The city council, which has six new members, raced through this year’s budget process, wrapping things up about a week earlier than usual. The process was less transparent than any budget in recent memory, with last-minute amendments and few opportunities for the public to get a clear sense of what the council was doing, much less weigh in, before consequential votes.
On this week’s episode of the podcast, we talked about the county’s longest-serving executive, Dow Constantine, and his imprint on the county, including the light rail system, public health, ballot measures that have funded human services, shelters, and mental health care, and his big plans to redevelop Pioneer Square.
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Big-picture, the 2025-2026 city budget prioritizes police, funds unprecedented surveillance to enforce new laws designed to penalize sex work and drug use, and cuts dozens of jobs, including the people who work to reduce workplace discrimination and keep the city’s critical IT systems running.
Despite an ongoing structural deficit, the budget also includes more than $100 million in new spending, funded with the JumpStart spending tax, which the council permanently converted from a dedicated funding source for affordable housing, Green New Deal priorities, student mental health programs, and other spending categories into an all-purpose revenue source for the city’s general fund.
Mayor Bruce Harrell announced the departure of Office of Police Accountability director Gino Betts on Friday afternoon; Interim Police Chief Sue Rahr and OPA employees recently raised concerns that Betts had slow-walked major investigations on serious alleged misconduct while focusing on minor misconduct cases. Also, the council’s vote against Councilmember Cathy Moore’s proposed capital gains tax grew more lopsided at the full council meeting, a bad sign for its future passage. And Joy Hollingsworth dismissed Logan Bowers, her extremely online (and extremely opinionated) staffer, just before the budget vote.
1. Gino Betts, the director of the city’s Office of Police Accountability, will leave his position next month, after two and a half years on the job. According to the official account—released by Mayor Bruce Harrell’s Friday afternoon, shortly after I reported the news on Bluesky—Betts “announced his intention to resign effective December 13” and will be replaced on an interim basis by his deputy, Bonnie Glenn.
Behind the scenes, though, Betts was under heavy fire. Interim police chief Sue Rahr overturned several of his disciplinary decisions and expressed the view that he took too long to complete major investigations, including into former police chief Adrian Diaz, whom multiple women have accused him of sexual harassment, discrimination, and fostering a hostile work environment.
Diaz, appointed in September 2022, has remained on the city’s payroll since May, when Harrell announced he would be stepping down as chief. The Office of Inspector General (OIG), which is overseeing some of the investigations into the former chief, has reportedly sent one, involving allegations that Diaz used his security detail to run personal errands, to Harrell for review.
Harrell appointed Betts and Diaz in July and September 2022, respectively..
Some OPA staff complained that Betts spent too much time investigating relatively minor offenses while slow-walking major investigations like the ones into Diaz and Kevin Dave, the officer who struck and killed 23-year-old pedestrian Jaahnavi Kandula almost two years ago. PubliCola confirmed that the OPA finally wrapped up its investigation into Dave last week, but it will likely be weeks before the office recommends any formal discipline for Dave, who has remained employed by SPD since Kandula’s death in January 2023.
Rahr has expressed frustration about the city’s accountability system—telling the city council in July, for instance, that “because the OPA and some of the other other partners have so many investigations going, there’s a pretty significant time lag between when a complaint is made and when it’s resolved. … We have a lot of minor misconduct investigations that are going to OPA, and I have the perception that it’s clogging up the system to be really good. And I would like to see us figure out a way to better distinguish between those two things.
In July, a group of OPA employees delivered an anonymous complaint to several city council members, along with the OIG and Community Police Commission, saying Betts had “ignored and not investigated” complaints against Diaz, including allegations that he used his security detail for personal errands, retaliated against employees who spoke out against him, and discriminated against female employees. The letter, which PubliCola obtained from a source, also accused Betts of creating a “toxic work environment.”
Betts was the fifth director of OPA, which was previously called the Office of Professional Accountability.
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2. As we reported this week, the City Council voted 6-3 to reject a 2 percent tax on capital gains that mirrors the state capital gains tax, which statewide voters overwhelmingly upheld in the November election. Joy Hollingsworth, who voted for the new tax in the council’s budget committee (which includes all nine council members), switched her vote to “no,” dashing progressive hopes that capital gains would be an easy win just as soon as progressive Alexis Mercedes Rinck joins the council.
