Tag: city budget 2023

City Council, homelessness, housing, Mayor Harrell

Harrell Budget Would Permanently Expand Encampment Cleanup and Removal Team
Deputy Mayor Tiffany Washington and Mayor Bruce Harrell

By Erica C. Barnett

Previewing a budget proposal the council will discuss Friday morning, Mayor Bruce Harrell said on Thursday that unless the city council renews and expands funding for encampment removal and response, the “significant decrease in tents in parks and on sidewalks” since he took office might go away.

“If that funding is not renewed … this level of service that we’re demonstrating will lapse. The progress we’re making in the city, building our ‘One Seattle,’ will lapse,” Harrell said.

Harrell has proposed spending just over $38 million on the Unified Care Team and the Clean City Initiative, two initiatives that encompass a wide variety of spending and staff across several city departments, including Parks, the Seattle Department of Transportation, and Seattle Public Utilities. The two programs include all of the city’s spending related to encampment removals, outreach, and trash pickup, including the city’s “purple bag” encampment trash abatement program.

A majority of that money, about $23 million, would continue existing programs. The rest would be new funding—$10 million to replace temporary federal dollars added during COVID, and $5 million in brand-new programming. 

According to council presentation, the new funding “could significantly increase the Unified Care Team’s capacity to conduct encampment removals” across the city.

Overall, Harrell’s budget would 61 new permanent positions to the city’s encampment removal, outreach, and cleanup efforts. Among other new positions, the money would pay for two new customer service representatives to respond to encampment complaints, six new “system navigators” to do outreach and make offers of shelter in advance of encampment removals, and 48 new permanent positions in SDOT and the parks department to coordinate and conduct encampment removals.

In addition to making a number of positions funded with one-time federal emergency dollars permanent, Harrell has proposed changing the way UCT staff are deployed. Instead of working as a citywide team, staffers would be assigned to one of six geographic areas, a change Harrell said would enable encampment response workers to become more familiar with the communities and organizations where they work.

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Deputy Mayor Tiffany Washington said that since Harrell took office, the city has eliminated a backlog of “1,500 complaints related to unauthorized encampments” and continues to develop more tools to respond to and resolve encampment complaints.

“What that means,” Washington said, “is that… we send someone from the Unified Care Team to do an inspection and then we resolve the issue if we can. ‘Resolve’ could be RV remediation. It could be hauling away a burnt RV that had been sitting there for weeks. It could mean making a referral to shelter and then resolving the site. And so when we say we cleared [a request], it means that for all of those [1,500] requests, someone went to the site to do an inspection, put the data in the database, and then we either addressed it, or it self-resolved.”

Harrell’s proposal would also eliminate funding for street sinks that would have provided unsheltered people places to wash their hands, and would reduce spending on public “hygiene stations” (temporary restrooms) and mobile shower trailers for people experiencing homelessness, saving a total of $1.3 million.

The request for millions in additional funding for encampment cleanups comes at a time when the city is trying to close a $141 million shortfall that is projected to grow larger every year until at least 2025. According to an issue-identification presentation prepared for the city council’s budget committee, which will discuss Harrell’s proposal tomorrow morning, the new funding “could significantly increase [the UCT’s] capacity to conduct encampment removals” across the city.  A memo accompanying that presentation adds that, legally speaking, there’s no guarantee that the new funding won’t be used to “accelerate encampment removals.”

Harrell’s proposal would also eliminate funding for street sinks that would have provided unsheltered people places to wash their hands, and would reduce spending on public “hygiene stations” (temporary restrooms) and mobile shower trailers for people experiencing homelessness, saving a total of $1.3 million.

Harrell’s predecessor, Jenny Durkan, repeatedly refused to fund or implement the street-sink program, which could have helped prevent repeated outbreaks of diseases like shigella and hepatitis A among Seattle’s homeless population.

“We have to simultaneously improve service response to rapidly house people living in shelter, and coordinate strategies to ensure public spaces are open, safe, and can be used for their intended purpose,” Washington said. As we’ve reported, there are far more people living unsheltered in Seattle than there are available shelter beds, which means it is not even theoretically possible to shelter everyone who is living outdoors.

On Wednesday in downtown Seattle, officials formally announced an effort we reported on last month to create a unified “command center” to connect people living unsheltered downtown to housing and shelter.

