The view from Capitol Hill’s Pride Place. Affordable housing spending will reach an all-time high in the city in 2024.
Teresa Mosqueda will step up to represent Seattle constituents the King County Council.
Kshama Sawant is off to start a new national party.
The two veteran Seattle City Council members marked the passage of the final city budget under their watch in familiar fashion with budget chair Mosqueda celebrating wins for human services and housing and Sawant standing alone in opposition to the final compromise package.
The final 2024 Seattle budget plan was approved 8 to 1 by the council acting as committee Monday. Tuesday will bring a final vote, a formality in the multi-month process.
“Thanks to affordable housing and homelessness advocates, our labor partners and human service workers, community members, and our Select Budget Committee colleagues, this budget includes the City’s largest-ever investment into affordable housing—yielding nearly $600 million for affordable across the biennium,” Mosqueda said in a statement.
CHS reported here on the council’s final roster of amendments to reshape Mayor Bruce Harrell’s spending proposal and claw back revenue raised by the more than $200 million JumpStart tax on the city’s largest employers for affordable housing and human services.
The administration’s 2024 spending plan also emphasized affordable housing plus a boost for treatment and diversion to join a crackdown on public drug use while also including spending for the city’s existing first responders at Seattle Police and the Seattle Fire Department to be maintained at status quo levels.
Mosqueda, whose legacy on the council will likely be as the mother of the JumpStart effort, lauded the tax’s place in keeping Seattle’s plans mostly intact with spending “made possible in large part due to JumpStart progressive revenue.”
“This budget ensures that we’re making good on the city’s promises to human service provider wage increases without leaving workers behind,” Mosqueda said. “Together, we have invested in culturally specific counseling services and domestic violence supports, youth programming and mental health services in Seattle Public Schools, enhanced food security programs, and many more investments to help stay healthy, housed, and safe as our community continues to feel the impacts of COVID-19, increased costs, and high inflation.”
Next year’s budget battle could be quite a fight. The council says Harrell’s proposed budget did not include a proposal for new revenue and expanded “the gap between revenue and expenditures” to a total of over $247 million dollars a year on average starting in 2025.
The final budget was able to chisel that down to $218 million thanks “primarily
from the forecast update and an error in the transmitted financial plan,” — “a gap that still must
be closed in 2025 when the temporary use of JumpStart progressive revenue can no longer
supplant the General Fund.”
Mosqueda says the next council will need to continue the work of reducing the gap.
“Given additional analysis and development needed on revenue options, the work
Council has begun to develop and pass revenue to fully close the City’s budget gap will need to continue in 2024, and the looming revenue challenges that are on the horizon in 2025 and
beyond must continue to be front of mind,” the report on the 2024 plan reads. “Our city values do not align with a budget that assumes this level of coming austerity. The future of our city and the sustainability of our community is too important to gamble on.”
Sawant, meanwhile, stuck to her guns, continuing her annual opposition to the final compromise spending plan. Still, she finished her final council budget season with a victory or two including her push for $20 million from a JumpStart increase to fund student mental health services.
But her bid to divert $1.5 million in Harrell administration spending on new gunshot detection technology was less successful.
In 2024, Sawant will be succeeded on the council by Joy Hollingsworth as the veteran Seattle lawmaker steps out of local politics to focus on the creation of a new national political party.
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