September 2025

Seattle’s budget is precariously balanced, faces long-term problems

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Seattle News:

First off, we’re officially in budget season! Both Mayor Bruce Harrell’s proposed Seattle budget for 2026 and Executive Shannon Braddock’s proposed King County budget for 2026-2027 were introduced on Tuesday. 

I wrote an overview of the Seattle budget, which covers a lot of ground. Once again, the Seattle Police Department (SPD) was the clear winner, with the largest budgetary increase of any City department. 

And for those of you who remember that pesky budget deficit, Harrell managed to avoid having to make large cuts and layoffs by continuing to transfer the JumpStart payroll tax into the General Fund and getting behind two new revenue sources: the retool of the B&O tax championed by Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck and a new 0.1% public safety sales tax. 

Harrell got very lucky in that the most recent city revenue forecast was decidedly better than the one earlier this year. He would have also been in trouble if it weren’t for Rinck’s B&O tax proposal, which explains why he got behind a new progressive revenue source for the first time in his mayoral term. 

However, that revenue forecast is very uncertain, and it’s quite possible the next forecast, due October 20, will be significantly worse. Happily for Harrell, that will be the city council’s problem and his hands will remain relatively clean for his reelection campaign. 

King County has already passed its own 0.1% public safety tax, which is singlehandedly saving the county from its own large deficit. 

Speaking of SPD, ICE is launching a new advertisement campaign to recruit Seattle law enforcement. They’re offering hiring bonuses and student loan forgiveness to entice candidates, while telling them they’ll be working to detain illegal immigrants who have committed crimes. However, here in Washington State, 60% of those currently in detention have no criminal record, while others have minor infringements only like traffic violations.

I dived into Seattle’s new AI Policy so you wouldn’t have to. Somehow I survived the many buzzwords and learned about the 42 AI pilots the City of Seattle has conducted so far. I covered several concerns, but I think one of the most interesting things I discovered is SPD’s potential interest in diving into the world of AI-generated predictive policing. 

Relatedly, PubliCola reported on an Office of Police Accountability (OPA) complaint from a community member who used an AI-detecting tool that found several public-facing communications from SPD (blog posts and a statement from the new police chief) appeared to be completely or partially written by AI. 

As I reported at The Urbanist, on October 8, the Seattle Public Schools school board is set to vote on whether Garfield High School will have a “Student Enforcement Officer” (SEO) pilot program this school year. They were supposed to vote on this pilot during their September meeting, but board director Joe Mizrahi asked for a postponement while he works on an amendment. 

Washington State News:

In July, Cascade PBS reported that Governor Bob Ferguson has the lowest six-month approval rating of any Washington State governor since 1993. 

And things aren’t slated to get any easier for Ferguson. Out this week, the most recent state revenue estimate has gotten worse. Revenues are expected to drop another $889 million over the next four years. Lawmakers will grapple to rebalance the state’s 2026 budget during the short legislative session early next year. 

Local Media:

Earlier this week, Seattle’s Cascade PBS station announced it’s laying off most of its newsroom staff and discontinuing production of local long-form journalism. This is a huge blow to local journalism in the Puget Sound area, and to be honest, I’m still reeling. You can donate to the laid off journalists here.

The cancellation of Cascade PBS’s local coverage comes the same year we’ve seen a large shift over at The Stranger, which appears to have changed its focus to covering local arts and culture at the expense of covering as much local news as in the past. Certainly from my perspective, as a local reporter covering the public safety beat, the sudden lack of a criminal justice reporter at The Stranger has left a huge void in what gets covered.

Mayoral candidate Katie Wilson has been promoting her Local News Dollars program that would provide public funding to small local media outlets, which gives me some hope for the future. But in the meantime, now would be a good time to donate to those outlets that still exist, including PubliCola, The Urbanist, the South Seattle Emerald, and Real Change. 

I suppose I should also mention that you can support Notes from the Emerald City and my work through my Patreon. 

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The City of Seattle is watching you

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Surveillance News:

First off, I’ll share my piece on Seattle’s surveillance expansion. City Council passed the legislation to implement this expansion on a 7-2 vote on Tuesday. Yesterday I heard about a website that some concerned citizens put up with a good round-up of media coverage of the vote.

