Tag: city budget 2024

City Council, Mayor Harrell, Media

What Seattle Will Lose If It Loses the Seattle Channel
City Council candidates Alexis Mercedes Rinck and Tanya Woo on a recent episode of “City Inside/Out.”

By Erica C. Barnett

In planning for a potential $260 million budget shortfall this year, Mayor Bruce Harrell asked most city departments to come up with potential cuts of 8 percent—a worst-case scenario the mayor’s office avoided by using about half the funds from the JumpStart payroll tax to pay for staff and services that are usually funded through the city’s general fund.

One department that did get gutted—not cut by 8 or 10 percent, but slashed in half—is the Seattle Channel, the city’s award-winning source for arts coverage, interviews with elected officials, campaign debates, and other original programming.

Harrell’s budget proposal would eliminate the jobs of three videographers who film, produce and edit programs and meetings, two half-time web positions, a senior producer, and the channel’s  operations manager. The cuts would mean the end of all original Seattle Channel programming, leaving only city council meetings and mayoral events.

During a recent presentation to the City Council, City Budget Office director Dan Eder that with the decline in cable subscriptions, the cable fees that help fund Seattle Channel are no longer enough to keep it going. “At this point, we just didn’t have enough money available to us… to continue that program,” Eder said.

In an email, a spokesperson for the mayor’s office, Callie Craighead, made a distinction between “primary programming of government affairs” and “supplementary” or “additional” programming like the original work that has been the Seattle Channel’s mainstay for the past two decades. “Should the revenue forecast improve or if the City can arrange for other funding solutions, we would be supportive of restoring this additional programming,” Craighead said.

The cuts would save about $1.6 million—about 0.085 percent (0.008) of a $1.9 billion general-fund budget that includes tens of millions of dollars in new spending on police overtime, planning for the 2026 FIFA World Cup (which will include six matches in Seattle), and downtown beautification projects such as removing the fountain in Westlake Park.

The city has known about the decline in cable revenues for many years; last year, Harrell’s budget suggested using new tax revenues, based on the recommendations of the city’s Revenue Stabilization Work Group, to sustain the Seattle Channel and other programs with dwindling or unstable revenues. After voters elected a new, anti-tax city council last. year, Harrell changed his tune, issuing what amounted to a no-new-taxes pledge.

Shows that Harrell’s budget would eliminate immediately include “City Inside/Out,” a public affairs hosted by broadcasting veteran Brian Callanan; Art Zone, a “weekly love letter” to local arts and culture hosted by Nancy Guppy; and BookLust, a popular interview show hosted by Nancy Pearl, along with 20 other shows. Callanan, along with longtime producer Susan Han, has a year-to-year contract with the channel; both will lose their jobs if the cuts go through.

Gary Gibson, who managed the Seattle Channel from 2002 to 2007, recalled that the city set up a commission in 2001 to help revitalize the city’s cable-access channel, then called TV SEA, which only aired city council meetings and mayoral press conferences.

“It was a vehicle for putting out council meetings and the mayor’s press conferences—that’s all they did. There was no original programming and there was no enterprise reporting or any kind of content creation.” The commission said the channel should create engaging shows that would have an audience beyond meeting watchers, and put those shows online so people could watch them any time. “They had this idea to create a democracy portal—a two-way communication between government and the citizens,” Gibson said.

Now retired from broadcasting, Gibson led the channel through its transition in the early 2000s, from a standard public-access cable channel (called TV-SEA) that aired mayoral press conferences and council meetings, into a unique online resource offering original shows like “City Inside/Out,” “Ask the Mayor,” and election debates.

Under Harrell’s plan, the Seattle Channel would once again be little more than a portal for council meetings and press events.

Han, who has been with Seattle Channel for 17 years, said she “did expect some belt-tightening” this year, but was surprised that Harrell proposed eliminating all of the channel’s award-winning programs. “We’re just going to have to really fight to try and save the show,” she said, referring to “City Inside/Out.” “I don’t know if we have the ability to save the station.”

