Tag: city budget 2027

City Council, City Hall, human services

Council Critics Accuse Wilson of Creating “the Unfund Budget”

By Erica C. Barnett

Mayor Katie Wilson’s centrist critics on the Seattle City Council spent most of Wednesday accusing the mayor of creating a budget that, as Councilmember Bob Kettle put it repeatedly throughout the day, “unfunds” (rather than defunds) critical services, including encampment removals, graffiti and park restroom cleanups, and transportation projects.

The theme of the day was insinuation: Council members complained about things that have supposedly fallen apart that Bruce Harrell is no longer in office, like the state of parks restrooms or the swiftness of encampment sweeps, then blamed them on Wilson and her budget priorities. Dan Strauss, for instance, said a business owner’s complaint about an encampment that stayed in the same spot for three months shows that there’s been “a complete change in how effectively the city is addressing homelessness,” while Rob Saka assailed the mayor for proposing 10 new portable public restrooms when “we can’t even get our own bathhouse in order!”

“How many new bathrooms are proposed for expansion?” Rob Saka asked rhetorically, projecting to the rafters. “Now we want to expand, create new shiny things, when we can’t even properly take care of the things we have today? Hmm!”

In general, the day’s two budget meetings (which I covered in detail on Bluesky, starting here) were an opportunity for councilmembers who opposed Wilson’s election to overstate the likely impact of her proposed budget cuts and suggest that she should have made different, unspecified decisions to address a $175 million budget deficit.

Take, for example, the “unfunding” of the city’s Unified Care Team, which would lose two and a half administrative positions—desk jobs—that have never been filled.

This cut, Kettle said, represented a larger “deprioritization” of encampment removals—one that has deprived the Parks Department of the “heavy equipment” it needs to haul tents, trash, and people’s possessions away after encampment sweeps. Piling on, Maritza Rivera claimed Wilson’s “budget renders us incapable” of addressing homeless encampments. And Saka railed against the mayor’s decision to move the city’s Unified Care Team back to the Human Services Department rather than having its duties spread across four separate city departments.

Addressing the mayor (who, quite possibly, could hear him from her office five floors above), Saka said, “Now, this might be a good thing to deprioritize [the UCT] t and bury that work down in a department somewhere. It might be a political bone to throw at your democratic socialist base, but it does our communities harm!”

Last year, Saka sponsored a budget proviso, or spending restriction, that required Wilson to maintain the $30 million, 116-member Unified Care Team and keep spending money on specific priorities, such as $2.2 million for police to be present at sweeps.  “Some people on the far, ultra-left lost their national minds!” when he sponsored the proviso, Saka bellowed. “Calls to employee wellness programs skyrocketed, apparently, in some circles after I did that! But it was a wise and responsible thing to do.”

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Later in the day, during a discussion about how to resolve a growing deficit in the Seattle Department of Transportation’s transportation fund ($41 million on average each month this year), council members suggested this was the first they were hearing about the seriousness of SDOT’s financial problems. (SDOT has said the shortfalls stem from higher-than-anticipated costs and lower-than expected revenues.) “I did not know up until a couple weeks ago, right during the budget, as part of the budget process, that SDOT was operating basically in the red in this way,” Rivera said. “This is a new development for council.”

In fact, a staffer reminded her, the budget the council adopted last year showed a growing negative transportation fund balance starting in 2027. That same budget noted that SDOT had finished paying off a previous interfund loan, unanimously approved by the council in 2020, last year. “I think there was some awareness that the transportation fund was having challenges,” the staffer said. “Now it may not have had awareness that starting in 2026, after the interfund loan was paid off, that we continue to have those challenges, but … I looked at last year’s financial plan, and it was a negative balance, and projected for it to be negative balance for this year and the coming years.” 

The council has the authority to revise the budget to reflect their own priorities. But there’s a difference between expressing genuine concern about cuts and deficits and continually rehashing the last election.

Instead of responding like the business community has to Wilson’s budget (with a tone of surprised approval, since the budget funds centrist priorities, like police, with minimal cuts and no new taxes), the council is spending a huge amount of rhetorical energy this year grandstanding over relatively insignificant cuts (rarely have so many budget speeches centered on the elimination of two vacant administrative positions) without acknowledging that for every program they restore, they’ll have to find commensurate cuts elsewhere in the budget. It’s as if Wilson’s opponents on the council think the mayor made up a mean budget just to spite them, and that their job is to righteously restore funding for all their pet projects without balancing the ledger.

