The proposal makes real cuts to close a $175 million gap—and reflects the conflict between campaign ambitions and a budget deficit that has gone unaddressed for years.

By Erica C. Barnett

Mayor Katie Wilson’s proposed 2027 budget (announced earlier this week, while I was out of town) would accomplish something that her predecessor, Bruce Harrell, never really attempted: It would close the city’s $175 million structural budget deficit, created largely by the use of one-time funds to pay for ongoing new programs in every budget since 2020. And it would do so in a transparent, sustainable way—by actually cutting departmental budgets, eliminating 128 mostly positions (all but 15 of them vacant), and by foregoing many of the budget tricks that Harrell used to create on-paper balanced budgets that in fact were deeply unsustainable.

What Wilson’s budget does not do, with a couple of notable exceptions (increased shelter funding, new public restrooms, and cuts to civilian police position), is strongly reflect many of the values that got the mayor elected, including a commitment to police alternatives, taxing big corporations, and funding not just hundreds but thousands of new shelter beds.

In particular, it includes no new progressive revenues and heavily relies on the existing JumpStart tax to supplant programs that were previously paid for through the general fund—including $65 million in existing homelessness funding that will now come out of JumpStart. It eliminates funding for long-vacant positions, ongoing new programs for which Harrell and the council used one-time funding, and some of Harrell’s pet-priority projects, like graffiti removal and AI.

The plan has earned Wilson praise from the business community, and from some in Seattle’s conservative and right-wing press. It is small-c conservative in a way that Harrell’s spendthrift, please-everybody budgets never were. It’s possible that many of Wilson’s most hard-core supporters will rally around this budget even though it further institutionalizes the repurposing of JumpStart and other policies that progressives roundly criticized Harrell for, simply because they’re coming from Wilson.

In some ways, it may have taken Wilson—a heterodox housing and transit activist who the mainstream press loves to refer to as an “avowed socialist”—to propose this budget. The council, which overloaded last year’s budget with spending restrictions designed to lock Wilson in to their priorities, will almost certainly have a field day with it, piling on new spending while insisting (as budget chair Dan Strauss did on Thursday) that their budgets have always been sustainable. But if the council decides to knock Wilson’s budget, which is balanced through 2030, out of balance, it will be on them, not her.

I’m going to focus on some of the highlights of the budget, which the city council took up today at an initial high-level today. I’m also focusing on changes to the budget that haven’t been previously announced. Previously announced changes include funding for universal free meals at schools; funding to enforce the city’s ban on residential junk fees and on algorithmic grocery pricing; funding to accelerate shelter construction; funding for a new city prosecutor to pursue extreme risk protection orders and the return of $127 million in city funding for homelessness programs from the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, which I’ve covered elsewhere.

Lots and lots more to come; these are just a few things that jumped out at me as I took a first look at the 735-page budget book.

JumpStart is Basically Just a Slush Fund Now

JumpStart—a tax, paid by businesses, on the compensation of highly paid workers at large companies—was originally supposed to provide additive funding for affordable housing, green jobs, and equitable development, all areas that were related to the spike in Seattle’s cost of living due to the recent influx of high-paid tech workers. Instead, since it passed, every mayor has used a growing portion of the JumpStart fund to pay for basic city needs—which of course means less money for the emerging needs JumpStart was created to address. Wilson’s budget is no different.

Wilson’s budget takes $173 million out of JumpStart to supplant general-fund spending unrelated to the four JumpStart priorities, plus another $65 million to pay for homelessness programs that were previously paid for out of the general fund. The budget counts the existing homelessness programs as “JumpStart” priorities, which is technically true, but because they’re existing general-fund programs I’m going to add them to the $173 million, to get a total of $238 million that Wilson is proposing to takes out of the JumpStart bucket.

Overall, Wilson’s budget repurposes a whopping 59 percent of this year’s $402 million in JumpStart revenues for general-fund purposes. However, because the budget also grabs $43 million out of a fund balance JumpStart has left over from previous years, plus $8 million in earnings from JumpStart fund investments, that total could also be calculated at around 52 percent—still substantially more than the 38 percent Wilson’s budget claims by counting the shifted homelessness programs as essentially new JumpStart spending. (Wilson’s budget uses another large JumpStart balance transfer in 2028, but the fund starts to grow again the following year).

“No More Public Safety” (will be the KOMO headline when they figure this out)

Police spending is projected to grow this year, but not because the mayor is proposing to substantially increase hiring. As we’ve reported, SPD has been put on notice that it needs to slow hiring even as applications pour in from people attracted by huge starting salaries, and Wilson’s budget eliminates temporary hiring bonuses adopted after hiring dropped in 2020; it also cuts millions in funding Harrell added for ridiculous macho recruiting ads.

The biggest cost increase in the SPD budget is a $56 million in wage and benefit increases from the Seattle Police Officers Guild contract Harrell and the city council agreed to last year; that contract, as we’ve reported, boosts the salaries of newly hired cops well above six figures.