As I said on this week’s “Hacks and Wonks” podcast, recorded on Thursday before the vote, Rinck will be an advocate for the tax—in stark contrast to the appointed council member she defeated, Tanya Woo, whose husband is the lead trader at an investment firm. But as I also noted, Hollingsworth’s (and Dan Strauss’s) support for the tax was squishy—it’s much easier to take a controversial position when you know a bill won’t pass then cast the deciding vote in its favor.
However, I said I considered it politically risky to switch a vote on something as consequential as a capital gains tax: Council members have to consider their decision carefully and give a solid reason for doing so. Otherwise, they risk looking flaky—look at former council member Andrew Lewis, who voted against arresting people who use drugs in public before voting for it, and ended up losing to his more conservative challenger Bob Kettle anyway.
Apparently, I was wrong on this point—Hollingsworth didn’t give a substantive reason for her vote, instead offering the explanation that the budget committee (that is, the whole council) ended up with a “do not pass” recommendation, with four of nine council members supporting it. If Hollingsworth remains a no on the tax, it’s unlikely to pass.
3. Prior to Thursday’s vote, Hollingsworth dismissed her legislative director, Logan Bowers. (Unlike previous councils, where each legislative assistant typically staffed a different policy area, most of the current council members have slotted their staffers into a hierarchical structure where a “chief of staff” oversees a couple of “directors.”)
Reportedly, Bowers—an extremely online former software engineer who likes to spar with progressives on social media—had a habit of inserting himself between Hollingsworth and other council members in a way that made it unclear whether he was representing Hollingsworth’s views or his own. It’s unclear what incident, if any, prompted his sudden dismissal on Wednesday. Neither Bowers nor Hollingsworth responded to requests for comment.
Bowers, who owns several weed stores with his wife, tried to challenge Kshama Sawant in District 3, the seat Hollingsworth now holds in 2019. He lost in the primary.
The Seattle City Council approved a 2025-2026 city budget this afternoon that makes sweeping structural changes to the JumpStart payroll tax, originally earmarked for a list of progressive spending priorities, instead of imposing the “fiscal responsibility” and financial discipline that its six new members promised in their campaigns.
The budget addresses a long-anticipated structural gap not just by repurposing more than $300 million in JumpStart revenues this year, but by eliminating the spending plan for the tax, allowing it to serve as an all-purpose money spigot in perpetuity—or at least until 2040, when the tax sunsets and a future council will have to take it up again.
As we’ve written, there are significant risks in turning JumpStart into a primary funding source for the general fund, which includes everything from police to human services to parks. Revenues from the tax have been coming in much higher than the city originally estimated, but they could decline dramatically based on the actions of any of the small number of companies—principally Amazon—that that pay most of the tax.
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That hasn’t happened in JumpStart’s first few years, but it’s a bad bet to put the fate of basic city services in the hands of a few large companies whose business decisions could tank the budget overnight; it also puts the city in a poor bargaining position if those companies threaten to move or pull jobs of Seattle unless the city gives them some concession, like a zoning change or support for a favored transportation project.
After the budget vote, the council declined to pass a capital gains tax proposed by Councilmember Cathy Moore, which would have funded rental assistance, food for hungry Seattle residents, and homeownership programs. Councilmember Maritza Rivera said the city still lacks enough “data” to know whether renters need financial help, while Councilmember Rob Saka called the proposal the “right tax” at the “wrong time.”
The tax, which would have applied to profits on non-real estate investments above $262,000, has a similar volatility problem to JumPStart—at the state level, collections dropped more than 57 percent between 2023 and 2024—but the city could reduce the impact of potential violent swings by reserving most of the revenues for one-time needs or programs that don’t need the same funding from year to year. They’re unlikely to impose that kind of discipline on themselves, but they could. And the capital gains tax would bring in a fraction of JumpStart collections—between about $16 million and $51 million a year, according to city budget staff.