Which is to say: Get ready for tomorrow’s meetings, which will focus on the human services, police, and fire departments, three areas where many on the council have, if anything, even bigger feelings about the mayor’s budget proposal.

City Council, Elections, LGBTQ+, Mayor Wilson

Council Learns What “One-Time Funding” Means; Podcaster’s Advocacy for Anti-Trans Campaign Didn’t Violate Election Law

1. City council members who funded an unsustainable budget last year by using one-time dollars to fund tens of millions in new spending are finding out this year what “one-time funding” means.

For years, the council has used a combination of one-time spending and magical thinking to approve new budget adds every year, without creating any kind of plan to pay for them in the future. Last year alone, the council added $78 million in one-time spending to a budget that was already deeply unsustainable. (If you search the budget they approved, you’ll see that the phrase “one-time funding” appears no fewer than 107 times!)

One-time does not mean “actually forever, but we’ll find money for it later (wink).” It means one-time—as city budget director Aly Pennucci repeatedly had to remind outraged councilmembers, who complained that programs they failed to fund for more than one or two years had somehow vanished in Wilson’s budget. These included subsidies for private inpatient rehab, a “district fund” for each councilmember, and a long list of small-business assistance programs. (The budget does include between $10 million and $15 million to make some of the council’s 2026 additions permanent.)

Well into the third day of departmental budget presentations, Rob Saka wanted to know why Wilson was not funding a homeownership program the council funded with one-time dollars last year. Pennucci gave the same explanation she’d been giving for days. Saka, using his oratorical shouting voice (if you watch council meetings, you know the one), responded: “So I hear you saying, it’s not technically a cut, because it was a one-time add!”

To his credit, unlike other councilmembers, Saka did not follow up this comment by continuing to refer to the reduction in one-time funds as a cut.

There was one instance when a council member objected not to the end of one-time funding, but to Wilson’s decision to find money for a priority the council and Harrell previously paid for with one-time funds. Dan Strauss zeroed in on $$4 million for food banks and hot meal programs the council funded on a one-time basis this year. These funds, Strauss said, should be closely scrutinized, because unlike public safety, “providing food is not a charter responsibility.”

Bob Kettle brought up a similar objection when he suggested that the Office of Housing could address some of its own significant budget shortfall by building less affordable housing and counting projects built by the Seattle Social Housing developer, which is separate from city government, toward Seattle’s total number of affordable housing units.

Thinking of affordable housing in the city as one big thing, Kettle said, could help the council “ameliorate” some of Wilson’s “wrong choices”—like setting theoretical caps on police hiring after 2028—by freeing up funding for other council priorities. Counting those units as Seattle affordable housing “could provide some flexibility in the budgeting process because, hey, you know, [the social housing developer has] also got their shoulder in and they’re working hard to contribute to the overall process,” Kettle said. 

Social housing (which the council’s centrists tried to stop) is funded by a dedicated payroll tax, and was designed to create a new kind of mixed-income public housing in which higher-income renters subsidize lower-income renters. It is quite different than the subsidized affordable housing OH funds and builds, and the two aren’t fungible. Getting rid of some low-income subsidized housing would actually eliminate housing for low-income people,

(As an side: Elected officials who support more funding for police often raise this claim about “charter responsibilities,” as in “public safety is our number one charter responsibility.” But actually, the charter lays many other basic responsibilities city government is supposed to address, and “health” actually comes before “safety,” followed by “environment” and “general welfare.”)

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There was also a lot of—what’s the technical term?—nonsense and grandstanding from the council, particular when the Seattle Department of Transportation presented its budget. Struass, in particular, took the opportunity to gripe about hyperlocal issues in his neighborhood, including the fact that King County Metro cut hours on his bus route, which he has consistently characterized as the only bus route from Ballard to downtown Seattle. (It is not). You can read about more of those on my Bluesky.

One other exchange I do want to highlight is Strauss’ suggestion that the city is wasting money by allowing the King County Regional Homelessness Authority to serve as the Continuum of Care for the region. “A bureaucratic system from the county” is “creating inefficiencies for us,” Strauss asserted, adding “I don’t think we have time for that.”

