The projected deficit loomed over last year’s City Council elections, and Councilmembers Joy Hollingsworth, Bob Kettle, Cathy Moore, Maritza Rivera, Rob Saka and Tanya Woo all promised to perform an audit of the city budget before taking any other steps to close the gap.
Seattle is legally required to have a balanced budget, and has relatively few tools available when its revenues don’t match spending. City leaders can cut staff and services, they can raise taxes, loosen restrictions on taxes earmarked for certain programs, and they can nibble around the edges with things like hiring freezes, which Mayor Bruce Harrell implemented in January. The new Council majority has said they’d prefer to find places to cut before considering any new taxes. and the deep analysis is meant, in part, to help them figure out where to do so.
The analysis is organized in an upside-down pyramid, with each layer showing how much the budget has grown over five years. The top layer is total budget growth from 2019-2024. The next layer separates departmental budgets into six policy areas — Administration; Arts, Culture and Recreation; Education and Human Services; Livable and Inclusive Communities; Public Safety; and Utilities, Transportation, and Environment — and groups each city department into one of them. And finally, the document looks at each department’s major program areas to identify where the growth stems from.
The Livable and Inclusive Communities policy area — which includes the Office of Housing, Construction and Inspections, Economic Development, Civil Rights and more — saw the largest five-year growth. Budgets in that grouping grew by $363.8 million or 174% since 2019. Much of that comes from the $270 million growth in the Office of Housing budget as the city has rapidly expanded its investment in subsidized affordable-housing construction.
The Education and Human Services policy area had the next largest five-year growth, up $196 million or 65% since 2019. More than $142 million of that increase comes from the Human Services Department, which contracts with nonprofits to provide social safety-net programs to address homelessness, food insecurity, elder care and more.
The city’s internal operations costs have also risen sharply in the past five years. The Administration policy bucket — which includes IT, human resources, the mayor’s office and the legislative department, among others — grew by $387.2 million, a 33% increase. At the May 1 Finance Committee meeting, Strauss said he was interested in digging much further into that policy bucket to understand the cost increases.
Rounding out the policy areas: Arts, Culture and Recreation grew by $109.7 million or 28%; Utilities, Transportation and Environment grew by $573.6 million or 17%; and Public Safety grew by $115.1 million or 16%.
Josh Cohen
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