Category: Taxes

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.

City Council, Density, Mayor Harrell, public safety, Taxes

Seattle Nice: CARE Team Expansion and a Missed Opportunity for Neighborhood Businesses

By Erica C. Barnett

Gearing up for Seattle’s 2025 budget season on the latest episode of Seattle Nice, we discussed Mayor Bruce Harrell’s proposal to increase the local sales tax rate by 0.1 cent to pay for an expansion of the city’s CARE Team and 911 department, backfill $20 million in spending that currently comes from other sources, and add funding for firefighters, addiction treatment, and the fire department’s Health 99 overdose response team.

Governor Bob Ferguson gave cities and counties the authority to hike sales taxes to pay for public safety programs in his budget last year, effectively punting his promise to spend $100 million on police to local jurisdictions and forcing cities and counties to use a regressive sales tax increase if they wanted more public safety funding. King County already passed its 0.1-cent tax in June; assuming Harrell’s proposal passes, the total sales tax in Seattle will rise to nearly 10.6 percent.

We dug into what the new tax will pay for, as well as why CARE Team expansion is happening now, after a lengthy stalemate between the Seattle Police Officers Guild and CARE over what responsibilities SPD is willing to hand over to unarmed social workers.

Since 2023, a memorandum of understanding between CARE and the police department requires cops to go out with CARE on every call, limits the kind of calls CARE’s first responders are allowed to respond to, and restricts the size of the team to 24 people. That MOU expires at the end of the year.

Although new SPOG contracts typically drag on for years (the most recent contract, covering the years 2021 through 2023, passed in April 2024), that may not be the case this time, as we discussed, thanks to the recent primary election results, which had Katie Wilson leading incumbent Harrell outright.

In short, SPOG appears to be racing (relatively speaking) to wrap up their latest contract this year, betting that Katie Wilson might win the mayor’s race and be less willing than Harrell to provide concessions to the union without corresponding improvements to police accountability.

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This goes far beyond CARE, of course, but the new urgency around the contract seems to have produced a new willingness to give the team some of what it’s been asking for almost since its inception, including expansion from 24 to 48 tea members, the ability to go out on calls without a police escort and to respond to more types of calls where a social worker can do more good than officers with guns.

Harrell’s sales tax proposal, part of the 2025 budget he announced today, includes funding for CARE expansion, which suggests the MOU language may already be settled. As Sandeep put it, “The specter of Katie Wilson has scared SPOG into actually making the deal to allow alternative dispatch.”

Also this week, the guys gave me a lot of time to geek out over the council’s amendments to legislation implementing “phase 1” of the city’s comprehensive plan, which just passed last week.

Did they go into a boredom-induced fugue state? Who knows, but I did get an opportunity to talk about why I’d be thrilled to have bars, restaurants, and late-night corner stores in my own residential neighborhood. Unfortunately, the council foreclosed that possibility when they voted to restrict new businesses in neighborhoods to stores and to make them close no later than 10pm—a missed opportunity to give more people access to the kinds of things that make a city a city.

Mayor Harrell, Police, Taxes

Harrell Proposes New Sales Tax to Expand CARE Team, Fund Treatment, and Backfill Budget
Mayor Bruce Harrell, with Seattle Fire Chief Harold Scoggins.

About half the $39 million in funding from the sales tax increase would backfill spending on existing programs; the rest would shore up the city’s crisis response system and fund new treatment beds.

By Erica C. Barnett

Mayor Bruce Harrell announced his plans to allocate a new 0.1-cent sales tax to a slate of non-police public safety programs yesterday, including programs that might otherwise face budget cuts as well as an expansion of existing programs such as Health 99 and the CARE team, which responds alongside police to low-risk 911 calls.

Standing inside Fire Station 10 a few blocks from City Hall on Thursday afternoon, Harrell called the new tax plan part of a “comprehensive approach to investing in both quality, safety and public health as two sides of the same coin and interconnected and not in conflict.” The city council has to approve the tax before it can go into effect.

In all, Harrell announced, the city would be investing $39 million from the new sales tax on non-police public safety investments. Governor Bob Ferguson’s budget, passed earlier this year, authorizes local jurisdictions to pass a 0.1-cent sales tax to pay for public safety.

King County just passed its own 0.1-cent sales tax increase to help fund the county’s public-safety budget; assuming the Seattle tax increases passes, the combined sales tax in Seattle will total nearly 10.6 percent.

