Seattle City Council, mayor and mayor-elect spar over proposed $10 million police cut

Seattle City Council is considering slashing the Seattle Police Department’s budget by $ 10 million to offset declining revenue and has drawn criticism from the city’s mayor and elected mayors for violating public safety.

The Chair of the Committee on Budgets, Teresa Mosqueda, presented her proposed balanced budget package on Tuesday afternoon and suggested that the Council make the cuts proposed by Mayor Jenny Durkan in September.

“Over the past seven weeks we’ve worked diligently to address many of the issues community members and councilors have been reporting to ensure we meet the needs that are growing across our city and invest in a fairer investment and fair Seattle “Said Mosqueda in her presentation on Tuesday.

“By releasing today’s budget, we hope you see significant investment and a vision for a more equitable, safer, healthy, and more inhabited Seattle.”

With Durkan proposing its initial budget of $ 7.1 billion in September, projected revenue for the city fell by $ 15 million for 2022 as major employers announced they would continue working remotely through early 2022 and employees from JumpStart -Exempt city payroll tax.

“This budget proposal was compared with an August revenue forecast by the city’s budget office, which assumed that major employers will almost completely return to work this autumn,” said Esther Handy, the council’s central HR director, during the presentation. She said it seemed “potentially overly optimistic” by September given the ongoing pandemic.

City Budget Office director Ben Noble said Tuesday the August estimate failed to predict the impact of the COVID-19 Delta variant on the JumpStart tax, which was first levied by companies with Seattle employees in early 2022 who earn at least $ 150,000 annually.

To offset the impact of the drop in revenue, Mosqueda focused on cutting the police budget to preserve the council’s priorities in tackling affordable housing, homelessness and criminal justice reform.

Durkan criticized Mosqueda’s proposal and blamed the council for the recent personnel problems in the SPD. She said the proposal failed to prioritize public safety.

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“The city council’s previous promise to relieve the SPD by 50%, their treatment of Chief (Carmen) Best and their earlier firing budget resulted in an exodus of 325 SPD officials in the past two years,” said Durkan. “Several plans to address the hiring and retention proposed by Chief (Adrian) Diaz and myself have been repeatedly rejected by a majority of the council.”

“And just yesterday, another councilor suggested blocking my emergency hiring proposal, which has already resulted in a ten-fold increase in applications for 911 jobs in Seattle,” she said. “Further cuts by the SPD and underfunding of the 911 center are not a plan for real public safety.”

“We need alternatives to armed police operations, and we have expanded those alternatives significantly,” said Durkan. “But if someone calls 911 with a dangerous, potentially life-threatening emergency – we need enough police officers to respond.”

Mayor-elect Bruce Harrell also criticized the proposal in a separate statement, saying the results of last week’s election – in which Harrell was elected over progressive city council president M. Lorena González – showed the city’s desire for public safety.

“Last Tuesday, Seattle voters strongly and unequivocally opposed the defunding of the police,” said Harrell. “Our campaign sent a clear message and commitment: we need to provide real security to the community, ensure unbiased policing and reduce response times by improving training, hiring more and better officials, creating unarmed and alternative responses, and the culture within change the SPD. This vision and these goals for improvement and reform cannot be achieved with this proposed $ 10 million cut. “

The Council will be informed of the Mosqueda proposal at 9:00 a.m. on Wednesday and will be heard by members of the public in a hearing at 5:30 p.m. All council meetings are remote and can be accessed at seattle.gov/council.

A final budget vote is expected on November 22nd.

Late Tuesday, Mosqueda said her proposal would still fully fund the requirements of the federally mandated reform consent decree as well as the Durkan government’s recruitment plan, and it was about making up for lost revenue, not an affront to public safety.

“Of course we still need officers. We really need officers. We funded the entire recruitment plan, ”Mosqueda said, citing the council’s proposed $ 27 million investment in public safety, including alternative responses to certain emergency calls.

“But if we reduce the workload for officers currently having to respond to health calls, home emergency calls, and case management calls – as if they were being called into these situations with ID and a gun – we will relieve the stress of where ‘you are deployed, and then have they have a lower workload that actually frees them up to focus on the issues they signed up for primarily as officers. “

Mosqueda said the council’s budget package, however, would not cover some technology and other spending in the SPD’s budget to address the city’s housing crisis and other economic problems exacerbated by the pandemic.

“We have, yes, made some cuts that I don’t think we can afford to put money in a till and see if it is spent while people are now literally in need of food and shelter,” Mosqueda said. “And of course I want to make these investments. I hope the next government will find other ways to fund things that they think are important. But with general fund money, I have to prioritize that people are housed, fed and looked after. “

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/seattle-city-council-mayor-and-mayor-elect-spar-over-proposed-10-million-police-cut/