Seattle budget season is oh so political

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Seattle News:

It’s been a busy week, and I have three new stories to talk about. 

First off, I wrote about Seattle’s proposed surveillance expansion for The Urbanist, which would give SPD access to 365 SDOT cameras as well as permission to purchase many more cameras to place in three more areas of the city. That the City is trying to push forward with this plan right now, given what’s happening at the federal level, is particularly concerning. 

The public safety committee will be discussing this expansion again (and voting on it)  on Tuesday, August 12 at 9:30am. There will be the opportunity to give public comment at the beginning of this meeting. 

Next up, as I reported at The Urbanist, the Seattle Shield Initiative passed this week, which means Seattleites will be voting on the B&O tax restructure in November. While the council watered the proposal down, it passed with an unanimous vote, which is something I wouldn’t have expected as recently as a month ago. The fact that Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck was able to get this passed in time to be put on the ballot in spite of not having any strong allies on the council is notable. It seems like having Mayor Bruce Harrell on board helped to smooth the way. 

The city received another revenue forecast this week, which was a bit less bad than the one in April. However, the Office of Economic and Revenue Forecasts’ interim director Jan Duras said it’s likely the next revenue forecast, due in October, will be worse.  

This is interesting maneuvering on the part of Harrell, who now gets to base his proposed budget, due at the end of September, on a better forecast than is likely to be true by the time the council actually has to pass the budget. Since his budget team is assuming the Seattle Shield Initiative will pass in their formation of the budget, it’s possible he won’t have to make many unpopular cuts in his proposed budget before the election at the beginning of the November. 

This also means the council will be left with the football when it comes time to grapple with any necessary budget cuts later in October, should the revenue forecast worsen. 

It seems like Harrell might not be overly eager to introduce the public safety sales tax hike after all. If the City doesn’t need the revenue to bridge a deficit gap, he can play it safe with public opinion and postpone implementing such a regressive tax. Even if a councilmember decides to go for it, it will leave Harrell with clean hands.

Councilmember Rinck was also able to add $300,000 to the city’s supplementary budget this week to pay for legal defense for unaccompanied children facing detention and deportation. This money was taken from underspend from Seattle’s much criticized SCORE jail contract. Councilmembers Rob Saka and Martiza Rivera were the sole “no” votes.

My third piece, at Bolts Magazine, covers the renewal of Seattle’s democracy voucher program this week. The City is supposed to convene a workgroup in early 2026 to look into possible improvements to the program, including strategies to better deal with independent expenditures in local races. This will be an opportunity for stakeholders to participate in figuring out what’s next for the program. I’ll also be very interested to see how the combination of democracy vouchers and ranked choice voting in 2027 pans out. 

More Seattle news:

We had a primary! Progressives in Seattle did very well. There is a ton of analysis available to read, none of which I am going to link to. My observation, for what it’s worth, is that many more people appear to pay attention to national news than to local news, so I tend to think the Trump effect is one of the main factors at play here. 

As I was writing this, the news dropped that Katie Wilson, who is running against Harrell for mayor, has broken 50% of the primary vote. Wilson is more than 15,000 votes ahead of Harrell at this time. 

The next consent decree hearing has been set for Wednesday, September 3. This could be the last hearing of Seattle’s consent decree. 

Seattle is paying $3 million to settle the lawsuit brought by SPD’s Deanne Nolette, who alleged wage, job and gender discrimination. She also alleged that former Chief Adrian Diaz had retaliated against her since she had also been up for the Chief job, and that he “has a history of misogyny.” 

Housekeeping:

I’ll be out on vacation the next few weeks, but never fear, I’ll be back at it before the end of the month. Close followers of local news know that the fall tends to be a particularly busy time, and this year should be no exception. 

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