By Erica C. Barnett
Seattle Nice has two interviews for you this week!
On Friday’s show, we sat down with Mayor Katie Wilson and her budget director, Aly Pennucci, to talk about Wilson’s deficit-busting budget proposal, which is already facing stiff pushback from councilmembers who have grown accustomed to writing budgets that are balanced in the short term but assume huge deficits in future years. As I’ve reported, a cohort of centrist councilmembers elected in 2023 (plus Debora Juarez, appointed to replace Cathy Moore, who quit a year and a half into her term) are upset that Wilson failed to fund projects they paid for with one-time dollars last year.
Council members have also said they want a commitment to hire 1,400 officers (rather than the 1,250 the budget funds) and add police surveillance cameras to Seattle Center, where seven people were shot, three fatally, at the Bite of Seattle earlier this year.
We asked Wilson and Pennucci about the council’s initial reaction to the budget and how they’re doing things differently this year.
On CCTV cameras at Seattle Center:
Wilson: “There were not cameras right at the scene of the Bite of Seattle shooting, but there are cameras at Seattle Center, and camera footage from surrounding businesses has been used extensively in in the investigation.
“Seattle Center is not, in general, a high crime area of the city, and has never been talked about, to my knowledge, prior to the shooting as a potential location for CCTV cameras hooked up to the Real-Time Crime Center. … My budget does include $500,000 for security and safety at Seattle Center, and I believe that there’s been some conversation at Seattle Center about a potential use of some of that funding …[for] mobile cameras that could be used during big events. So there might be some solution there that’s not, you know, permanent 24/7 CCTV cameras.”
On demands to commit to hirng 1,400 officers:
Wilson: “It’s simply not responsible budgeting to promise that we’re going to keep hiring police officers indefinitely without any projected way to pay for them. And in fact, even the near-term hiring plan of 1,250 was established without a way to pay for it, which is why we had to come up with extra money in order to fund these 66 additional police officer positions in order to get up to that 1,250 goal. Let alone 1,400 or whatever numbers people like to throw out there. So, you know, really, this is about what can we afford, and to get to any number higher than 1250, first we have to get to 1250. So let’s get to 1250.
“There’s a lot of different factors which influence how many officers we actually need to do the work. And so I don’t really think it’s that helpful to to try to put a specific number on it.”
On ongoing homeless encampment sweeps by the city’s Unified Care Team:
Wilson: “So the Unified Care Team, for the most part, has been continuing to operate the way that they were before I took office. We’ve been doing work with them to figure out how they can adjust some of their operations to get better outcomes for people experiencing homelessness, and that was a directive that I gave earlier this year. And so they’ve come back with recommendations, and we’re in conversation now about ways that they can change how they do their work to be more effective in matching people with with services, and and also more effective in responding to some of the felt needs in in neighborhoods. …
“My values have not changed, and I don’t think that I ever said during the campaign that I was going to stop the operation of the Unified Care Team. I said that we needed to shift to a model where we were moving people from encampments into shelter, and that is what we’re trying to do. And I’m as impatient as everyone else to have that happen faster.
“When you look at how the Unified Care Team does their work, they prioritize encampment sites based on safety considerations, both safety for the people living there and safety considerations for people in in the surrounding neighborhood. There often legitimate hazards. Obviously, when an encampment is is obstructing a sidewalk or an entrance to a light rail station a space in a park, the method of prioritization is really about safety and also about other high priority uses of that of that public space. And so I think there are good reasons often for needing to remove an encampment, even if we don’t have appropriate shelter to offer to people. And I don’t love it, right? I hate it actually. And also, that is the world that we’re living in until we actually have shelter that’s appropriate to people’s needs, and so that is why that is such a high priority for me.”
Listen to our entire interview—including Pennucci’s succinct explanation of the two budget refrains she’s had to repeat ad nauseam in response to council questions—here:
Earlier this week, we spoke with City Councilmember Dionne Foster about her legislation to give developers with stalled housing projects a deep temporary discount on Mandatory Housing Affordability fees. We asked Foster about her proposal to add some form of MHA fee in former single-family areas, where townhouses and small apartment buildings are now allowed, bringing their potential density in line with the city’s low-rise zones, where MHA applies. (Former councilmember Moore proposed imposing existing MHA fees in these areas.) We also asked why her legislation, which includes a window for new (rather than in-the-works) development to get a smaller discount on fees, excludes much of Southeast Seattle, the Central District and the CID.
On expanding MHA to neighborhood residential: “It is not a proposal to take MHA as is and put it in neighborhood residential. So what it does do is say, I want our our central staff, our team here on the second floor at City Hall, to work on a proposal that includes inclusionary zoning in neighborhood residential.
“There’s also some things that we put in there around approaches to make sure it’s a flat fee, or ways to think about it so it’s not constantly escalating, to make it more predictable for folks who are building in neighborhood residential. So there’s more work to do to figure out this concept. It is specifically not the proposal that former council member Cathy Moore put forward last year. Although I think because it’s talking about a form of inclusionary zoning in neighborhood residential, that is sort of the easiest thing for people to reach for. I understand that response, but it’s where I’m actually asking for something different and to work on a process to identify that and get that right.”
On excluding new projects in areas of “high displacement risk” from the proposal: “It’s not exclusion of housing in those areas, but it was really [designed] to take into account the fact that we want to make sure we’re not accelerating, necessarily, the pace of housing in certain geographic areas that have maybe seen a lot of development or where there’s a high risk of displacement concern. The basis for this is using some of the city’s data around high risk of displacement, so that we’re not over-incentivizing production in those areas during this short period of time.”
Listen to our conversation with Foster here: