Last week, the Seattle City Council voted 8-1 to approve their 2025-2026 budget proposal, dubbed “The People’s Budget” by Council Member Maritza Rivera. This characterization is not only a clear erasure of Council Member Kshama Sawant, but it’s deeply untrue. The City Council failed to tax the rich, bastardized the City’s tax on corporations, defunded important programming for working people, inflated the Seattle Police Department’s (SPD) already bloated budget, and ran a process so littered with shenanigans, “The People” could hardly keep up —let alone sufficiently advocate for their priorities. Dozens of advocacy groups have expressed disappointment with the budget. Conversely, the business interest that helped the council get elected gave them an enthusiastic “two thumbs up.”
Council Member Tammy Morales, the lone “no” vote on the budget, said that the council “turned a blind eye” to thousands of constituents during their negotiations.
Choking back tears, Morales said, “To the advocates who have worked so hard to protect funding for programs that serve communities of color, that serve the most vulnerable, or that could have addressed our housing and infrastructure needs, I’m sorry that this budget will cause more harm.”
Revenue Woes
The City faced a quarter billion dollar revenue shortfall this budget cycle, driven largely by inflation and the loss of one-time pandemic relief funds. In his initial proposal, Mayor Bruce Harrell raided $330 million in revenue from the JumpStart Payroll Expense Tax, allocating $287 million to backfill the General Fund, which covers expenses for the SPD, Seattle Parks and Recreation (SPR), and more. This rightfully angered housing advocates, environmentalists, and Seattle progressives at large because Jumpstart funds are legally obligated to pay for affordable housing, Green New Deal initiatives, and equitable development projects. Adding insult to injury, Harrell also introduced another $100 million in new spending while breaking the City’s 2020 commitment to a broad coalition of JumpStart supporters.
Advocates urged the council to use JumpStart for its intended purposes, not as a slush fund. Instead, the council agreed to siphon off more than $300 million from JumpStart, depriving Seattle of potentially thousands of new affordable units amid a worsening housing crisis. They also amended the spending plan to allow them to keep raiding JumpStart. Additionally, the council voted to kill JumpStart’s Oversight Committee and set a 2040 sunset date, which could leave the city in dire financial straits if the council continues relying on the tax to balance its deficits year after year.
But their budget still sets them up for a $100 million deficit in 2027. Council Member Cathy Moore introduced a 2% local expansion to the state’s popular capital gains tax to help mitigate the looming shortfall, but her colleagues rejected it.
These votes reflect the priorities of big business, namely the Chamber of Commerce. Corporate donors poured more than $1 million into the 2023 election to install a slate of conservatives to carry out their clear anti-tax agenda. Credit where credit is due, Moore, backed by big business in her recent campaign, turned out to be one of the council’s strongest fighters for taxing the rich.
But the council couldn’t even do austerity right — they ended up adding even more new spending than the Mayor included in his budget draft.
This should piss you off. Most of the City Council campaigned on the promise to take a deep dive into the budget, eliminate inefficiencies and waste, and make cuts before even considering new taxes on their wealthy donors. Yet when they conducted their precious audit, they found there was little to cut. Still unwilling to tax the rich, they instead burdened departments with new reporting requirements to justify future defunding, effectively pushing off the issue another two years. Meanwhile, they have the audacity to claim the previous council budgeted irresponsibly. That council’s JumpStart tax saved their asses.
Fuck Working People
Maybe Rivera was channeling a Citizens United, “corporations are people too” thing when she called this budget “The People’s Budget.” Typically, though, “The People” refers to the collective, and most Seattlites work a job and rent an apartment. So workers and renters should be the priority, right?
The budget can’t truly be considered the “People’s Budget” if it includes the layoffs for the 55 workers, as the City Council voted to do. These layoffs affect 47 positions across six departments — the IT department, Finance and Administrative Services, Seattle Department of Construction and Inspection, Human Resources, Department of Neighborhoods, and SPR — as well as seven other positions that may get cut in 2026. As Morales noted in her remarks, these layoffs save the City about $8.8 million, less than the amount Council Member Bob Kettle proposed for increased police overtime.
