September 2024

Harrell’s proposed budget might lead to permanent defunding of affordable housing

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Seattle News:

The big news this week is Mayor Bruce Harrell’s proposed 2025-2026 budget. Here is an overview from the Budget Director of the proposed budget, along with a list of summary and related articles:

In the proposed budget, Harrell moved MORE than the amount of the deficit from the Jumpstart tax fund to cover that deficit. (For those who want figures, he’s transferring $287 million from Jumpstart to the General Fund, and his Budget Director is now saying the deficit for 2025 is around $250 million.) 

This means significantly LESS money for affordable housing, the Green New Deal, small business support, and the Equitable Development Initiative, which Jumpstart is supposed to fund. 

He also cut many programs and 159 positions, 76 of which are currently filled. This means 76 layoffs.

Through a combination of defunding affordable housing and other Jumpstart prioritizing, cutting city programs, and planning for layoffs, he was able to fund some new priorities in the proposed budget, many of which center around public safety.

SPD’s budget is increasing by 16%, or $62 million, in 2025, standing at $457 million. It now constitutes 26% of the entire General Fund. The department’s “ghost cop” positions are maintained, and 30 more civilian positions are added, including 7 new civilian investigators, 2 new special parking enforcement officer positions, and 21 new Real Time Crime Center analysts, 12 to begin in 2025 and the remainder to begin in 2026.

SPD emphasis patrols in the new SODA and SOAP zones will receive an additional $10 million. Almost $4 million are allocated for the surveillance technology pilot that includes RTCC software and CCTV cameras, compared to $1.5 million allocated for this purpose in the 2024 budget.

Seattle will be spending almost $3 million for beds at the SCORE jail in Des Moines, as well as an additional $2 million for more beds in the King County Jail. 

The Unified Care Team that performs the city’s encampment sweeps will be receiving an additional $3.19 million and will be conducting sweeps on weekends.

There will also be legislation transmitted to the council to make permanent the city’s ability to use the Jumpstart payroll tax funds to pay for General Fund priorities however it chooses. Were this change to be made permanent, in future years it could lead to even further defunding of affordable housing, Green New Deal, small business support, and the Equitable Development Initiative. 

The next opportunity to give public comment on the budget is on Wednesday, October 16 starting at 5pm. Budget Chair Dan Strauss has said everyone planning to speak at that particular hearing will receive two minutes to speak. (During most of the public comment periods, if there are enough speakers present, time will be cut to one minute or even 30 seconds.)

If you want a break from thinking about the budget, you can read my article on the new surveillance technology approved by the public safety committee this week. A final vote on the new technologies–CCTV cameras and RTCC software–is expected on Tuesday, October 8 at 2pm.

Other News:

King County Executive Dow Constantine announced the county’s proposed budget this week. Some investments include: 

  • $7.9 million to maintain the Regional Peacekeepers Collective’s work to prevent gun violence
  • $2.3 million for 13 new juvenile detention officers at the Patricia H. Clark Children and Family Justice Center, otherwise known as the youth jail; two new juvenile probation counselors; and additional community programs and transition navigators for youth in and exiting detention
  • $1.725 million for installing “jump barriers” and replacing bunks at the King County Jail to make it harder to commit suicide
  • $56 million to support affordable housing projects within a half mile of a transit station

Marcus Harrison Green wrote (his first?) column at The Stranger in defense of closing the youth jail. Here’s a little taste:

“Instead of blaming a strategy to diminish incarceration that has not been fully implemented, fully funded, or fully committed to, you’d think he and other King County Council Members might be the first to admonish and blame our current system, which is still heavily focused on a carceral approach that has resulted in a 61% rise in juvenile bookings last year, and the same percentage rise in bookings so far this year—returning us to the incarceration levels of 2019.”

Tacoma’s police chief was suddenly placed on leave earlier this week, and in a bizarre turn, the city is refusing to answer any questions about it. 

Recent Headlines:

 

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More jail beds for Seattle

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Seattle News:

Next week the Washington State Supreme Court will hold a hearing on public defender caseload standards. This is a case that could have wide-spread implications and is worth following. 

King County Office of Public Defense Director Anita Khandelwal announced her resignation this week. Her last day will be October 4. Matt Sanders will be replacing her on an interim basis; appointing a new director will probably take several months. 

The Seattle City Council went ahead and passed the SODA, SOAP, and prostitution loitering laws on Tuesday, after hours of public comment that was mostly against the new legislation. I wrote an article tying together the recent Supreme Court Grants Pass decision with Seattle’s attitude towards sweeps and these new laws.

The Stranger reported that “precinct data casts doubt on whether most voters who live in these areas support these policies. In half the zones, voters cast ballots against the current city council members in the 2023 election.” This could forecast potential electoral backlash against some current council members in 2027.

Earlier today, Seattle and King County announced they’ve come to a new agreement about the King County Jail. According to the press release, “the revised agreement updates rates that have been in place for many years, while allowing the City to use up to 135 jail beds and lift booking restrictions for misdemeanor crimes prioritized by the City of Seattle.” 

Seattle intends to spend $24 million on the King County Jail contract in 2025. The city’s recent contract for a SCORE jail pilot was not mentioned and is presumably proceeding as planned, adding another 20 or more beds of jail capacity for the city.

The council finally decided to add an alternative to I-137 funding social housing to the ballot in February, when the initiative will be decided during a special election. The alternative calls for the JumpStart tax to fund the PDA at $10 million a year for five years, thereby pitting affordable housing against social housing. Given that the Council’s suggestion would potentially rule out social housing’s mixed income model, it wouldn’t be creating true social housing in a way that would be likely to succeed.

This alternative may be vulnerable to a legal standard of what an appropriate alternative measure would be, however. Further, former City Attorney Pete Holmes says the actions thus far of the council could be seen as a “voter suppression tactic” in violation of the City Charter. This possibility could open up certain council members to a recall. 

Seattle Budget and Public Safety Meetings Next Week:

On Monday 9/23 at 9:30am the Governance, Accountability, and Economic Development committee will have a special meeting to vote on new legislation that would make SPD hiring bonuses permanent. This legislation would also increase hiring bonuses for lateral hires (officers from other departments who already have experience) from $30,000 up to $50,000. New recruits would continue receiving a $7,500 hiring bonus. 

This proposal would cost about $1.5 million per year and come out of SPD’s budget, most likely from “salary savings.” 

As PubliCola reported, “There is little evidence to suggest that Seattle’s already generous one-time signing bonuses have increased police hiring (and substantial evidence to suggest that one-time bonuses are ineffective as a hiring and retention strategy).”

Public comment will be heard at the beginning of this meeting. 

On Tuesday, 9/24 at 9:30am the Public Safety committee will meet to vote on new surveillance technology being deployed by SPD, namely CCTV cameras and RTCC software. You can read more about this so-called Technology-Assisted Crime Prevention Pilot in my previous pieces on the subject here and here. 

One of the amendments planned for discussion would expand the area of the pilot focused on Aurora by several blocks, increasing the price tag on the proposed technology. Were the current amendments to be adopted, the cost would be $1.3 million for CCTV cameras and another $0.40 million for the new RTCC software, a number that has changed from the original budget attached to this project. We may learn more about the ongoing costs for this pilot program in the proposed budget next week. 

Councilmember Saka would also like a feasibility study on expanding the pilot to other areas including West Seattle.

It is noteworthy that the city’s Surveillance Advisory Working Group do NOT recommend implementing either of these technologies in a pilot program at this time. 

Public comment will be heard at the beginning of this meeting. 

On Tuesday, 9/24 at 2pm Mayor Bruce Harrell will present his proposed 2025-2026 budget.

On Wednesday, 9/25 at 9:30am Central Staff will be giving council an overview of the proposed budget. Unless things change, public comment will be heard at the beginning of this meeting.

Starting on Friday, 9/27 at 9:30am the council will begin hearing budgetary department presentations. As of now, public comment is also supposed to be heard at the beginning of this meeting, but this is subject to change. 

Recent Headlines:

 

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Permanent SPD Hiring Bonuses and Expanded SODA Zones

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Budget Talk:

Looking for last-minute plans for tomorrow afternoon? Hosted by the 46th District Democrats, I will be joined by Ron Davis tomorrow, Saturday 9/14 at 2pm to give a presentation about the Seattle city budget and the upcoming budget season. We’re meeting at the Northeast Public Library, 6801 35th Ave NE, and the program will be 90 minutes long. Feel free to come on up and brush up on budget basics!

Seattle News:

On Monday morning, the Seattle City Council is holding a special Governance, Accountability, and Economic Development Committee meeting to discuss legislation that would make SPD officer hiring bonuses permanent. It would also increase the lateral hiring bonus from $30,000 to $50,000. Officers would be eligible for these bonuses if they left SPD for a period of at least two years and then elected to return. Any officer receiving a bonus must then serve at SPD for at least five years. The annual estimated cost of this program is $1.5 million.

Last Tuesday, the Public Safety committee met to discuss the SODA and SOAP legislation, both of which they unanimously passed. You can read my live tweets of the meeting here.

Several new SODA zones were added to the legislation: Pioneer Square, Belltown, Capitol Hill, and the University District, and some added blocks to the CID proposed zone. The SOAP zone ordinance was changed so that the SOAP zones will no longer apply to sex workers, only to buyers and promoters. However, the prostitution loitering law is still part of the ordinance.

The Stranger reported that in an initial draft of the SOAP bill, Moore tried to include funding for The More We Love, a one-year-old nonprofit organization that is mostly known for conducting sweeps. As such funding would be required to go through a competitive bidding process, Moore later retracted that part of the legislation. Currently no additional funding for services is included in the ordinance.

The final vote on this legislation will be on Tuesday, September 17 at 2pm. 

In a graffiti case against SPD, a judge has ordered the city to pay over $750,000 in legal fees for the plaintiffs, who won their jury trial back in June. 

In the case of the death of Black Lives Matter protester Summer Taylor, a jury ruled that the state was not negligent, and that the driver who struck Taylor must pay their family $6 million in damages. 