On a practical level, what this means is that when the city sweeps an encampment, most of the people living there do not end up in shelter, but simply “self-resolve” by moving to another location. Outreach workers, including those employed by the city, may have only one or two shelter beds to offer to the people who remain on site, which may or may not be appropriate for the people who happen to remain in that encampment. Even when people do “accept” an offer of shelter, half or more don’t end up enrolling for even one night, a damning indictment of the shelter referral system the city uses in the overwhelming majority of encampment “resolutions.”

During his presentation Thursday, Harrell name-checked the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, which will receive around $90 million from the city next year—a $10 million bump. On Wednesday, Harrell, KCRHA director Marc Dones, and representatives from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development and King County Executive Dow Constantine’s office officially announced an effort we reported on last month to create a unified “command center” to connect people living unsheltered downtown to housing and shelter.

The center—technically a conference room at the city’s Emergency Operations Center downtown—is part of a public-private effort to reduce the number of unsheltered people downtown to “functional zero” by next year. The goal, KCRHA and HUD officials said, is to break down the “silos” that keep various parts of the homelessness system from working well with each other; for example, cities often require people to go through the shelter system before they “graduate” to housing, an extra step that can act as a barrier for people stuck in the homelessness system.

So far, according to data KCRHA provided this week, the agency’s outreach staff have connected with 665 people living unsheltered downtown and identified about 300 units of existing housing for them; the goal, Dones said Wednesday, is to offer people at least three housing options to choose from, instead of the typical one, and to reduce the barriers to housing faced by people who are homeless or poor.

“What we have built into our housing system for folks experiencing homelessness is this incredibly aggressive set of mechanisms that are all based on the idea that people who are poor are out to commit fraud at every turn,” Dones said. “This morning, we were talking about,  how do we not need any of the things [like ID cards and income checks] that we’re used to needing? And if we just had this piece of paper, with someone’s housing preferences on it, how can we have them housed in 12 hours?”

That concept, however, remains speculative; so far, the effort has not moved anyone into housing, and there is no funding for additional housing or shelter attached to the project.

City Council, housing, human services, Mayor Harrell

Council Digs In on Harrell’s “IOU” Budget
Source: City Council central staff budget presentation

By Erica C. Barnett

The city council started breaking down Mayor Bruce Harrell’s budget in earnest on Tuesday, zeroing in on the mayor’s high-level plans to balance the budget by using revenues the city previously allocated to other purposes, including the JumpStart payroll tax, to help resolve a $141 million budget gap that is expected to grow every year through at least 2026.

Overall, the mayor’s budget would add about $32 million in net ongoing new expenditures (total expenditures minus cuts) next year, and about $52 million in 2024. Over two years, those proposed new expenditures include $8.8 million to make the Seattle Community Safety Initiative, a youth gun violence prevention program run by the nonprofit Community Passageways, permanent;  $3 million for the Regional Peacekeepers Collective, another program run by Community Passageways; $1.2 million a year to keep the Public Defender Association’s Co-LEAD shelter program going; $11 million over two years for police hiring bonuses at SPD; and at least $13 million to expand the city’s Unified Care Team, which does outreach and encampment removals, and the Clean Cities Initiative, which clears trash and removes graffiti from buildings.

Every year, the mayor proposes a budget and the council amends and approves it. The process can be highly contentious, especially in lean years. Starting in 2021, the city has used the new JumpStart payroll tax—a payroll tax on the city’s largest employers—to fill revenue shortfalls caused by the COVID pandemic and the resulting economic downturn. Harrell’s budget would continue to use the JumpStart tax to fill the ongoing budget gap, using $86 million in JumpStart revenues to backfill the general fund in 2021, and $84 million in 2024.

Last year, anticipating that future mayors would continue trying to use JumpStart revenues for non-JumpStart purposes, the council passed a law codifying the existing, but never fully realized, JumpStart spending plan. The ordinance restricts JumpStart spending to four specific categories: Housing (primarily affordable rental housing for people making less than 30 percent of median income); local businesses and economic recovery; equitable development projects that increase opportunity and prevent displacement; and investments that support the city’s adopted Green New Deal priorities.

On Tuesday, Harrell and Mosqueda announced the beginning of a process that could lead to new progressive taxes or fees to pay for some of the programs his current budget relies on JumpStart to fund. The new Revenue Stabilization Work Group includes representatives from business, labor, and nonprofits, including the progressive Washington Budget and Policy Center and the Transit Riders Union.

