City Council, Mayor Harrell

Bad News for the City Budget: New Forecast Slashes $241 Million from Last Year’s Projection

By Erica C. Barnett

The city’s budget forecast is grim, Office of Economic and Revenue Forecast Council director Jan Duras told the council Thursday morning, as national economic turmoil threatens to lower tax revenues in nearly every economic sector, from construction to tourism. In an unusual move, the council adopted the “pessimistic” (as opposed to “baseline”) version of the forecast, which lowers total revenue projections by $241 million over the next two years compared to the budget the city adopted last year.

That total includes a $50 million two-year shortfall in the general fund resulting from lower sales taxes, business and occupation taxes, utility taxes, and many other revenue sources. The payroll tax alone, which depends heavily on just ten companies (nine of those in the tech sector), is now expected to bring in $142.3 million less than the current city budget anticipates.

“The City of Seattle was already dealing with the effects of high inflation,” the council’s budget committee chair, Dan Strauss, told PubliCola after the briefing. Strauss, along with Council President Sara Nelson, represents the council on the four-member forecast council. “Now, we are beginning to see the real impact indiscriminate tariffs, increased market volatility, and federal funding cuts could have on Seattle’s budget.

?Since federal trade policy is rapidly changing, it is difficult to project the impact it will have on our economy. We adopted the pessimistic forecast today so we are able to plan for the worst, while still hoping for the best.”

The revenue forecast council, which was established in 2021, includes two representative each from the city council and mayor’s office; prior to 2021, the City Budget Office was in charge of revenue forecasts. Today’s vote marked the second time the city has adopted the pessimistic forecast, rather than the “baseline” forecast, since COVID shut down the economy in April 2021.

As you might expect, Trump’s tariffs, stock-market volatility, inflation, and the looming recession are having a significant impact on Seattle—and when the economy is uncertain, people spend less money and businesses pay less in local taxes. This year, forecast council staff said, travel to Seattle (including visits from Canadians) is expected to take a hit, along with housing construction, attendance at venues that charge admission tax, and revenue from parking taxes and parking meter fees.

Job data also suggests that in response to rising payroll tax rates (which went up in 2023 and will rise again this year to pay for student mental health and social housing, respectively), large companies subject to the tax have been moving or adding jobs outside Seattle, a trend that could be contributing to lower tax revenues from JumpStart.

This is a problem not only for the programs JumpStart was created to fund, but for the general-fund programs to which it has been steadily repurposed. For years, the city has increasingly relied on the tax to pay for general city purposes, and last year, the council eliminated any requirement that it follow the original JumpStart spending plan, which allocated the funds primarily to affordable housing construction. But as they recently discovered, JumpStart is not an endless money faucet, but a volatile revenue stream that can swing dramatically depending on the decisions of a single company.

Wall-o-numbers: The relevant (scary) ones are in red.

Keep in mind that this is just the April forecast; the city will get two more forecasts before adopting a budgetin the fall. But unless the national and local economy suddenly start to trend in a positive direction, the likelihood is that things will get worse, not better, before then.

Simply put, it probably isn’t possible—and definitely isn’t prudent—for the mayor and council to continue to ignore growing, ongoing budget shortfalls by relying on the JumpStart fund to patch over deep structural issues year after year.  As I reported last year, the city’s current budget is only balanced (thanks to JumpStart) through 2026; after that, even before Trump’s policies threw the global economic order into chaos, the city projected a shortfall of of $78 million in 2027, growing to $158 million in 2028.

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Those numbers were already looking shaky, because they assumed JumpStart revenues would continue to rise and rise, bringing in more revenue every year and forestalling difficult budget choices. The city’s existing budget assumes the JumpStart tax will bring in $440 million this year, $466 million in 2026, $483 million in 2027, and $505 million in 2028. The new revenue forecast, which covers two years, downgrades the 2025 and 2026 numbers to $359 million and $380 million, respectively, a cumulative drop of $167 million from what the city was assuming.

This means that the mayor and council have a bigger budget problem than they thought they would last year, when they larded the budget with $100 million in brand-new programs, including some (like live CCTV surveillance by SPD’s new “real time crime center”) that will now require ongoing funds in every budget.