The underlying budget (to which council members added their own flourishes, including an amendment that sets aside $2 million to remove a curb-height barrier that prevents left turns into the preschool Councilmember Rob Saka’s kids attended, which he’s been complaining about since 2021) includes new investments in surveillance cameras in so-called crime hot spots, including a 60-block stretch on and around Aurora Ave. N, along with additional cops to monitor those cameras in real time.
It also expands the city’s encampment removal team; funds police positions that SPD acknowledges will not be filled this year (SPD routinely uses this money to fund new initiatives outside the annual budget process); adds $2 million for a “receiving center” for people trying to leave the sex trade on Aurora; expands the CARE team, a group of social workers who respond alongside police to some non-emergency 911 calls; saves the Seattle Channel; and lavishes money on Harrell’s “Downtown Activation Plan,” a downtown revitalization and beautification effort, while making no significant new investments in similar efforts outside the center city.
The budget also includes significant cuts—laying off many of the internal IT staff who help keep core city functions going; eliminating workforce equity and training programs designed to prevent workplace discrimination and recruit and retain workers from diverse backgrounds; cutting back on parks maintenance and slashing the city’s environmental programming in parks by 50 percent; slashing the size of the city’s permitting and inspections department; and cutting services to tenants at risk of eviction, including legal assistance, which will now be available only to people making around $30,000 a year, more than $10,000 less than a full-time minimum wage job.
During Thursday’s meeting, the council spent more than an hour giving speeches that mostly consisted of thanking staff and each other and praising themselves for their hard work on what Councilmember Maritza Rivera called “the people’s budget”—a remark that prompted muffled laughs from some of the advocates holding “Budgets are a moral document!” signs in the room.
Only progressive Councilmember Tammy Morales—the only council member whose top priorities got yanked out of the consent package and rejected by her colleagues—offered any criticism of the budget, which she noted will save a mere $8 million (0.1 percent of the $8 billion budget) by laying off about 80 people. Then she voted against the budget, the first time she has done so in her five years in office.
Her voice breaking, Morales said, “Thebottomlineisthatthiscouncilturnedablindeyeinadeafeartothe thousandsofconstituentswhocamehereforatleast10hoursofpubliccommentandhavebeenemailingandcallingustomaintaintheJumpStartspentplantorestoretheOversightCommitteetofullyfundtenantservicesandtoprotectourcityworkers.” Advocates in the room stood up and gave “jazz hands”—Strauss’ preferred alternative to applause—and quietly whispered “thank you” before the vote.
On this week’s episode of Seattle Nice, we spend some time talking about outgoing King County Executive Dow Constantine’s legacy as the man who has held that position longer than anyone in modern history.
Although the county doesn’t get nearly as much coverage (and thus attention) as the city of Seattle, it has equal or more power and authority over a lot of policies and issues people care about, including the fentanyl overdose crisis, solutions to homelessness, mental health care, incarceration, and transit. Seattle controls the streets, but the county controls the buses; Seattle passes local laws and arrests people, but King County oversees the jails.
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In his 15 years as executive, Constantine has watched five elected Seattle mayors come and go (six if you count Greg Nickels, who served during Constantine’s time on the King County Council). He oversaw the expansion of the county’s Veterans Levy to include human services and programs for seniors; was instrumental in passing a sales tax for, and implementing, the Health Through Housing shelter program; and he oversaw the Public Health Department’s response to the COVID pandemic. He served as chair of the Sound Transit board during the campaign and successful passage of the $54 billion Sound Transit 3 ballot measure, proposed the Best Starts for Kids levy, and championed the recently passed Crisis Care Centers levy, which will fund five walk-in clinics for people experiencing mental health crises.
We talked about Constantine’s legacy—including his seeming flip-flops on jail closure and his big plans for South Downtown and Pioneer Square (oh yeah, he also proposed eliminating the planned Chinatown/International district light rail station, a move that furthers his proposal)—before turning to other subjects, including Cathy Moore’s proposed capital gains tax (more on that in our next episode) and efforts by new city council members to tell King County how to operate its sobering center and buses.
“Shooters shoot, players play, and leaders lead”: Rob Saka makes his case for shutting down the South Lake Union streetcar.
