A month after Mayor Jenny Durkan vetoed the Seattle City Council’s proposed new 2020 budget — which would have cut funding to the Seattle Police Department — the council on Tuesday passed a new, Durkan-approved package after failing to find the seven votes needed to override the mayor.
For the activists who have pushed the council to act quickly toward cutting funding from the police, the vote represents a bitter disappointment.
City council members had called their initial budget, which passed unanimously in August, a “down payment” on a public safety system that relies less on police. Unlike the last version, the new one approved Tuesday is largely stripped of cuts to the police department and exhumes the controversial Navigation Team, which oversees cleanups of homeless encampments.
Council President Lorena González, who favored keeping the council’s previous budget in place, brought the new measure as a backup plan “that I’ve heard directly from the mayor on [that] she will not veto.”
Now the council will move almost immediately into deliberations over the city’s 2021 budget.
For those who spent the summer on the streets and inside City Hall pressuring the city to redefine public safety, the council’s failure to override the mayor’s veto stings.
The standard public comment period before the council’s vote was overwhelmingly in favor of overriding Durkan and preserving the cuts. Evelyn Chow, an organizer with Real Change, told the council, “You took small initial steps, but now when it matters the most you’re giving into mayoral pressure and the people are all watching. We need you to stand with Black lives, not with Jenny Durkan.”
"Your compromise plan is a betrayal and your actions and careers will be remembered through history as a betrayal to Black lives," said Christina Shimizu, a member of Decriminalize Seattle.
The previous budget— which the council passed unanimously in August — cut 100 full-time positions from the police department, eliminated the police-led Navigation Team, trimmed executive salaries and committed $14 million for community-led public safety organizations, among other things. Those measures already fell short of the 50% cuts to police that some demonstrators had called for, but were nevertheless celebrated as a culmination of the near-constant activism since George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis in May.
But Durkan vetoed the council’s budget changes, faulting the council for what she said was a poorly conceived and executed process. There was “no plan for how the city will bridge gaps in the police response that will be caused if we lose 100 police officers,” she said as she vetoed the measure.
"The bills I’m vetoing were passed without the level of collaboration that I think we need and, more importantly, that the city expects of us," Durkan said.
Tuesday’s new budget is more reflective of the mayor’s preferred path forward. Without the specific cuts to the police department, officer layoffs are no longer imminent. And while several vacancies on the Navigation Team will not be filled, the team’s basic structure — police officers and human services staff responding to encampments together — remains in place. The council’s original budget eliminated the team entirely.
The new budget also significantly scales back what would have been about $14 million in investments in community-led organizations. Durkan has promised $100 million toward the same purpose in her 2021 budget, but balked at the council’s plan to move money from other parts of the city budget to push money out the door this year.
The new budget does set aside $3 million for noncongregate homeless shelter. It also allocates $2.5 million for community-based investments, $1 million toward involving citizens more closely in the budgeting process and $500,000 for behavioral health services.
Councilmember Andrew Lewis, who voted against overriding Durkan’s veto, said he’s still committed to reducing the size of the police department and growing alternatives. But, he said, those conversations would be more productive in the next round of budget negotiations.
“I mean, the summer budget was never going to be an appropriate vehicle to really make these lasting changes because it's so temporary, it's so improvised,” he said in an interview.
“We can be much more intentional, strategic and deliberate crafting the 2021 budget,” he said.
Lewis also raised questions of how much the city would have accomplished even if it had reversed the mayor’s veto. Labor hurdles would have likely pushed any layoffs into 2021 regardless. And the council members are limited in forcing the mayor to spend the money they allocate in the way they want.
“We can appropriate money, but we can't force the mayor to spend it,” Lewis said. He’s confident that the agreement struck Tuesday commits Durkan’s office to take seriously a plan to sketch out alternatives to police, particularly in relation to crisis response.
Wrangling the 2020 budget has represented a collision of two historic moments in Seattle and the country — the COVID-19 pandemic and the massive protests against police brutality and racism.
City Hall rarely makes such significant changes to the budget of the current year. But a roughly $400 million hole in the city’s finances — blown open by COVID-19 shutdowns — forced the council and the mayor back to the table. As part of those deliberations, activists demanded cuts to the Seattle Police Department and found a sympathetic ear in the sitting council.
Earlier in the summer, as the protests hit their peak, seven of nine council members expressed varying levels of support for cutting the department by half — a lukewarm commitment that was quickly spun into a done deal.
Since then, even some of the most strident council members have allowed that their ability to make such dramatic cuts this year were limited. In their first budget revision, only one member, Kshama Sawant, put forward a proposal to cut the rest of the department’s 2020 budget by 50%. The rest agreed to cuts that equaled around $3 million.
As she often does, Sawant berated her colleagues for their vote. “This ‘alternate’ bill, which is being characterized as a compromise, is in fact a stunning betrayal and capitulation to Durkan, the Seattle Police Department and big business,” she said in a statement..
Durkan is set to roll out her proposed 2021 budget next week.