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Harrell’s cuts would eliminate coverage that no one else in the city is providing—coverage that’s made possible, in part, because Seattle Channel is part of the city itself and has spent decades building trust with city leaders. The tone of its coverage is genuinely fair and balanced, and producers go out of their way to give both sides of an issue or campaign an opportunity to make their best case.

For example, during the heated debate over a proposal to recall then-council member Kshama Sawant in 2021, Han was able to convince Sawant to appear on a panel, moderated by Callanan, with representatives from the “Recall Sawant” campaign. It was the only time Sawant and her opponents sat down for a debate.

“I tried to get her own the show from April until November, and she finally said yes,” Han recalled. “That’s the thing with producing our show—you make a lot of phone calls before you hone into the right balance. And it’s not like we’re being paid hourly. We just really care that we have the best version of that show.”

Later this week, Callanan said, the Seattle Channel will hold another debate between proponents and opponents of the $1.55 billion transportation levy—a measure that has received little recent coverage from the shrinking local press corps or campaign reporters, who are largely focused on  national and state races.

“It’s going to be half hour, we’re going to have opposing sides, and we’re going to present some pretty comprehensive coverage on an issues that’s huge” to the city, Callanan said. “Here are the pros,  here are the cons, here is what both sides say. It’s that type of reporting” that will be lost if Harrell’s cuts go through, he said.

“Art Zone with Nancy Guppy” is another longtime staple of the Seattle Channel’s coverage.

Beyond election debates, the Seattle Channel provides ongoing coverage about the details of what the city council, mayor, and city departments are up to—everything from profiles of department leaders to half-hour sit-down interviews with council members. “I think this is something city should be really proud of,” Callanan said. “For me, it’s the idea of the city standing behind this ethic of preserving quality journalism that provides transparency into what they’re doing.”

While the Seattle Channel serves as a forum for elected officials, it isn’t a mouthpiece—which is one reason many mayors and council members have complained about the channel’s coverage over the years. Common complaints include charges that the channel gives too much time to opposing views; that its reporters should be producing promo pieces for elected officials, not journalism; and that it’s unreasonable to expect officials to sit down and answer questions.

Callanan said his goal has always been “talking to local officials in the best way possible. I want to make sure we’re doing everything we can to provide those avenues for local officials to be in front of people, have people ask questions, and have the officials respond.” However, he added, “It has been more and more challenging to get public officials to commit to interviews.”

Sometimes, this pushback has led to involuntary programming changes; for example, former mayor Ed Murray ended “Ask the Mayor,” a show where the mayor responded to viewer questions, by refusing to appear on it, and no subsequent mayor has revived the show.

Harrell has also reportedly groused about the channel’s coverage, along with the fact that its camera operators can’t always drop what they’re doing to cover his events; however, he’s the first mayor to propose eliminating 100 percent of its original programming and its two-person web team.

The mayor’s office insists that its decision to eliminate the Seattle Channel’s programming is a matter of simple budget math, not a response to its coverage. “We looked at other comparable cities with an active government-access television channel and the proposed 2025 Seattle Channel budget of $1.7 M is more in line with those cities.” Craighead said.

Harrell’s budget assumes that council meetings and his own press events will go up online without the two people who currently make that happen, which Han calls unrealistic. “Our web team is fantastic, and they’re also the ones that do the live stream and put the show on all these different platforms,” Han said. “When the mayor says we’re still going to be able to put all this stuff out and do livestreams and all that, I think he’s mistaken.”

Gibson, the former Seattle Channel general manager, said he doesn’t “really get the calculus” that led Harrell to propose eliminating everything that makes Seattle Channel unique among municipal TV stations. “It just doesn’t seem like that much to pay for that kind of transparency into government activities.”

City council members Sara Nelson and Dan Strauss have both publicly expressed their support for Seattle Channel since the mayor released his budget, and Nelson told a constituent she plans to introduce a budget amendment that would restore at least some funding this week. Neither Nelson nor council spokesperson Brad Harwood responded to PubliCola’s questions about the Seattle Channel or Nelson’s amendment.

