Category: Mayor Harrell

Mayor Harrell

Harrell’s “Emergency” Legislation on Covenants that Limit Grocery Store Sizes Won’t Address Seattle’s Food Deserts
This new apartment building in Greenwood, anchored by a Trader Joe’s, is one of two sites the mayor used as a example of restrictive covenants that may contribute to food deserts. The other example, an abandoned Albertson’s in Haller Lake, is now a Sprouts.

By Erica C. Barnett

Yesterday—fresh off a campaign debate at which he asserted that “Trump will walk all over” his opponent, Katie Wilson—Mayor Bruce Harrell announced legislation to ban restrictive, anti-competitive covenants that, he said, are contributing to the lack of pharmacies and grocery stores in certain parts of the city.

“When a company closes a grocery store or pharmacy, they can add a restrictive covenant into a property’s deed or lease that blocks a new grocery or pharmacy from locating at the same place,” Harrell said in a statement announcing the new legislation. “They do this to block competitors, and these actions harm neighborhoods and contribute to grocery and pharmacy deserts.”

Seattle, like other cities, has a growing number of food and pharmacy “deserts” due to a series of consolidations and closures by grocery and pharmacy chains. Rite Aid, which bought Bartell Drugs, has closed at least 40 stores in Washington over the past few months, including every Bartell store. Kroger, which owns Fred Meyer, recently announced plans to close dozens of stores across the country, including several in the Seattle area.

In his announcement, Harrell noted the existence of “at least two covenants restricting … the square footage of any future grocery store at that location for as long as 50 years.”

Curious, we asked for these two examples. Both are currently North Seattle grocery stores.

The first, a Sprouts store that opened in 2020 in North Seattle’s Haller Lake neighborhood, filled a space that had been vacant since the Albertson’s supermarket that had been there closed in 2018. While the covenant on the property, located at N 130th St. and Aurora Ave N, does restrict any grocery to less than 28,000 square feet for 20 years, the rest of the once-vacant space has now been filled by a HomeGoods store—not my personal idea of a highest and best use, but in keeping with the strip-mall built environment of this area just south of Shoreline.

Grocery stores in the immediate vicinity of the Sprouts include an Amazon Fresh, an Asian Family Market, a US ChefStore retail-wholesaler, and several smaller grocers specializing in Ethiopian, Latin American, and Eastern European foods. There’s also a Safeway and a Town and Country Market a couple miles north in Shoreline, a straight shot up Aurora Ave. N. That’s still too far to qualify as convenient, but the area now has one more grocery option than it did a couple years ago, when the old Albertson’s was just a vacant building.

The second covenant Harrell cited in his announcement is also now a grocery store—Trader Joe’s, at the corner of N 87th St. and Greenwood Ave. N, in the heart of the Greenwood neighborhood. The TJ’s, which replaced a single-story, car-oriented Safeway, anchors a new mixed-use development with nearly 300 new apartments. The company did have to comply with a covenant restricting its size to 20,000 square feet, but that’s actually is on the generous side for Trader Joe’s. And fortunately for those who want a big-supermarket experience, there’s a large Fred Meyer store just four blocks away.

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A spokesman for HSD told PubliCola that Trader Joe’s and Sprouts don’t accept benefits under WIC (the Women, Infants, and Children Nutrition Program), which helps pregnant people and new parents buy healthy foods, because they don’t meet WIC’s minimum stocking requirements. That’s a real issue, but it’s related to company policy, not store size. Many large supermarkets in Seattle don’t accept WIC benefits, and some very small convenience stores do; changing WIC policies (for instance, by requiring participation or making it easier for stores to qualify and stay in compliance) is a federal issue, not the purview of the city.

Harrell’s proposal, which Council President Sara Nelson has said she’ll sponsor, won’t hurt anything—and maybe, at some future date, it will even stop a grocery store that’s closing from adding a restrictive covenant in a neighborhood where groceries are actually in short supply. But the legislation, and the flurry of stories that accompanied it, does create the illusory apperaance that the city is taking meaningful action on food deserts, which are primarily in southeast and southwest Seattle, not north of the Ship Canal.

