to the recent primary election results, which had Katie Wilson leading incumbent Harrell outright.
In short, SPOG appears to be racing (relatively speaking) to wrap up their latest contract this year, betting that Katie Wilson might win the mayor’s race and be less willing than Harrell to provide concessions to the union without corresponding improvements to police accountability.
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This goes far beyond CARE, of course, but the new urgency around the contract seems to have produced a new willingness to give the team some of what it’s been asking for almost since its inception, including expansion from 24 to 48 tea members, the ability to go out on calls without a police escort and to respond to more types of calls where a social worker can do more good than officers with guns.
Harrell’s sales tax proposal, part of the 2025 budget he announced today, includes funding for CARE expansion, which suggests the MOU language may already be settled. As Sandeep put it, “The specter of Katie Wilson has scared SPOG into actually making the deal to allow alternative dispatch.”
Also this week, the guys gave me a lot of time to geek out over the council’s amendments to legislation implementing “phase 1” of the city’s comprehensive plan, which just passed last week.
Did they go into a boredom-induced fugue state? Who knows, but I did get an opportunity to talk about why I’d be thrilled to have bars, restaurants, and late-night corner stores in my own residential neighborhood. Unfortunately, the council foreclosed that possibility when they voted to restrict new businesses in neighborhoods to stores and to make them close no later than 10pm—a missed opportunity to give more people access to the kinds of things that make a city a city.