In his third State of the City Address, Mayor Bruce Harrell said he wanted to go back to the “basics” while still “innovating.” However, given the next moves he said he plans to make, he seems most interested in doing the bare minimum and regressing to please the conservative forces that got him and his new city council elected.
One Seattle Comp Plan
In perhaps the highlight of his remarks on Tuesday, Harrell announced he would unveil his “One Seattle”-branded comprehensive plan, a document the council will use to help shape Seattle’s growth over the next decade.
Very cool, however, very late. The City promised the draft in April 2023 but kept kicking it down the road until now, much to the chagrin of housing advocates.
Beyond saying he’d release the plan in a couple weeks, Harrell didn’t say much in his remarks. He promised his plan would bring “missing middle housing” to every neighborhood. That’s not his idea, of course. The state now requires Seattle to legalize fourplexes and sixplexes in most neighborhoods, whether the Mayor likes it or not.
On the housing front, he also said he will soon transmit legislation to the council related to office conversions. That idea may qualify as innovation if you ignore the fact that urbanists have long debated and bemoaned the policy’s significant limitations.
Levy To Move
In the arena of transportation, Harrell teased the Levy To Move Seattle, which the City must try to renew this year. Again, bare minimum. The Levy To Move Seattle, a nine-year, $930 million levy that funds about one-third of the City’s transportation budget will dry up in December.
Harrell said his plan will emphasize the “basics,” but the basics he outlined seemed to favor car infrastructure. For cars, he promised specifics such as repaved roads, filled potholes, and repaired bridges. For pedestrians and cyclists, he promised “dialogue” about sidewalks, transit, and safety in general. We will see if this rhetoric becomes reality in the coming weeks, when he unveils his levy proposal, which transit advocates want him to triple.
The Deficit
In the last moments of his speech, Harrell finally addressed the quarter-billion-dollar budget deficit that he and the council will have to deal with during this year’s budget process.
In 2022, fans of robust social services saw a glimmer of hope when he and former Council Member Teresa Mosqueda launched a work group to recommend new forms of progressive revenue to fill the gap that threatened critical City programs. After much delay, the task force came up with nine ideas that they did not explicitly recommend because some of the business-aligned members were salty about their failure to totally obstruct their own work. Mosqueda and the previous council failed to pass any of the not-explicitly-recommended recommendations, despite seriously considering a local expansion to the State’s capital gains tax. Instead, they left the budget deficit in the hands of a more business-friendly council that seems eager to appease their corporate donors’ wishes for austerity.
In his speech, Harrell rejected the term “austerity,” but he appeared to promote an all-cuts budget in alliance with big business, corporate landlords, and other monied, conservative power players that got him elected. He added that new revenue would not fix the deficit and argued that the City should “hit reset, revise our budgeting practices,” and “double-down on the programs, projects, and policies that are effective and making the most difference for the people of Seattle.”
Such an approach will require a “system-wide analysis of every dollar spent,” Harrell said. I asked his office how that differs from his past budgeting processes and I will update if I get a response.
I also asked his office to clarify whether Harrell supports any new progressive revenue and, if he does not support new revenue, then to say where he would cut. They did not respond.
Harrell’s lack of answers on budget issues leaves his constituents to wonder how he will fund the programs he bragged about and promised to beef up in his speech, such as the CARE Team, the heat pump rebate program, CiviForm, and, most importantly, his plan to hire 1,400 cops out of thin air. He changed the application from paper to digital, so that should do it!
Fixing potholes doesn’t just benefit motorists. As a long time bicyclist on Seattle streets (in both north and south Seattle), I can identify many of these potholes season after season, as if they were landmarks.
Wow, Hannah. Your grapes are so very sour.
As a cyclist, I’m in favor of “repaved roads, filled potholes, and repaired bridges.” Am I doing it wrong?
I hope they “analyze every dollar spent” on vacant police positions, and then stop spending those dollars. But something tells me that won’t be one of the new regime’s “revised budgeting practices”
As a daily transit rider, I’m also in favor of filling potholes and re-paving streets. With the suspensions shot on Metro’s aging fleet, a trip into downtown is sure to shake loose your fillings.
As a daily transit rider, I’m in favor of fixing potholes, but stop wasting my tax $ on cop positions you’re never going to fill.
Austerity is always a failed policy.
So now according to Hannah not supporting new revenue is bad, when before it was good.
https://www.thestranger.com/news/2022/12/01/78749515/council-votes-to-take-more-money-from-you-but-not-amazon
Hannah, maybe you could make up your mind?
Hannah and the Stranger have long taken the position that it’s better to promise everything and deliver nothing (as did former CMs Gonzalez, Herbold, and Sawant) than it is to plan to do what you can with what you have.
As far as effective city budgetary practices go, I’d like to see the Stranger comment on the approaching $1B Seattle has spent on homelessness services since then-Mayor Murray declared a “Homelessness Crisis.” (As Real Change is both Hannah’s former employer and a long-term recipient of some of those government dollars, I have a pretty solid idea of what she might say on that topic.)
@8 As far as effective city budget practices go, since the date you reference the city has spent ~$3B on police, but as you love to remind everyone crime here is out of control. Speaking of delivering nothing.
@9
Crime’s outta
Control EVERYWHERE!
we haven’t enough Guns quite Yet
plus
getting
Defunded
broke the Po-
po’s Will, thirteen12
it’s a Wonder
Any of ’em can
even get Outta bed
specially the one making
$315,000 per annum. go figure!
@9: You might want to read those “System Failure” reports again. The police diligently referred cases to City Attorney Pete Holmes for years, without his taking action on most of them.
(SPD generally does not deserve sympathy, so please stop trying to manufacture it, by victim-blaming them.)
@11 only one index crime (Larceny-Theft)–and none in the Violent category–potentially includes misdemeanors, so whatever Holmes was doing has very little to do with the reported crime rate
@13: Yeah, persistently ignoring misdemeanor assault and thefts did nothing to encourage the unpunished criminals to try bigger crimes.
Not big on understanding human behavior, eh?
@14 wait are you saying you think there are gateway crimes? That’s like broken windows ad absurdum. And you suggest I don’t understand human behavior. I’m dead
Bruce Harrell is a bad mayor, the new city council is an embarrassment, and most of the blame goes on self-identified liberal voters who decided to vote for reactionary politics.
@15: I wrote nothing about “gateway crimes” or “broken windows.” I merely noted criminals whose behaviors go uncorrected may escalate to more serious crimes.
For example, the original “System Failure” report profiled Travis Berge, whose long criminal career never resulted in any meaningful intervention. Sometime after the report was published, Berge committed felony assault against Lisa Vach, his tentmate girlfriend, and publicly bragged about it; when even all that did not get him detained, he beat her to death. Immediately after killing her, he died during police pursuit.
Had Seattle intervened correctly during any of his many prior transgressions, both Berge and Vach might still be alive.