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.
“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.”
The Yesler Building, site of the county’s sobering center since 2019 (photo via King County)
By Erica C. Barnett
Earlier this month, City Councilmember Maritza Rivera proposed a budget amendment directing the city’s Human Services Department to analyze “the appropriateness and feasibility” of using King County’s sobering center, which provides people a place to recover from the acute impacts of alcohol and drug intoxication, “to address individuals arrested under Seattle’s drug possession laws, including an evaluation of the need and feasibility for such a facility to be secure.” The amendment is now in the council’s “consent package” of amendments slated to pass without further discussion.
But King County says it has no interest in converting the sobering center into a secure facility for people arrested for public drug use and possession, and says neither Rivera nor Council President Sara Nelson, who supports Rivera’s amendment, has reached out to the county to discuss their idea.
“The City of Seattle has not spoken to us about these budget requests, and the County has no intention of changing the model to what the Councilmembers describe,” King County Department of Community and Human Services director Kelly Rider told PubliCola. “The intended purpose of this facility is to serve people living unsheltered to sleep off acute alcohol or drug intoxication or opiate overdose and connect them to treatment, housing assistance, and other supports.”
During a recent council discussion, Rivera said the sobering center was a facility the county “had [operated] pre-COVID, actually, and had not reopened. I know that they’re looking to r- establish and reopen it.” In fact, the county’s sobering center has been open continually in various locations, mostly the Yesler Building in Pioneer Square, since before the pandemic, and has been operating out of the Yesler Building since 2022.
However (as a more recent staff description of Rivera’s amendment acknowledged) it has faced challenges finding a permanent location. In 2022, a plan to move the sobering center to an existing Salvation Army shelter in SoDo was thwarted by anti-shelter efforts led by, among others, Chinatown/International District activist Tanya Woo—who subsequently ran for city council, lost, got appointed, and then lost again.
Rivera said the sobering center could be a place where people who use drugs in public “can sober up, and then we can offer services and they can consent and then go get the treatment that they that they really need.”
The sobering center, which is operated by Pioneer Human Services, currently offers case management and can direct people to treatment and other services, but it does not compel people to “go get treatment” and most people who leave the facility do so by walking out the door. Its primary purpose is to relieve downtown emergency service providers by giving people under the influence of substances a safe, dry place to go that isn’t the hospital or jail. Sobering centers have been around, and serving this specific, limited purpose since the 1970s.
The county is still looking for a building to permanently house the sobering center, allowing the county to double its current capacity from 30 to 60 people a night.
Last week, City Councilmember Cathy Moore proposed a 2 percent local tax on capital gains—earnings from investment income—above $262,000 a year. In a statement, Moore said the tax is necessary to help supplement the JumpStart payroll tax, a marginal tax on high-income workers’ wages paid by large employers. JumpStart was originally earmarked to fund affordable housing, green jobs, and equitable development, but the proposed 2025-2026 budget would use a majority of revenues from the tax to close a gaping budget hole (more on that in a moment).
“After a thorough review of the budget and the mayor’s proposal to utilize Payroll Expense Tax dollars to cover the General Fund deficit, it’s clear that our city is still facing the need for additional revenue to address the unmet needs of thousands of households that are rent and food insecure,” Moore said in a statement. Her proposal would explicitly restrict the use of the tax to “rental assistance for rent burdened households, down payment assistance to low, moderate, and workforce households, and food assistance to food insecure households.” The ordinance doesn’t lay down specific percentages for each category, and notes that the spend plan could be subject to future amendments.
Even as Moore proposes earmarked progressive revenue, the council is poised to pass a separate budget bill that would gut the adopted spending plan for the JumpStart tax by making it optional instead of mandatory.
Since the first year the city began collecting the tax, in 2021, it’s used a portion of JumpStart revenues to backfill general-fund shortfalls, justifying these transfers with the ongoing impact of the COVID pandemic.
This year, facing a budget shortfall of more than $260 million, Mayor Bruce Harrell avoided “public-facing” cuts (and added another $100 million in spending on his own priorities, like CCTV surveillance and police emphasis patrols) by dipping deeper into JumpStart than in any previous year, with less than half of JumpStart’s higher-than-anticipated revenues going to the purposes it was created to fund. The council (whose new members ran on pledges of fiscal responsibility) piled on their own spending requests, and the result is the city’s largest budget proposal ever.
