After nearly two months of deliberation, Seattle Metropolis Council unanimously adopted Mayor Bruce Harrell’s 2026 metropolis price range.
The practically $9 billion price range retains Harrell’s most important priorities intact, together with a bloated $486 million police division price range and thousands and thousands for graffiti scrubbing. This price range is balanced, but it surely’s not sustainable. It relies on cash left over from 2025, and a collection of one-time funds that create a maze of fiscal cliffs. To proceed a lot of this price range into 2027, Mayor-Elect Katie Wilson can have a $140 million deficit to tango with.
In January, the outgoing conservatives—Council President Sara Nelson, appointed Councilmember Mark Solomon, Metropolis Lawyer Ann Davison, and Mayor Harrell can be changed by Dionne Foster, Eddie Lin, Erika Evans, and Katie Wilson, respectively.
The centrist majority laid down some preemptive protection.
The price range allocates practically $30 million funding for the Unified Care Group (UCT)—Seattle’s cross-departmental coalition of homeless encampment sweepers—a $5.7 million enhance over final yr’s price range. Harrell’s administration performed extra sweeps than his 5 predecessors mixed. As Publicola reported Wednesday, the proviso will make it very troublesome for incoming progressives to make use of these funds for the rest.
To spice up one other Harrell precedence, the price range elevated the police division price range by $34.5 million, bringing the whole to $486 million. About $26 million will go towards the officer hiring spree Harrell and conservatives on Council brag about.
The price range additionally modified what the Seattle Transit Measure, a six-year, voter-approved 0.15 p.c gross sales tax, will pay for. Meant to spice up transit entry, tax {dollars} will as a substitute pay for extra safety. Progressive Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck was the lone “no” vote towards that change. Councilmember Bob Kettle has argued that extra safety will create safer transit, and in flip enhance ridership. It’s not clear why Kettle thinks safety is at the moment a deterrent for riders. Assaults towards transit staff have been up between 2023 and 2024, however that additionally displays a change within the definition to incorporate verbal threats, whereas assaults towards passengers are down, and basic illegal conduct is down much more.
And as a final nod to our grafitti-obsessed government and the feckless council she led, Nelson gave SDOT $4.1 million for graffiti “abatement.”
The price range wasn’t a complete bummer. It allotted about $350 million for reasonably priced housing, which was hailed as a “record-high” by Funds Committee Chair Dan Strauss and Harrell. That is technically true—it beats final yr’s report excessive by $1 million—however when adjusting for inflation, the Workplace of Housing’s spending energy is down, The Urbanist reported.
To fill within the anticipated hole in federal Continuum of Care (CoC) funds for everlasting supportive housing, Council put aside about $11 million, including to the $9 million already in Harrell’s proposed price range’s reserves for federal cuts. The US Division of Housing and City Growth introduced new guidelines for its CoC program this fall—it can not prioritize Housing First applications—an evidence-based mannequin of addressing homelessness rooted in the truth that folks can higher tackle psychological well being, employment or different points as soon as they’ve housing—because it has prior to now. Solely 30 p.c of an award can be utilized for such applications, which means Seattle might lose as much as $40 million for its homeless applications.
The price range expands the Group Assisted Response and Engagement (CARE) staff, town’s different policing division. Practically $7 million was carved out to double the variety of group disaster responders—professionals who reply to non-criminal 911 calls.
The price range handed unanimously for the primary time in a decade, Strauss stated.
“We’ve got way more work to do, and I simply wished to take that second to acknowledge the second by which we simply handed right into a brighter future,” he stated.
We’ll see.