The city could decide to finally new revenues, such as a capital gains tax or tax on excessive compensation for corporate CEOs—unlikely, but possible. There are good arguments for new taxes, but none of the proposals on the table would bring in enough to address shortfalls in the hundreds of millions; the high-end estimate for last year’s proposed capital gains tax, probably the most feasible and lucrative option, was $51 million a year.

They could also decide to dip into the city’s emergency reserves, but that still won’t solve the problem, and would leave the city short on cash in future years, when the budget deficit is expected to grow.

Or they could make cuts. This seems like the least likely option in 2025, since there have been no signs the mayor or council are particularly panicked about the forecasts they’ve been seeing. Hell, the council just took time out of their busy schedules to pass a resolution decrying the very concept of removing a penny from the police department, so it’s hard to imagine they’re asking tough questions yet about what happens if they suddenly need to cut $300 million from the budget. In addition, it’s an election year for Mayor Bruce Harrell and Council President Sara Nelson, and neither wants to be known as the “austerity” candidate.

If the situation didn’t seem dire enough already, remember that Trump’s dismantling of the federal social safety net has already hit Seattle, cutting funds for agencies that provide vital services to children, immigrants, people who can’t afford health care, and those experiencing homelessness or housing instability, to name just a few. Last week, for instance, the director of the Downtown Emergency Service Center told a council committee that DESC gets about $35 million, or a quarter of its operating budget, from federal sources; if those funds aren’t replaced by other sources, many of the 8,000 people the shelter and housing agency serves annually could end up back on the streets.

And they’re just one agency. Others, like the Kids In Need of Legal Defense program, which helps immigrant children who would otherwise have to represent themselves in court, are already winding down their work—they lost their federal funding, and they can’t function without it. These problems go beyond anything the city can address on its own, but every government in the state has an obligation to do what it can. Will this council and mayor be up for the challenge? We’ll know soon enough.

Addiction, Drugs, Police

Seattle’s CARE Department Chief Amy Barden and Her Husband, Former Deputy Police Chief Eric Barden, Have a Podcast

By Erica C. Barnett

Amy Barden, the chief of the Community Assisted Response and Engagement (CARE) program, has started a podcast called BomBardened along with her husband, recently retired deputy police chief Eric Barden. The first episode of the show features a conversation with Ginny Burton, founder of a prison-based program called Overhaul—Unrelenting Transformation—and a vocal critic of evidence-based approaches to addiction and homelessness, including Housing First, harm reduction, and medication-assisted treatment.

Barden said the show gives her and her husband an opportunity to highlight, though not necessarily endorse, the perspectives of guests with various views and backgrounds; upcoming guests will include actor Billy Baldwin; Pallet Shelter and Weld founder Amy King; and peer counselor and drug court housing case manager Joe Barsana.

“The basic idea behind it was to be able to debate things respectfully,” Barden said. “[Eric and I] have really different lenses on most of the issues, but happily, most of the time we have reach similar conclusions about what would be most helpful.”

The podcast’s kickoff interview was the second Amy Barden has done with Burton, who interviewed Barden on her own Modern America podcast earlier this year. On that show, Barden appeared to agree with Burton’s criticism of low-barrier supportive housing providers like the Downtown Emergency Service Center—whose buildings get a high number of 911 calls because they house people with challenging mental health conditions who would otherwise be on the street—and praised Union Gospel Mission’s high-barrier shelter, which has a different population and purpose, for having fewer emergency calls.

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“The spirit of the place is different. There are more activities, there’s more pro-social behaviors,” Barden said. Asked about those comments, Barden said that “from a 911 lens, [UGM] is a more peaceful environment, but you’re 100 percent right that DESC is doing its best to get the very most vulnerable people inside.”

As the first guest on BomBardened, Burton laid out her views as an advocate for abstinence and incarceration, and mentioned that she personally hosts people who want to “kick” fentanyl at her house. In Burton’s view, using medication, such as buprenorphine or methadone, to treat addiction is just embracing addiction to a different drug—an opinion that was once common at treatment centers and in 12-step recovery groups, but has become less prevalent as attitudes toward medication-assisted treatment have evolved.