The new law does allow the city to use the tax for other purposes in one circumstance: If general fund revenues fall below about $1.5 billion, the city can siphon off JumpStart funds equal to the gap between actual revenues and $1.5 billion. If general fund revenues were $1.4 billion, for example, the mayor and council could take up to $100 million from the JumpStart fund to address the shortfall.

Harrell’s budget would require the council to amend this newly adopted law so that the general fund “floor” would rise every year according to the rate of inflation (currently 7.6 percent), which would also increase the differential between revenue projections and the new floor. The change would set up JumpStart to permanently solve a structural budget gap that exists because general-fund revenues aren’t rising nearly as fast as inflation, including property taxes, which by law can only increase 1 percent a year.

As a memo from the council’s budget staff puts it, “the proposed policy change … could result in permanently backfilling revenue losses that are due to noninflationary factors in other funds. Put another way, the JumpStart Fund transfer would be permanently solving stability issues inherent with the existing [general fund] financing structure.”

The change would enable the city to rely on the JumpStart tax to provide a huge, permanent cushion for the overall budget by diverting more and more of the tax from its original purpose. Next year, for example, the general fund actually is close to $1.5 billion, the current floor, meaning that under current law, the city can’t use JumpStart revenues to pay for anything above that amount. If the council adopts Harrell’s proposal, the change would allow the mayor to remove $105 million from the JumpStart fund in 2023, $176 million in 2024, and $189 million in 2025.

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Council budget Teresa Mosqueda said she was disappointed that Harrell proposed permanently changing the law governing how the payroll tax can be used, since the council agreed in principle back in August that the city could use JumpStart revenues in excess of previous projections, as long as those funds went to prevent budget cuts and “austerity.” At the time, those excess revenues amounted to $84 million in 2023 and $71 million in 2024—not much less than the amounts Harrell has proposed allocating.

“I think making these changes in perpetuity is very problematic to the sustainability of JumpStart and… concerning for this for the budget overall,” Mosqueda said. “To rely more and more on JumpStart creates greater instability for our overall budget going forward.”

Harrell’s proposal would also repurpose revenues from two other sources: The short-term rental tax on Airbnbs, which is earmarked for the Equitable Development Initiative (EDI); and state taxes on car services like Uber and Lyft, a fairly small revenue source that’s supposed to go to affordable housing.

District 2 (southeast Seattle) Councilmember Tammy Morales, who heads the committee that oversees EDI, said the program “is not just about affordable housing. It’s not just about senior housing. It really is about intentionally building space or the essential services that any healthy neighborhood needs and [providing] the opportunity to do it in a culturally appropriate way.” Although the Office of Housing funds housing projects, Morales continued, they often don’t pay for ground-floor services, like health clinics and day care centers, which is one reaseon the city started the Equitable Development Initiative in the first place.

“In asking departments to really tighten their belts, to look at where we can save money, we came up with the increase [for human service workers] of 4 percent, which would create anywhere between, I believe, $7 million to 12 million or so in savings, which allows us to do other things to help the same communities that they serve. And so we think that what we propose is consistent with the values that we set forth.”—Mayor Bruce Harrell

Harrell’s budget also includes an assumption that the city will spend $10 million less than what’s in the budget for the next two years, without identifying where those future savings will come from—a policy a council staffer referred to as an “IOU to come in under budget.” In 2022, the mayor achieved about $20 million in savings by placing “holds” on dozens of items the council added to its 2022 budget last year, including a new pre-filing diversion program for people over 25; money for a new health clinic for Asian Pacific Islander seniors; funding for the Mobile Crisis Team; and the expansion of an Office of Housing program that provides case management and housing stabilization to people who are homeless or at risk of homelessness.

Mosqueda also flagged her disapproval of Harrell’s proposal to limit mandatory increases in human service providers’ wages at 4 percent a year—about half what they would receive under legislation the council, then led by Harrell, passed unanimously in 2019. As we reported, Harrell even added an amendment to the 2019 bill clarifying that it was important to provide inflationary wage increases during times of economic hardship, not just prosperity.

When PubliCola asked Harrell about this apparent about-face, the mayor said he saw no contradiction between his position three years ago and his proposal to effectively overturn that legislation now.