Lavender Rights Project, Seattle Pride, and the Seattle DSA have made social media posts against the expansion. Lavender Rights Project wrote, “Lavender Rights Project is located directly within the zone of this projected surveillance expansion. Yet no impact analysis was conducted, nor was robust effort made to engage with our staff, or the communities we represent–those who will be most affected by these decisions. This disregard highlights exactly whose safety is prioritized, and whose lives are put at risk.”

This flier was also spotted in Capitol Hill:

In other surveillance news, DivestSPD found that state and federal law enforcement officers are sharing license plate data on obscure Seattle police email lists. 

The Intercept reported on how the company Fusus connected City of Seattle officials, including Claudia Gross-Shader from the Auditor’s Office, to a man, Marshall Freeman, who they introduced as the deputy chief administrative officer of the Atlanta Police Department. What Fusus neglected to tell the City was that Freeman is a member of their board and owns a small share of the company. The City didn’t find out until recently; in the meantime, Seattle bought Fusus’s real-time crime center software for an estimated price of $1.8 million. 

The kicker? “Gross-Shader also noted that the city had not seen research demonstrating the ability of Fusus’s technology to play a significant role in reducing retail theft, the issue that originally brought her to look into the company.”

Flock Safety, known for its extensive nationwide network of license plate readers, has rolled out a new feature that analyzes driving patterns to determine “suspicious” behavior and flag people as potential participants in organized crime. The ACLU writes about several reasons why this is concerning.

Forest Park, a city in Illinois, gave U.S. Customs and Border Patrol access to their license plate data. This example is noteworthy because Forest Park doesn’t use Flock Safety license plate readers, which have been garnering a lot of press recently. Their license plate readers are provided by Motorola Solutions, showing the dangers of this technology aren’t a matter of a single problematic vendor. 

Finally, Waymo self-driving cars are now being tested in the Seattle area. I know self-driving cars are a controversial issue and there are many big fans of the technology out there, but I would be remiss not to point out the surveillance capabilities of these vehicles, with LAPD and other police departments obtaining surveillance footage from these cars and using it as evidence. You can read 404 Media’s reporting about that here.  

Seattle News:

Earlier this month, I wrote about the opening of the new post-overdose stabilization ORCA center across from the King County courthouse. DESC, the organization that runs the new center, is also pioneering a different medicine treatment protocol for opioid addiction that thus far seems to be easier for people to tolerate. 

Last week, Seattle’s long-lasting consent decree finally came to an end. Mayor Bruce Harrell also announced he expects to finish negotiating a new contract with SPOG by the end of the year, about which he is very optimistic. We’ll see what he trades away to keep the CARE responders in existence. 

Harrell announced that as of the first day of school, the City has now hired more than 40 additional mental and behavioral health professionals across Seattle Public Schools (SPS) middle and high schools, for a total of over 60 mental health staff. You can read the press release about safety measures at SPS here.

Speaking of SPS, there will be a key board meeting on Wednesday, September 17 at 4:15pm where school board members are expected to vote on a pilot bringing a police officer back into Garfield High School.

Today Harrell announced $1.7 million in awards to expand services for survivors of commercial sexual exploitation (CSE). Organizations that received awards are the Organization for Prostitution Survivors, the Seattle Indian Health Board, Real Escape from the Sex Trade (REST), and Consejo Counseling and Referral Service. Notably absent from the list is one of former Councilmember Cathy Moore’s favorite providers, The More We Love.

King County and Washington State news:

This week, the King County Council voted in favor of moving forward the process of buying and opening a crisis care center in Capitol Hill. 

Washington Supreme Court Justice Mary Yu announced her retirement at the end of the year. Governor Bob Ferguson will appoint a replacement to serve until an election next year, where candidates will run to finish Yu’s term, which goes until the end of 2028. 