While there have obviously been massive financial problems at the KCRHA—which is why the city is reasserting control over the homelessness contracts it funds—the continuum of care is a federally mandated system that oversees applications for federal funding for programs across King County and its 39 cities. It has never been at the city of Seattle, and a recent forensic audit did not identify it as a source of financial issues.

2. As a few others reported last week (when I was out of town), the state Public Disclosure Commission dismissed a complaint against Let’s Go Washington, the group behind two initiatives targeting children’s rights at school, on September 23. The complaint was filed by Washingtonians for Ethical Government, a nonprofit established in 2015. I reported on the initial complaint back in May

The first initiative would ban trans girls from playing sports in school and require children to prove their sex assigned at birth, through a medically unnecessary physical exam if they don’t have a longtime pediatrician willing to attest that they possess a vagina. The second would give parents access to any notes teachers or counselors make about conversations with students, including conversations about sensitive topics they may feel uncomfortable or unsafe broaching at home, like gender, abortion and birth control, and sexuality.

The complaint alleged that right-wing podcaster Brandi Kruse, who has served as a de facto spokesperson for the campaign, was doing official campaign work when she spoke on the campaign’s behalf. In short, WEG argued that Kruse’s speeches at campaign rallies and fundraisers constituted work on behalf of the campaign, and the campaign should have either compensated her for that work or reported it as an in-kind contribution. The PDC disagreed, agreeing with Kruse and the campaign that the podcaster is just a regular campaign volunteer expressing her personal opinions, and distinguishing her “keynote” speeches to Republican Party groups from her campaign speeches because she does “significant advance planning” for the former.

Kruse argued that the promotion does for the campaign on her own podcast isn’t political advertising either, because the campaign does not directly “control” what she says there. (In theory, she could say something that cast the campaign in a poor light, though she never has). The PDC didn’t address that defense.

City Council, Mayor Wilson

Mayor Wilson Rolls Out Small-C Conservative Budget that Addresses City’s Structural Deficit

The proposal makes real cuts to close a $175 million gap—and reflects the conflict between campaign ambitions and a budget deficit that has gone unaddressed for years.

By Erica C. Barnett

Mayor Katie Wilson’s proposed 2027 budget (announced earlier this week, while I was out of town) would accomplish something that her predecessor, Bruce Harrell, never really attempted: It would close the city’s $175 million structural budget deficit, created largely by the use of one-time funds to pay for ongoing new programs in every budget since 2020. And it would do so in a transparent, sustainable way—by actually cutting departmental budgets, eliminating 128 mostly positions (all but 15 of them vacant), and by foregoing many of the budget tricks that Harrell used to create on-paper balanced budgets that in fact were deeply unsustainable.

What Wilson’s budget does not do, with a couple of notable exceptions (increased shelter funding, new public restrooms, and cuts to civilian police position), is strongly reflect many of the values that got the mayor elected, including a commitment to police alternatives, taxing big corporations, and funding not just hundreds but thousands of new shelter beds.

In particular, it includes no new progressive revenues and heavily relies on the existing JumpStart tax to supplant programs that were previously paid for through the general fund—including $65 million in existing homelessness funding that will now come out of JumpStart. It eliminates funding for long-vacant positions, ongoing new programs for which Harrell and the council used one-time funding, and some of Harrell’s pet-priority projects, like graffiti removal and AI.

The plan has earned Wilson praise from the business community, and from some in Seattle’s conservative and right-wing press. It is small-c conservative in a way that Harrell’s spendthrift, please-everybody budgets never were. It’s possible that many of Wilson’s most hard-core supporters will rally around this budget even though it further institutionalizes the repurposing of JumpStart and other policies that progressives roundly criticized Harrell for, simply because they’re coming from Wilson.

In some ways, it may have taken Wilson—a heterodox housing and transit activist who the mainstream press loves to refer to as an “avowed socialist”—to propose this budget. The council, which overloaded last year’s budget with spending restrictions designed to lock Wilson in to their priorities, will almost certainly have a field day with it, piling on new spending while insisting (as budget chair Dan Strauss did on Thursday) that their budgets have always been sustainable. But if the council decides to knock Wilson’s budget, which is balanced through 2030, out of balance, it will be on them, not her.

I’m going to focus on some of the highlights of the budget, which the city council took up today at an initial high-level today. I’m also focusing on changes to the budget that haven’t been previously announced. Previously announced changes include funding for universal free meals at schools; funding to enforce the city’s ban on residential junk fees and on algorithmic grocery pricing; funding to accelerate shelter construction; funding for a new city prosecutor to pursue extreme risk protection orders and the return of $127 million in city funding for homelessness programs from the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, which I’ve covered elsewhere.