Only about half of the funding Harrell announced yesterday will be new. Of the $39 million, $15 million will supplant existing general-fund spending for the city’s CARE Team, a group of 24 civilian first responders who respond alongside police to certain 911 calls—freeing up general fund dollars to fund other city priorities.

Another $5 million will replace one-time federal funding (from several sources) for LEAD, whose operator, Purpose Dignity Action, was facing a budget cliff for the nationally recognized diversion program. Last year, in response to a new law that made simple drug possession and use a misdemeanor, LEAD started taking referrals exclusively from police, rather than community members; the new funding, according to PDA co-director Lisa Daugaard, will allow the group to help about 100 more people next year.

The remaining $19 million will including funding to:

  • Add 20 new fighter recruits in 2026 ($2 million);
  • Expand the Downtown Emergency Service Center’s “field-based” work to provide opioid treatment and medicine to people living in shelters and permanent supportive housing, among other locations ($1.2 million);
  • Expand the fire department’s Health 99 response team, including two new case managers and new vehicles ($1.6 million);
  • Add funding for the Seattle Indian Health Board’s Thunderbird Treatment Center, a rehab center that was previously located in Rainier Beach that’s reopening on Vashon ($1.8 million);
  • Add funding for future detox and inpatient treatment beds through a competitive bidding process ($2.8 million);
  • Hire 12 new 911 call takers, plus three trainers and three administrative staff—an investment that will offset current overtime spending at the city’s 911 call center ($2.6 million);
  • Double the CARE team  from 24 to 48 responders, a change CARE Department director Amy Barden said will allow them to respond to calls across the city for about 20 hours every day ($6.9 million).

Council president Sara Nelson, who proposed dedicating 25 percent of the new tax to treatment earlier this year, said she was not “going to split hairs” about how much of the funding in the new plan will go to fund new treatment beds (in all, the treatment portion of the proposal amounts to about 16 percent of the overall proposal).

“Because of my subject [expertise], my personal experience, because I see such a great need—throw all the money at this,” Nelson continued. Nelson has talked publicly about her own experience going to treatment for alcohol addiction and has frequently advocated for more direct city funding for rehab, which has not traditionally been under the city’s purview.

The CARE team is currently under a memorandum of agreement that restricts its size to 24 responders, does not allow CARE to go out on calls without police, and restricts the kind of calls CARE can respond to. This has limited the team’s ability to do what it was established to do: Respond to calls that are more appropriate for social workers than police.

Additionally, because police officers can choose whether to respond to calls themselves or hand them off to CARE, the volume of calls CARE can respond to has fluctuated fairly dramatically over time.

According to Barden, a city analysis of more than 50,000 calls the CARE team believes they can respond to, but can’t because of the MOU, that only 300 included any kind of police action, such as a citation.

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The MOU expires at the end of the year, and any new agreement with CARE will be part of the next contract between the city and the Seattle Police Officers Guild (SPOG). Ordinarily, SPOG contract negotiations tend to drag out for months or years, but the union is reportedly amenable to reaching an agreement quickly now that it appears likely that Katie Wilson, not Bruce Harrell, will be mayor next year. It now appears likely that the new contract will allow CARE to respond to more types of calls, expand to 48 members, and respond to calls without police in tow—a huge turnaround from the extremely restrictive MOU.

Harrell said he couldn’t comment on the MOU because the negotiations with SPOG are ongoing. But Barden, who is not a party to the negotiations, said she was optimistic. “I get along with [SPOG president] Mike Solan personally and I feel his support is genuine.”

If the city doesn’t manage to reach a contract with the police union that gives CARE more freedom to respond to calls, Barden continued, she has about “47 contingency plans,” such as working with King County to direct the CARE team to respond to calls to 988, the mental-health crisis line. Because 988 isn’t a city system, responding to those calls wouldn’t require negotiations with Seattle police. But that’s the nuclear option. Reading through the lines of Harrell’s and Barden’s comments Thursday, the city appears to believe SPOG will work with them to let CARE’s responders actually perform the jobs they were hired to do.

Affordability, Elections, housing, Mayor Harrell, Taxes

This Week On PubliCola: September 13, 2025

By Erica C. Barnett

Welcome back to us! PubliCola went on a brief summer break, but we returned this week with news about the mayor’s race, the comprehensive plan, the expansion of police surveillance, and much more.