The council approved budget adds from the centrist majority—including $1.5 million to turf a field where Rob Saka coaches Little League, directly outside to his kids’ elementary school—while rejecting much smaller proposals from Tammy Morales for a tenant work group and workplace equity.
By Erica C. Barnett
[UPDATE: After this post went up, council budget committee chair Dan Strauss added a final public comment period to the agenda for tomorrow’s budget committee meeting at 9:30 am, which will be the last opportunity to give feedback on the budget before council members vote this week, first as the budget committee on Tuesday, then as the full council on Thursday.]
The Seattle city council, which now includes five people with little or no direct experience in city government, spent the past week in a mad rush to finalize a 2025-2026 budget for the city, in a process that was among the least transparent and most chaotic in recent history.
Ordinarily, the council takes up the mayor’s budget by proposing amendments, getting cosponsors, and discussing each substantive amendment in public before passing or rejecting it, giving members of the public adequate (if not ample) time to see each proposal and give feedback. This year, parts of that standard framework appeared to be holding on by a thread.
At several points, council members proposed making significant changes to the budget on the fly, distributing hot-off-the-printer amendments that had never been distributed publicly (and are still not available online). At others, council members’ amendments met technical deadlines but weren’t up the city’s website (and still aren’t), so that anyone wanting to know what the council was discussing had to be in chambers, in person, to get a copy.
For more than a week, an online document that shows how much money goes into each spending category consisted of 50 blank pages—an oversight that wasn’t fixed until late Thursday or early Friday, long after the last opportunity for public comment on the budget.
Frequently, council members seemed unfamiliar with the basic concepts underlying the amendments they were voting on. Tanya Woo, for instance, said she opposed a proposal from the council’s lone progressive, Tammy Morales, for the city to do a Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) on anti-displacement measures for at-risk homeowners as part of the city’s comprehensive plan—a common practice during citywide zoning changes.
Woo said she opposed Morales’ proposal because an EIS is “environment impact study that will help look at the environment as it is, as well as how we do we look at zoning. … It will help inform, but not do what we think it’s going to do, based on what I’ve been hearing recently.” She understood what an EIS is, she continued, but asked a staffer, “can you tell us what the EIS does and is?”
An EIS, in reality, looks at many different impacts of zoning changes; the scope of the comprehensive plan EIS includes residential and commercial displacement, housing costs, and tree impacts, along with standard “environmental” factors.
Woo will leave the council on November 26, when Alexis Mercedes Rinck, who defeated her in November, takes over the citywide council position to which the council appointed Woo in January after she lost to Morales in District 2. If the general sense of confusion among the new council members was confined to her, it might be less notable. But the new councilmembers repeatedly expressed their “confusion” or desire to have staff produce new reports informing then about items that have already been studied—for example, why Seattle residents sometimes can’t afford to pay their rent.
During a discussion of Cathy Moore’s capital gains tax proposal, which would pay for rent and food assistance, for example, Councilmember Maritza Rivera said, “I have not seen any data points to suggest the need” for either priority, adding that “we don’t know the level of those needs until we get these data points and information from departments.” In fact, Moore noted, the city does know that about 90,000 people in Seattle are rent-burdened, along with the length of current wait lists for rent assistance in Seattle and many other data points that are mentioned in the capital gains tax legislation itself.
Also unconvinced that rent assistance should be a priority, Woo—whose family owns the Louisa Hotel apartment building—suggested “possibly having social workers inside buildings or resident advisors inside these buildings to help people get to the root cause” of why they can’t pay their bills. Moore, defending her proposal, said she agreed that it was important to get to root causes, but noted that “one of the root causes is that people’s income is not keeping up with the cost of living.”
This is exasperating stuff—especially, I have to imagine, to the council staffers who have spent most of the last year trying to explain how the city works to council members who frequently demonstrate more confidence than curiosity. But it also has a direct impact on the city, because the budget isn’t just a “moral document,” as elected officials like to say—it’s also, and primarily a document that dictates how the city spends its residents’ tax dollars, and it’s important for the city council to understand what’s in it and why.