Lots and lots more to come; these are just a few things that jumped out at me as I took a first look at the 735-page budget book.

JumpStart is Basically Just a Slush Fund Now

JumpStart—a tax, paid by businesses, on the compensation of highly paid workers at large companies—was originally supposed to provide additive funding for affordable housing, green jobs, and equitable development, all areas that were related to the spike in Seattle’s cost of living due to the recent influx of high-paid tech workers. Instead, since it passed, every mayor has used a growing portion of the JumpStart fund to pay for basic city needs—which of course means less money for the emerging needs JumpStart was created to address. Wilson’s budget is no different.

Wilson’s budget takes $173 million out of JumpStart to supplant general-fund spending unrelated to the four JumpStart priorities, plus another $65 million to pay for homelessness programs that were previously paid for out of the general fund. The budget counts the existing homelessness programs as “JumpStart” priorities, which is technically true, but because they’re existing general-fund programs I’m going to add them to the $173 million, to get a total of $238 million that Wilson is proposing to takes out of the JumpStart bucket.

Overall, Wilson’s budget repurposes a whopping 59 percent of this year’s $402 million in JumpStart revenues for general-fund purposes. However, because the budget also grabs $43 million out of a fund balance JumpStart has left over from previous years, plus $8 million in earnings from JumpStart fund investments, that total could also be calculated at around 52 percent—still substantially more than the 38 percent Wilson’s budget claims by counting the shifted homelessness programs as essentially new JumpStart spending. (Wilson’s budget uses another large JumpStart balance transfer in 2028, but the fund starts to grow again the following year).

“No More Public Safety” (will be the KOMO headline when they figure this out)

Police spending is projected to grow this year, but not because the mayor is proposing to substantially increase hiring. As we’ve reported, SPD has been put on notice that it needs to slow hiring even as applications pour in from people attracted by huge starting salaries, and Wilson’s budget eliminates temporary hiring bonuses adopted after hiring dropped in 2020; it also cuts millions in funding Harrell added for ridiculous macho recruiting ads.

The biggest cost increase in the SPD budget is a $56 million in wage and benefit increases from the Seattle Police Officers Guild contract Harrell and the city council agreed to last year; that contract, as we’ve reported, boosts the salaries of newly hired cops well above six figures.

The rest of the increase, about $12.6 million, will pay for 66 net new officers who were “hired in 2026 but only partially funded” in Harrell’s 2026 budget, plus funding for two SPD mental health professionals that Harrell’s budget only funded for nine months of this year (speaking of unsustainable budget tricks). The budget essentially calls for capping the number of police officers at 1,250 after 2028, a figure that will unquestionably surface as an issue during the budget process, when the city council has a whack at the budgey,.

SPD’s budget also goes down in one area where Harrell allowed it to balloon unaccountably: The police chief’s office, which former chief Shon Barnes expanded dramatically by establishing a cadre of new positions, each more elaborately titled than the last, will lose three positions. Barnes’ Chief Communications Officer (FKA communications director) Barbara DeLollis and his Executive Director of Crime and Community Harm Reduction Lee Hunt left earlier this year. Alex Ricketts, Barnes’ chief of staff, is still a member of SPD’s command staff, while Andre Sayles, one of Barnes’ two deputy chiefs (most chiefs have just one deputy) is now interim police chief.

Overall, the budget provides funding for 1,866 positions each year through 2030—24 fewer, thanks to cuts to mostly vacant civilian positions, than last year. These positions include parking enforcement officer jobs that have been unfilled for years; PEO jobs are perennially hard to fill because they pay relatively poorly and are high-stress, which is one reason why cutting the empty positions does not actually mean cutting back on parking enforcement.

What it does mean is that SPD will lose some of the funding it uses for other purposes, in an annual sleight-of-hand that is not visible in budget documents. Although the department gets funding for overtime, they routinely use more than they ask for at the beginning of each year; to make up this predictable shortfall, the department uses SPD’s funded but vacant positions to pay for their overspending. (Further routinizing this lack of spending restraint, SPD routinely asks the council to add more money to the department’s budget later in the year as part of a less-visible “supplemental” budget process.) The budget’s $6.5 million or so in civilian savings, in other words, is also $6.5 million SPD can no longer use as a slush fund to pay for overtime; if these reductions become part of the budget.