Wednesday, September 10

City Expands Police Surveillance Despite Overwhelming Opposition, Concerns About Civil Liberties

More Seattle neighborhoods will be under 24/7 live police surveillance after the Seattle City Council voted 7-2 to expand police cameras into three additional neighborhoods. Council camera supporters claimed the near-universal opposition among civil rights groups and public commenters didn’t represent a silent and unseen majority of city residents who support surveillance.

Thursday, September 11

Debate Over Affordable Housing Tax Break Heats Up

Opponents and fans of a program that gives tax breaks to developers who set aside some affordable apartments had their say before a briefing on amendments to the plan. Opponents called the changes a giveaway to developers that won’t produce truly affordable housing, while proponents said the changes would make it feasible for them to build affordable housing at a time when development is slowing.

Friday, September 12

“Day Tents” and “Active Rat’s Nests”: Council’s Housing Budget Interrogation Goes Off the Rails

For months, councilmembers have claimed the Office of Housing is “sitting on” hundreds of millions of dollars they should be spending. A hearing where city staff explained why housing grants take time turned into a free-for-all for the council to criticize all sorts of housing policies, from the lack of a real-time vacancy database for affordable buildings to the purported presence of “rat’s nests” at an unspecified building.

Harrell on the Attack and Defensive in First Televised Mayoral Debate

In a debate on the Seattle Channel, Mayor Bruce Harrell went on the offensive with his challenger, labor activist and Transit Riders Union founder Katie Wilson, while also suggesting Wilson is racist for opposing police surveillance, a view she shares with civil rights groups across the city as well as the city’s own Community Police Commission, Office for Civil Rights, and surveillance working group.

City Council, housing, Taxes

City Plans Major Overhaul of Affordable Housing Tax-Break Program
An MFTE building, Mad Flats, on Capitol Hill

By Erica C. Barnett

The city is getting ready to overhaul a program that provides tax breaks to developers who agree to keep 25 percent of their apartments affordable for 12 years (or 20 percent if 8 percent of the units are two-bedroom), known as the Multifamily Tax Exemption program (MFTE). It’s the city’s main program for providing housing affordable to moderate-income people; as of November 2024, according to a University of Washington evaluation of the program, there were nearly 7,000 income-restricted units in Seattle as a direct result of MFTE tax breaks

The MFTE program has been overhauled several times in its 27-year existence; the current program, known as “Program 6,” has been in place since 2019. In that update, the City Council imposed a cap on rent increases of 4.5 percent a year and reduced the maximum income for eligibility, opening up the program for lower-income renters.

While those changes made more people eligible for MFTE units, they also made developers less likely to participate in the voluntary program. As construction costs ballooned starting in 2019, market rents in Seattle softened, making MFTE units less competitive with the market–and the program less appealing to developers who might otherwise participate in it.

According to the UW study, “The City of Seattle has a difficult responsibility to calibrate the relationship between the costs of the program (benefit to developers) and the public benefits it delivers (more affordable housing). As the City pushes for greater public benefits, the program becomes less attractive to developers. This is the central tension.”

The proposed update, known as “Revised Program 7” to distinguish it from an earlier proposal that came out of the city’s Office of Housing, would set new (generally higher) rent and income limits for most of the affordable units created under the MFTE program, adjusting eligibility standards so that the program would be geared toward people earning between 40 percent of Seattle’s median income for the smallest units to 90 percent—about $113,000 for a two-person household—for two-bedrooms.

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Updating the tax-break program has been fairly uncontroversial so far—somewhat surprisingly so, given some council members’ recent opposition to other proposals that would encourage new housing, such as density increases in the comprehensive plan, on the grounds that they aren’t tailored to very low-income people.

It may help that the council’s most vocal opponent of such measures, Cathy Moore, is off the council and no longer chairs the Housing and Human Services Committee, which discussed the legislation last week. During public comment at last week’s housing and human services committee, just one speaker vociferously opposed the proposed changes to the program: Longtime Phinney Ridge neighborhood activist Irene Wall, who argued that MFTE was “a failed program” that served too few people for the amount it costs homeowners like herself in additional taxes.

“The Office of Housing spent months trying to figure out what to do with this program,” Wall said. “They asked tenants if they like their rent reductions in their new buildings, but there was no outreach to any of the taxpayers who are funding this graft. Why are the taxpayers not considered equal stakeholders in this scheme?”