Editor’s note: After we posted this story, Nelson put out a press release saying she was “working to preserve funding for the city’s Seattle Channel.” The announcement did not include any other details.

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

Harrell’s Budget Plan Uses Affordable-Housing Tax to Fund Police, Jails, Sweeps—and Downtown Beautification

By Erica C. Barnett

Mayor Bruce Harrell announced a 2025-2026 budget proposal on Tuesday that avoids major cuts (and adds funding for Harrell’s priorities, like police and homeless encampment removals) by repurposing a majority of the JumpStart payroll expense tax to fill what would have otherwise been at least a $260 million budget deficit.

The budget will cut 159 positions, including 76 that are currently filled. However, thanks largely to hundreds of millions of “extra” funding from the JumpStart tax, it also preserves funding for the Equitable Development Initiative, saves a men’s shelter in the Central District that would otherwise have closed, and preserves existing hours at libraries, community centers, and senior centers.

Under current law, JumpStart funds, which come from an employer tax on the wages of highly-compensated workers, are supposed to be allocated to four broad spending categories: Affordable housing, small businesses, equitable development, and the Green New Deal. Last year, the council increased the tax slightly to create a separate bucket of about $20 million for student mental health programs—of which Harrell’s budget preserves about $15 million.

The council passed JumpStart tax in 2020 over the vociferous objections of business groups like the Seattle Metro Chamber, which sued to stop it, and the Downtown Seattle Association; a separate spending plan established how JumpStart revenues could be spent. The city has repeatedly used some JumpStart revenues to backfill the general fund, which pays for most city services. But the mayor’s proposal represents a wholesale raid on this funding source—one that goes far beyond anything the previous council or mayor ever publicly contemplated.

Under Harrell’s plan, $287 million in JumpStart revenues will go into the general fund next year (and $233 million in 2026), and another $43 million will go into a reserve fund in case revenues come in lower than expected in the future. In 2025, just $233 million would be available for designated JumpStart priorities.

During a media briefing on Tuesday, City Budget Office director Dan Eder didn’t provide a specific justification for pouring more than half of JumpStart revenues into the general fund, except that the tax have been producing more money than anticipated. In other words, we have a deficit over here, the money is over there, so why not use that money to fix this unrelated problem? And—while we’re at it—why not change the law to allow us to do that every year?

Harrell’s budget makes this pretty explicit, noting that “The City can avoid making additional reductions to critical municipal services for those who live, work, and visit Seattle by making the ‘extra’ payroll tax revenues available to the General Fund.”

Of course, there are opportunity costs to not spending a windfall on the things it’s supposed to be spent on—housing, for instance, is not getting any cheaper to build, and doubling the amount the city can invest in housing now would benefit the city and its taxpayers in the long term.

And there’s something a bit unsavory about leaders who opposed the JumpStart tax—including the Chamber, which issued a rapturous press release praising Harrell for his JumpStart-dependent budget—celebrating its conversion into a slush fund that the city can use for any purpose.

But that’s where we are. The council, and Harrell, have vowed to address structural budget issues without raising taxes, so the tax many of them opposed will now provide a nearly-blank check to fund everything from World Cup festivities to the expansion of the mayor’s encampment removal team. Here are a few items that jumped out on my initial perusal of the budget.

Money for Police, Encampment Sweeps

The mayor’s budget would fund nearly 1,900 positions in SPD, including many that will remain unfilled, and increase the department’s overall budget from $393 million this year to $454 million in 2025. The fire department and Community Assisted Response and Engagement Team will also see increases—allowing the team’s unarmed responders to expand to a wider geographic area—and the overall “public safety” bucket will now amount to just about half percent of the general-fund, or discretionary, budget.