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Just about every other department takes cuts to vacant positions in Wilson’s budget, but SPD’s are the most likely to raise objections from the council. Councilmember Bob Kettle was already fulminating against them at the council’s initial budget briefing on Thursday.

Council members also signaled Thursday that they have big questions about Wilson’s decision to reduce funding for the Community Assisted Response and Engagement (CARE) team to defer funding for 14 new crisis responders, the previously planned expansion for this year. (The budget doesn’t propose eliminating any of these positions).

CARE is also taking over a bunch of gun violence prevention initiatives from the Human Services Department as part of the gun-violence plan Wilson announced last week.

CARE department Chief Amy Barden said in the past that the 34-member team has had challenges filling its time because of excessive restrictions in the SPOG contract (CARE team members were told not to respond to a crisis in a grocery store parking lot, for instance, because of a contract provision saying they could only respond to crises that occur on publicly owned land), but has said in recent months that SPD has shown more willingness to allow the team to respond to the type of calls for which it was explicitly created. Wilson’s budget also eliminates funding for nine vacant 911 call taker positions, another potential point of conflict with the council.

The proposed budget also cuts overtime at the Fire Department by $7 million, requiring “the department to manage staffing within available resources.” Expect council fireworks over this one as well.

A few little things that could become big things

Stuff to look out for as the budget conversations go on this fall:

• The Seattle Department of Transportation’s budget is seriously out of whack, thanks largely to revenue shortfalls in SDOT’s Transportation Fund and Transportation Benefit District fund that I’m sure will get explained in more detail when the council discusses the department’s budget.

Transportation fund revenues have been declining every year. In Wilson’s budget, declining revenues in these two funds translate into cuts to both new capital projects and basic maintenance, as well as a shift in funding for “high priority” projects, like sidewalks and curb ramps, to the city’s automatic traffic camera program, which is expected to bring in more revenues once it expands to include automated speeding cameras (in addition to cameras that red-light and other traffic violations). The budget also increases taxes for parking in commercial

• Wilson’s budget proposes eliminating an awful lot of council (and mayoral) adds from previous years, which will undoubtedly rub some councilmembers the wrong way. For instance, the budget for the Parks Department cuts seven new positions the council added last year; I’ve asked the budget office which positions these are, but the possibilities include two anti-graffiti staff and three new park rangers. The budget would also cut some vacant positions on the Unified Care Team, which removes homeless encampments; Harrell and the council have repeatedly expanded the team and the council placed a restriction on the budget last year that makes it nearly impossible to cut the size of the 116-member team.

Wilson’s Parks budget also eliminates $500,000 in “discretionary graffiti funding”; Harrell, by his own admission, was absolutely obsessed with ridding Seattle of graffiti, and the word “graffiti” appears 71 times in his 2026 budget, compared to six times in Wilson’s.

The budget would also cut $500,000 Harrell added to last year’s budget for an AI system that was supposed to “streamline the permitting application process and improve customer services using Artificial Intelligence and data integration.”

• There’s also a new $500,000 for the (still troubled, from the complaints I continue to hear) Workday payroll system—this time, to pay for “surge” tech support to deal with changes to labor union contracts in real time. You would think that things like pay increases and classification changes could be handled by the city’s very large citywide and departmental HR staffs, but this is Workday we’re talking about.

 

City Council, Mayor Wilson, Police

Mayor’s Press Secretary Departs, Budget for Police Salary Hikes Tops $80 Million

1. Sage Wilson, Mayor Katie Wilson’s press secretary, is leaving the mayor’s office after less than seven months on the job, after deciding he’d be more effective as an advocate for progressive causes outside the mayor’s office than inside it. Wilson, who previously worked in media relations for the labor advocacy group Working Washington and the progressive policy group Civic Ventures, doesn’t have a job lined up yet; his last day will be in early August.

Sage Wilson is just the latest in a string of mayoral staffers to leave Wilson’s office, and the second top communications staffer. In June, as we reported, Wilson asked her communications director (and Sage Wilson’s boss), Seferiana Day, to resign after a string of bad press for the mayor, much of which occurred while Day was on medical leave. After Day’s departure, the mayor’s office hired Crystal Nicole Fincher, the political consultant, podcaster, and co-owner of KVRU Radio, to join her team temporarily as a big-picture communications consultant, and brought on longtime SDOT spokeswoman Dawn Schellenberg as a temporary media relations staffer.

