The Seattle City Council approved the City’s 2022 budget on Monday after a few dramatic last-minute amendment showdowns. Advocacy groups quickly set to work framing their victories and pointing to losses to be rectified in future budgets.
For example, Seattle Neighborhood Greenways pointed to the tripling of the Vision Zero safe streets budget and climate justice group 350 Seattle celebrated $16 million for the Seattle Green New Deal and $194 million for affordable housing. Much of the drama hinged around the police budget this year, and groups were framing it in a number of different ways.
Perhaps the biggest last-minute fight was Council President Lorena González’s proposal to remove 101 vacant and unfillable “ghost” positions out of the Seattle Police Department (SPD), which would have freed up $19 million. Pro-SPD and anti-accountability forces, rallied by a eleventh hour scare tactic video by interim Police Chief Adrian Diaz, beat back that amendment and it failed on a 5-4 vote (more on that here), even as González decried the misleading cynical ploy. This means SPD will keep a privilege no other City department has to reserve staff positions in future budgets (draining other departments of resources) even though it can’t fill those positions in the near-term due to its officer training pipeline being maxed out.
On the other hand, the Council rejected efforts by Councilmember Alex Pedersen (and a smaller proposal by Andrew Lewis) to pump millions of rainy day funds into SPD hiring incentives and overtime pay. They also passed a few minor cuts to the Mayor’s police budget, but ultimately funded her proposal to hire 125 new officers next year.
Only city to reduce its police budget two years in a row
A Solidarity Budget coalition statement celebrated progress in reining in SPD spending. This year the coalition took the unprecedented step of proposing their own budget from scratch instead of only reacting to the Mayor’s proposal (I helped craft the transportation and housing sections).
“Building on last year’s uprising in defense of Black lives, the 2022 Budget shrinks the Seattle Police Department’s budget footprint for the second year in a row, the only major U.S. city to accomplish a reduction,” the Solidarity Budget coalition wrote in a press release. “The budget now goes to out-going Mayor Durkan to approve, setting the stage for incoming Mayor Harrell to follow through on the City’s commitments to racial equity and environmental justice.”
Solidarity Budget member Travonna Thompson-Wiley of Black Action Coalition pointed to work that remains to be done.
“Our community continues to feel the pressure of a global pandemic, climate crisis, and housing crisis,” Thompson-Wiley said in a statement. “With Solidarity Budget, we fight to ensure the most vulnerable folks have access to resources that will truly help Seattle thrive. Previous city budgets have not reflected the cries from our community — cries for help with housing, childcare, food access, and more. Those same budgets continued to prioritize the investment in harm and not in care. When will Seattle protect poor and working class folks? When will Seattle actually invest in care? Our Solidarity Budget is the best hope to protect our wins and protect our people.”
The Mayor hopes to add 35 officers on net, but has also assumed a lower pace of attrition than SPD’s current trajectory and also didn’t factor in unvaccinated officers likely to be fired due to her vaccine mandate. The City said SPD has achieved a 92% vaccination rate; however, the department is unlikely to find accommodations for all of the remaining 8% of its workforce.
Amazingly, the Seattle City Council hasn’t had to fire any officers in order to reduce the SPD’s budget and footprint. The two most recent firings were the two police officers terminated for storming the nation’s Capitol during the Trump-backed January 6th coup attempt. Officers retiring or leaving the department has done their work for them. This is despite a record haul in pay, overtime, and retroactive pay leading to SPD’s median pay hitting $153,000 in 2019.
Despite winning on SPD “ghost” positions, the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce struck a fairly sour tone on the budget and stressed $5 million in cuts from the Mayor’s SPD budget.
“Without restoring funding for additional officers, recruitment incentives, and overtime, Seattleites can expect to continue to wait too long to get responses for urgent calls for police services,” the Chamber Director of Communications Jillian Henze wrote in a post Monday.
“Not all emergency calls need a response from an armed officer, but alternative responses are still being explored and are not in place,” Henze continued. “If the city were to undertake a new composting and recycling initiative, the city would not reduce trash services before scaling up new programs. It would continue picking up garbage while building the new recycling and composting program. This budget leaves us without the public safety services we need.”
It’s great to see that the Chamber agrees that SPD is the trash in this scenario, but it’s unclear how $5 million in cuts from the City Council could be so impactful to a department that still ended up with a $355 million budget and the Mayor’s preferred staffing plan. In fact, the tone was very different than the one struck by Seattle Police Officers Guild (SPOG) president Mike Solan, who seemed pretty excited about the budget outcome.
“The city council’s vote on today’s budget is the beginning of a great political pivot away from unreasonable activism and back to the moderate policies that made Seattle the Emerald City,” Solan said in an email to KIRO 7.
