The Seattle City Council is setting a mid-June timeline for sorting out how best to utilize some $239 million in federal funding expected to be available to the city from the American Rescue Plan Act. Meanwhile, community and business groups are making their cases for why the bulk of the money should go to support investments in important areas like equity and homelessness.
The discussion also comes amid signs that Seattle’s experiment with a $30 million participatory budgeting program hoped to be a new path forward from months of Black Lives Matter protests in the city will take longer than hoped to get off the ground.
The council’s Finance and Housing Committee is set to discuss the federal recovery funding Tuesday morning:
CHS reported here on a March resolution from the council listing out a long roster of priorities for the federal aid including nine priorities:
• Vaccines and testing
• Food assistance
• Homelessness and housing services (including rental assistance)
• Immigrant and refugee support
• Child care
• Small businesses, worker assistance, and workforce recovery
• Community wellbeing
• Transportation
• Revenue replacement and financial resilience
The council says the resolution was based on principles first shaped during its efforts to shape the 2020 COVID-relief bill and the JumpStart Seattle spending plan, “centering the need to begin pivoting the City’s efforts from acute emergency relief to long-term economic and community recovery as well as the potential to leverage other local, state, and federal programs and partners.”
The King County Council must also decide how best to allocate more than $400 million in federal fundings.
This week, King County Equity Now called for the city and county “to invest at least $300 million from the recently awarded ARPA funding directly into the local Black community.”
“To provide meaningful relief, you cannot keep investing in failed services and service providers. We are disproportionately affected and need self-determined solutions,” Isaac Joy, King County Equity Now president, said in a statement. “Black community-centered services are fundamentally different. It’s not just about providing affordable housing, shelter services, or a specific kind of service. It’s about us holistically coming around our community top to bottom, through education, social services, business development, job training, food programs, community ownership, and more. It’s about bringing folks into cultural spaces that already exist, where people can be healed and replanted in community. In order to do that, Black community is in dire need of investment, especially after COVID.”
Meanwhile, the city council is also hearing from downtown business interests who support using the funding to power the housing and services component of the “Compassion Seattle” charter amendment that would overhaul Seattle’s governmental structure around managing homeless services and create a separate $200 million fund to back it.
“Our city and county declared a state of emergency on homelessness nearly six years ago and we’re still waiting for the bold action that declaration demands,” DSA president and CEO Jon Scholes said in a statement. “Our elected leaders have an obligation to apply these historic federal funds to the crisis and suffering on our streets. Let’s act with urgency to get people inside and get them the help they need. Prioritizing homelessness in this spending plan is a key to our community’s recovery.”
The city council plans to finalize its ARPA proposals by mid-June.
The ARPA debate comes as the process to move forward to create a $30 million participatory budgeting process in Seattle designed to more directly address Black communities and priorities has become bogged down in City Hall. Publicola reports that Seattle City Councilmember Tammy Morales is reluctant to move forward on two options currently on the table to create the new process. One plan would follow guidance from the Black Brilliance Research Project (BBRP) team to create a 26-person steering committee.” Another cheaper, faster plan would put the Department of Neighborhoods in charge of participatory budgeting.
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