Most of that spending increase ($46 million) will pay for raises the police union bargained earlier this year. About $2.5 million will pay to staff the Real-Time Crime Center and CCTV cameras I covered on Tuesday. SPD will spend another $10 million on emphasis patrols in the areas “where crime is concentrated,” which generally overlap with both the CCTV surveillance zones and the new drug and sex work exclusion areas, where police will have the power to arrest anyone under a “stay out” order.

The Unified Care Team (UCT), which removes encampments and informs their displaced residents about available shelter beds, will get 11 new employees from various departments, expanding the team to 32 members and allowing it to remove encampments and respond to calls seven days a week. The mayor’s budget highlights this new spending under “Race and Social Justice Initiatives.” In his budget speech on Tuesday, Harrell said the UCT “has made a significant difference for the people of Seattle, housed and unhoused,” and claimed that his administration has “decreased tent encampments by 72 percent since I took office, and increased shelter referrals incredibly.”

Data indicates that homelessness in Seattle has not declined, and a referral to shelter does not mean a person arrives at shelter, stays there for any length of time, or receives housing or other services that would enable them to exit homelessness.

Repurposing JumpStart

JumpStart, as I mentioned, will now be used for all sorts of things that have nothing to do with its original purpose.

Historically, changing the spending plan for an earmarked tax has been quite controversial—in 2017, for instance, the council ended an attempt by then-mayor Jenny Durkan to siphon away funds from the sweetened beverage tax by legislating a spending plan with a veto-proof majority. Now, an anti-tax council has indicated their eagerness to change the underlying law and turn JumpStart into an all-purpose money spigot.

In addition to spending JumpStart revenues on “critical General Fund obligations (like police, parks, fire, transportation, etc.)”, the budget will use the tax to fund mayoral priorities like the Downtown Activation Plan, planning for the 2026 World Cup, staffing for Sound Transit 3 planning, EV charging infrastructure, and upgrades to downtown parks.

Few of these “JumpStart” projects fit into the original categories of affordable housing, Green New Deal jobs, and equitable development. All of these original categories will still get funding—the Equitable Development Initiative, for example, will actually grow slightly—but Harrell’s budget also directs millions of dollars of dedicated JumpStart funding to his pet projects downtown, including:

• A two-year, $3.7 million “revitalization of Westlake Plaza which could include removal of out-of-commission fountain, stage renovation, an electrical systems upgrade, and repairs to paving and trip hazards”;

• $1 million for Seattle Restored, the downtown storefront revitalization fund;

• $186,000 for “center city park activations”

• $2.6 million in spending for the 2026 FIFA World Cup, including $265,000 for a coordinator to oversee World Cup activities in the downtown area, $365,000 for a two-person team that will “respond to anticipated increased demand in the biennium, including for events related to the 2026 World Cup,” and another $2 million “in reserve” to plan for the six-game, three-week event.

• $350,000 to upgrade the downtown monorail station;

• $1.5 million to fund graffiti removal, business outreach, a “safe walk service,” and cleaning in downtown Seattle;

• $ 1 million to “support public space activations, public space improvements, and a centralized [Downtown Activation Plan] communications strategy; and

• $250,000 for a consultant to advise on the “major public investments” that are planned for SoDo, which include a new civic center, housing, and a relocated jail on land largely owned by developer Greg Smith.

First Comes Arrest, then Comes Incarceration

In addition to $10 million for overtime for cops to patrol “emphasis” areas; in addition to establishing remote, 24/7 surveillance of neighborhoods across the city; in addition to increasing the police (and fire) budget dramatically, the city also plans to spend millions of dollars on new jail beds to put people arrested for misdemeanors, including newly created misdemeanors like public drug use and prostitution loitering.

The budget includes almost $3 million for the city to rent 20 jail beds at the SCORE jail in Kent, plus an additional $2 million (rising to $2.7 million in 2026) for additional misdemeanor beds at the downtown Seattle jail. The city recently announced an agreement with King County to open up more jail beds for people who commit low-level misdemeanors throughout the city.

Incidentally, the proposed county budget, introduced by King County Executive Dow Constantine on Monday, includes $1.725 million to finish installing “jump barriers” and replacing bunks to make it harder for inmates to commit suicide. In the last 18 months, at least seven people have died in custody at SCORE.