The problem in these areas isn’t that smaller grocery stores are replacing big ones, but that there aren’t enough places to get groceries or fill prescriptions, period. (On Rainier Ave. S. alone, two Rite Aids and a Bartell have closed in recent years and have not been replaced.) Bringing grocery stores and pharmacies back to the parts of town profit-seeking corporations have abandoned won’t be as simple as telling them they can’t restrict the size of future stores when they close.

As a side note, an actual proposed new grocery store in Wedgwood has been mired in the city’s design review process for months. The local design review board finally allowed the project to go forward, subject to future conditions, this week, but not before hours of discussion over whether to make the developer move a proposed child care center, whether to require an on-site restaurant to be open specific hours, and whether to allow “pictures of produce” in store windows —along with, as always, debates over aesthetic details like what type brick the developer can use. Which just goes to show: Even when a company wants to open a grocery store in Seattle, the Seattle Process is often stacked against it.

 

Elections, housing, King County, Mayor Harrell, podcasts, Police

Seattle Nice: Harrell’s Election-Year Budget, King County’s RealPage Ban, and Mayor Pete’s Endorsement

 

By Erica C. Barnett

On this week’s episode of Seattle Nice, we discussed Mayor Bruce Harrell’s election-year budget proposal, a one-year plan for 2026 that increases spending by more than $50 million, including “one-time” programs that will almost certainly require ongoing funds. Harrell’s budget also adds $26 million to hire new police officers, on top of the Seattle Police Department’s existing budget; public safety, including police and fire, now makes up more than half the city’s discretionary budget.

The one-time spending in Harrell’s budget includes temporary funding for programs that are likely to lose federal funding under the Trump Administration, as well as assistance for immigrants being targeted by the federal government. These needs are likely to accelerate, rather than diminish, over the next several years.

Sandeep and I actually agreed that the city should be doing more to address future budget deficits (Harrell’s budget, not counting the one-time funds, assumes a deficit that will grow from $140 million in 2027 to $374 million in 2029). Where we departed ways was on the question of whether the city should be “”goring some oxes” in the budget by telling some human services organizations they’re “not going to get money because we’re not seeing results. … I think there would be a human cry coming from the progressive side saying, this is austerity budget[ing]. ”

While it’s definitely true that slashing the city’s budget for human services would anger progressives, I argued that the call for cuts seems to always focus on programs designed to help people directly with needs like food, housing, and other basic needs, rather than departments like SPD, whose funding only goes up every year. (Police are always a sacred cow, never a gored ox). This year, public safety departments will consume more than half the city’s discretionary budget, with SPD accounting for half that amount, at $486 million.

Perhaps the city could reduce some of this year’s expansion plans for SPD, I suggested, by taking a peek into the extremely opaque police budget and finding some money there; personally, I’d stop the CCTV surveillance program, which Harrell added to the budget as a new ongoing obligation last year, and look for other places where money is sitting unused or being spent ineffectively.

We also talked about the King County Council’s recent vote to ban the use of rent-pricing software like RealPage. David noted that bans on rent-fixing software are similar to “trust-busting,” in which the federal government cracked down on mergers, price-fixing, and other anti-competitive practices. Landlords use algorithmic pricing tools to charge the highest rent possible, a rate that can vary day by day—much like Ticketmaster, Expedia, and Uber use “dynamic” pricing to determine the price of tickets, flights, hotels, and rides.

Finally, we all issued our verdict on former transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg’s endorsement of Harrell. Our assessment: A big “whatever.”

City Council, Elections, Mayor Harrell, Police, Uncategorized

Black-Led Group Responds to Mayor’s Claim They “Darkened” His Skin; Real Estate-Backed Harrell PAC Tops $1 Million; Police Chief Disparages PubliCola

1. On Friday, Mayor Bruce Harrell accused his opponent, Katie Wilson, of “darkening” his photo in a social media post, blaming her for “another chapter in the troubling history of manipulating skin color to dehumanize candidates of color” like himself. The image Harrell circulated, an Instagram post by the Black-led progressive nonprofit Common Power, made his skin looked unnaturally orange.