The family of Jaahnavi Kandula is suing Seattle for $110 million plus $11,000 in a reference to SPOG VP Daniel Auderer’s cruel comment about Kandula’s life having no value. PubliCola reported that attorney Vonda Sargent said Officer Kevin Dave should have never been hired, and the fact that SPD knew about his history and still hired him points to a systemic problem. 

The Seattle Indian Health Board is walking away from working with SPD to improve how officers track cases of missing and murdered Indigenous people and behave with Indigenous communities. In doing so the organization is walking away from a contract of $87,500 per year. 

Abigail Echo-Hawk, the organization’s executive vice president told The Seattle Times, “I’m tired of sitting on committees while people die. We’re going to work with entities that want to change, and I hope SPD will eventually be an organization that wants to meaningfully help.” 

PubliCola has given a rundown of the OPA’s current investigations on former SPD Chief Adrian Diaz. There are currently 14 intake investigations on the former Chief that are pending at OPA.

Recent Headlines:

 

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How the democratic process in Seattle is being undermined by the City Attorney’s Office

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There hasn’t been a huge amount of news as we all recover from the long weekend, but let’s look at what we’ve got this week.

Seattle News:

This weekend there was follow-up on a story I wrote last March about Seattle Municipal Court Judge Pooja Vaddadi. If you remember, the City Attorney’s Office (CAO) announced they would file an affidavit of prejudice against Vaddadi on all criminal cases going forward. Six months later, this tactic to prevent Vaddadi from hearing criminal cases is ongoing. 

Now Judge Vaddadi, recently returned from maternity leave, has published an op-ed in The Stranger sharing her perspective on this unprecedented step on the part of Davison. 

In her own words: “This behavior has a significantly negative impact on the Court and our democratic process. If prosecutors can effectively nullify a sitting judge this way, we do not have real elections. To my knowledge, this is the first time in Washington history that a prosecutor has made it so a particular judge will never hear any criminal cases.”

Vaddadi claims every detail named in the memo written by then-Criminal Division Chief Natalie Walton-Anderson, who now works for the Mayor’s Office as the Director of Public Safety, is false, and many of its false claims, even were they true, do not reflect the bias of which Vaddadi has been accused. Neither Vaddadi nor any reporter has been able to obtain the details for the cases cited in the memo. Vaddadi is blunt in her op-ed: “The CAO has failed to provide any evidence of this case simply because it does not exist.”

The memo in question was circulated only a few weeks after Vaddadi had disqualified a prosecuting attorney from a case due to a “potential ethics and evidentiary issue,” the only decision made by Vaddadi that the city has appealed. Her decision was later held up by the Superior Court. 

As budget season quickly approaches, it is also relevant to point out that not only do these blanket affidavits undermine the democratic process of electing judges in Seattle, they are also costing the city additional money, as it now needs to hire pro tem judges to cover the cases Vaddadi is not able to hear. 

In other news, Seattle kids returned to school on Wednesday, and there is a report that on the first day of school, an SPD officer sat in Garfield’s parking lot most of the day. Two security guards were also observed patrolling, and some members of Community Passageways were present at lunchtime. 

King County News:

Following the King County Council’s vote last week to support a non-binding motion to keep its youth jail (The Judge Patricia H. Clark Children and Family Justice Center) open, The Stranger reported on how Councilmember Girmay Zahilay’s vote in favor of this motion seems to contradict his 2019 platform to “dismantle our current youth prison model.” The article speculates that Zahilay might have chosen to vote in this way due to a desire to become the next King County Executive; if he’s preparing for a run next year, he might benefit from distancing himself from the “radical” left. 

However, Zahilay  told The Stranger that his position on youth incarceration hasn’t actually changed that much, and that the community groups that helped him develop his platform back in 2019 were in favor of his amendments to the recent motion, which was originally put forward by Councilmember Reagan Dunn. 

Current Executive Dow Constantine, on the other hand, is sticking with his decision made in 2020 to work towards closing the youth jail. He told The Stranger, “The youth justice system does not produce the outcomes we all want, which are safe communities and healthy kids.”

As the narrative of increasing youth crime begins to spread both locally and elsewhere in the nation, The Stranger provides an important counterpoint by looking at local case referral numbers: juvenile crime at present seems about on par with pre-pandemic numbers. Bookings into the youth jail are now also about on par with pre-pandemic numbers. Both these numbers had dropped in 2020 due to the pandemic.

The main difference between pre-pandemic and now appears to be that youth are more likely to be using guns, which is a strong argument in favor of investing more heavily in the County’s  gun violence prevention programs that are perennially underfunded. 

King County’s budget season begins at the same time as Seattle’s, with Constantine’s proposed budget dropping on September 24 and council budget briefings beginning on September 25. 

While King County usually does a biennial budget, for this budget cycle they will only be preparing a budget for 2025 in order to avoid budget season overlapping with elections for county offices. Voters recently approved elections at the county level to move to even years, which means those elected for office in 2023 and 2025 will only serve three-year terms. Four-year terms will resume beginning for those elected in 2026. 

Recent Headlines:

 

How the democratic process in Seattle is being undermined by the City Attorney’s Office Read More »