The rest of the increase, about $12.6 million, will pay for 66 net new officers who were “hired in 2026 but only partially funded” in Harrell’s 2026 budget, plus funding for two SPD mental health professionals that Harrell’s budget only funded for nine months of this year (speaking of unsustainable budget tricks). The budget essentially calls for capping the number of police officers at 1,250 after 2028, a figure that will unquestionably surface as an issue during the budget process, when the city council has a whack at the budgey,.

SPD’s budget also goes down in one area where Harrell allowed it to balloon unaccountably: The police chief’s office, which former chief Shon Barnes expanded dramatically by establishing a cadre of new positions, each more elaborately titled than the last, will lose three positions. Barnes’ Chief Communications Officer (FKA communications director) Barbara DeLollis and his Executive Director of Crime and Community Harm Reduction Lee Hunt left earlier this year. Alex Ricketts, Barnes’ chief of staff, is still a member of SPD’s command staff, while Andre Sayles, one of Barnes’ two deputy chiefs (most chiefs have just one deputy) is now interim police chief.

Overall, the budget provides funding for 1,866 positions each year through 2030—24 fewer, thanks to cuts to mostly vacant civilian positions, than last year. These positions include parking enforcement officer jobs that have been unfilled for years; PEO jobs are perennially hard to fill because they pay relatively poorly and are high-stress, which is one reason why cutting the empty positions does not actually mean cutting back on parking enforcement.

What it does mean is that SPD will lose some of the funding it uses for other purposes, in an annual sleight-of-hand that is not visible in budget documents. Although the department gets funding for overtime, they routinely use more than they ask for at the beginning of each year; to make up this predictable shortfall, the department uses SPD’s funded but vacant positions to pay for their overspending. (Further routinizing this lack of spending restraint, SPD routinely asks the council to add more money to the department’s budget later in the year as part of a less-visible “supplemental” budget process.) The budget’s $6.5 million or so in civilian savings, in other words, is also $6.5 million SPD can no longer use as a slush fund to pay for overtime; if these reductions become part of the budget.

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Just about every other department takes cuts to vacant positions in Wilson’s budget, but SPD’s are the most likely to raise objections from the council. Councilmember Bob Kettle was already fulminating against them at the council’s initial budget briefing on Thursday.

Council members also signaled Thursday that they have big questions about Wilson’s decision to reduce funding for the Community Assisted Response and Engagement (CARE) team to defer funding for 14 new crisis responders, the previously planned expansion for this year. (The budget doesn’t propose eliminating any of these positions).

CARE is also taking over a bunch of gun violence prevention initiatives from the Human Services Department as part of the gun-violence plan Wilson announced last week.

CARE department Chief Amy Barden said in the past that the 34-member team has had challenges filling its time because of excessive restrictions in the SPOG contract (CARE team members were told not to respond to a crisis in a grocery store parking lot, for instance, because of a contract provision saying they could only respond to crises that occur on publicly owned land), but has said in recent months that SPD has shown more willingness to allow the team to respond to the type of calls for which it was explicitly created. Wilson’s budget also eliminates funding for nine vacant 911 call taker positions, another potential point of conflict with the council.

The proposed budget also cuts overtime at the Fire Department by $7 million, requiring “the department to manage staffing within available resources.” Expect council fireworks over this one as well.

A few little things that could become big things

Stuff to look out for as the budget conversations go on this fall:

• The Seattle Department of Transportation’s budget is seriously out of whack, thanks largely to revenue shortfalls in SDOT’s Transportation Fund and Transportation Benefit District fund that I’m sure will get explained in more detail when the council discusses the department’s budget.

Transportation fund revenues have been declining every year. In Wilson’s budget, declining revenues in these two funds translate into cuts to both new capital projects and basic maintenance, as well as a shift in funding for “high priority” projects, like sidewalks and curb ramps, to the city’s automatic traffic camera program, which is expected to bring in more revenues once it expands to include automated speeding cameras (in addition to cameras that red-light and other traffic violations). The budget also increases taxes for parking in commercial

• Wilson’s budget proposes eliminating an awful lot of council (and mayoral) adds from previous years, which will undoubtedly rub some councilmembers the wrong way. For instance, the budget for the Parks Department cuts seven new positions the council added last year; I’ve asked the budget office which positions these are, but the possibilities include two anti-graffiti staff and three new park rangers. The budget would also cut some vacant positions on the Unified Care Team, which removes homeless encampments; Harrell and the council have repeatedly expanded the team and the council placed a restriction on the budget last year that makes it nearly impossible to cut the size of the 116-member team.

Wilson’s Parks budget also eliminates $500,000 in “discretionary graffiti funding”; Harrell, by his own admission, was absolutely obsessed with ridding Seattle of graffiti, and the word “graffiti” appears 71 times in his 2026 budget, compared to six times in Wilson’s.

The budget would also cut $500,000 Harrell added to last year’s budget for an AI system that was supposed to “streamline the permitting application process and improve customer services using Artificial Intelligence and data integration.”

• There’s also a new $500,000 for the (still troubled, from the complaints I continue to hear) Workday payroll system—this time, to pay for “surge” tech support to deal with changes to labor union contracts in real time. You would think that things like pay increases and classification changes could be handled by the city’s very large citywide and departmental HR staffs, but this is Workday we’re talking about.