By Erica C. Barnett

Mayor Katie Wilson’s centrist critics on the Seattle City Council spent most of Wednesday accusing the mayor of creating a budget that, as Councilmember Bob Kettle put it repeatedly throughout the day, “unfunds” (rather than defunds) critical services, including encampment removals, graffiti and park restroom cleanups, and transportation projects.

The theme of the day was insinuation: Council members complained about things that have supposedly fallen apart that Bruce Harrell is no longer in office, like the state of parks restrooms or the swiftness of encampment sweeps, then blamed them on Wilson and her budget priorities. Dan Strauss, for instance, said a business owner’s complaint about an encampment that stayed in the same spot for three months shows that there’s been “a complete change in how effectively the city is addressing homelessness,” while Rob Saka assailed the mayor for proposing 10 new portable public restrooms when “we can’t even get our own bathhouse in order!”

“How many new bathrooms are proposed for expansion?” Rob Saka asked rhetorically, projecting to the rafters. “Now we want to expand, create new shiny things, when we can’t even properly take care of the things we have today? Hmm!”

In general, the day’s two budget meetings (which I covered in detail on Bluesky, starting here) were an opportunity for councilmembers who opposed Wilson’s election to overstate the likely impact of her proposed budget cuts and suggest that she should have made different, unspecified decisions to address a $175 million budget deficit.

Take, for example, the “unfunding” of the city’s Unified Care Team, which would lose two and a half administrative positions—desk jobs—that have never been filled.

This cut, Kettle said, represented a larger “deprioritization” of encampment removals—one that has deprived the Parks Department of the “heavy equipment” it needs to haul tents, trash, and people’s possessions away after encampment sweeps. Piling on, Maritza Rivera claimed Wilson’s “budget renders us incapable” of addressing homeless encampments. And Saka railed against the mayor’s decision to move the city’s Unified Care Team back to the Human Services Department rather than having its duties spread across four separate city departments.

Addressing the mayor (who, quite possibly, could hear him from her office five floors above), Saka said, “Now, this might be a good thing to deprioritize [the UCT] t and bury that work down in a department somewhere. It might be a political bone to throw at your democratic socialist base, but it does our communities harm!”

Last year, Saka sponsored a budget proviso, or spending restriction, that required Wilson to maintain the $30 million, 116-member Unified Care Team and keep spending money on specific priorities, such as $2.2 million for police to be present at sweeps.  “Some people on the far, ultra-left lost their national minds!” when he sponsored the proviso, Saka bellowed. “Calls to employee wellness programs skyrocketed, apparently, in some circles after I did that! But it was a wise and responsible thing to do.”

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Later in the day, during a discussion about how to resolve a growing deficit in the Seattle Department of Transportation’s transportation fund ($41 million on average each month this year), council members suggested this was the first they were hearing about the seriousness of SDOT’s financial problems. (SDOT has said the shortfalls stem from higher-than-anticipated costs and lower-than expected revenues.) “I did not know up until a couple weeks ago, right during the budget, as part of the budget process, that SDOT was operating basically in the red in this way,” Rivera said. “This is a new development for council.”

In fact, a staffer reminded her, the budget the council adopted last year showed a growing negative transportation fund balance starting in 2027. That same budget noted that SDOT had finished paying off a previous interfund loan, unanimously approved by the council in 2020, last year. “I think there was some awareness that the transportation fund was having challenges,” the staffer said. “Now it may not have had awareness that starting in 2026, after the interfund loan was paid off, that we continue to have those challenges, but … I looked at last year’s financial plan, and it was a negative balance, and projected for it to be negative balance for this year and the coming years.” 

The council has the authority to revise the budget to reflect their own priorities. But there’s a difference between expressing genuine concern about cuts and deficits and continually rehashing the last election.

Instead of responding like the business community has to Wilson’s budget (with a tone of surprised approval, since the budget funds centrist priorities, like police, with minimal cuts and no new taxes), the council is spending a huge amount of rhetorical energy this year grandstanding over relatively insignificant cuts (rarely have so many budget speeches centered on the elimination of two vacant administrative positions) without acknowledging that for every program they restore, they’ll have to find commensurate cuts elsewhere in the budget. It’s as if Wilson’s opponents on the council think the mayor made up a mean budget just to spite them, and that their job is to righteously restore funding for all their pet projects without balancing the ledger.

Which is to say: Get ready for tomorrow’s meetings, which will focus on the human services, police, and fire departments, three areas where many on the council have, if anything, even bigger feelings about the mayor’s budget proposal.