The Mayor asked for budget cuts from other city departments to close an anticipated $150 million funding gap next year.
Mayor Bruce Harrell delivered his first state of the city speech yesterday at Seattle City Hall and struck similar notes as he did on the campaign trail. He stressed clearing homeless encampments, staffing up the Seattle Police Department (SPD), and getting back to the basics, with numerous informational dashboards promised to chart progress.
“Quite candidly, perhaps because of the pandemic, I did not inherit clear departmental systems to adequately address the issues of public safety or homeless,” Harrell said. “I’d like to be clear on a point: I’d believe in going back to the basics. That’s where good governance begins. The basics includes efforts like our Housing First policy, fixing a pothole, making sure our sidewalks and parks are safe for families to use, making sure we are enforcing our criminal laws against those who are harming others.”
The mayor singled out Woodland Park as a park he’d be clearing of encampments as soon as possible in partnership with Councilmember Dan Strauss, whose 6th District encompasses the area. “Trash, fires, and inhumane conditions” associated with the Woodland Park encampments were unacceptable, he said.
The issue of policing composed the lion’s share of his speech. Harrell made a hiring pitch, asking people to apply to fill the 125 SPD positions funded in the last budget and pledging he’d hire the “right kind of officer” and lower response time to calls. It’s not clear a significant response time reduction could be achieved from a net gain of 35 officers (the city projects 90 separations to go with the 125 additions). Harrell also promised his administration would end the federal consent decree, which has been in place for nearly a decade, by demonstrating SPD is a successfully reformed department. He also expressed confidence his approach to public safety is aligned with new City Attorney Ann Davison — the first Republican elected in Seattle in decades — who ran on a hardline platform incorporating largely debunked tenets of broken windows policing.
