Durkan Budget Would Gut JumpStart Spending Plan, Increase Funding for Encampment Response

by Erica C. Barnett

(This article originally appeared on PubliCola and has been reprinted with permission.)

Mayor Jenny Durkan released the final budget of her term yesterday, Sept. 27, outlining the proposal at a very high level in a six-minute speech from North Seattle College. In the coming weeks, the proposal will be debated, analyzed, and rewritten by the Seattle City Council (the addition of 35 net new police officers is an obvious target for their red pens), and PubliCola will be covering every aspect of those upcoming discussions. For now, though, here are a few initial notes on the plan, which reflects better-than-expected revenues and incorporates a lot of ongoing federal funding for COVID-19 relief.

Diverting JumpStart Tax Revenue

The budget proposes taking $148 million from the City's payroll tax fund, a repository for revenues from the JumpStart payroll tax, and moving it into the general fund to pay for Durkan's other priorities. Legislation the mayor will transmit to the council would also empower future mayors to use JumpStart revenues for virtually any purpose, including the "[m]aintenance of existing essential City services." The mayor's proposal would remove language from existing law stipulating that the tax can't be used to "supplant existing funding from any City fund or revenue source."

The council adopted the payroll tax specifically to fund programs addressing housing, homelessness, and equity and created a separate fund for JumpStart revenues with the intention that they couldn't be used for other purposes — which is precisely what Durkan is proposing to do.

"The proposed changes are necessary in order to reconcile the priorities identified in [the JumpStart bill] with Council actions in support of other critical funding needs, including homelessness, community safety, BIPOC investments, domestic violence prevention and victim services, appropriate compensation for City employees, and the ongoing shortfall in some City revenues," the mayor's budget proposal says.

Durkan attempted to reallocate JumpStart revenues last year as well.

A summary of the bill by the City Budget Office notes that Durkan didn't sign the JumpStart bill, "expressing many of the same concerns about earmarking certain revenue streams at a time when the City was making significant investments using one-time funding received from the federal government as a response to the COVID-19 public health emergency." She also vetoed legislation last year that used JumpStart revenues to fund COVID-19 relief, a veto the council narrowly overturned.

The City estimates that JumpStart will bring in about $235 million next year, so Durkan's plan would use up the majority of JumpStart funding for non-JumpStart purposes. The budget would use one-time federal emergency dollars to backfill the gap in the JumpStart fund, but because those funds only last one year, the budget creates a future funding cliff for the next mayor and council. If the council adopts this plan, it will have to either cut the programs Durkan funded using a tax meant for other purposes, or continue to dip into JumpStart revenues while cutting back on programs funded this year with one-time funds. It seems unlikely that the council will allow this part of the budget proposal to stand as is.

This is hardly the first time Durkan has proposed dipping into funds earmarked by legislation for a specific purpose in order to fund her own unrelated priorities. In 2018, she started using funds from the sweetened beverage tax — a tax that was supposed to fund healthy food programs in areas most impacted by the tax — to pay for programs that had historically been funded through the City's general fund, creating "extra" money for her office to allocate elsewhere.

When the council attempted to reverse this sleight-of-hand and use the tax revenues for their designated purpose, Durkan accused them of "cutting" programs that she was using the tax to fund, setting off a nasty battle that resulted in the council creating a designated fund for soda tax revenues — much like the designated JumpStart fund.

Adding Police Officers

Durkan wants to add another 35 (net) new police officers to the force — a fairly modest goal, but one directly in conflict with many councilmembers' stated commitment to reduce the size of the police department and invest the savings into community-based public safety alternatives. Last year, Durkan vetoed the entire city budget because the council amended it to reduce the size of the police force, a veto the council subsequently overturned.

Although the budget proposal includes funding for new and continued alternatives to policing and police response, such as Health One and Triage One, and funding for the Regional Peacekeepers Collective, a gun-violence prevention program, it also commits to "restoring SPD staffing to previous levels" by hiring new officers. To that end, Durkan's budget also includes $1.1 million to pay for hiring incentives for new recruits and officers who make lateral transfers from other departments.

The City Council just rejected a series of proposals from Councilmember Alex Pedersen that would have set aside as much as $3 million to retain existing officers and recruit new ones to the department.