The city’s municipal court has told the city that it will need extra funding for additional judges and staff to handle first appearance cases for the inmates held at SCORE and the downtown jail, plus the expected flood of misdemeanor sex work, drug use, and SOAP/SODA violation cases. But Harrell’s budget includes no new funding for the court.

The budget also includes an $18 million increase to the city’s judgments and claims fund, which pays for legal claims and lawsuits against the city. For several years, the city has consistently lost more lawsuits and legal claims than budget planners anticipated.

So What About All Those New Services the City Promised?

As the mayor, council, and city attorney have doubled down on arrests and incarceration as the city’s primary response to low-level crime and “disorder,” they’ve consistently reassured the public that these measures are just the “stick” portion of a well-thought-out plan that will also include many “carrots”—investments in new services for the people targeted by police and judicial crackdowns.

These services were supposed to include new drug treatment programs; new shelter for people living outdoors; new funding for mental health services; and assistance for people in the sex trade who could soon be arrested for “prostitution loitering.”

Not only does the budget not deliver on these promised services (save for a vaguely described $2 million investment in services for victims of human trafficking, which does nothing for non-trafficked sex workers), it cuts many of the services people rely on to stay afloat. While funding for police continues to skyrocket, many small but important programs are being cut due to a purported lack of funds.

A small sample:

• The Seattle Channel, whose “City Inside/Out” program is the one place where the mayor and council routinely sit down for long-form interviews about local issues, will be decimated, losing not only the “City Inside/Out” program (along with producer Susan Han and host Brian Callanan), but local arts stalwart Nancy Guppy, whose “Art Zone” program Harrell’s budget will eliminate.

The channel, which has produced original reporting for decades, will be reduced to filming local meetings, a huge loss not only to local programming on civic affairs but to public transparency.

• The Department of Neighborhoods’ Food Equity Fund will fund three to five fewer programs to address food inequity each year.

• The Farm to Child program, which provides fresh produce to  in-home family childcare providers, will be eliminated.

• Parks maintenance outside downtown, along with activation programs in non-downtown parks, will be cut.

• The Parks CommUNITY fund, a new program that funds community-led parks projects in underserved neighborhoods, will be cut from $2.5 million to $1.5 million.

• Programming at Carkeek and Discovery Parks will be eliminated, along with seven staff positions, and could be replaced by unspecified “public-private partnerships.”

• Funding for legal assistance for low-income people, including legal counsel for homeless youth and children and representation for people challenging adverse decisions on public assistance, will be eliminated, along with free tax preparation help provided by the United Way, a call center to help older adults and their caregivers access services to help them stay in their homes, and the Culturally Nourishing Food program for seniors.

In general, the city council has been extremely supportive of Harrell’s agenda; their changes will likely be at the margins, rather than wholesale strategic shifts or major reappropriations. The council’s budget committee will kick off the fall budget process with a meeting at City Hall at 9:30 Wednesday morning.

Mayor Harrell

As Budget Cuts Loom, Mayor’s Staff Ballooned, Thanks to Workers On “Loan” From Other Departments

Mayors often take on staff from other departments, but Harrell has taken the practice to a new level, with 27 staff on “loan.”

By Erica C. Barnett

On Tuesday, Mayor Bruce Harrell will release a 2025-2026 budget proposal that will likely include significant cuts to close a budget deficit of more than $250 million. As preparation, Harrell asked most departments (except the Seattle Police Department and other public safety departments) to come up with potential cuts of 8 percent. One department that has grown steadily despite the budget shortfall: The Mayor’s Office, which now has 63 staffers thanks to a steady influx of employees on “loan” from other executive departments.

Currently, in addition to 36 people who officially work for the mayor, Harrell’s office includes 27 staffers who are funded by, and technically work for, 16 other departments, but in reality work full- or part-time in Harrell’s office. In some cases, these staffers were working jobs in their previous departments that are no longer being done; their relocation to the mayor’s office represents a direct loss to the departments they left.

