By Erica C. Barnett

On Thursday, the Seattle City Council voted (earlier than usual!) to pass the city’s 2026 budget, which includes modest amendments to the budget outgoing Mayor Bruce Harrell proposed in September. Like Harrell’s proposal, the budget puts off dealing the city’s structural budget deficit for another year, piling on tens of millions of ˜dollars in new spending and setting up a nine-figure shortfall for incoming mayor Katie Wilson to deal with next year.

We’ve reported extensively on the details of Harrell’s budget, which we characterized as “rickety” (and which council central staff called “inherently unsustainable“) because it uses one-time funds and other short-term budget tricks to pay for ongoing needs like food assistance and expands programs rather than reining in spending, as the five centrist councilmembers elected in 2023 promised to do.

For instance, the budget pays for expanded police camera surveillance (a program proponents assure us will never be misused by ICE, because of state laws prohibiting proactive police cooperation with immigration enforcement) and adds a budget restriction on the encampment sweeps team, the Unified Care Team, intended to force Wilson to spend the money on the UCT and nothing else. (Editor’s note: The original version of this story said the budget “expands” the Unified Care Team. In fact, while spending on the team increased due to inflation, the total number of UCT staff remains steady at 116.)

The budget also expands Harrell’s anti-graffiti squads, a top priority for Harrell as well as City Attorney Ann Davison, who also lost her reelection bid in December.

The budget relies on big new tax increases to pay for both new and expanded programs, such as a doubling of the city’s alternative response team, the CARE Team, and to backfill the general fund shortfall. (Gone are the days when voters and the council passed taxes and used them only for a specific purpose—like the JumpStart payroll tax, which was originally earmarked for specific progressive purposes and is now being used to expand police surveillance, increases to the city’s sales tax and Business and Occupation tax are being cannibalized to address budget shortfalls right from the start.)

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It also expands spending on police (whose overtime budget will remain essentially untouched despite a hiring spree spurred by a new contract that pays new officers $126,000 after six months), increasing SPD’s budget by $35 million.

Harrell’s $80 million “reparations” package, which he claimed would help Black Seattle residents buy houses or stay in their homes, ended up looking more like a cynical election ploy when it became clear that Harrell planned to achieve this ambitious number largely by adding “reparations” branding to existing programs.

The council did make edits to Harrell’s plan, a few of them significant. For instance, they decided not to fund his election-year promise to add 300 new shelter beds, putting that money instead into a reserve fund to pay for permanent housing programs that stand to lose federal funding next year. And they opted not to fund most of a new plan to rapidly house people living outdoors in Pioneer Square in the runup to the World Cup next year, paring back the joint Downtown Seattle Association-Purpose Dignity Action plan from $4 million to $700,000.

The council meets one final time to adopt the budget, along with dozens of ordinances needed to enact it, at 1:00 this afternoon.