Funding for the Regional Homelessness Authority

The budget proposes sending more money — $104.2 million, compared to $75 million the City agreed to provide in the interlocal agreement adopted in 2019 — to the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, which is supposed to take over (almost) all the homelessness programs previously managed by the City at the end of this year. The homelessness authority is funded by the City and King County; suburban cities, which hold three seats on the authority's governing board, don't contribute financially to the authority.

Mayoral spokeswoman Kamaria Hightower said the higher-than-expected contribution "represents increased spending on homelessness projected [for] 2022. The [agreement] was written in 2019 and did not contemplate the pandemic or the massive infusion of funds to help our most vulnerable neighbors stay safe."

The new funds include $2.4 million in state and local funds for "tiny home villages," coincidentally the same amount of State and local dollars the council has been trying to get the mayor to release to pay for three new tiny house villages this year. The mayor's proposed $2.4 million would pay for ongoing "operations, maintenance, and services for three tiny home villages (estimated 120 units) or other noncongregate emergency shelter or temporary housing options," leaving open the possibility that the regional authority might fund a different shelter option.

However, because the money is supposed to "operationalize" funding in the state capital budget that was explicitly for "tiny homes," it's likely that advocates for tiny house villages would object strongly to using the money for some other kind of shelter. Authority CEO Marc Dones has expressed skepticism about tiny houses as a form of temporary shelter, noting that people tend to stay in villages far longer than the City's own goals for the program.

There's also funding in the proposal for a new men's shelter run by Africatown at a former nursing home in the Central District; ongoing support for the Salvation Army's mass shelter in SoDo; and about $190 million for new housing, paid for through the voter-adopted housing levy, federal dollars, and other funding sources.

The budget also proposes $6 million for services to help people who receive federal emergency housing vouchers maintain their housing when the vouchers run out. Some of this money, according to the budget summary, could come from rapid rehousing funds. As we've reported, the City's plan to move people quickly from two shelter-based hotels into apartments using rapid rehousing subsidies has failed to place many people in housing, largely because the people moving into the hotels tend to be poor candidates for rapid rehousing programs, which generally require tenants to pay full market rent within a few months to a year.

Maintaining Encampment Sweeps

Although Durkan's budget plan relinquishes control of most homelessness work, it still assumes that the City, not the regional authority, will maintain its role removing encampments and, to some extent, doing outreach to unsheltered people, although the form that role will take is unclear. Budget director Ben Noble told PubliCola yesterday that although "the shelter contracts and related pieces are all going to the regional authority … the feeling was that folks who are on the street and not in a sanctioned encampment but living outside are still the primary responsibility of the City."

Seattle Public Utilities, in other words, will still do outreach to people living in RVs; the Human Services Department's HOPE Team will still "conduct outreach to and mitigate the impacts of those living unsheltered," according to the budget document; and the parks and transportation departments will continue removing unsheltered people and their tents from public property.

In the past year, encampment sweeps have fallen largely to Parks Department workers, who are not trained as social workers or homeless outreach providers. Durkan's proposed budget actually increases funding for this work by almost a million dollars, adding 6.5 full-time equivalent employees to respond to "the increased demand on [Seattle Parks and Recreation] to address impacts of unmanaged encampments, such as litter removal, storage of personal belongings, and data collection & reporting in compliance with Multi-Department Rules (MDAR)."

MDARs are rules that dictate how encampments can be removed. However, the City is allowed to ignore these rules if they determine that an encampment constitutes an "obstruction" because it's located in a park or right-of-way; under Durkan, the City used this "obstruction" exemption to effectively rewrite the rules on encampment removals.

Funding the Department of Transportation

The Seattle Department of Transportation will also get more money to remove encampments from sidewalks and streets, which fall under its purview. The proposed budget would also re-start work on the long-stalled downtown streetcar, which Durkan "paused" in 2018, providing $2.4 million from the City's tax on transportation network companies like Uber and Lyft to do a "comprehensive project review to assess how to proceed with the [streetcar] project."Additional details about SDOT's capital funding proposals, including investments in bike and pedestrian infrastructure, are in the Capital Improvement Program document; we'll be wading deeper into that discussion when the council discusses the transportation budget.

Erica C. Barnett is a feminist, an urbanist, and an obsessive observer of politics, transportation, and the quotidian inner workings of City Hall.

Featured image by Susan Fried.