“When you’re dopesick, that’s when the clarity starts to occur,” Burton said, adding that harm reduction is a “distorted concept” pushed by pharmaceutical companies to keep people addicted to drugs that that “get you loaded.” (The general medical consensus is that in prescribed doses, opiate replacement drugs make it possible for people to function, and don’t get them high.). Instead of pushing back, Barden agreed that reducing harm or keeping people stable is not enough. “Somebody should be better off in six months and much better off in a year,” Barden said.

Barden said she didn’t push back on Burton’s views, which contradict the approach adopted by the CARE dual-dispatch team, because she isn’t an expert on addiction. “When I watched it back, I though there were a couple of things I wish I had interrogated,” she said, adding, “I’m a harm reductionist—but I’m a directional harm reductionist.”

Eric Barden, who left SPD in December, said first responders should have more power to force people into treatment after they reverse an overdose, comparing that near-death experience to someone who tries to jump off the bridge. In the former case, he said, first responders have to let the person walk away.

“That’s not what we do with somebody who’s going to jump off the bridge. We try to save them, and then we take them and we involuntarily commit them to treatment, because we know that they’re in a place that’s going to ultimately lead to their death. And there is absolutely no intellectual difference between the addict who is overdosing and is going to kill themselves than the person that’s about to jump off the bridge, and yet we treat them very, very differently.”

(Not to belabor this too much, but “treatment” is not one thing and it is incredibly difficult to access if you’re poor. Also, the state’s involuntary treatment act has strict standards for commitment, and even those who meet the standards can only be detained for a maximum of 14 days.)

Barden said she and her husband have different perspectives on addiction because “he’s generally informed by the worst-case scenario.” But, she added, fentanyl is different than other drugs, in that it’s deadly and can cause cumulative brain damage. (Again, not to belabor, but: Same goes for alcohol.) “If it’s predictable that you’re not going to be here in a couple years, I do think we should be thoughtful about that,” Barden said. “We can’t just keep Narcaning the same kid without [us] taking some kind of accountability.”

Editor’s note: This post initially misstated Eric Barden’s former position; he was deputy chief of SPD, not assistant chief. Amy Barden also reached out after publication to clarify that in her final quote, she meant that “we in public safety should assume accountability, not the person being revived again and again.” We have updated the post to reflect these changes.

City Council, homelessness, Trump, Uncategorized

Grim Outlook for Local Homelessness Programs Under Trump’s Slash-and-Burn Cuts
KCRHA deputy CEO Simon Foster

By Erica C. Barnett

During the second meeting of the City Council’s special committee on the impact of federal funding cuts last week, housing and homeless service providers laid out in stark terms what will happen when, not if, cuts to federal funding for housing development and services for people experiencing homelessness or housing insecurity kick in.

The housing impacts alone will be broad and widespread across every kind of affordable housing, from buildings financed privately through federal tax credits to permanent supportive housing that relies heavily on federal support.

Services that help keep people housed, such as health care, will also become harder to access, as the Trump administration targets Medicaid recipients—cutting funds and imposing work requirements on the state’s poorest residents, including many with disabilities that make it impossible to work.

Meanwhile, the region’s homelessness agency stands to lose the federal funding that is the agency’s third-largest funding source, and is now facing a choice about whether to comply with the administration’s new mandate to verify their clients’ immigration status and provide that information to ICE.

“We know that immigration verification requirements have a chilling effect that extends throughout the community, and that even documented individuals are less likely to seek help,” King County Regional Homelessness Authority deputy CEO Simon Foster said, because “they are afraid of the repercussions to themselves, their friends and their families.”

The meeting offered a first look at the impacts federal cuts will have on the housing and homelessness system locally. The speakers—who, in addition to Foster, included Naomi See from Hunt Capital Partners, Jess Blanch from Enterprise Community Partners, interim Chief Seattle Club director James Lovell, and Downtown Emergency Service Center director Daniel Malone—described a bleak cascade of consequences.