Dan Strauss, the budget chair, shares some of the blame for this year’s truncated, confusing budget cycle. By shortening the budget timeline (ordinarily, the budget wraps up the week of Thanksgiving) for a brand-new council unfamiliar with the process, Strauss left little room for discussion or error, and made it even more difficult for the public to understand what the council was doing, at a time when the council’s communications department eliminated a critical transparency tool.
Strauss also failed to maintain discipline among council members who wanted to put last-minute amendments forward, resorting to public admonishments that had no practical effect because in most cases, council members who broke Strauss’ budget rules had a majority of the council behind them.
And as much as the centrist council majority has portrayed this as a new era of good feelings and civility, they made plenty of exceptions when faced with progressive opposition to their priorities. Councilmember Bob Kettle, for example, went “over the edge” at Morales, as he put it, after she proposed taking $500,000 away from a CCTV surveillance to pay for tenant services on Friday, seething, “It is unconscionable that you created a situation and now you want to take out the fix for that situation!” (It was not the first time Kettle lost his temper during the budget process.) Kettle’s outburst came after Moore added $400,000 over the biennium to the surveillance program, bringing the two-year cost to more than $6.5 million.
I’ve been covering city budgets for a long time, and this year’s budget was almost uniquely hard to follow; had I known everything was going to fly by so fast, and be documented so inadequately, I would have reverted to the old-school practice of marking up the hundreds of budget amendments by hand as they passed or failed, along with vote counts. As of today, there’s still no online record of the votes on Friday; I know staff is taxed by the last-minute changes and shortened timeline, but the public deserves to know how their representatives voted on important budget priorities without watching an all-day meeting, and certainly sooner than the day before the final vote.
If you follow me on Bluesky, you saw my almost-live posts about this week’s discussions, which give a detailed account of what was happening in the room as the council voted on hundreds of amendments. Here, I’m going to focus on the big picture—revenue and spending—before telling you about a few important, telling, or otherwise noteworthy small-picture items that emerged in the past few days.
If you want an overview of what’s in Mayor Bruce Harrell’s budget proposal, from what it will fund to how it’s funded, I did that here, here, and here; if you want a look at the council’s initial proposed changes, you can read that here; and if you want to read more followup coverage, that’s here, here, here, here, and here. I won’t be revisiting everything I’ve covered before (although I can’t resist just one more look at Rob Saka’s amendment committing up to $2 million to take out a traffic safety barrier that prevents illegal left turns at the preschool his kids attended), so please go back and read my previous coverage to catch up before the final votes this week.
JumpStart Up for Grabs, Capital Gains On the Defensive
As I’ve reported, this year’s budget will address a long-anticipated structural deficit by eliminating the city’s legal commitment to use the JumpStart payroll tax to fund housing, equitable development, and student mental health; it will also eliminate a committee—established as part of the 2019 JumpStart legislation but never convened—that was supposed to provide oversight and transparency into how the tax is being used.
The council has known for years that they would face a large, structural budget deficit starting this year, thanks largely to decisions made during COVID to use temporary federal dollars to pay for programs that ended up being ongoing. When the city started looking at solutions, centrist councilmember (now Council President) Sara Nelson said it was important to “live within our means“—a sentiment most of the new councilmembers echoed on the campaign trail. Now that the budget deficit is here, however, the council is retconning a different story: One where no one could have seen this coming.
Strauss, the budget chair, ascribed the need to turn JumpStart into a permanent all-purpose funding source to an economic downturn that went on longer than anticipated. “I really wish that we had been correct that in 2025 we would be past the downstream economic issues,” Strauss said, but “we aren’t out of the woods,” so the JumpStart spending commitments have to go.
Both Moore and Morales urged caution about that strategy, proposing amendments that would require at least some JumpStart revenues to go to at least some of its initial spending categories. Morales’ would set aside 70 percent of revenues for the original spending plan, and Moore would put 55 percent of the reserves toward housing programs. The council will vote on both of those proposals tomorrow, along with the rest of the budget.
Moore also, as we reported last week, proposed a capital gains tax of 2 percent on investment income above $267,000 a year, to pay for rental assistance, food assistance, and homeownership programs. In an interview, she said she proposed the tax—despite running as one of those “fiscal conservatives”—because “we need a lot more money for rental assistance, we need to be supporting more homeownership opportunities for people who are low-income and moderate income… and we are looking at a food crisis, a silent crisis. Those are all areas where, while there is funding in the budget, there is insufficient funding.”