“What I said in 2019 [was], we have to recognize that social workers and mental health counselors and those providing some of these essential services are underpaid… through good times and bad times,” Harrell said. “In asking departments to really tighten their belts, to look at where we can save money, we came up with the increase of 4 percent, which would create anywhere between, I believe, $7 million to 12 million or so in savings, which allows us to do other things to help the same communities that they serve. And so we think that what we propose is consistent with the values that we set forth.”

On Tuesday, Harrell and Mosqueda announced the beginning of a process that could lead to new progressive taxes or fees to pay for some of the programs his current budget relies on JumpStart to fund. The new Revenue Stabilization Work Group includes representatives from business, labor, and nonprofits, including the progressive Washington Budget and Policy Center and the Transit Riders Union.

City Council, homelessness, housing, human services, Mayor Harrell, Police

Early Council Budget Concerns Include Plans to Raid JumpStart Tax, Cut Pay for Human Service Providers


Chart showing growing gap between city of Seattle revenues and planned expenditures through 2026By Erica C. Barnett

In a preview of the next several weeks of budget deliberations, the city council’s budget committee (which includes all nine council members) discussed their initial questions and concerns about Mayor Bruce Harrell’s proposed budget this week.

The budget would require the city council to overturn a 2019 law Harrell himself supported when he was on the council. That law requires the city to increase human service provider contracts by the rate of inflation, with the intent of providing raises to service providers that at least keep up with inflation; during the meeting when the council unanimously approved the law, Harrell said it was important to provide raises to human service providers “in both periods of economic growth and in periods of economic hardship,” and sponsored an amendment codifying this intent.

The contracts that would be impacted include all the homeless contracts the city funds but that are now administered by the King County Homelessness Authority. Harrell’s proposal would amend this law to cap mandatory pay increases at 4 percent a year, or about half the current rate of inflation, meaning that as long as inflation is higher than 4 percent, human services workers would see declines in real wages year after year. Harrell’s budget cites economic hardship as the reason he is proposing the cut.

Three years ago, Harrell took the exact opposite position. In 2019, as council chair, he proposed and passed an amendment emphasizing not only that the money needed to go directly to “underpaid” workers but that the city intended to provide full inflationary increases “in both periods of economic growth and in periods of economic hardship.”

Harrell’s proposed $10 million budget increase for the KCRHA would be earmarked mostly for shelters and tiny house villages, rather than the items the homelessness agency proposed funding in its request for $90 million in additional city and county funding; that unfilled request would have funded a 13 percent wage increase for homeless service providers.

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“In the entire spectrum of building this budget, this decision was particularly difficult,” city budget director Julie Dingley told the committee. “We know that human service provider workers do some of the most difficult and meaningful work in the city and that employers do not necessarily enjoy the funding needed, but unfortunately, during forty-year high inflation, the ongoing liability that the current law would require, does not match our ongoing general fund resources.”

Three years ago, Harrell took the exact opposite position. In 2019, as council chair, he proposed and passed an amendment emphasizing not only that the money needed to go directly to “underpaid” workers but that the city intended to provide full inflationary increases “in both periods of economic growth and in periods of economic hardship.”

Introducing his amendment at a full council meeting that year, Harrell said, “Some of us have been around where we’ve had real tough times, [during] a recession. While we’ve had to make tough cuts, the work [human services providers] do is so critically important that we recognize we have to preserve if not even enhance the funding” during economic downturns.

On Wednesday, Councilmember Lisa Herbold, echoing comments by budget chair Teresa Mosqueda, said she was “disappointed” that the mayor’s budget would permanently cap increases for human service providers regardless of the actual inflation rate. ”

“We heard from folks this morning, nonprofit leaders, who have already passed budgets that provide a modest but essential wage increase for staff on the strength of their trust that the city was going to to follow the law and fully fund the required increase,” Herbold said. “Our intent is to advance nonprofit worker wages, not force them further behind, which I feel that this proposal does.” 