– KCRHA, which received $66 million directly and indirectly, through King County, from HUD’s Continuum of Care program last year, is bracing for cuts that could impact ongoing contracts with housing providers and direct subsidies to help people stay in their housing. Overall, nearly 2,200 formerly homeless people could be at risk of losing their housing from federal cuts, along with another 2,300 in transitional housing and other programs. More than 240 people in programs funded through KCRHA could lose their jobs if the programs they operate are eliminated.

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– The federal Low Income Housing Tax Credit program, which helps fund most affordable housing projects, could drop in value dramatically, limiting its effectiveness. LIHTC is complicated to explain, but basically, states award federal tax credits to developers who sell them to investors at a discounted rate—say, 90 cents on the dollar. If that rate gets too low for the developers to build their projects, they have to seek funding from “gap funders,” like the city and county, or forego building.

The reasons this is happening, See said, are at least twofold: Corporate tax rates are likely to increase soon, which makes investors place a lower value on housing tax credits, and tariffs on Canada and Mexico are likely to increase the cost of materials used in construction, including drywall and lumber, making it harder for new housing to pencil out.

– The state’s Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), which helps low-income people pay their utility bills and weatherize their homes, could be cut. Earlier this month, the Trump administration eliminated the entire federal LIHEAP program as part of the mass firings at the Department of Health and Human Services, throwing the future of state-level programs in question.

According to Jess Blanch, from the affordable housing funder Enterprise Community Partners, Washington received $66 million from the federal government for LIHEAP last year, providing utility assistance to households with an average income of 150 percent of the federal poverty rate— $22,590 for a one-person household or $46,800 for a household of four.

– Cuts to two federal programs that help house people and keep them housed, Section 8 and the less-known Section 4, which helps community-based housing providers build capacity to increase their effectiveness, could dramatically increase homelessness, Blanch said. Enterprise and one of its partners recently received notice from DOGE that “due to our supposed non compliance with the DEI executive order,” HUD is freezing their funds, impacting providers like DESC that were set to receive grants.

– Individual organizations that rely on federal funding, including DESC, stand to lose huge chunks of their operating budgets thanks to slash-and-burn cuts at HUD, HHD, and Medicaid. Malone noted that DESC gets about a quarter of its funding from federal sources. In late March, DESC learned that a federal grant that funds outreach and engagement with opioid users had been eliminated (along with the entire federal agency that oversees substance use and mental health treatment across the country), forcing DESC to “scramble to figure out what to do about how to manage the loss of those funds,” Malone said.

– Funding for opioid addiction treatment through Medicaid could also be at risk, since Trump seems determined to go after states that expanded Medicaid. “Reductions in federal cost share of Medicaid expansion would result in a huge hit to the state, and the state would have to figure out how they were going to continue people on health insurance if that were to happen,” Malone said.

These are state and federal issues, not merely local ones, but the city could make funding decisions that help offset the current and future cuts. Revenue is one option, although the council has not shown much appetite for new taxes—a modest capital gains tax, proposed by Rinck and her colleague Cathy Moore during last year’s budget, could provide some funding, but the council majority rejected this option, arguing that there wasn’t enough data about the need for funding rent and food assistance.

Lovell, from the Chief Seattle Club, noted that “no matter what we do, that level of federal funding that’s at risk cannot simply just be absorbed without something having to go away. And the only way to prevent that, I think, is with a different revenue source” from the state, King County, or the city. Lovell said the council would “probably have to have a special budget session just to kind of brush up on what the federal impacts have been and how they’ve passed through to the city.”

So far, the committee has focused on surfacing problems, rather than identifying solutions that the council can advocate and implement. That has value in itself—but only if the rest of the council chooses to listen and take action based on the flood of, yes, data they’re receiving about people who will be directly impacted by the cuts.

City Council, podcasts

Seattle Nice: Fees for Housing, a Lightweight Condemnation of “Defund,” and a Critique of Seattle’s Response to Shootings

By Erica C. Barnett

On this week’s episode of Seattle Nice, we blast through a range of local topics—from the city council’s nonbinding resolution denouncing “defund” (Rob Saka called it a “truth and reconciliation” process), to Councilmember Cathy Moore’s efforts to impose Mandatory Housing Affordability fees on small infill “middle housing” in former single-family neighborhoods, where state legislators recently forced cities to allow townhouses, fourplexes, and other kinds of very low-density development. Developers say that MHA fees would make small projects infeasible by adding potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars in pre-development costs; Moore said they should just accept lower returns.