Harrell spokesman Jamie Housen said only 13 of the 27 loaned staffers “dedicate 100% [of their] time in performing work assigned by” the mayor’s office, but he did not specify the percentage performed by the other 14.

By way of comparison, an org chart from former mayor Jenny Durkan’s office shows that on September 17, 2019, Durkan had 45 staffers, including nine that were “on loan” from seven departments.

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The 27 loaned staffers include two top executives. Aisha Foster, previously a manager at the city’s HR department, is now Harrell’s Executive Director of Talent Acquisition, and Paul Jackson, Jr., formerly in charge of bridge and structure maintenance at the Seattle Department of Transportation, is now head of Harrell’s Graffiti Programs and Initiatives. Two other employees, from Seattle Public Utilities and Arts, are also on Harrell’s in-house graffiti team. The Unified Care Team, which removes encampments and provides shelter referrals to their displaced residents, includes four mayoral staffers on loan from other departments.

Housen defended Harrell’s liberal use of other departments’ staffers and position funding authority, saying the office “is designed to best deliver meaningful progress for the City and its residents, including how we manage staff and capacity. This can mean bringing on out of class and on-loan employees who have relevant subject matter expertise and operational experience with departments under the Executive and for bodies of work that span across multiple different departments, like the Unified Care Team. These employees often work closely with the departments they are on loan/OOC from as liaisons and advisors to help drive efficiencies.”

Housen said the mayor has the authority to “manage positions within the Executive Branch as to best deliver results for the public.”

A full list of the loaned employees is available here.

 

City Council, Police

Former Community Police Commission Director’s 2025 Budget Slashed Staff Unnecessarily
Former Community Police Commission Director Cali Ellis and Co-Chair Joel Merkel

By Erica C. Barnett

Cali Ellis, the former executive director of the embattled Community Police Commission, has reportedly threatened to sue the CPC for discrimination, alleging that she was fired because of a disability she recently disclosed to the commission.

Ellis was quietly put on indefinite administrative leave earlier this year and replaced on an “acting” basis in August by former CPC director Bessie Scott, who just accepted a position as city manager of Antioch, California.

Before leaving, Ellis proposed eliminating the positions of several staffers, apparently in lieu of firing or disciplining the people currently in those positions.

Although Mayor Bruce Harrell asked every city department to identify potential cuts of 8 percent to help close the city’s $250 million budget gap, the CPC and its 10-person staff were exempt from this directive because the police department is still under a federal consent decree, with a hearing on the agreement coming up in Judge James Robart’s courtroom on October 16.

Nonetheless, PubliCola has learned, Ellis submitted a 2025 budget that cut two of the CPC’s community engagement staffers—a reduction that would represent far more than 8 percent of the commission’s budget. The move caused immense consternation among commissioners, who were unaware of Ellis’ decision until it was too late to undo it.

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Although the City Budget Office finessed the budget-in-progress to reduce the the proposed cut by half, they did so by keeping both positions but cutting them in half—a move designed to satisfy no one, except perhaps Judge Robart, because the budget would not show a reduction in the number of CPC positions.

Because the mayor’s budget proposal is balanced and almost out the door, the CPC will have to go to the city council and propose cuts to some other department if it wants to claw back the positions—a potentially daunting task with a new, inexperienced council just going into its first budget cycle, with an agenda that has so far been heavy on police hiring and light on police accountability.

The CPC recently hired a deputy director, but currently lacks a policy director and is short several several staff, including a community engagement staffer who’s on loan to another department and may not return. Another community engagement staffer recently resigned in a mass email to the commission, CPC staff, and a list of CPC stakeholders.

“I was excited by the CPC’s mission to uplift the voices of the underrepresented and those most impacted by unconstitutional policing, along with helping to build bridges between SPD and the community for healthy police reform,” the staffer, Jo-Nathan Thomas, wrote. “However, I believe the CPC has become a farce that I can no longer serve with true integrity.”