In a statement, Harrell campaign manager Marta Johnson said, “We are asking the Wilson Campaign and Common Power to immediately retract the manipulated image and apologize for the clear intent to darken Bruce’s skin tone. There is no excuse to alter the tone of a candidate’s skin, especially given the troubling history of racist intent behind these types of manipulations.”

Harrell made the accusation again during a debate on Saturday at the Royal Room in Southeast Seattle, saying she had used the “common tactic—to darken my image in a regular picture, to make me look ominous, okay?”

The practice of darkening Black and brown people’s skin tone in photographs has a long and ignominious history based in colorism and the racist idea that darker-skinned people are more threatening than those with lighter skin. The most famous example comes from Time magazine, which dramatically darkened OJ Simpson’s skin color on its cover in 1994.

Beyond the screen shot, Harrell presented no evidence for his claims.

On Sunday, Common Power director Charles Douglas responded to Harrell’s accusation that his group had darkened Harrell’s skin to make him look “ominous”: “The claim that we ‘darkened’ Mayor Harrell’s photo is both offensive and untrue. As a Black man leading an organization primarily run by people of color, I know firsthand the harm caused when racial tropes are weaponized in politics.”

“To suggest that Common Power engaged in such tactics is a sensationalist smear that reeks of desperation from a mayor who has repeatedly contributed to inequality and hurt the very communities he now claims to represent.” On Sunday, Common Power and the 36th District Democrats swapped out the photo of Halloween Harrell for a less orange version.

The source for the image appears to have been a story by the (UK) Independent about the 2021 mayor’s race. The photo appears to have been taken in low light at this debate, creating the unnaturally orange cast.

Smartphone photos taken by several different people in similar conditions at Saturday’s low-light debate at the Royal Room made both Harrell and Wilson look orange, with Harrell’s black hair coming through as grayish in the photos. For example, a reader contributed this photo of Harrell checking in on the Huskies game during the debate; my own, unedited iPhone photos, taken from the front row, turned Harrell an even more extreme orange color and tinted Wilson orange as well.

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2. As I reported on Bluesky last week (seriously, follow me there for the latest breaking news, short news items, and live coverage of everything from mayoral debates to the council’s budget deliberations), the  business-backed political action committee supporting Mayor Bruce Harrell, Bruce Harrell for Seattle’s Future, has raised more than a million to defeat Harrell’s challenger, Katie Wilson. Most of that money, $554,000, has come in since the beginning of September—revealing a rush to fill the pro-Harrell campaign’s coffers after the mayor’s dispiriting 41 percent showing in the August primary.

The biggest donations to the PAC, which is separate from Harrell’s official campaign, come from real estate advocacy groups, development and property management companies and their current or retired CEOs, and land-use attorneys who work for real-estate interests. Overall, real-estate interests contributed at least $592,000 of the $1,080,500 the PAC has collected so far. Tech companies and their leaders, including retired tech company founders as well as current executives like Microsoft CEO Brad Smith, gave another $257,000, at a minimum.

A majority of the 218 contributors to the pro-Harrell PAC listed their occupations as “retired” (59 total) or did not list their occupations (56 total), so the true percentage of both real estate interests and tech company executives is almost certainly higher than the ones I was able to confirm.

A pro-Wilson PAC, Katie Wilson for an Affordable Seattle, has raised about $85,000.

3. During a meeting about the city’s police department budget on Monday, Seattle Police Chief Shon Barnes responded to a question from Council President Sara Nelson by saying he couldn’t answer it because Nelson cited PubliCola as her source.

“I came across an article in PubliCola … that mentioned [the city’s proposed contract with the south King County jail] SCORE, and I wanted some information on this,” Nelson said. “I think that it mentioned that we are no longer depending on that contract. Is that the case?” 

