By Erica C. Barnett

On Thursday, the Seattle City Council voted (earlier than usual!) to pass the city’s 2026 budget, which includes modest amendments to the budget outgoing Mayor Bruce Harrell proposed in September. Like Harrell’s proposal, the budget puts off dealing the city’s structural budget deficit for another year, piling on tens of millions of ˜dollars in new spending and setting up a nine-figure shortfall for incoming mayor Katie Wilson to deal with next year.

We’ve reported extensively on the details of Harrell’s budget, which we characterized as “rickety” (and which council central staff called “inherently unsustainable“) because it uses one-time funds and other short-term budget tricks to pay for ongoing needs like food assistance and expands programs rather than reining in spending, as the five centrist councilmembers elected in 2023 promised to do.

For instance, the budget pays for expanded police camera surveillance (a program proponents assure us will never be misused by ICE, because of state laws prohibiting proactive police cooperation with immigration enforcement) and adds a budget restriction on the encampment sweeps team, the Unified Care Team, intended to force Wilson to spend the money on the UCT and nothing else. (Editor’s note: The original version of this story said the budget “expands” the Unified Care Team. In fact, while spending on the team increased due to inflation, the total number of UCT staff remains steady at 116.)

The budget also expands Harrell’s anti-graffiti squads, a top priority for Harrell as well as City Attorney Ann Davison, who also lost her reelection bid in December.

The budget relies on big new tax increases to pay for both new and expanded programs, such as a doubling of the city’s alternative response team, the CARE Team, and to backfill the general fund shortfall. (Gone are the days when voters and the council passed taxes and used them only for a specific purpose—like the JumpStart payroll tax, which was originally earmarked for specific progressive purposes and is now being used to expand police surveillance, increases to the city’s sales tax and Business and Occupation tax are being cannibalized to address budget shortfalls right from the start.)

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It also expands spending on police (whose overtime budget will remain essentially untouched despite a hiring spree spurred by a new contract that pays new officers $126,000 after six months), increasing SPD’s budget by $35 million.

Harrell’s $80 million “reparations” package, which he claimed would help Black Seattle residents buy houses or stay in their homes, ended up looking more like a cynical election ploy when it became clear that Harrell planned to achieve this ambitious number largely by adding “reparations” branding to existing programs.

The council did make edits to Harrell’s plan, a few of them significant. For instance, they decided not to fund his election-year promise to add 300 new shelter beds, putting that money instead into a reserve fund to pay for permanent housing programs that stand to lose federal funding next year. And they opted not to fund most of a new plan to rapidly house people living outdoors in Pioneer Square in the runup to the World Cup next year, paring back the joint Downtown Seattle Association-Purpose Dignity Action plan from $4 million to $700,000.

The council meets one final time to adopt the budget, along with dozens of ordinances needed to enact it, at 1:00 this afternoon.

By Erica C. Barnett

The Seattle City Council is getting ready to approve the city’s budget for the first year of Mayor-Elect Katie Wilson’s term, and they’ve made a number of last-minute changes since the election that will impact (or constrain) what Wilson can get done during her first year.

Overall, the council is preserving much of Harrell’s budget intact, with one significant exception I covered earlier this week: On a split vote, councilmembers decided to set aside about $11 million, on top of $9 million already in Harrell’s budget, as a reserve that can fund fund permanent housing in response to anticipated federal funding cuts cuts.

After Wilson, along with progressives Dionne Foster (replacing Sara Nelson in Position 9) and Eddie Lin (replacing Mark Solomon in District 2) won election in November, the council’s centrist majority made moves to prevent the mayor-elect from upending the council’s spending priorities, at least in her first year.

They also bickered, sometimes at length, over new spending—including attempts by Rob Saka, who represents West Seattle, to drain most of a $1 million “federal response reserve” fund and put that money into projects in his distrixt—as well as aspects of the budget that haven’t changed since Harrell proposed it back in September, such as increased permit fees.

With one week left before the council votes, here are some highlights of the council’s post-election budget deliberations.

Protecting Sweeps

The Unified Care Team, a multi-departmental group that removes encampments and, in some cases, refers their displaced residents to available shelter beds, remains the same size in Harrell’s budget, although spending on the 116-member team will increase by about $6 million due to inflation. ((Editor’s note: The original version of this story said the budget “expands” the Unified Care Team. In fact, while spending on the team increased due to inflation, the total number of UCT staff remains steady at 116.)  Saka, who said last week that the UCT responds “compassionately and appropriately” to unsheltered homelessness, added a proviso, or spending restriction, saying that the $30 million Harrell’s budget provides for the UCT can’t be spent for any other purpose.

The proviso will make it difficult, though not impossible, for Wilson to use the $30 million for anything other than sweeps, which she has said she opposes in most cases.

For example, it says $888,000 can be spent for no other purpose than towing and disposing of “inoperable” RVs. Another $2.2 million has to go to the Seattle Police Department for “officer time dedicated to the UCT,” a reference to the police who are now part of every UCT sweep.

Before the vote (6-1-2, with Alexis Mercedes Rinck voting no and Joy Hollingsworth and Dan Strauss abstaining), Saka, Mark Solomon, and Maritza Rivera described the UCT in reverent tones. Rivera took a moment to “shout out” outgoing deputy mayor Tiffany Washington, who has overseen the city’s homelessness response under both Harrell and his predecessor Jenny Durkan, praising the team for displaying “such care and such compassion and grace.”

