Council Increases Spending on SPD Marketing, Rejects Proposals to Release Youth Mental Health Funding and Block Expansion of Encampment Removal Team
"I haven't seen anything but women in [SPD's] recruitment efforts," public safety committee chairman says.
By Erica C. Barnett
The Seattle City Council’s select budget committee, which includes all nine council members, approved Mayor Bruce Harrell's midyear budget adds virtually unchanged on Wednesday, despite several efforts by Councilmember Tammy Morales to amend the proposal.
Morales wanted to release all of the the approximately $20 million the city will collect in payroll taxes for youth mental health programs this year, instead of waiting until next year or later to spend all the money. Morales said her amendment would "maintain the commitment" the council made to students, who organized in response to a shooting at Ingraham High School in 2022, during last year's budget.
The mayor's office, which recently released its plan to spend $10 million of the money collected this year, has said that because the tax was only proposed, and approved, at the end of last year's budget process, the city needs more time to come up with a plan to allocate all the funds in the future. Channeling this argument, Councilmember Bob Kettle called Morales' comments "an injustice to the executive," then went further, arguing that the proposal to fund student programs "came out of nowhere" and emerged "out of the blue" last year.
Council President Sara Nelson jumped on that one, saying she could tell Kettle exactly why there was suddenly an extra $20 million for youth mental health care: Because former councilmember Kshama Sawant just wanted to raise taxes before exiting the stage, essentially creating a budget problem by providing too much money for students without a clear spending plan.Â
Obviously, it takes time to figure out how to spend a sudden windfall and, having done that, to get the money out the door. A larger concern, for those who want to see the full $20 million go to mental health services for young people in the future, is that once the funding is rolled back into the larger JumpStart fund this year (and used, as it inevitably will be, to help patch the city's ongoing budget hole), it will be harder to claw back for its intended purpose in future years.
Council members have already expressed skepticism about the entire $20 million, suggesting that perhaps the city should reconsider getting into "a whole new line of business" and let the funding lapse back into the larger, easy-to-pilfer JumpStart fund.
The council also rejected a Morales proposal to redirect funding for 19 new members of the Unified Care Team, which removes encampments, toward the similarly named CARE Team, a group of social workers who are dispatched, along with police, to certain non-emergency 911 calls. Earlier this year, Harrell announced the city would take back funding it had been providing the King County Regional Homelessness Authority for outreach, reallocating it to the UCT.
The 19 new UCT members would include 14 people with the title "counselor," who would "support outreach-led encampment resolutions, provide referrals to shelter during encampment removals and provide support to individuals to move out of immediate hazard/obstruction locations," according to a budget memo.
Finally, the council approved adding $800,000 to an existing $2.6 million police marketing contract, with a new provision from Councilmember Cathy Moore stipulating that half the money has to be aimed at recruiting women. Moore's amendment replaced a proposal from Morales that would have not allowed SPD to spend the same $400,000 until it reported to the council on how it is currently spending the marketing dollars to recruit women and a status update on its goal of a 30-percent female recruit class by 2030. Â
Public safety committee chair Kettle objected to Morales' amendment, saying that while he is "110 percent behind" efforts to recruit more women to SPD, I don't think [the amendment is] needed in the sense that everything I see regarding recruitment, everything I see, is already including women in those recruitment efforts.
In fact, Kettle added, "I haven't seen anything but women in [SPD's] recruitment efforts."
As PubliCola reported earlier this week, the marketing firm SPD hired on a no-bid "piggyback" contract, Copacino Fujikado, produced three video ads that exclusively feature male, apparently white, officers rescuing people from dangerous situations, including one in which a male officer saves a crying woman bound with rope from a man who is holding her and another woman hostage.