Washington Supreme Court justices are required to retire the year they turn 75 years old. Associate Chief Justice Charles Johnson will be turning 75 in 2026, and Justice Barbara Madsen will be turning 75 in 2027. With three Supreme Court seats up for grabs in the next few years, these upcoming judicial elections will shape the future of Washington state. 

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SPOG President says DC is a “blueprint” of Trump’s future public safety actions across the nation

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Surveillance News:

Seattle’s public safety committee passed its surveillance expansion proposal out of committee before the council’s summer recess. We are expecting a final vote on the proposal on Tuesday, September 9 at 2pm. As usual, public comment will be heard at the beginning of this meeting. 

I went onto Hacks & Wonks to discuss this surveillance expansion further, as well as how it ties into the greater federal surveillance expansion, so keep an eye out for that episode later this week. 

For now, I’ll give you a little preview. President Donald Trump announced the federal takeover of the Washington DC police department the day before the Seattle committee vote on the surveillance expansion was taken. Reporting shows that there is now most likely federal control over DC’s real time crime center. Right now that surveillance can help the feds with their immigration crackdown in DC, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what this surveillance data can be used to accomplish, particularly for a federal government that is rapidly moving into authoritarianism. That Seattle might somehow be uniquely immune to this attempt is wishful thinking at best.

Seattle Police Officers Guild (SPOG) President Mike Solan recently had the D.C. Police Union Chairman Gregg Pemberton on his podcast to discuss the situation in DC. Pemberton said the police in DC welcome the intervention by the feds, and Solan clearly supported Trump’s actions in this regard as well. 

Solan said, “Pay attention to what’s happening in the District of Columbia because it is the blueprint of what you’re going to see nationwide when it comes to the Trump administration’s public safety actions.”

Solan is elected by a majority of SPD’s rank and file to represent them.

In Seattle, CCTV security footage (private cameras in this case, as opposed to the cameras owned by SPD) led to the incorrect arrest of an innocent man for an arson in Wallingford. He was held in jail for a month before his case was resolved. His defense attorneys called the SPD’s actions in this case a “rushed and racist misidentification.”

In other surveillance news, it turns out US Customs and Border Patrol has had direct access to Flock Safety’s license plate reader database through a “federal pilot program.” Flock says it has now paused all federal pilots. 

Over at Cascade PBS, Nate Sanford is doing a deep dive on local governments’ usage of ChatGPT. The two stories focus on Bellingham and Everett, as they responded more quickly to public record requests than other cities such as Seattle.

Seattle News:

A new pilot bringing a police officer back to Garfield High School might be beginning soon. The school board is expected to vote on the issue at their September 17 meeting. 

Mayor Bruce Harrell provided the necessary letter of support that allows the crisis care center in Capitol Hill to move forward. 

SPOG has donated $350 to Ann Davison’s reelection campaign for Seattle City Attorney. New reporting at PubliCola says that Davison has failed to live up to her campaign promises made when she first ran back in 2021. 

Real Change reported that SPD spent almost twice as much on legal settlements as had been budgeted between 2014 and 2024. The amount SPD has gone over budget has increased a great deal since 2020. 

DivestSPD reported that almost 400 SPD officers made more than $200,000 in 2024. 76 officers made more than $300,000. 

King County News:

King County is significantly expanding its youth mobile crisis teams from two teams up to nine. 

Candidate for King County Executive (and current Councilmember) Claudia Balducci said she’s planning to introduce a measure to use part of the county’s recently passed 0.1% public safety sales tax bump in order to create a retail crimes task force. Kroger recently decided to shut down a Fred Meyer in Kent (and also one in Lake City), a decision that some people are attributing to shoplifting. Balducci’s opponent Girmay Zahilay, along with UFCW 3000 (the grocery workers union), question whether this is really the primary reason for the store closures.

The King County council passed the county’s public safety sales tax, which is a regressive tax that hits poorer people harder, in order to deal with the county’s upcoming budget deficit. However, there might be a bit of money left over from the tax, and a big question during the county’s budget season will be how this extra money will be spent. King County’s public health programs and clinics, as well as its behavioral health services, are expected to be hard hit financially by federal policy changes. One possible use of any extra dollars could be bridging some of these new and expected funding gaps.

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