To pay for it all, elected officials appear committed to using JumpStart—which was supposed to pay for additive programs, not city obligations that would ordinarily be funded through the general fund—as a fungible source of general fund revenues in perpetuity.
Technically speaking, the bill amending JumpStart expresses the council’s “wish to maintain the intent of the original 2020 spending plan,” then Xes out that entire spending plan, replacing it with a section that says it “may be used” to support programs along the same lines as what was in the original proposal. “May,” in legislation, is the legal equivalent of “may not,” and the effect of the change is to release the council from any future legal obligation to fund the priorities laid out in the 2020 bill. It also appears to allow the city to use JumpStart to fund JumpStart-style spending, like funding for housing, equitable development, or Green New Deal-type programs that would ordinarily be paid for out of the general fund, as opposed to new programs made possible by the additive tax.
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This wasn’t unexpected. Since the first JumpStart collections began in 2021, the mayor and council have treated its spending plan like a suggestion, repeatedly adopting short-term bills that provide exceptions that have allowed the city to stave off major budget cuts without raising new taxes or cutting back on any of the city’s biggest cost drivers, like the police department’s budget. This kind of thing used to be controversial—when then-mayor balanced her 2019 budget with $6 million from the soda tax, a widespread backlash led to legislation that imposed a strict spending plan—but has become so routine that merely suggesting the city keep the commitments it made when it passed the tax is treated like an outrage by the same conservative organizations that opposed JumpStart to begin with, but now see it as a useful slush fund.
The council’s legislation (technically sponsored by the budget committee, an indication of majority support) will also eliminate an oversight committee that provides updates on the impact of the tax.
One issue with relying on JumpStart to fund basic, ongoing city services is that the tax is potentially quite volatile, because its revenues are largely based on the payrolls of a handful of large tech companies, primarily Amazon. With only a few years of data, the city is essentially just assuming revenues will continue to go up forever, without much of a visible plan for what to do if they don’t. By tying future general-fund budgets to the fate of JumpStart, the city is making a bet that tech companies won’t cut jobs in Seattle, now or in the future.
The capital gains tax suffers from a similar volatility. An analysis by the city’s Office of Economic and Revenue Forecast, which looked at state capital gains tax revenues, concluded that revenues from the tax “are very likely to fluctuate significantly for year to year and from forecast to forecast.” In 2027, for example, the forecast council concluded that depending on compliance rates, a 2 percent local capital gains tax could pull in as little as $16 million, or as much as $51 million—a huge, and somewhat unsettling, range.
The city council will hold the second of two public budget hearings tomorrow, Tuesday, at 5 pm in council chambers; find out how to attend and comment here.
Mayor Bruce Harrell delivers his annual budget speech in September.
The mayor and city council have a spending problem.
By Erica C. Barnett
Buried in Mayor Bruce Harrell’s proposed budget, on page 661, are two numbers that strongly suggest the city is not done pulling money out of the JumpStart payroll tax fund, and will probably rely even more heavily on revenues from the tax in the future. The JumpStart tax, also referred to as the payroll expense or payroll tax, is a tax large employers pay on the compensation of their highest-paid employees; it’s currently earmarked for affordable housing and economic development in marginalized communities,
Those numbers, at the bottom of a chart showing a big-picture view of the city’s general fund, are a projected budget deficit of $78,609,000 in 2027 and $151,238,000 in 2028.
Although out-year budget numbers are always more speculative than projections in the immediate future, the scale of these potential deficits could lead the mayor’s office to propose using even more JumpStart revenues to backfill those shortfalls in the future—just as a projected budget deficit of $229 million in Harrell’s mid-biennial budget raised alarms last year and prompted the mayor to propose a 2025-2026 budget that uses $287 million in payroll tax revenues for general purposes that are not a part of the city’s JumpStart spending plan..