In response, Barnes told Nelson he would not answer her question, forcing her to reframe her factual question about SCORE. “I’ll be clear. I do not read PubliCola, so I won’t respond to that,” Barnes said. After Barnes answered the rest of Nelson’s questions, but not the one about SCORE,  budget director Dan Eder had to jump in and answer in the affirmative. 

Barnes’ dismissive comment about PubliCola was the first time I can recall, in this publication’s 16-year history, that a department director has used a public meeting to disparage us directly. SPD’s communications department has reportedly stopped including stories from PubliCola in the department’s daily news clippings email, and in a recent social media post, Barnes said he wouldn’t be “swayed by opinions, criticism, lies, or the stories that others may fabricate.” He added, cryptically, “This is my leadership journey and you won’t make me quit! The battle is not mine.. It’s the Lords!”

PubliCola will, of course, continue to apply a critical lens to SPD and other city departments in our coverage, as we have since 2009.

 

Elections, homelessness, Mayor Harrell

Digging into Harrell’s Campaign “They Aren’t From Here” Homelessness Talking Point

By Erica C. Barnett

On the campaign trail and in his slickly produced Seattle Channel budget video, Mayor Bruce Harrell has been touting a new statistic: “Most of the most of the people that are homeless in Seattle did not become unhoused in Seattle,” he said at a recent debate. He’s made a similar claim at other campaign forums and events.

“About 70% of people experiencing homelessness on Seattle streets became homeless outside of our city, and even with Seattle providing over six providing over 60% of the region’s shelter beds and 85% of the region’s tiny homes, we cannot do this alone,” Harrell claimed in his budget video, adding that it’s time for the rest of the region to step up and take care of their homeless residents. He also called on the King County Regional Homelessness Authority to identify land in areas with “fewer land constraints than we have here” where new shelters could open away from the city.

Leaving aside the fact that unhoused people congregate in cities, rather than far-flung suburbs, for obvious reasons—not only are there services here, there’s also community, opportunity, and access to transit—Harrell’s “they’re not from here” stat is extremely misleading, because it’s based entirely on responses to about 240 surveys with people who showed up at KCRHA’s survey tents over several days in January and February 2024.

A bit of background: Since 2022, the KCRHA has based its Point In Time Count of the region’s homeless population not on a physical count (which generally results in undercounting) but surveys with people who travel to fixed sites to provide demographic data and answer questions. This technique, known as respondent-driven sampling, was used to extrapolate some of the data in the full 2024 report, including an estimate (16,868) of the total number of sheltered and unsheltered homeless people across the county.

However, Harrell’s “about 70 percent” number (actually 69 percent) isn’t based on that sampling method; it’s based on raw data that represents less than a third of about 800 surveys across all parts of King County. In Seattle, the KCRHA interviewed around 240 people.

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This is important, because statistics based on small, self-selected samples of people aren’t generally considered reliable guides to demographic and population-level trends; that’s why KCRHA used statistical sampling for all its top-level data, rather than just extrapolating directly from a few hundred surveys.

It’s also to important to know that Harrell’s new talking point completely ignores the 43 percent of people who said they were last stably housed outside King County, which is one reason the “last housed in Seattle” and “last housed in King County” sample sizes are so small. If the city and county based their “fair share” of homelessness spending on where people were housed most recently, it would make sense for both Seattle and King County to refuse to fund services for nearly half their homeless residents, a heartless policy neither would be likely to adopt.

During a “deep dive” on the PIT numbers on Friday, KCRHA data staffers confirmed that researchers intended for the raw survey information to be taken “at face value,” not used to “make any further inferences” about the homeless population as a whole. The staffers also noted that KCRHA didn’t ask how long it had been since people had stable housing; given that the number of chronically homeless people increased in the 2024 count, people could have been talking about housing they had years in the past, which makes the question of which city or region they “belong” to murkier.