In addition to going in deep on MHA (and appropriately shallow on Saka’s lightweight resolution), we talked about a recent city audit that explored some of the reasons gun violence has been declining in cities like Baltimore, Milwaukee, and Las Vegas, even as shootings continue to rise in Seattle. The City Auditor’s Office recommended more transparent, better-integrated information about patterns in gun violence, and said the city should collaborate more effectively with regional governments and community groups to understand the root causes of shootings in specific communities, rather than responding reactively and operating in siloes.

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At a recent council committee meeting, Deputy Mayor Tiffany Washington said she felt a lack of “respect” from the council, which moved forward with the audit even after the mayor’s office directed the auditor’s office to stop working on it, telling Councilmember Maritza Rivera and Council President Sara Nelson that the mayor’s office and police department are already implementing all the recommendations in the audit, rendering the audit unnecessary and even insulting.

Last week, Rivera said the mayor’s office contacted her right after the meeting to discuss the concerns she raised about shootings in and around Magnuson Park, and she felt at least somewhat reassured that they heard her and were taking action. But, she added, the city still needs to centralize its response to gun violence in response to the audit—taking the kind of “all-hands-on-deck” approach of other cities that have actually seen gun violence go down.

Listen to Seattle Nice below or wherever you get your podcasts.

Mayor Harrell, Police

City Settles Discrimination Lawsuit by Black Police Captain Demoted by Former Police Chief Diaz
SPD Captain Eric Greening

By Erica C. Barnett

The city of Seattle has settled a discrimination lawsuit filed by Seattle Police Department Captain Eric Greening, a former assistant police chief who was demoted by former Seattle police chief Adrian Diaz last year, reportedly for for around $1 million. Greening’s lawsuit, which received national attention, alleged that Diaz demoted Greening, who is Black, for raising concerns about discrimination against women and people of color in the department.

SPD general counsel Rebecca Boatright confirmed the settlement, referring more detailed questions to City Attorney Ann Davison’s office, which did not immediately respond to PublCola’s questions late Monday morning.

Greening’s lawsuit is one of many alleging sexist and racist discrimination at SPD under Diaz, who was reassigned by Mayor Bruce Harrell last year to an ill-defined “special projects” role where he continued to collect a $338,000 annual salary until Harrell finally fired him in December.

When Harrell announced he was removing Diaz as chief last May, he praised Diaz as “a good human being” whose “integrity, in my mind, is beyond reproach.” At the time, Diaz faced a half-dozen discrimination lawsuits. Immediately after his reassignment, Diaz went on a right-wing talk show to announce that he was gay, which the host said proved his “innocence” of charges that he had harassed women who worked for him, or of the “absurd” claim that was having an affair with a female staffer former FOX newscaster Jamie Tompkins, whom he hired and promoted. (Diaz is married to a woman.)

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Ultimately, that alleged affair—not the lawsuits and allegations of harassment and discrimination—is what brought him down, after investigators found he and Tompkins had lied to investigators repeatedly about their relationship.

Steve Hirjak, another former assistant chief, settled his own discrimination lawsuit for $650,000 in 2023.. KUOW reported last year that eight officers had sued over alleged discrimination at the department, including four lawsuits that directly named Diaz. Over the last two city budget cycles, the city’s budget has included a cumulative $21 million in extra funding to defend the city and pay out judgments and claims in lawsuits, owing to “extraordinary, high-cost cases and a naFonwide trend of increasingly expensive settlements and judgments,” according to the 2025-2026 budget.

Greening’s attorney, Toby Marshall, said he was “unable to comment” on the settlement.