Day’s old position has been posted publicly, but the mayor’s office has reportedly been talking to Gregory Joseph, until recently the communications director for the Alliance for Gun Responsibility. (Editor’s note: This story originally said Joseph was the Alliance’s current communications director. A representative from the group reached out to let us know his “role ended in June.” We regret the error). Several sources have told PubliCola the mayor’s office has interviewed Joseph “informally,” although the official line is that they haven’t done any interviews yet and are considering any and all candidates for the job. (The mayor’s office did not immediately respond to questions about the communications director position Wednesday morning).

Prior to joining the Alliance, Joseph was in the news in New Orleans for allegedly misusing $51,00o in city funds to create campaign mailers for his boss, then-mayor LaToya Cantrell, during the final stretch of an ultimately unsuccessful recall campaign against her.  Joseph was later accused of violating procurement policies with a no-bid contract as well. According to local media reports, the council found Joseph guilty of violating city policies, gross misconduct, incompetence and neglect of official duty and unanimously voted to suspend his pay, effectively firing him.

Another Wilson staffer, city council liaison Tracey Whitten, just went on an extended medical leave, telling the City Council in an email that she plans to return in November.  In her absence, Karem Levitas, a senior policy advisor to the mayor who spent a decade as a policy staffer for the city’s Office of Labor Relations, will take over.

The relationship between the council and mayor, as we’ve reported, has been rocky, thanks in part to early friction between councilmembers and two Wilson staffers, Jonathan Grant (who resigned in May) and Kate Kreuzer (reassigned to a different job two weeks before Grant was asked to step down).

Asked about mayor-council relations during a media availability earlier this week, City Council President Joy Hollingsworth gave an equivocal answer, saying the relationship was new, still  “building,” and getting better over time. But she also said Wilson’s team didn’t talk with the council before introducing their Families, Education, Preschool, and Promise levy spending plan, which led to a heated debate over whether to use levy funds to pay for universal free lunches or targeted spending on take-home food for low-income kids.

” I do not like a food fight,” Hollingsworth said. “Number one, if I were to have a conversation with the mayor about this plan before they announced it in April, I would have said let’s lower the [eligibility] threshold to 30 percent”—making schools eligible for free meals when 30 percent of their kids qualify for free and reduced lunches—”instead of 40 percent. … let’s get those schools that are on the bubble for the first year, and then the next year we can expand it.”

2. The city’s midyear supplemental budget is usually as boring as its name. This year is largely no exception—the proposal, before any council amendments, keeps the city’s 2026 budget mostly in balance, with just $500,000 in additional spending that does not have an identified funding source. (The council adopts supplemental budgets every year to keep spending in line with expectations and make any changes that the original budget, adopted every November, didn’t anticipate.)

But the staid supplemental does include a potential warning sign: The budget update assumes the city will spend just over $80 million this year paying retroactive (2024-2025) and current (2026) wage increases for SPD officers (represented by the Seattle Police Officers Guild) and officers with a rank of lieutenant or captain (represented by the Seattle Police Management Association), combined.

This total is about $12 million less than the city estimated back in 2025, when the fiscal notes, or cost estimates, for the new contracts totaled a little more than $90 million. And that was back when SPD estimated it would hire 100 new officers this year; more recently, the department said they were on track to hire 167 new cops, a pace that could require them to slow down hiring unless the city gives them even more money.

City budget director Aly Penucci told PubliCola the city already set aside enough in reserves for just this kind of budget uncertainty, and noted that $90 million represented the “estimate of what the potential maximum exposure would be that is refined as more information is known.”

Even so, the big numbers are ominous news for next year’s budget, for which Wilson has asked every department (including SPD) to come up with cuts of 5 to 10 percent. (The city is facing a deficit of about $175 million next year). Some on the council have reportedly signaled intent to hold the line on police spending, aka business as usual, giving SPD whatever it needs to hire as many new recruits as can walk through the door and meet the minimum standards.

With various public safety departments, including fire and police, taking up almost half a billion dollars,  holding police harmless this year will require bigger cuts to other city departments. Boring though supplemental budgets may be, the debate over whether to slow down police spending is shaping up to be the major battle of the upcoming budget season.