Listen to this week’s Seattle Nice podcast, where Sandeep and Erica find rare common ground in condemning pay cuts for human service providers 

As of earlier this year, the KCRHA reported that the five largest homeless service providers had more than 300 vacancies for jobs that average between $20 and $25 an hour, or between $41,000 and $52,000 a year. Increasing all human services contracts (which include more than just homeless providers) by 7.6 percent, as existing law requires, would cost about $6.5 million. As a point of contrast, Harrell’s budget includes more than $4 million for police recruitment and retention strategies, an effort to increase the number of Seattle Police Department officers that includes hiring bonuses of up to $30,000, on top of an $83,000 starting salary that rapidly increases to six figures, plus overtime, according to SPD’s recruitment page.

Bar graph contrasting low human service provider wages with the Seattle median
Image via King County Regional Homelessness Authority

Harrell’s budget proposes a second change to law that takes the opposite approach to high inflation as his proposal to cap human service contract increases below inflationary levels. This change would allow the city to use the JumpStart payroll tax fund, which is earmarked for housing, Green New Deal programs, equitable development, and small businesses, to provide about $86 million toward filling the $140 million budget gap.

Last year, the council passed a law setting a clear limit on the use of JumpStart funds to backfill general fund shortfalls: If the general fund falls below $1.5 billion, the city can use JumpStart money for other purposes. Harrell’s budget would change that law to pin the general fund baseline to inflation, setting the floor for JumpStart transfers at a variable rate based on the current rate of inflation and allowing the city to use more of the earmarked money for non-JumpStart purposes whenever high inflation leads to economic hardship.

That money includes a presumption of $44 million in unspent JumpStart funds from this year, most of which would go toward a new revenue stabilization (“rainy day”) fund equal to 10 percent of JumpStart revenues every year; another $9 million would pay for administering the JumpStart tax itself through the general fund.

Mosqueda, the architect of the JumpStart tax, said she had questions about how the mayor is proposing to spend the repurposed tax and whether his plan aligns with the four priorities in the original JumpStart legislation.

“We have to continue, as a council, to make sure any of the higher-than-anticipated revenue that is being suggested to be used for investments into the general fund does still align with our city’s core progressive values” as well as “with the priorities this council has articulated in the past,” Mosqueda said.

“Part of the demand we all heard was, you have to tell us where you’re going to spend this [JumpStart] money. I totally agree that we need more revenue in the general fund so we can do the basic things that we need to do as a city, [but] these are commitments we have made to the people of Seattle.”—City Councilmember Tammy Morales

For example, Mosqueda questioned the mayor’s proposal to use $3 million a year in JumpStart funds to pay for 14 new positions at the city to support Sound Transit’s construction of light rail from West Seattle to Ballard, which Dingley said fits into the “Green New Deal” spending category because it involves shifting people from single-occupancy vehicles to trains.

When the council first considered the JumpStart tax, Councilmember Tammy Morales notes, “Part of the demand we all heard was, you have to tell us where you’re going to spend this money. … I totally agree that we need more revenue in the general fund so we can do the basic things that we need to do as a city … [but] these are commitments we have made to the people of Seattle” in the JumpStart spending plan itself and subsequent legislation codifying the spending categories the tax can be used for.

Chart outlining Mayor Harrell's proposed changes to the uses of the JumpStart payroll tax

Harrell’s budget proposal would also broaden the use of the JumpStart tax to allow it to fund housing for people making up to 60 percent of the area median income; currently, the tax primarily funds housing for very low-income people making up to 30 percent of AMI, a group that is not served at all by the market-rate housing market. The JumpStart tax can already pay for mixed-income housing that includes people making up to 60 percent of median, but the change would likely change the balance in favor of people making more money.

Harrell’s budget uses $20 million in unspent funds from 2022 and assumes an ongoing $10 million annual “underspend” in both 2023 and 2024; City Budget Office director Julie Dingley told council members Wednesday that she “would prefer not to have to use this kind of strategy,” but that “we feel comfortable at this point that there will be about this amount left at the end of the year” to balance the next year’s budget.

The budget also proposes using general fund dollars to continue and expand the Clean City Initiative and the new Unified Care Team, which together clean up trash, displace and relocate encampments and RVs, provide information about services and shelter beds to people being displaced by sweeps, and take residents’ complaints about encampments. The proposed budget would allocate more than $13 million to these programs, not counting the many individual line items related to graffiti cleanup, a particular pet peeve for Harrell. The budget would spend more than $800,000 on graffiti abatement, plus another $250,000 on Harrell’s One Seattle Day of Service, which includes graffiti abatement by volunteers.