Selfie! Teresa Mosqueda got a last group selfie with her colleagues including new council president Sara Nelson, far right (Image: Seattle City Council)
Newly placed Seattle City Council president Sara Nelson says the new makeup of the city’s legislative body including new District 3 representative Joy Hollingsworth should align with efforts to increase spending on public safety and salaries of Seattle Police officers while also somehow stepping away from “our reliance on new revenue (taxes) to pay our bills.”
“My vision as council president boils down to good governance, which is the foundation of sound public policy,” Nelson wrote in an op-ed published this week in the Seattle Times that took aim at the city’s JumpStart tax on its largest employers in addition to laying the groundwork for increased spending on police. “I believe that if we change the way we operate, starting with coming in to work in person, Seattleites can expect to see a major reset in tone and direction at City Hall.”
“Judging from the mood in chambers on Tuesday, the audience clearly agreed,” Nelson writes.
CHS reported here on Tuesday’s inauguration ceremony, the swearing-in of Hollingsworth, and the election of Nelson to lead a council where six of the nine members will be starting their first terms at City Hall.
In an interview with CHS, Hollingsworth was non-committal on her support for Nelson’s early push on the police spending and business tax cutback initiatives.
“I’m getting briefed on all the stuff the council has voted on, including the budget and the nuts and bolts,” Hollingsworth said. “I can’t really comment on what another council member has addressed.”
But Hollingsworth said public safety remains her top priority and that she continues to hear concerns from constituents about gun violence after shootings in the Central District and a deadly 2023 across the East Precinct and Capitol Hill in Seattle’s record year of homicides.
In her Seattle Times op-ed and interviews, Nelson has positioned approval of a new contract with the Seattle Police Officers Guild union as an opportunity for the council to repair holes in the city’s public safety system torn open by the previous council.
“The past few years have seen a sharp uptick in policy-setting council initiatives, many of which passed through committee review quickly with scant public input and came to a vote with minimal debate,” Nelson said. “This legislation diverted time and resources away from addressing our greatest challenges and was frequently ideologically driven.”
Despite the push for increased public safety spending and a looming $218 million budget deficit in 2025, Nelson also appears ready to target the city’s JumpStart tax, its tax on the payrolls of its largest employers instituted to help power pandemic recovery but now one of the more flexible sources of major revenue available for city hall’s spending plans. More than $200 million in JumpStart tax dollars were earmarked for affordable housing and human services in the city’s 2024 budget.
The tax was created under legislation from Teresa Mosqueda who resigned her seat on the council this week to take her newly won position on the King County Council.
With Mosqueda gone and a mostly new council in place, Nelson says taxes are “an unsustainable fix for the wrong problem.”
“The real problem is spending,” Nelson said, adding that the council “raised over a billion dollars in new taxes in the last three years to fuel spending on new programs.”
“Instead of ‘jump-starting’ Seattle’s recovery, hundreds of businesses closed or left downtown, taking those jobs elsewhere,” Nelson writes.
Making progress on both the public safety spending and the City Hall belt tightening or possible weaning off taxes like JumpStart are long term propositions. In the meantime, 2025’s budget deficit looms. According to the council, its final 2024 budget package deliberations and amendments “reduced the projected deficit in 2025 from $247 million to $218 million.”
CHS reported here in August on options identified by Mayor Bruce Harrell’s Revenue Stabilization Workgroup for raising more funding. That group’s output is a roster of nine possible new taxes including ideas like a vacancy tax or a city income tax. It seems pretty clear Nelson won’t be a champion of those ideas leaving belt-tightening as the only option. How the new president leads the council in making those cuts will be Nelson’s biggest job in the new year.
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Good.
Dumb. The cop budget has already increased tenfold over the past few years. So they stopped doing their jobs and needed a council that wouldn’t question their history of racism to seize an opportunity to make more money…to uh, fall asleep at intersections and shoot POCs?
This statement is objectively not true. Stop spreading nonsense
Marcus, Summit Man merely comes here to troll, spout inaccuracies and let off steam now that Sawant is no longer around. It would be best for all of us not to engage. Just let him bang his spoon on his high chair while filling is diaper and he’ll eventually go away. They all do.
Yeah agreed — it’s a lot easier to call someone a troll than to actually engage with the reality of their point. It’s not like SPD deserves criticism or anything. They’re all trolls ya see!! Every. Last. Critic. Smarten up and you’ll figure out why people keep criticizing.
SPD does in fact deserve criticism. Where did I say they didn’t?
Claiming their “budget has already increased tenfold” is the inaccuracy I was referring to. If you have evidence to the contrary by all means, lay it on us, pal.
Budget grew from 355m to 370m….where’s the lie?
That is 6% growth far less than “tenfold” you stated in your initial post and below inflation growth so in real terms the budget has shrunk.
Oh buddy. Math is not your strong suit, is it?
Awesome! Glad we all now agree homeless and drug users are not humans. Also, can’t wait for more cops! Keep letting the IDF train you too, boys. I like where that whole situation is going. And remember, say it with me everyone–“Taxes are theft!” What a wonderful city we live in.
The goal is not to hire “more” cops, but simply to get back to the staffing level prior to the last few years. The SPD is down approximately 500 officers from the level that is needed to maintain public safety, and even that level is significantly less than most major cities.