The numbers are cumulative, so the 2028 figure represents an unaddressed 2027 deficit of $78 million, plus an additional shortfall of $73 million in 2028. Both of these projected deficits already account for ongoing increases in the amount of JumpStart payroll tax the city will transfer into the general fund—$469 million in 2027, and half a billion dollars in 2028.
It isn’t unusual for the city to project deficits in future years. But prior to this decade, these projected deficits, when they showed up in the budget, were tens of millions of dollars, not hundreds of millions. Once the projections started showing future shortfalls near or above $200 million, back in 2022, city officials began wringing their hands in public about the “looming budget cliff” and talking about ways to raise more revenue to forestall major cuts. That led to Harrell’s decision, supported by most of the council, to take hundreds of millions of dollars out of JumpStart to close a deficit most recently projected at $260 million. Harrell’s budget shows the deficit immediately bouncing back into the hundreds of millions, indicating this year’s fix—raiding JumpStart—won’t be enough to close the long-term gap.
PubliCola requested an interview with the budget office last week and followed up on Monday. We’ll update this post if we hear back.
The mayor’s budget indicates that this year’s controversial use of JumpStart funds, which are currently earmarked by law to specific spending categories (affordable housing, Green New Deal programs, equitable development, and small businesses), may be the tip of the spear for a wholesale reallocation of payroll tax revenues in the future.
The most obvious alternative, assuming the city does not come up with new revenue sources or expand the payroll tax, would be to cut existing programs and refrain from creating new ones.
Fiscal restraint, needless to say, doesn’t win popularity contests, and Harrell—who’s up for reelection next year—has mostly taken the opposite approach. Although his proposed budget would eliminate 159 positions—mostly in IT (including the Seattle Channel), human resources, and the Department of Construction and Inspections—it also adds $100 million in new spending on “mayoral priorities,” like police, downtown activation, and jails.
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Among other new and expanded programs, the mayor’s budget would add funding for police “emphasis patrols” around downtown Seattle; expand the Unified Care Team, which removes encampments and refers people to shelter; fund dozens of new jail beds for misdemeanor offenders, such as drug users; and create a “real time crime center” where police will monitor new surveillance cameras mounted in neighborhoods across the city.
(The city council, which will approve a final budget in November, includes many new members who ran on the anti-tax premise that the city “doesn’t have a funding problem, it has a spending problem.” That claim is a bit hard to reconcile with spending $100 million on new programs in the face of a $260 million budget deficit.)
We’ve written about the primary way Harrell has proposed paying for all this new spending—by using $287 million in payroll tax revenues next year, and more every year after that. But Harrell’s 2025-2026 budget also depletes the JumpStart fund balance—essentially, a non-renewable reserve of unspent money—taking $140 million from this pot next year and another $90 million in 2026. By 2026, the total amount of funds left over at the end of the year, after all spending is accounted for, will be reduced from $97 million to $179,000.
Harrell’s budget does propose funding a payroll tax “revenue stabilization reserve” of $43 million, established last year to provide a cushion if revenues come in lower than expected—for example, if a large tech company leaves the city and takes its tax base with it. But the budget also dips into this fund in 2026, a year when payroll taxes are projected to continue their skyward trajectory, pulling out $8 million before replenishing the fund over the next two years.
Neither the mayor nor the council have discussed the $158 million deficit projection publicly yet, much less articulated a plan for dealing with it. Using JumpStart to close indefinite budget gaps (while piling on new spending every year) has significant risks: Because the majority of JumpStart revenues come from a tiny number of companies, a decision by even one of those companies to move jobs out of Seattle could tank the fund. The city is basing its projections—an arrow that always goes up, up, up—on less than three years’ worth of data, compared to other taxes whose fluctuations are well understood.
There’s also the question of political risk: Does this council, and this mayor, want to eliminate or severely handicap a source of funding for affordable housing in a city where people who don’t have six-figure incomes are being displaced?
The JumpStart tax, paid by companies that employ highly compensated workers, was designed to offset the impacts that companies like Amazon have had on Seattle’s housing market and economy by providing access to housing, jobs, and small-business development opportunities for people who haven’t benefited from the city’s tech boom. Now, it’s being used as a funding source for programs that arguably run counter to its original purpose, like jails, surveillance of low-income neighborhoods, and police.
