Seattle's budget looks to be in trouble for years to come
Seattle Budget News:
First off, we have my analysis of the 2025 proposed Seattle budget over at The Urbanist. I dig into proposed police and other “punitive” spending and compare it to what’s being spent for alternatives, diversion, and upstream solutions.
PubliCola reports on the Seattle budget outlook for future years, with projected deficits of $78.6 million in 2027 and $151.2 million in 2028. While not as large as the deficit faced this year of around $250 million, these are still large numbers that signal we’re not out of the woods even if we follow Mayor Bruce Harrell’s plan of diverting a large percentage of the Jumpstart payroll tax away from its intended purpose of supporting affordable housing, Green New Deal, and equitable development investments and into the General Fund to pay for things like big raises for SPD officers and the ability to sweep homeless encampments even on the weekends.
As PubliCola reports: “But Harrell’s 2025-2026 budget also depletes the JumpStart fund balance—essentially, a non-renewable reserve of unspent money—taking $140 million from this pot next year and another $90 million in 2026. By 2026, the total amount of funds left over at the end of the year, after all spending is accounted for, will be reduced from $97 million to $179,000.”
While I know this might sound wonky, what it means in practice is continued budget deficits (and cuts) well into the future unless another source of progressive revenue is identified.
Other Seattle News:
On Tuesday, the city council voted to pass the crime prevention pilot that includes CCTV and a new real time crime center. It also voted to pass $50,000 hiring bonuses for lateral hires at SPD.
This week the Seattle Fire Department announced it’s making buprenorphine, a drug that treats opioid withdrawal, available to use by all its emergency crews. According to the press release, “The SFD currently has about 35 paramedics trained to administer the medicine and has begun the process of training the firefighter/EMTs who staff the post-overdose response unit (Health 99) and Health One units.”
PubliCola interviewed interim SPD Chief Sue Rahr last week. While Rahr had previously said she’d only stay in the position for six months (until around the end of the year), she’s saying now that she’s not going to make that promise. Erica Barnett does ask Rahr what went wrong in the backgrounding process of Kevin Dave (the officer who killed Jaahnavi Kandula and had a history of reckless driving and no current WA driver’s license), a question I’ve been asking for some time, but surprising no one, Rahr replies that she doesn’t know.
I found this exchange to be particularly illuminating:
“ECB: I totally get the problem statement. What you’re describing as the solution, frankly, is kind of Whac-a-Mole.
SR: It is, but doing nothing doesn’t work either. And what we know is that just having social workers go out and talk to people, in and of itself, is not working. If it was working, we wouldn’t have so many people out there. I think you need to have a multi-pronged approach, and if nothing else works, there has to be a backstop.”
One could argue that the reason social workers aren’t effective all on their own is because there aren’t enough services and places to live for them to offer people. But alas, instead of trying that out as a solution, it looks like Seattle will continue robustly funding the backstop that doesn’t get to the root of the problems.
The Seattle Municipal Court judges elected Honorable Anita Crawford-Williams to serve as Presiding Judge and Honorable Damon Shadid to serve as Assistant Presiding Judge. They will serve a term of two years starting at the beginning of 2025.
Current Presiding Judge Faye Chess will be stepping down. You might remember that she was elected to that position right after the election of Judge Pooja Vaddadi in late 2022 in what I called at the time “an act of breathtaking pettiness.” In an early vote with no notice, neither Vaddadi nor Judge Damon Shadid were allowed to participate in that vote.
Articles to make you think:
Last weekend Kevin Schofield wrote about a paper studying bail reform: “The report thoroughly and completely debunks the notion that bail reform causes a rise in crime.”
The Stranger published an article about candidate for the state legislature Andrea Suarez. All politics aside, this article provides one of the best explanations of housing first I’ve read.
Also in The Stranger is a column by Justin Ward calling for a more robust public health response focusing on mental health to increase public safety:
“Instead of mobilizing the vast resources of one of the richest metropolitan areas in human history to solve our housing and mental health crisis, area leaders are doubling down on the failed strategy of criminalization. On top of pointless prosecutions of the mentally ill that waste money and that are frequently dismissed, city officials are escalating sweeps, scaling up surveillance, implementing banishment areas, and raiding housing funds to pay for police raises.
If we want to prevent murders like that of Ruth Dalton, we must get serious about treating mental health problems before they become public safety emergencies.”
And over at South Seattle Emerald, Gennette Cordova wrote about how funding education reduces crime: “Every glaring, shameful example of our city’s leaders overinvesting in police under the guise of increasing public safety, while underfunding the community programs that are proven to reduce crime, must be highlighted again and again until people come to understand that so many of the shortcomings we experience in our communities are a result of our patterns of intentional systematic failures.”
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Chloe Cockburn: Latest criminal justice news and updates 10.8.24