How is getting back to a prior staffing level not hiring more cops? Seattle is tiny compared to other cities yet on par with their police budgets. AND officers largely take take their income taxes to neighboring counties, starving our city of necessary funds. It’s not our fault so many officers quit the force like babies or died from COVID buddy…more cops is just more irresponsible fiscal waste. Public safety is harmed by high rents and regressive tax policies, and according to all studies, crime is a byproduct of poverty. The sky is also blue.
The comparisons of police staffing in various cities is on a per-population basis, so your argument is bogus. Boston, for example, is about the same population as Seattle, but has something like 2000 police officers, many more than we do.
Are you Summit Man’s roommate?
Dawg if everyone with good opinions like ours lived together, we’d already have social housing. Single family homeowners are also capable of holding leftist views btw, but it its quaint that you thought we were roommates. Nice one, Zip!
It is exciting to see a focus on fundamentals and good governance. Seattle used to be a very functional and vibrant city run by reasonable people before the shift to district elections 10 years ago which allowed ideological zealots to grab the steering wheel and drive the city into a swamp filled with needles, stolen goods, and human waste.
I’m having much difficulty locating said swamp from my city apartment window.
try leaving your apartment once in a while… I went downtown yesterday trying to locate a specific special kind of bandage because I got a bad burn a few days ago.. I looked online first to make sure they had it – only one drug store has what I’m looking for in stock, in stores and not every branch had it.. After passing the barrage of security cameras, the special doors, the armed guard and making my way to the first aid aisle, I found that all of the boxes of what I was looking for had been stolen. Lovely..
“stolen” aka sold out or unstocked. Nationwide reports of mass-shoplifting epidemics have been empirically proven false, and Walgreens specifically came out in 2023 and admitted it exaggerated reports of shoplifting. Your favorite pharmacies all suck now because of consolidation and their clear lack of ability to compete with online retailers post COVID. I prefer shopping in store too, and yes most pharmacies suck now, especially in cities…but the idea that it’s drug users and homeless causing these massive chains to provide a horrible retail experience is ludicrous. You wanna keep homeless and drugs off the street, talk to the landlords keeping them priced out of housing.
This isn’t about “preferring” to shop in a store… it’s about getting an appropriate bandage on a painful burn ASAP… I looked online to be sure the item was in stock – it should have been.. I asked the person doing the stocking, in case it was just still in the back – sorry but nope, what should have been on the shelf wasn’t there.
Stick your head in the sand all you like but yes indeed, trying to buy anything downtown is a horrible experience and it’s not because of the stores… go over to Bellevue and the same chain store isn’t a mess, with idiotic items like shoelaces locked to the display..
Just because 20 years ago there were flops that 10 junkies could still somehow manage to scrape enough money together to stay in (or find an abandoned building to squat in) doesn’t mean that rents are the problem and drugs aren’t..
Trekked over to Bellevue to get the dressings that I really needed.. The store was neat, clean, no armed guard, no barrage of security cams. Everything and more that I was looking for was in stock and on the shelves as promised. Nothing was locked up or behind glass… I don’t want to have to get in my car and drive.. I chose where I live because it is a walkable neighborhood. It’s a shame that we’ve let things get to the point they have, where I need to drive to the suburbs just to get what I require at a pharmacy.
So, apparently you haven’t seen the numerous videos in the news (and on online) showing organized gangs of people flooding a store and stealing anything they can grab?
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/08/business/organized-shoplifting-retail-crime-theft-retraction.html
You fell for a literal hoax concocted by retail lobbies. Cool anecdote though. And yes I have seen the few same videos on loop for all of 2023.
Good governance is literally the only job of the City Council.
It’s not City Council’s job to fix “systemic racism” or “ban Caste discrimination that didn’t really happen in America but your City Councilor is an Indian so you get to be preached on it”.
Anyone who has aspirations to fix wider issues are more than welcomed to run higher office…. and leaving Nelson alone who just wanna run a semi-competent City.
honestly bring on the vacancy tax, but they may find that backfires too. love the idea that they think taxing corps is the problem here… good luck applying that doctrine to reality. I do agree good governance is needed, but perhaps that should apply specifically to SPD, which should be doing FAR more with their ever increasing budget.
300k a year salaries… how much do these clowns need??? Worst department in the country next to Chicago. Mike Solan can’t get out of town fast enough
My home town takes umbrage. It will always be number one.
Nelson runs a successful business. She understands finance, which is a breath of sanity for Seattle.
Government isn’t a capitalistic business though. To quote a former supreme court justice, “I like to pay taxes. With them, I buy civilization”
If her understanding finances leads to plans for cutting taxes and reduce services, she’s not a “breath of sanity” for a council leader of a city with many in need due to wealth inequality.
Nelson is the biggest buffoon there is. She even looks like a school teacher nagging you to not steal toothpaste or whatever makes her stay up all night. I dislike her so much. Cannot wait to vote her out.
I’m hoping some sanity remains for standing up to SPOG with contract negotiations this time around. SPD’s hiring problem isn’t a financial one, it’s a cultural one. A culture of corruption and distrust of the citizens these folks are supposed to be protecting. Either properly reform them, or disband and form a new public safety division. Plenty of other cities have shown the way, while Seattle got stuck for a bit and may now be retreating to bow down to SPOG.
What other civil service job out there allows employees to still fail to track overtime properly, frequently leads to deaths among the population due to wildcat strikes, and has such strong scorn for the city they are serving? Not sure why so many people tolerate this unique behavior from one of many city departments meant to serve the needs of the city’s population.