Most of her council colleagues appeared to disagree, and the tax looks unlikely to pass. In addition to Rivera’s call for more “data” to demonstrate the need for rent and food assistance, Saka—a cosponsor of the legislation—said he didn’t want to raise taxes until the city has addressed the public’s sense that “they are not getting a return on investment” in general.
“Some in our city would argue that we have a revenue problem. Others would say, ‘No, no, we actually have a spending problem.’ And I happen to find elements of both of those arguments compelling, and I personally feel I was elected to specifically reject the false choice narrative and framing and clap back against the either/or, divisive kind of rhetoric and champion what Mayor Harrell calls the politics of A. N. D.,” Saka said.
Saka added that “as someone who strongly supports infrastructure, getting hammers in hands, shovels in grounds,” he couldn’t support any kind of new revenue unless it included funding for “generic infrastructure.”
Rob Saka had a lot to say this week about the free legal work he did for a preschool his kids attended. His top budget priority this year was removing a traffic safety barrier that prevents drivers from turning left across a bus lane, bike lane, and sidewalk into the preschool parking lot.
Budget debates, Trump-era worries, speeding cops, and more.
By Erica C. Barnett
I was busy watching (and live-posting about) the City Council’s budget committee meetings this week, so posting on the site was a little light on Thursday and Friday (more on that at the bottom of this post). Beyond the budget, this week’s posts included a piece by Josh about what’s worrying him this week, news about SPD’s internal policy on speeding, a post about (yet another) anti-trans group renting space from the Seattle Public Library, and more.
Big-picture, the biggest proposed changes in the city’s 2025-2026 budget are an amendment from budget chair Dan Strauss to end the city’s short-lived commitment to spend the proceeds from the JumpStart payroll tax on a list of specific categories, including housing and youth mental health, and an effort by Cathy Moore to pass a 2 percent tax on capital gains that would impact fewer than 1,000 people in the city. The council is currently poised to gut JumpStart and reject capital gains.
Josh Feit writes about what’s worrying him about Trump’s victory, including a resurgence of abusive social behavior, harsh crackdowns in the very cities that progressives wrongly consider “blue islands”; and a widespread posture of resigned acquiescence among liberals and leftists who are exhausted and confounded by Trump’s victory
A micro-example of the new City Council’s approach to the budget (in general: blustering confidence about policy prescriptions combined with righteous indignation at any suggestion that they don’t know everything already) is Maritza Rivera’s proposal to spend city resources researching whether King County’s sobering center could be a locked facility for people arrested under the city’s new anti-drug laws. As I reported, Rivera never reached out to the county, and they have no interest in changing the purpose of a facility that’s been around for decades.
Almost two years after officer Kevin Dave struck and killed 23-year-old student Jaahnavi Kandula in a crosswalk while driving 74 miles an hour, SPD has updated its policy on speeding to include more detailed, but still imperfect, guidelines about when emergency driving is allowed.
Burien City Manager Adolfo Bailon filed a formal complaint against a local public commenter for advocating for a higher minimum wage in the city, accusing her of breaking a law that bars public officials from electioneering. And the Seattle Public Library is once again renting its facilities to an anti-trans group, saying it can’t refuse to rent to any person or organization unless they explicitly threaten violence.
As I mentioned, I’ve been updating readers about the city’s budget discussions on Bluesky, so if you aren’t following me there, you’re missing out on a lot of fascinating real-time updates and analysis that provide insight into how the council, and especially the five brand-new members, is navigating the complex budget process and each other this year. Follow me, PubliCola, and the podcast I do with Sandeep Kaushik and David Hyde, Seattle Nice.
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Diaz, appointed in September 2022, has remained on the city’s payroll since May, when Harrell announced he would be stepping down as chief. The Office of Inspector General (OIG), which is overseeing some of the investigations into the former chief, has reportedly sent one, involving allegations that Diaz used his security detail to run personal errands, to Harrell for review.