Neither Ellis nor the commission’s most recent policy director, Linnea Lassiter, responded to PubliCola’s questions. Lassiter worked for the CPC briefly this year but also reportedly left involuntarily. CPC co-chair Joel Merkel declined to respond to questions, except to confirm that Ellis is “on leave.”

The CPC has stopped holding regular meetings, which used to happen every two weeks; the most recent meeting, in early September, consisted entirely of an executive session to discuss pending litigation.

City Council, Mayor Harrell, Mental Health

Council Rejects Full 2024 Funding for Youth Mental Health, Calls Previous Council Lazy and Irresponsible
A young man testified in front of the City Council on Tuesday.

Bob Kettle accused Tammy Morales of failing to do due diligence before proposing legislation to release funds collected from a payroll tax increase this year.

By Erica C. Barnett

The Seattle City Council narrowly rejected a proposal from Councilmember Tammy Morales to release the full $20 million that’s supposed to be collected this year to fund youth mental health services. The previous council voted 6-3 to approve an increase in the JumpStart payroll tax for this purpose.

Dan Strauss, who voted with Sara Nelson, Maritza Rivera, Cathy Moore, and Bob Kettle against Morales’ proposal, then introduced an amendment that added $2.25 million for gun violence prevention to the $10 million the council has agreed to spend this year; the remaining funds will go back into the city’s JumpStart fund and can be used to address the city’s $260 million budget deficit.

The vote was virtually identical to the one the council, convened as the nine-member budget committee, took last week. What was different was the level of vitriol council members directed at both the original tax increase, adopted by a previous council that the new council has turned into a synecdoche for government waste.

Rivera kicked things off by asking Deputy Mayor Tiffany Washington a series of leading questions about the actions of the previous council in order to establish that that council, unlike this one, “didn’t do the research,” chose $20 million as “an arbitrary figure that was not actually needed,” and “did not get guidance from mental health professionals.”

Saka (who ultimately voted for the proposal) piled on, saying there had been “no rational basis” for increasing the JumpStart tax to fund programs to improve student mental health, a comment that prompted astonished looks from some of the kids who had just testified about how such programs had benefited them.

Then Kettle jumped in, saying the previous council (which also included Lisa Herbold, Alex Pedersen, Debora Juarez, and Teresa Mosqueda, now on the King County Council) had shown an “absolute lack of good governance… lack of coordination, lack of anything, really.” Kettle then launched into a little interrogative exercise with Washington and Human Services Department director Tanya Kim, who were both on hand to answer questions.

Speaking about Morales as if she was not sitting right there, Kettle asked both executive staffers to confirm that Morales had not coordinated with the mayor or HSD when drafting her legislation to release the $10 million to the Department of Education and Early Learning. (Council members are part of the legislative branch, and are not required to seek approval from the executive branch before proposing legislation). Then, he turned to Council Central Staff director Ben Noble, who contradicted him—saying that “yes,” Morales did work with Central Staff on the legislation.

Kettle didn’t appear to like that answer, and corrected Noble, saying he clearly only meant yes “in the sense of getting the amendment into the system, calendaring, you know, into the system.” Noble responded that in fact, central staff put the same work into Morales’ amendment that they would put into any amendment, including an analysis of the underlying policy. Kettle switched tacks again, summarizing for Noble: “So, clearly, not with the executive, the people who have to carry out what needs to be done.”

It was a weird moment, made weirder by all the leading questions that gave the mayor’s office an opening to talk about how personally insulted and hurt Harrell and his staff were by the suggestion that the mayor would use mental health funding to close the budget gap.

“The mayor cares about this issue very greatly,” Washington said, “and so to just hear it put out there like he’s just going to take this money for mental health and [use it to] close the deficit gap was hard for me to hear, and very untrue, because he doesn’t have the power to do that.”