The budget also fucked over renters. The council restored some of the funding Harrell swiped from tenant services, but did not return funding to 2024 levels. The council rejected Morales’s attempt to save the low-cost tenant workgroup that Harrell stymied and defunded. Moore also passed an amendment that negates the right to counsel for anyone making more than 200% of the federal poverty level, which in 2024 comes out to about $30,000 a year for a one-person household. That means a full time minimum wage worker already unbearably rent burdened by the average 1-bedroom apartment, would not qualify for a pro-bono eviction lawyer. The change puts Seattle in law with State law, but wouldn’t it be nice to strive for better?
This also fits in with the council’s wealthy donors’ agenda. The real estate industry contributed hundreds of thousands to the conservative slate’s 2023 campaigns. Corporate landlords typically advocate against renter protections and the right to counsel so they can more easily evict tenants and make more money.
How Do Those Boots Taste?
The City Council couldn’t stomach spending a measly $50,000 on a renters workgroup, but they sure did dole out the dough for the cops! As the Urbanist reported, Harrell’s proposed budget increased police spending by about 16%, bringing SPD’s budget to $457 million. That’s $115 million more than the City allocated to the Office of Housing.
The bulk of that boost comes from the hefty raises the Seattle Police Officer Guild negotiated in their recent contract, but it also accounts for hiring bonuses, new civilian positions, surveillance technology, more jail beds at both SCORE and King County Jail, and increasing sweep capacity so the City can push homeless people around even on the weekends.
Morales proposed an amendment to reallocate this funding to restore more of the tenant services Harrell defunded. In response, she got a condescending finger wag and a totally inappropriate reprimand from Kettle.
“It is unconscionable that you created a situation and now you want to take out the fix for that situation!” Kettle scolded Morales.
You know what’s unconscionable, Kettle? Voting to funnel potentially hundreds of millions of JumpStart dollars from affordable housing every year, slowing progress on addressing our critical housing crisis, damning countless to homelessness, and paying to increase the frequency the City sweeps those Seattlites around. But yeah, yell at Morales for suggesting the council take a little off the top of the surveillance camera funding.
The Downtown Seattle Association (DSA) seems to have gotten many items on their wish list such as more money on cops, increased surveillance, additional jail beds, and weekend capacity for the City’s already relentless sweeps. DSA represents some of the usual suspects when it comes to business PAC donors — Clise Properties, Goodman Real Estate, and Martin Selig Real Estate to name a few. But Rivera could agree that business associations made up of her donors fall under the politically charged phrase “The People.”
My Brain Is Soup And I Don’t Wanna Write This Post Anymore
I won’t lie. This budget process has been incredibly hard to follow.
In the past, council staff tracked the budget amendments on an incredibly slick webpage. This year, one would have to rife through old agenda packet links, rewatch countless hours of meetings, and exceed the recommended dose of Advil to see the budget so plainly. I’m honestly feeling the onset of a migraine trying to describe it all.
The council only made the information less accessible to the viewing public by proposing last-minute walk-on amendments and making verbal changes at points. To his credit, Budget Chair Dan Strauss cautioned against that tact. Undoubtedly, he had the right idea.
It’s evident that inexperience played a huge role in making this budget process more confusing. City Hall lost a great deal of institutional knowledge, welcoming a new, very inexperienced crew. Some members of the council, many of whom have little to no experience legislating, went on lengthy diatribes about different departments. Instead of offering salient critiques, the rants almost always revealed a lack of understanding of how the department functioned. For example, Council Member Maritza Rivera seemed unaware that the Office of Labor Standards conducts outreach for small businesses to comply with labor law. Then-Council Member Tanya Woo said she opposed Morales’ amendment adding additional Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) requirements, but while she feebly argued against it, she asked, “can you tell us what the EIS does and is?”