Turning JumpStart into an anything-goes revenue stream is an idea that’s sure to get pushback—especially from advocates who remember how hard businesses fought to stop the tax. This year’s budget may be remembered as a proof of concept for repurposing even more, or all, of the revenues from JumpStart, using a tax opposed by businesses and pro-business elected officials to avoid coming up with a stable solution to the city’s budget challenges.
L’il Sebastian, one of the horses that will soon be unemployed under SPD’s current budget plan.
By Erica C. Barnett
City Councilmember Rob Saka raised a number of concerns during this week’s budget briefings, asking questions no one else thought to ask. Questions like:
• Can we bodega our way out of this?
At least twice this week, Saka asked whether it made sense to encourage “bodegas”—which he defined as “small, locally sourced, organic kind of stores”—when many neighborhoods are losing large grocery stores. “We’re not gonna bodega our way out of this,” Saka said during a presentation by the city’s Department of Construction and Inspections. He repeated the quip at a presentation by the Office of Sustainability and Environment, adding that in his West Seattle district alone, “we can expect to lose at least two grocery stores, big grocery stores. They’re on the chopping block as the result of a proposed merger” between Albertson’s and Kroger.
The city (unlike federal regulators) can’t do much to impact the decisions of national corporations, but they do have the power to support or oppose land-use policies that make it easier to build small grocery stores as part of the upcoming comprehensive plan update; currently, as we’ve reported, the mayor’s proposal would once again make corner stores legal, but only on literal corner lots—a proposal unlikely to make much dent in the existing food deserts in Saka’s West Seattle district and other parts of the city.
• Speeding cameras that “just send you a ticket in the mail”: Y/N?
Saka, who chairs the council’s transportation committee, raised objections this week to speed enforcement cameras in school zones, saying he was “default skeptical of of enforcement cameras that have the capability to just send you a ticket in the mail. I don’t support wide-scale mass deployment of those.” The city has slowly rolled out speed cameras at 19 schools over the last decade, and funded new cameras in 18 additional school zones last year.
School zone cameras have proven to be an effective deterrent to speeding in school zones, which in turns reduces collisions between cars and pedestrians, including school children, around schools.
“Rather than having these cameras as a revenue-generating tool only … I think our approach needs to be guided by data,” Saka said, adding that he worried the city was targeting “historically marginalized and underrepresented” communities with the cameras.
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“We are being asked to to review and approve a substantial decision, a significant decision, a policy choice, regarding automated enforcement in our city. And is this the appropriate balance and deployment of these cameras relative to the other potential uses that we talked about? I don’t know. I don’t know.”
As The Urbanist reported in 2023, the new cameras will primarily be deployed in more affluent parts of the city.
Saka has been a vocal supporter of a different use of camera technology—live police surveillance cameras, which will be used to keep constant tabs on crime “hot spots” like Aurora Ave. N, downtown, and the Chinatown/International District. In fact, he added an amendment to the CCTV surveillance bill last month to put Alki and Harbor Aves. SW next in line for cameras to deter street races.
• Should horses be cops?
The Seattle Police Department has proposed cutting the police department’s mounted patrol, which includes a half-dozen horses, and moving mounted officers to other duties; in a presentation to the council, SPD Chief Sue Rahr explained that the decision to eliminate SPD’s small mounted patrol was “a decision that has been in the making for more than a decade.”
Saka argued that the mounted patrol plays a vital “community engagement role,” then suggested SPD’s decision might not be final—”maybe it is, maybe it isn’t”—before returning to the horses at the end of the meeting, when he took the time to recite each of their names out loud, like an In Memoriam segment at the Oscars.
“Callum, Blue, Change, Sebastian, Doobie, and how can I not forget the two lovable barn cats, Sully and Katy Perry,” Saka said. “So there’s real-life animals behind the impact of the decision.” He then added the names of the “impacted officers,” calling them “real-life people… that are directly impacted.” The horses will go to other owners, the police officers, unlike 76 other real-life people who will lose their jobs under Harrell’s budget proposal, will be reassigned to other duties.