As the central staff analysis of the underlying legislation notes, in the absence of explicit action by the council to spend the full $20 million, “the remaining $10 million in appropriation authority will go unused, and the funds will either remain in the JumpStart Payroll Expense Tax Fund balance and be available for spending in 2025 or future years, or the appropriation could be abandoned, and the monies diverted to other eligible purposes in 2024.”

City Council, labor, Mayor Harrell, Morning Fizz, Police

Officer Who Killed Pedestrian Got Recruitment Bonus, Decent Wages for City Workers Will Add Tens of Millions to Budget Gap

1. Kevin Dave, the officer who struck and killed 23-year-old student Jaahnavi Kandula in January 2023, was part of the cohort of new recruits who received $15,000 bonuses under the first of former mayor Jenny Durkan’s police recruitment programs. The plan, adopted in February 2019, provided $7,500 to new police recruits and $15,000 to officers transferring “laterally” from other departments. Dave was previously an officer in Tucson, Arizona, but was fired from that previous position in 2013 after failing to meet minimum standards during his 18-month probation period.

Dave’s personnel file, obtained by PubliCola reporter Andrew Engelson, indicates he received the $7,500 bonus in two payments in exchange for agreeing to stay at the department for three years after his hire date in November 2019.

Durkan, along with then-police chief Carmen Best, argued for hiring bonuses in 2019, 2020, and 2021 on the grounds that they would help SPD recruit a younger, more diverse cohort of police officers. Dave, a white man, checked “I choose not to disclose this information” next to demographic questions about his race and gender—an unusual move (in 2023, all 41 SPD recruits provided this information) that, if widely adopted, would muddy SPD’s demographic data and could make the department appear more diverse than it is.

SPD could announce how it will discipline Dave, as well as Daniel Auderer—the Seattle Police Officers Guild vice president caught on tape laughing over Kandula’s death—as early as this Friday. Last week, Seattle City Attorney Ann Davison announced she was giving Dave a traffic ticket for second-degree negligent driving, an infraction.

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2. A text-based poll sent to Seattle residents this week asked about how the Seattle City Council should close a $230 million budget gap this year, along with a list of quality-of-life questions that reflect items the city could prioritize for funding or target for cuts. Among questions about policing, homelessness, and crime, the poll included a number of questions about the state of downtown Seattle—a top priority for Mayor Bruce Harrell and business groups like the Seattle Metro Chamber—and taxes.

One question asked whether, after “rais[ing] taxes to fund new programs and initiatives” for several years, the city should “maintain the spending levels and programs in place today and raise new taxes to cover this $230 million deficit” or ” work to offset the deficit by prioritizing government basics, supporting our city’s most vulnerable residents, and reducing non-critical spending before considering tax increases.” Other questions ask whether respondents would feel safe visiting downtown Seattle during the day and at night; “how much impact … closing encampments in parks, on sidewalks, and on other public right of ways would have on improving quality of life in Seattle”; and whether they agree that “Downtown Seattle cannot fully recover until the homelessness and public safety problems are addressed.”

It’s unclear who is behind this poll, which mentions the city council but not the mayor. Harrell has indicated he does not plan to propose any new taxes to close the budget gap, and city departments are already making plans for significant budget cuts amid an ongoing hiring freeze.

3. Meanwhile, Harrell announced that he and the Coalition of City Unions have reached a tentative agreement that will provide a retroactive pay increase, known as a wage adjustment, of 5 percent for 2023 and a 4.5 percent wage adjustment for this year, for a total increase of 9.7 percent this year. (Because the 4.5 percent is an increase above the adjusted 2023 amount, the total works out to 9.7 percent rather than 9.5—math!) The final agreement, as we’ve reported, is a victory for the city unions, which dismissed Harrell’s initial 1 percent proposal as “insulting” and spent much of the last year fighting to increase it.

The final step is approval by the city council, which now includes several members who have suggested the city “has a spending problem” rather than a structural budget problem. Departments are reportedly coming up with plans to lay off employees if the mayor and council stick with their promises to eliminate the budget shortfall without raising new revenues. The new labor contracts are expected to add tens of millions of dollars to the budget this year and in 2025.