The council also added to the confusion by cosponsoring stuff they didn’t even support — Council Member Rob Saka had me fooled when he cosponsored the capital gains tax, only to vote against it later.
So, no. This can’t be “The People’s Budget.” “The People” could hardly tell what the Council voted on!
“So, no. This can’t be ‘The People’s Budget.'”
You are so right, Hannah—none of Sawant’s sham budgets ever passed. This one did.
“not only a clear erasure of Council Member Kshama Sawant, but it’s deeply untrue”
Good, fuck Sawant and her Trump supporting ass.
Considering the people voted for this council and knew what they were getting I’d argue this is the people’s budget and what Hannah is complaining about is the activists budget getting round filed. It’s worth stating again that none of the affordable housing projects identified by the previous council have had their funding cut. The argument is over the excess revenue the tax has generated (notice there is zero talk of returning that). Taxpayers in this city have had to adjust for inflation as well (as one example my homeowners insurance just went up another 30% this year after getting a 25% increase last year) but I guess we’re just supposed to suck it up and continue to pay through the nose so we can maintain our progressive utopia.
“…more than $300 million from JumpStart, depriving Seattle of potentially thousands of new affordable units…”
Math is hard.
“The City of Seattle celebrates the resounding approval of an unprecedented $970 million Seattle Housing Levy by voters on November 7, 2023. […] The levy will support the development of more than 3,100 new affordable housing homes…” (https://housing.seattle.gov/mayor-bruce-harrell-celebrates-voters-historic-passage-of-970-million-housing-levy/)
So, $300M would finance about a thousand such homes, not “thousands.” (One word, “potentially,” does a whole lot of heavy lifting in that sentence! Why not just have the JumpStart money “potentially” finance a billion luxury dwellings? Each with a pony!)
@2: “…a clear erasure of Council Member Kshama Sawant,”
From the place which magically forgot her very existence — once she started openly stumping for Trump, as you noted. (The Stranger has always been at war with George Orwell.)
If anyone knows “turning a blind eye” to people it’s Morales. She is a dismal council member when it comes to tending to her district.
And I suppose I would be upset about “affordable housing” if I thought the city gave anything but milquetoast approval to it while they focus on condoizing all of the single-family neighborhoods with ADU and DADU’s, many of which will be losing propositions for the saps who buy them.
@5: True radicals know: never let a good crisis go to waste. The Stranger has always hated Seattle’s SFH neighborhoods, and they want this “housing crisis” (which I solved quite easily, via the simple expedient of moving elsewhere) to persist as a method of cramming those hated neighborhoods with people, car traffic, and associated other resultant problems.
Want more housing, but without creating similar transportation problems? Raise the height limits on First and Capitol Hills to 30-40 stories.
@2 – agreed. If this budget results in “erasing” Sawant, it’s a good deal no matter what else it does. Hopefully her boy Fat Donald will deport her early. I hear he doesn’t like commie immigrants.
And if you want to look at who “fucked over” renters, look no further than the Scarfed Menace and her gang of idiots who made renting affordable housing untenable in the City. We’ve lost thousands of rental units already due to the crazy-ass laws they enacted. That trend is not stopping. It still makes financial sense to offer rental housing at the high end, but you are out of your fucking mind if you rent cheap apartments now.
Tammy Morales’ policies (and budgets) did disproportionate harm to communities of color and the city’s most vulnerable residents.
Furthermore, Tammy Morales’ policies caused the supply of rental housing to shrink and the cost of rent to increase. Her war on mom-and-pop landlords caused them to sell their affordable units in large numbers. In 2022 alone, Seattle lost over 10,000 affordable rentals
Tammy is like a slow agonizing poison that starts by deluding feeble-minded people and writers at The Stranger.
Catalina Vel-DuRay always has the best comments.
The Stranger should give them a weekly column. Readership would skyrocket.
@9: Agreed! Catalina always comes in with reasoned, well-thought-out responses.
A very resonable budget, the people have spoken and they want less wasted $ thrown at social services and more accountability and public safety. The ghost of sawant lives on in TS…