Like previous point-in-time surveys, the 2024 PIT count suggests not just that people are mobile—relocating around the region for various reasons, including local laws designed to keep them moving—but that “last stably housed” statistics aren’t a a good way of deciding whether people are worth spending local dollars on—even ignoring the obvious anti-humanitarian implications of making policy this way.

Elections, Mayor Harrell, Speech

Mayoral Candidate Wilson Withdraws from KOMO-Sponsored Debate, Citing Sinclair’s Censorship of Jimmy Kimmel

By Erica C. Barnett

Update: On Friday, Sinclair announced it would air Kimmel’s show.

“I’m pleased that Sinclair Broadcast Group has made the right decision, and I’m proud to have played a small part in standing up against federal government overreach and censorship,” Wilson said in a statement. “I’m also very excited to join the October 8 debate at Seattle University, which will be broadcast on KOMO TV.”

Seattle mayoral candidate Katie Wilson announced Thursday that she won’t participate in a debate co-sponsored by KOMO TV at Seattle University on October 8 unless KOMO, a Sinclair affiliate, lifts its boycott on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, which is now airing in most US markets after ABC suspended the show under pressure from the Trump Administration last week.

“I’m proud to be in a position today to play a small role in resisting the creep of authoritarianism in our country, and I hope that Sinclair Broadcast Group  will decide to stand up and do their part too,” Wilson said.

ABC yanked Kimmel’s show in response to right-wing outrage after the late-night host joked about Trump’s callous response to a reporter who asked how he was holding up after the murder of right-wing provocateur Charlie Kirk.

Earlier this week, Kimmel reappeared with a 28-minute monologue focusing on free speech. Viewers in markets whose ABC affiliates are owned by the right-wing broadcaster Sinclair, including Seattle, couldn’t watch the show on TV, because Sinclair is refusing to air the show again “until formal discussions are held with ABC regarding the network’s commitment to professionalism and accountability,” according to a company press release. (Sinclair did not immediately respond to PubliCola’s questions on Thursday).

“I want to participate in that debate, and I hope that Sinclair makes the right decision,” Wilson said. “And I hope that [it will go on] regardless, if KOMO is not able to participate.”

Chris Daniels, a longtime local TV journalist who’s now a senior reporter for KOMO, is scheduled to moderate the debate. He did not immediately respond to questions. We’ve reached out to Seattle University, the lead sponsor of the planned event, to find out if they will seek a different media sponsor and moderator if Sinclair doesn’t decide to air Kimmel again between now and October 8.

In a statement, Mayor Bruce Harrell called Wilson’s decision “hypocritical” given that she criticized his administration for allowing a fundamentalist Christian group to hold a rally at Cal Anderson Park in the heart of Capitol Hill, Seattle’s historic LGBTQ+ neighborhood.

“Standing up for the First Amendment cannot be situational or opportunistic, as it is for Katie Wilson,” Harrell said. “My opponent happily provided an interview to KOMO this week prior to Kimmel returning to the air. Hypocritically, in May, she advocated for denying free speech permits protected under the First Amendment.

On Thursday, Wilson brought up  her KOMO interview, saying that it “didn’t sit right with me” and contributed to her decision not to play ball with KOMO until Sinclair stops censoring Kimmel.

Wilson didn’t support denying a permit to the anti-trans group. In the Bluesky thread that was the source Danny Westneat selectively quoted in the column linked in Harrell’s statement, Wilson said the city should have turned down the heat by granting the permit in a “less contentious spot.” Instead, police pepper-sprayed, tackled, and arrested dozens of people who showed up to protest the extremist event.

Harrell said he was ” exploring effective options in partnership with Seattle’s Federal leaders—who have endorsed my campaign—to restore programming not only in our city, but throughout the nation.”

Mayor Harrell, Police, Taxes

Harrell’s Latest Budget Spikes City’s Deficit by Piling On New Spending In Election Year
Screenshot from Mayor Bruce Harrell’s recorded budget speech.

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.