2026 Episode 39: Breaking Down Mayor Wilson's Budget Proposal, with Kevin Schofield

All right, let's do this.

Time for Right Here, Right Now.

All right, Kevin, I wanted to start out with this idea of how we got here.

And folks, Kevin and I were actually with budget director Ali Panucci just before this show.

Ali, if you're listening to the podcast, we hope we get it close to right here.

Kevin, I wanted to start with this, how we got here, where Seattle's been when it comes to this deficit.

It's big picture stuff, but it's important to understand.

So here we go.

Let me try to break this down.

Stop me if we need to make some changes here.

So last 15 years, let's say.

period of rapid growth there.

With that came some rising service demands.

Also during that time, the city's wealth and income gap really grew and paying for costs at the scale of the need has become a real challenge for the city.

Here's one snapshot to look at it.

In 2010, the city had 11,400 full-time employees in 32 departments.

Today, it's 13,500. in 40 departments there so the city is definitely responding to some needs but the revenue coming in has been constrained certainly after covid how am i tracking so far on that kevin

i mean that's a good start so like there are four or five big sources for revenue for the city property tax which at the state level is constrained about how quickly you can grow at a very low level And then there's a bunch of ones that really kind of track their economy.

B&O tax, retail sales tax, utilities tax, and now we have the jumpstart payroll tax, right? So when the economy is booming, when businesses are growing, those grow really fast, and that's great.

But when things kind of ease off, like we saw particularly during the COVID time when, you know, it was a strain for that.

It got to the point where our revenues were just not growing that fast.

But, you know, inflation was still tracking pretty high.

Costs were high.

And the city could just not keep up.

So we ended up sort of in the structural place where because we're so – our fortunes were tied to – these revenue sources that were really based on the economy, we were just really, really stuck, right? And we wrote it out for a couple years until inflation went really high.