Arts

Three Fun Things: A Prescient Book, Secret Salads, and an In-Depth Examination of Housing First

By Erica C. Barnett

1. Doppelgänger: A Trip Into the Mirror World, by Naomi Klein (2023)

Doppelgänger, the 2023 book by Canadian political theorist Naomi Klein, begins with an simple but vexing question: Why were so many people online mistaking her for Naomi Wolf? Despite their divergent political views (Klein is a left-wing social activist; Wolf has morphed from ‘90s feminist into 2020s right-wing conspiracy theorist), the two Naomis have much in common. They’re both Jewish women, born eight years apart, who became the public face of their respective movements on the strength of blockbuster books (The Beauty Myth and No Logo, respectively). But their paths diverged wildly in the COVID era, as Wolf wandered further and further into what Klein calls the “mirror world” of conspiracy theory and pseudoscience.

Klein begins Doppelgänger by interrogating why the author of a book criticizing consumer capitalism and the branding of daily life would be so distraught over the damage Wolf had inadvertently caused to her own personal “brand” She then expands her lens to consider the impact of political and identity confusion, particularly on the left, more broadly, exploring how mistrust in the medical establishment has morphed into blaming vaccines for autism, for instance, and how this movement has very old parallels—for example, in Hans Asperger’s transformation from an avatar of the Red Vienna movement into a doppelganger who advocated murdering autistic children in the name of “scientific” Nazi.

Somehow, Klein manages to thread humorous observations about Wolf’s trajectory into nearly every chapter, concluding with a section on her own Jewishness that quotes at length from Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock, a book that layers doppelgänger upon Doppelgänger. In the book, a Jewish American novelist named Philip Roth confronts an imposter, also named Philip Roth. The “real” Roth is conflicted about his own views on Zionism, while the “fake” Roth advocates for Jews to abandon Israel and move to Europe in anticipation of an Arab-led second Holocaust. In the end, “real” Roth ends up rejecting his double’s anti-Zionism for an undercover assignment to collect intelligence for the Mossad, and the book ends abruptly (and ambiguously). Maybe, Klein writes, “he didn’t want to choose: Maybe he was telling us he was both that and this.”

As for Wolf, she remains in the Mirror World; shortly before Klein’s book went to press, in 2022, Wolf was posting gleefully about buying her first gun, which she believed would give her the power to “resist and deter victimization.”

“Civil war is here, she darkly warns: ‘I am a peaceful person. I do not want war. But war is being waged up on us.’ And like so many others, she is getting ready with more than words.”

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2. The salad menu at the Dough Zone

The Dough Zone, a mostly West Coast chain with 15 locations in Washington State, is well known for its springy, sprightly dumplings, including potstickers, xiao long bao, and wontons. You probably know this. But what you may not be aware of is that its salads also slap. I was reminded of this recently when I ordered the kale salad, an enormous pile of lightly blanched kale laced with sesame dressing and topped with a shower of roasted peanuts. Other options include the same kale salad with sweet and spicy garlic dressing and Romaine lettuce mixed with either dressing. I think their salads may change time to time (I still fondly remember a punchy Caesar from a few years ago); after you’ve picked your dumpling, noodles, and pancakes from the lengthy (and affordable) menu, add a check mark to this underrated section of the menu.

3. “Two Years in a Place Where Homelessness Ends,” New York Times

The New York Times spent a long time getting to know the residents of a permanent supportive housing building in the Bronx, and learned firsthand about the benefits and downside of this type of housing, which offers very low-rent housing, with few or no behavioral or work requirements, to formerly homeless people. Permanent supportive housing is a pillar of Housing First, a response to homelessness that addresses the housing needs of people with addiction and mental illness as well as those who have ended up on the street because of financial misfortune. The approach has come under fire from right-wing pundits and the Trump administration, who argue that people should have to get sober, get jobs, and demonstrate they are cooperating with psychiatric treatment before they “qualify” for homes.

Apartments at the Lenninger Residences are reserved for people struggling with mental illness; they provide a permanent home, but this permanence can create a feeling of being “stuck,” several residents told the Times. Their stories are both hopeful and heartbreaking (one resident featured in the story died after failing to go to the hospital for treatment for her addiction and HIV) and put a human face on an issue that can feel both abstract and polarizing.