The council also voted to require the Wilson administration to use $4 million from the Seattle Department of Transportation’s budget for graffiti removal—a top priority for Harrell, whose budget includes 22 staff dedicated to this purpose. They also placed a restriction on incoming City Attorney Erika Evans’ office requiring Evans to retain her predecessor Ann Davison’s “drug diversion alternative”—which, as we’ve reported, has not resulted in better outcomes for people caught up in the city’s new laws penalizing drug possession and public use.

Raising Permit Fees

Harrell’s budget included significant fee increases to pay for the ongoing operations of the city’s Department of Construction and Inspections, which is almost entirely funded by fees. The increases, which average 18 percent, are necessary if the city wants to keep a base level of staffing at the department at a time when permits for large housing projects are at a cyclical low ebb. Because the projects that are currently getting built are smaller, higher fees will disproportionately impact developers building townhouses and small apartment buildings, who may have less of a margin to absorb extra expenses than large apartment developers.

The main alternative to rate hikes—laying off many or most of SDCI’s permitting staff—isn’t ideal, because it would create a major brain drain and force SDCI to hire and train new people every time development picks up. That alone can contribute to permitting delays and slow down the creation of new housing—a persistent problem that most elected officials have decried.

The budget committee discussed these fees for nearly an hour at their meeting on September 30, where Councilmembers Maritza Rivera and Debora Juarez raised questions about how the new fees,will impact small developers. During a meeting on Monday, however, Rivera and Council President Sara Nelson (who attended the September 30 meeting virtually from her office) acted as though they were just hearing about the changes for the first time. This prompted Strauss to repeatedly direct a staff member to play the September 30 video on the big screen in council chambers to refresh his colleagues’ memories.

Rivera said it didn’t make sense to raise the fees that pay for most of SDCI’s budget if the department is actually doing less complex work right now, adding, “I don’t even think that this should be voted on during the budget.” (Not voting on it during the budget would effectively force SDCI, which is currently operating in the red, to use up the rest of its reserves or lay off staff).

Nelson, meanwhile, said she didn’t recall there ever being a previous conversation about the fees. “Maybe I wasn’t paying attention. But I don’t remember a lot of that information being presented before, and so that is why I have so many questions about this piece of legislation, increasing those fees,” she said.

The new fees passed, with Nelson, Rivera, and Solomon voting against them.

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Cops On Buses

King County Metro and Sound Transit have given no indication that they want the city to meddle in how they provide security on the buses and trains that they operate. Nevertheless, the city has persisted, including $5 million in the latest transportation levy for security guards on Metro buses. This year’s budget takes $275,000 out of the Seattle Transit Measure, which funds transit service in Seattle, to pay for a transit security tsar.

Rob Saka, who sponsored the amendment, said the new Chief Transit Security and Safety Officer—an executive-level position in SDOT—would help ensure people feel safe riding on King County Metro and Sound Transit buses and trains.

“I’ve said it before colleagues. I’ll say it again. Transit service is not one of those things. It’s not like the Field of Dreams. If you build it, they will come. If you expand it, we can count on more riders. To the contrary, we must, as we expand transit service, specifically boost transit safety and security,” Saka said.

Only Rinck voted against funding the new transit tsar, whose job duties remain generally unknown.

Sara Nelson’s Parting Shots

As much as we’d love for Sara Nelson’s swan song to be her (arguably petty, but correct) effort to prevent campaign consultants from double-dipping by holding jobs at City Hall—Christian Sinderman, who worked for Nelson’s victorious opponent Foster, also worked for Harrell while holding a long-term contract with the mayor’s office—we can’t praise her too hard.

That’s because on her way out the door, Nelson argued against restoring funding for a small city program that pays for counseling, legal aid,  education, and other assistance to tenants facing eviction, and convinced her colleagues to cut funding for a King County harm reduction program that distributes safer smoking supplies to drug users.

Nelson, who sponsored a separate amendment setting aside $6 million for rent assistance, characterized the tenant services program as an obvious waste of money. “I would much rather see this $400,000 go directly to keeping people housed, instead of to a bunch of lawyers,” Nelson said said. Advocates who work directly with tenants say legal assistance and other services make rent assistance more effective and help people stay housed long-term. T

The amendment, sponsored by Rinck, passed, with Nelson and Rivera abstaining.

Nelson—echoing language used by people who opposed needle exchanges during the AIDS epidemic—did manage to convince her colleagues that providing pipes, foil, and other safer smoking supplies was like “handing a suicidal person a gun.” Holding up a safe supply kit from the county, Nelson said, “It would probably be shocking to our constituents if they knew that we are using public resources to to help people get high by distributing pipes [and] foil” to drug users.

Nelson’s amendment, which passed (with Rinck voting no and Hollingsworth and Strauss abstaining) will “preclude any City support for the purchase or distribution of supplies for the consumption of illegal drugs, with the exception of needles.” The basic argument is that because people can transmit deadly diseases through needles, it makes sense to provide clean sharps to prevent that from happening, whereas smoking is generally lower-risk, so there’s no need to provide safe supplies.

The counter-argument, with which Nelson and the rest of the council are probably familiar, is that safe smoking supplies do prevent harm, reducing the transmission of infectious diseases like tuberculosis and preventing burns that can result when smokers use thin grocery store foil. Handing out smoking supplies, much like providing clean needles, also creates an opportunity for health care workers to offer other services, such as wound care and treatment medications, to people who would otherwise have no reason to visit a clinic.

Emotion prevailed, and the council passed Nelson’s anti-harm reduction amendment, with only Rinck voting against it and Hollingsworth and Strauss abstaining.