When Seattle City Council budget committee chair Teresa Mosqueda released a full slate of tweaks to Mayor Bruce Harrell’s proposed 2023-2024 budget early Monday morning, very few of the councilmember amendments adding Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) projects and programs made it into the final proposal. That’s largely due to a more pessimistic-than-anticipated revenue forecast earlier this month that sent the council into damage control mode. This morning The Urbanist covered how Mosqueda’s task of “delicately balancing” the final list of council priorities resulted in prioritization of spending like school health centers, abortion care, and cost-of-living increases for human services providers.
Many proposals, such as a $2.25 million expansion of the Home Zone program to improve traffic safety in neighborhoods that are currently lacking sidewalks or $2.5 million to get the Thomas Street “Redefined” corridor redesign back on track (after it was cut by Mayor Harrell), were left on the cutting room floor. Also dead is a proposal to tax bike and scooter share rides at 25 cents per ride, a proposal that would have cost about as much as it was expected to raise.
In fact, thanks to the incredibly gloomy revenue forecast, several essential transportation programs see significant cuts in SDOT’s two year budget as proposed, including a $4 million cut over two years to the city’s sidewalk safety repair program, and a $3.2 million cut to the bridge painting program. Those cuts join painful ones in other departments as well, including a $1.5 million cut to the Seattle Parks and Recreation’s Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) compliance program.
But the package does propose to add two new sources of city revenue to support transportation, providing new resources for priorities important to many councilmembers while not impacting programs elsewhere in the budget. The most significant one of these is an increase of $10 to the city’s Vehicle License Fee (VLF), currently at $40. But rather than use this funding to backfill sidewalk repair, or bridge painting, the current proposal would use most of the funds generated in the first year of the increase to fund a priority of one councilmember.
Transportation chair Alex Pedersen, who proposed to increase the VLF in the first place, has been advocating for improvements to the NE 45th Street overpass in the U District, improvements that had originally included space for people biking but which have now been watered down to just barriers: fences and railings. SDOT cited pushback from Washington State Department of Transportation, with its traffic engineer fretting about freeway on-ramp queuing, for abandoning the uphill protected bike lane formerly under consideration. The $1.5 million currently earmarked for this would utilize over 75% of the funding gained from raising the VLF in 2023, with the remainder going to another Pedersen priority, bridge major maintenance, a separate program from bridge painting.
It’s not at all clear why $1.5 million should go toward one project in District 4, when more neglected areas of the city continue to bear the brunt of most of the traffic violence in the city, especially in the same budget that defunds the sidewalk safety repair budget by millions per year.
In 2024, the anticipated $4 million per year from the VLF increase would be split equally between bridge maintenance and Vision Zero safety improvements. That additional safety money joins $1.3 million allocated by the mayor for 2023, but an additional increase for next year as proposed by Councilmember Tammy Morales was left out of the package. Morales, who represents District 2 where the city continues to see an incredibly disproportionate share of traffic fatalities and serious injuries, is not satisfied with the status quo and is pushing for yet another amendment that would fund improvements to South End streets.
An amendment allocating $250,000 to pedestrian improvements around Ballard’s brewery district, requested by Councilmember Dan Strauss, and signed onto by Councilmember (and Fremont Brewing Company founder) Sara Nelson was prioritized in the budget ahead of any projects that specifically target Seattle’s most dangerous streets.
