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.

20 replies on “The Final City Council-Approved Budget Preserves Harrell’s Priorities”

  1. So, even the Stranger has begun to understand the Wilson Administration will face a large budget shortfall, meaning Wilson’s more progressive policies will likely either not get as much money as the Stranger wants, or perhaps no money at all.

    However, encampments can overrun Seattle’s parks again, so at least the Stranger may get some of what it wants.

  4. @1 i never noticed the emcampments decrease, despite record efforts to ineffectually chase the residents in circles while reducing funding for any solutions that involve giving them places to live.

  5. Dale dear, I don’t see any other option than ineffectually chasing Our Unhoused Neighbors around. When we don’t, we end up with the Ballard Commons, or the west slope of Woodland Park, or the current situation in Little Saigon. Letting unwell people squat in their own filth for too long creates toxic situations.

    I wish there was a better way. I wish there was fresh thinking. But I just don’t see it coming out of city or county government, no matter who is in charge.

  6. Just to echo Catalina, @4 you must not get around much or are fairly new to Seattle – the sweeps have reclaimed large swaths of public parks that were previously unusable under Durkin (god, what a disaster she was). Sadly so much park infrastructure was damaged beyond repair (at Woodland Park most of the park shelters had to demolished – such a great resource gone).

  7. @4: Encampment sweeps find dead bodies and rescue kids being raped, but I guess that doesn’t matter to a super bleeding heart progressive like you.

  8. Money for public safety, police, and cleaning up graffiti?

    Just think of how much money we’d save if Seattle had no police and never cleaned up graffiti?

    We could use that money for increased harm reduction and free housing for people across the nation to enjoy in Seattle.

    That’s the type of Progressive Governance that will make Seattle extraordinary

  9. How will Progressives fund their budget priorities?

    Commerce produces over half the City’s tax revenues.

    How will Katie Wilson pay for her spending priorities if Amazon, et. al. keep exporting their revenue production and tech workers to Bellevue? She can’t tax what isn’t here.

    Amazon, Adobe, et. al. already had that process well underway under Harrell in response to the Jump Start Tax. When a lease expires, they abandon the building and go to Bellevue and other more friendly locales where workers don’t have to dodge tent homes, sewage, and needles on public space appropriated for private use.

  10. So the conservative council and outgoing mayor pass a budget that will hamstring the incoming more progressive administration, and somehow that’s the fault of the incoming mayor? The homeless budget will be slashed because Trump is a fascist and has changed the federal rules to make effective policies harder to implement, and that’s also Katie Wilson’s fault somehow?

    The real problem is conservative policies which are wasting public dollars on excessive policing and cosmetic policies like graffiti cleanup, starving resources from programs that would actually help. I agree with Catalina that you can’t just let encampments fester, but the way you handle that is comprehensive public housing that gives places for people to go when the sweeps displace them (and also provides housing for people in less severe situations).

    I wish the new mayor well, but I don’t expect much success because our problems are much deeper than one person can fix.

  11. @10: When tagging and graffiti are removed in an area, criminal activity dissipates. Big cities have learned that lesson over and over and over again.

  13. @12: Thank you so very much for mentioning little ol’ me in the same virtual breath as truly great commenters Bax, Buddhamat, and the truly immortal, wonderfully divine, forever darling Lady of Our Dear Slog, Mrs. Vel-DuRay. ‘Tis truly an honor I dared not hope to receive.

    The only way you could possibly have done me better would have been by including thumpus on your list of factualists, as he also uses facts to great effect in his comments.

    (Oh, and one quibble — you didn’t spell “factualist” correctly. I’m guessing your chronic over-reliance upon the word you did use meant it auto-populated without your even noticing? One must exercise care with the words, dear, as they do actually mean things.)

    Again, thank you so very much for the honor!

  14. @12 — it’s unfortunate that you, like The Stranger, want to disregard union members that operate buses. They have been begging for extra security for years and it wasn’t until one of their union brothers was brutally murdered on duty that they finally got it. The Stranger opposes this because it has decided that wherever there are tradeoffs, criminals and those engaged in anti-social behavior should be prioritized over regular people who are working on or riding the bus. I think that’s bad, and that we should prioritize bus drivers and passengers engaged in pro-social behavior, because it’s critical to have public spaces that work well and serve the public.

    So when it comes to a union and its members asking for help, The Stranger (and you) believe they should fuck off. The murderers are the priority, not the bus drivers.

  15. Cascadian dear, I wouldn’t classify graffiti removal as “conservative”, and aside from some horrendous incidents by individual officers, I would never accuse the SPD policing as particularly “excessive”, particularly in the last few years. You really have to go back to the 70’s for that. If anything, they’ve been rather milquetoast since the BLM protests ended. The bottom line is, we’re always going to have police. The focus should be on better police.

    As for “comprehensive public housing that gives places for people to go when the sweeps displace them (and also provides housing for people in less severe situations)”: We’ve seen, time and again over the last few decades, that those are two very different groups of people, and lumping them together is futile, dehumanizing, and dangerous for the latter group (see Renton Holiday Inn fire).

    “Housing First” is a nice cliche, but that housing needs to be based on an individuals mental and physical health, and that needs to include involuntary commitment. Yes, that sounds harsh, but it’s better than dying on the street.

    Lastly, the criminal element among Our Unhoused Neighbors need to be dealt with by the courts and prison system.

    But there’s also the question of where to put all this housing. Seattle is geographically constrained, land and construction prices are expensive. The entire region needs to be part of the solution, providing housing (and transit) for working people, and permanent health facilities for the addicted and mentally ill.

    So yes, the Mayor has limited resources, and the population is fickle and has high expectations – and they will tire of even the most reasonable excuses. I wish her well.

  18. @10: “The real problem is conservative policies which are wasting public dollars on excessive policing and cosmetic policies like graffiti cleanup, starving resources from programs that would actually help.”

    After ten years of homeless criminals victimizing Seattle’s citizens, good luck getting many to agree with your claim of “excessive policing.” And Seattle alone has spent well over a billion dollars on homelessness in the past ten years, so please feel free to tell us all about the success of that effort, and how it should receive any more funds.

  19. I’m tired of homeless being allowed to do anything with no accountability. Make them register with real identification like all homeowners and apartment renters do. Even the people living in tents and RVs. Pay for background checks and make anyone with open warrants go take care of them. If someone is cutting up bikes or chopping up thick copper wire cables make that subject to immediate arrest and offer drug treatment in jail if needed. Remove all inoperable RVs on our streets and junk them. Store the peoples stuff in a storage unit for 90days.

  20. Allow police to look in tents at any random time. If a tent is unused for sleeping remove it immediately. Make it a crime to provide tents pallets or toes. Make encampment stay out zones in 1 mile radius of any tiny home village or permanent supportive housing.

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