After almost two months of deliberation, Seattle City Council unanimously adopted Mayor Bruce Harrell’s 2026 city budget.
The nearly $9 billion budget keeps Harrell’s main priorities intact, including a bloated $486 million police department budget and millions for graffiti scrubbing. This budget is balanced, but it’s not sustainable. It depends on money left over from 2025, and a series of one-time funds that create a maze of fiscal cliffs. To continue much of this budget into 2027, Mayor-Elect Katie Wilson will have a $140 million deficit to tango with.
In January, the outgoing conservatives—Council President Sara Nelson, appointed Councilmember Mark Solomon, City Attorney Ann Davison, and Mayor Harrell will be replaced by Dionne Foster, Eddie Lin, Erika Evans, and Katie Wilson, respectively.
The centrist majority laid down some preemptive defense.
The budget allocates nearly $30 million funding for the Unified Care Team (UCT)—Seattle’s cross-departmental coalition of homeless encampment sweepers—a $5.7 million increase over last year’s budget. Harrell’s administration conducted more sweeps than his five predecessors combined. As Publicola reported Wednesday, the proviso will make it very difficult for incoming progressives to use those funds for anything else.
To boost another Harrell priority, the budget increased the police department budget by $34.5 million, bringing the total to $486 million. About $26 million will go toward the officer hiring spree Harrell and conservatives on Council brag about.
The budget also changed what the Seattle Transit Measure, a six-year, voter-approved 0.15 percent sales tax, can pay for. Intended to boost transit access, tax dollars will instead pay for additional security. Progressive Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck was the lone “no” vote against that change. Councilmember Bob Kettle has argued that additional security will create safer transit, and in turn increase ridership. It’s not clear why Kettle thinks security is currently a deterrent for riders. Assaults against transit workers were up between 2023 and 2024, but that also reflects a change in the definition to include verbal threats, while assaults against passengers are down, and general unlawful conduct is down even more.
And as a last nod to our grafitti-obsessed executive and the feckless council she led, Nelson gave SDOT $4.1 million for graffiti “abatement.”
The budget wasn’t a total bummer. It allocated about $350 million for affordable housing, which was hailed as a “record-high” by Budget Committee Chair Dan Strauss and Harrell. This is technically true—it beats last year’s record high by $1 million—but when adjusting for inflation, the Office of Housing’s spending power is down, The Urbanist reported.
To fill in the anticipated gap in federal Continuum of Care (CoC) funds for permanent supportive housing, Council set aside about $11 million, adding to the $9 million already in Harrell’s proposed budget’s reserves for federal cuts. The US Department of Housing and Urban Development announced new rules for its CoC program this fall—it will no longer prioritize Housing First programs—an evidence-based model of addressing homelessness rooted in the fact that people can better address mental health, employment or other issues once they have housing—as it has in the past. Only 30 percent of an award can be used for such programs, meaning Seattle could lose up to $40 million for its homeless programs.
The budget expands the Community Assisted Response and Engagement (CARE) team, the city’s alternative policing department. Nearly $7 million was carved out to double the number of community crisis responders—professionals who respond to non-criminal 911 calls.
The budget passed unanimously for the first time in a decade, Strauss said.
“We have much more work to do, and I just wanted to take that moment to recognize the moment in which we just passed into a brighter future,” he said.
We’ll see.
