These three charts tell the story of the Seattle’s 2025 city budget

On September 24, Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell announced the city’s 2025-2026 biennial budget. The $8.3 billion dollar annual budget is the city’s largest ever, including a $1.9 billion discretionary General Fund.

The budget comes after a year of austerity due to an expected $250 annual budget deficit. Cash flow issues — caused in part by retroactive pay increases won by city workers in their union bargaining agreements — also led Harrell to impose a hiring freeze and other cost-cutting measures.

In order to address the General Fund deficit, Harrell has tapped into Seattle’s JumpStart Tax on big businesses, which was originally intended to go mainly toward building more affordable housing, accelerating a just climate transition, assisting small business and supporting people of color-led organizations doing anti-displacement work.

Harrell has also proposed eliminating 159 mainly internally facing job positions, resulting in 76 workers expected to be laid off. This will save the city approximately $25 million in 2025, according to Mayor’s Office spokesperson Callie Craighead.

Despite Seattle’s difficult fiscal picture, Harrell has still proposed significant increases to his policy priorities, namely police and sweeps. Perhaps he is emboldened by the mostly new Seattle City Council, which swung significantly to the right after the 2023 local elections. The city council will have until the end of November to read, analyze and propose changes to Harrell’s budget proposal.

These three charts tell the story of the Seattle 2025-2026 city budget in a historical context. Be sure to pick up a copy of the October 23 issue of Real Change to read my full analysis.

JumpStart Tax proves its merit

One bit of good news for Harrell in 2024 was the windfall from Seattle’s JumpStart Tax. Because the tax applies to payrolls of high-earning employees, its revenue is largely tied to the value of tech company equity. With the stock market hitting record highs this year, revenues from the tax are expected to be about $80 million more than originally anticipated. Harrell’s budget repurposes approximately $85 in unspent JumpStart revenue to fill the 2025 budget deficit.

The Mayor’s Office has also proposed diverting about half of JumpStart revenues to fill General Fund expenses permanently. Since its inception in 2020, the JumpStart Tax has always been used to supplement the General Fund, as the chart above shows. At the same time, with Harrell’s increasing reliance on the tax, the proportion of revenue going to core JumpStart priorities is steadily decreasing.

This also means that about 1 in 6 dollars of one of the city’s only progressive revenue sources is subsidizing SPD and other non-fire public safety expenditures — something seen as anathema to many left-leaning constituents.

Sweeps 7 days a week, 365 days a year

The 2025 budget sees a major, 22% increase to one of Harrell’s signature policies — the Unified Care Team (UCT). The roughly $6 million in new funds will significantly expand the cross-departmental formation, which is charged with displacing homeless people’s vehicles and encampment, a practice commonly known as sweeps.

The new funding will increase the number of UCT clean-up crews from 8 to 12, with the new staff working on mainly Friday-to-Monday schedules. The budget also confirms plans announced in July to triple the amount of homeless outreach workers assigned to the team. These workers are responsible for connecting people to a limited amount of shelter beds and tiny homes set aside for the UCT. To learn more about the background of the UCT, read my previous post about the team’s budget.

The UCT is significantly larger than its predecessor, the Navigation Team. Before its disbandment in August 2020, the Navigation Team averaged a budget of under $10 million a year.

Both the Navigation Team and UCT operationalized Seattle’s sweeps policy, enabling the city to carry out many hundreds of sweeps a year in a more organized manner. Under both teams, the large majority of sweeps were conducted under the guise of “obstructions,” which do not require prior outreach or offers of shelter.

You can select and deselect specific funding categories to observe changes in funding over the last decade. Some departments like emergency management were transferred out of SPD after the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests.

Funding for police, courts and prosecutors rise

The 2025 budget sees the largest single-year increase in funding for the Seattle Police Department (SPD) since 2019. Like in that year, this is driven largely by pay raises secured by the city’s new contract with the Seattle Police Officers Guild.

This interactive chart shows that despite claims of “defunding SPD,” non-fire department related public safety funding has not significantly decreased and has actually risen at or above the rate of inflation throughout the last 8 years (calculation derived from the CPI-U for Seattle-Bellevue-Everett, February 12-month estimates).

In the 2025 budget, Harrell has proposed major increases for an array of public safety departments in addition to SPD, including the Seattle Municipal Court (SMC), the Seattle City Attorney’s Office (CAO) and the new Community Assisted Response and Engagement (CARE) department. This adds up to a 13.4% increase in non-fire public safety spending, well above the rate of inflation. The expansion stands in sharp contrast to other departments that will be forced to curtail their programming.