Overall, a median homeowner in Seattle spends $145 a year in property taxes to offset the taxes developers who participate in the program don’t pay in exchange for providing affordable housing.

Council President Sara Nelson, who has frequently beat the drum for more “workforce” housing, called MFTE “a program that’s extremely important because it it makes it easier to build housing across the board.”

The proposal would also replace a 4.5 percent annual cap on rent increases with the statewide rent cap (which doesn’t currently apply to MFTE buildings) of 7 percent plus inflation or 10 percent, whichever is smaller. Separate from the legislation, Office of Housing director Maiko Winkler-Chin told the council that OH is simplifying the income verification process for renters, which can require prospective tenants to fill out a lengthy, complex application for each MFTE unit they apply to rent.

“The city doesn’t have any program that supports workforce housing besides MFTE, really, for rental units,” Nelson said. “And that, I would say, is the greatest need because of the sheer numbers of people that fall within the category.”

The council, which is currently on its annual two-week summer recess, has until September 3 to propose amendments—for example, adjusting the maximum income levels so that higher-income renters are ineligible for the program—in advance of the next meeting to discuss the program on September 10.

City Council, Elections, housing, podcasts, Taxes

This Week on PubliCola: August 10, 2025
The crowd begins to gather at Mayor Bruce Harrell’s party early on Election Night

A huge election upset led this packed week, which included two podcasts (plus two-thirds of Seattle Nice on KUOW!)

By Erica C. Barnett

Monday, August 4

New Forecast Reduces City’s Projected Revenue Shortfall to $150 Million

Seattle’s latest revenue forecast, which will form the basis of the 2026-2027 biennial budget, reduced the. city’s projected two-year budget shortfall from around $240 million to about $150 million. The city’s revenue forecasters used a more optimistic model than the April forecast.

Seattle Nice: Seattle Sues Trump, Camping Ban Proposed, Business Tax Hike Heads to Ballot

On the first of two Seattle Nice episodes this week, we discussed the broader implications of a proposed ballot initiative that would make it illegal to fall asleep outdoors in unincorporated King County, a Seattle ballot measure to raise business and occupation taxes to pay for housing stability and human services, and a lawsuit filed by City Attorney Ann Davison, a Republican who’s struggling to retain support, over a seven-month-old Trump executive.

Tuesday, August 5

Business Tax Will Be on November Ballot, Despite Council Objections Over Spending “Buckets”

The city council approved the business and occupation tax proposal for the November ballot, overcoming objections from some councilmembers that it shouldn’t be dedicated to any specific purpose, but instead should go toward any current or future general-fund purpose elected officials decide they want to fund. In general, voters approve taxes for specific purposes, and there is no recent precedent for sending a blank-check tax measure to the ballot.

In Anti-Incumbent Rout, Progressive Candidates Lead In All Local Races

This week’s local elections represented a massive rebuke of the people elected in the wake of COVID and the 2020 protests against police brutality. Across the board in Seattle, progressive candidates were leading big, from Katie Wilson (running against Mayor Bruce Harrell) to Erika Evans (headed for victory against Davison).

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Thursday, August 7

Council Amendments to Comprehensive Plan Reveal Competing Priorities

City councilmembers have proposed more than 100 amendments to Mayor Bruce Harrell’s much-delayed Comprehensive Plan update, which only deals with neighborhood residential (former single-family) zoning. Some amendments would further shrink the size of neighborhood centers—small nodes of potential future density—while others would expand them and create new incentives for housing.

Seattle Nice: Election Results Emergency Edition!

On this week’s second edition of the podcast, we debated what’s behind the shift toward progressive candidates this year. I argued that it’s a combination of people’s desire to have people in office who’ll fight Trump policies that impact Seattle and a rejection of politicians who’ve prioritized cracking down on minor crimes over solving the affordability crisis; Sandeep says voters are reflexively “lurching to the left” because of Trump, not any specific local issues.

Friday, August 8

Another Tree Petition, Another Council Staff Departure, and Another Round of Election Results

A petition to “save the trees” is more blatantly misleading than usual, as the trees in question aren’t threatened by the development people are protesting. Maritza Rivera can’t seem to keep staff for more than six months. And the latest election results put Katie Wilson at 50.2 percent to Harrell’s 41.7, while Ann Davison and City Council President Sara Nelson lost ground too: The two incumbents have 33.8 percent and 35.8 percent of the vote, respectively.