By Erica C. Barnett

Mayor Bruce Harrell’s 2026 budget proposal is an election-year proposal that piles on funding for priorities that are broadly popular—including immigrant legal aid, small business assistance, and help for renters struggling to pay their bills—while deferring costs for major projects and using one-time funds to pay for long-priorities, including the city’s response to the Trump Administration’s policies and funding cuts.

The biggest new spending areas, as usual, are in the Seattle Police Department budget, whose budget will increase by around $35 million, including $26 million in new funding to pay for a net total of 76 new officers. The Real Time Crime Center, which monitors live CCTV surveillance cameras across the city, will expand, with $2 million in new funding for 12 new positions on top of at least $625,000 to expand camera surveillance into new neighborhoods.

Harrell’s budget expands new Police Chief Shon Barnes’ office substantially compared to that of his predecessor as permanent chief, Adrian Diaz. In 2025, the budget funded 70.5 full-time employees at the chief’s office, up from 59.5 the previous year. Next year, the budget expands Barnes’ office staff to 81.5 employees.

As we’ve reported, Barnes brought on his own team when he came to Seattle from Madison, WI, including a second deputy chief, a new assistant chief, a new chief of staff, a new executive director of crime and community harm reduction, and a new chief communications officer. The new positions, which all pay more than $200,000, add ongoing annual costs to SPD’s budget, including $1.34 million in salaries alone.

In all, Harrell’s one-year budget update increases general fund spending by more than $50 million, at a time when the city is facing an estimated $150 million revenue shortfall (with another forecast coming in October).

In 2027, Harrell’s budget assumes the budget will be $140 million in the red, an increase of $62 million over the $78 million deficit he projected for 2027 in last year’s budget. In 2028 and 2029, Harrell’s budget numbers get steadily worse, with a projected shortfall of $269 million in 2028 and $375 million in 2029. If he isn’t reelected in November, Harrell won’t have to deal with the consequences of this year’s spending spree; Katie Wilson will.

The JumpStart tax, which was originally dedicated to a specific set of spending priorities that included affordable housing, small business support, and Green New Deal programs, will once again serve as a slush fund to backfill general-fund priorities the city wouldn’t otherwise have the money to pay for. (Last year, the council passed legislation that allows this targeted tax on big businesses to pay for anything.) Almost half the anticipated 2026 JumpStart revenues—$189 million—are peanut-buttered all over the budget; my personal pick for the most off-topic use of this tax is $1.8 million for planning, cleaning, and emergency response for the FIFA World Cup soccer games.

The budget accounts for two new revenue sources that PubliCola has covered previously: A new business and occupation (B&O) tax that is supposed to mitigate Trump-era cuts, now expected to bring in about $81 million next year, and a 0.1 cent sales tax increase for public safety, which the council will have to approve by October 14 in order to start collecting revenues by next year.

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About $27 million of the new B&O tax will go toward mitigating Trump cuts and policies; the rest, a little more than $50 million, will go into the general fund to help address the budget deficit. (This idea was controversial for a hot second in July). About half the revenues from the sales tax increase, or around $20 million, will go to new public safety spending on programs like the CARE Team, treatment, and Health 99; the rest, like the majority of B&) tax revenues, will backfill general fund spending on existing city programs.

Overall, Harrell’s budget adds tens of millions of dollars of new spending and avoids tough choices at a time when the mayor is fighting an uphill battle for reelection, and pushes budget deficits and decisions about “one-time” allocations off to next year, when it’s very possible Harrell’s challenger Wilson will be in office.

That new spending includes millions of new dollars for graffiti abatement, prevention, and renewal, which Harrell and City Attorney Ann Davison have repeatedly suggested is one of the top public-safety problems in Seattle. (There’s even $160,000 to extend one-time spending for a “graffiti specialist,” funded in last year’s budget, who works with teens to get them to channel their creative energy toward city-sanctioned “graffiti art” and other “constructive” pursuits).

It also includes about $5 million, across several departments, to expand the city’s Joint Enforcement Team, which was in the news last year for a series of raids targeting so-called lewd conduct at gay bars on Capitol Hill. The team includes fire, police, and SDOT staff; it also targets mobile food vendors operating without a license, such as fruit sellers and taco stands.

On the campaign trail, Harrell has touted what he calls his superior budget expertise, calling himself an experienced executive who makes “tough choices” and deriding Wilson, the former head of the Transit Riders Union, as someone who never managed a budget over $200,000. Looking through the budget, though, it’s hard to find examples of tough choices, which might have included decisions such as finding $26 million for new police officers somewhere in SPD’s half-billion-dollar budget, rather than increasing SPD’s budget to pay for them.

Next year, whoever gets elected mayor, the city will have to decide whether to continue paying for a slew of new spending Harrell defined in his 2026 budget as “one-time” projects, a designation that means the budget does not have to account for them in future budget projections. If the one-time projects were included in those projections, they would increase those future deficits even more; if the next mayor makes them permanent, he or she will have to figure out how to pay for them, either with new taxes or by cutting other existing programs.

Here are just a few of the new programs for which Harrell’s budget provides no funding beyond 2026:

• Expansion of the Fresh Bucks program to include larger benefits ($60 a month toward fresh food instead of $40) and more recipients. The budget calls this a “one-time expansion” using new B&O tax revenues; however, access to healthy food is not likely to be less of a problem in 2027 than it is next year.
• $4 million in new spending, also from the B&O tax, to assist immigrants with naturalization, legal assistance, outreach, job training, and many other programs that have become urgently necessary under the Trump administration.
• Funding to help food banks procure food and expand their services, including mobile food banks and home delivery. The one-time $3 million add in Harrell’s budget nearly doubles the amount the city’s Human Services Department currently spends on food banks.
• $1 million for meal programs serving older adults, people experiencing homelessness, and other people who lack access to nutritious prepared meals.

Some of the one-time spends, as in all city budgets, are truly for one-time projects—including about $6 million in new spending for the 2026 FIFA World Cup games, which includes $495,000 for “community activations and celebrations,” $265,000 for a “FIFA coordinator,” and a $6.2 million FIFA operations reserve, on top of the currently unknown cost of police overtime while the games are going on.

The budget also include a number of cuts, which budget director Dan Eder said yesterday would protect “public-facing” city services. These come largely from eliminating one-time spending, cutting vacant positions and other unnecessary spending, and deferring projects that were supposed to happen this year until 2027.

Harrell’s budget also saves $3 million by removing a line item for a contract to transfer people arrested in Seattle to the SCORE jail in Des Moines; some skeptics considered this contract a bargaining chip to get the King County Jail in Seattle to start incarcerating more people accused of low-level misdemeanors, which it did, eliminating the need for the city’s deal with SCORE.

The city council will take up Harrell’s budget proposal starting tomorrow; the budget process runs through mid-November.