City Hall
McGinn's Budget Saves $18 Million With Layoffs, "Consolidations"
Mayor Mike McGinn announced the details of his proposed 2012 budget this morning at Seattle Central Community College; he'll formally present the budget to the city council at its meeting 2:00 this afternoon at City Hall. Council members, who've been getting sneak peeks of the budget over the past few weeks, will give their formal response to the budget after McGinn's speech this afternoon.
McGinn's proposed budget would close an estimated $18 million revenue shortfall by making cuts to departments across the city, consolidating the Office of Economic Development and the Office of Housing (which we wrote about last week), limiting hours at many community centers, and laying off just over 82 full-time city employees with a focus on management-level positions (17 percent of those who will lose their jobs are senior-level managers and strategic advisors).
Specifically, the proposal, which McGinn outlined to reporters on Friday, would:
• Change the way the city operates community centers, keeping more heavily used centers open longer and reducing hours at centers that are used by fewer people. "We can no longer take a cookie cutter approach to allocating community center hours," McGinn said Friday. "Where facilities are being used more heavily, we can expand those hours. Where they're being used less heavily," the city will reduce hours, McGinn said. It remains unclear specifically which services will be preserved and which users they serve; community centers serve not just kids and families but also seniors and disabled individuals.
• Spend the money from an insurance settlement on the former Sunny Jim's peanut butter factory, a facility located on city land that burned down last year, fixing roofs at six city-owned buildings. Previously , that money was earmarked to pay for a permanent homeless shelter at the decommissioned Fire Station 39 in Lake City. However, that proposal proved controversial among neighborhood residents, and the mayor's budget would make shelter planning part of the city's long-term capital improvement planning process (in effect, putting it off indefinitely), as PubliCola reported last week.
Asked why the money was no longer earmarked to house the homeless, McGinn told PubliCola Friday, "We had not seen that there had been any coalescing with the council over what the proposed solution was." Because the insurance settlement is a budget item, spending it on the proposed homeless shelter would require a supermajority vote of seven council members.
"We were hearing concerns that [council members] didn't think that was the best use of $950,000. Rather than leave that insurance money use sitting there waiting [for agreement], we're going to put money into the roof repair now. We're prepared to work with the council when we do coalesce around a solution."
"If you don't take care of the leaky roof, it's going to cost you more money in the long run."
• Keep library hours the same in 2012 as in 2011. Library hours have been a major priority among advocates for seniors and city council members. Previous budgets have already reduced library hours to threadbare levels---many branch libraries are now closed on Fridays and Sundays, and even the downtown library is open only a few hours on Sundays.
• Merge the offices of Housing and Economic Development for a savings of $338,000. Asked whether that was enough money to justify eliminating an entire department (OH director Rick Hooper's job would be cut under McGinn's budget proposal), McGinn responded, "These two departments have a history of working together. Of the $338,000 saved, we're going to reinvest $210,000 back into housing programs, targeting the low-income rental program," which has lost funding in recent years due to cuts in the federal community development block grant program.
• Invest $1.9 million, or about 0.25 percent of the city's total general-fund budget, into the city's rainy day fund, which pays for unanticipated financial emergencies. City council members have questioned whether 2012 is the right year to set aside money from the budget, given that the city still faces a revenue shortfall, and will vote on whether to set the money aside as part of the budget process later this year.
Asked whether the city should be setting money aside even as it cuts people's jobs, city finance director Beth Goldberg said Friday, "The recession ended two years ago. What is different about the great recession and the recovery from the great recession is that we're not seeing the robust revenue growth that we had in the past. That is the new reality. So to wait until 2013---I don't think it's going to get any easier for 2013 or 2014. ... We need to start building that discipline in now."
• Substantially cut the number of staffers at the Seattle Department of Transportation and restructure SDOT maintenance workers' schedules so they will no longer get overtime pay for working over the weekend, when most road repairs take place. The SDOT union, McGinn says, has agreed to reduce its overtime by 95 percent.
• Invest more than a million dollars in long-term transit planning---planning that, not surprisingly, McGinn has indicated would include planning for rail (light rail or streetcar) to Ballard and possibly West Seattle. "Now, some might say that this is not the right time for new transit investments," McGinn said this morning, "and I have to say, I agree. The time was about two decades ago."
• Save $6 million by not building a new jail in Seattle, part of a joint agreement announced earlier this year between King County and the city. Quoting Jesse Jackson, McGinn said at Seattle Central this morning, "He said we should invest in Penn State, not the state pen, and he was right."
• Continue to put off additional police hiring; instead of adding officers, McGinn said Friday , SPD will start "maintenance hiring" next year to backfill the number of officers the department has lost through attrition. It's unclear whether the city will be able to recruit and hire new officers at the rate it will need to in order to replace those who leave every year. Initially, the city had planned to hire 30 new officers every year starting in 2008 to implement the Neighborhood Policing Plan adopted that year
"There was a push to continue to increase the number of positions over time, and our budget doesn't allow us to do that," McGinn said Friday. "When you look at key outcomes of the Neighborhood Policing Plan ... we're exceeding the targets," including 911 response times, the amount of time officers spend on patrol, crime rates, and the number of backup vehicles. McGinn's budget would also preserve funding for SPD's crime prevention coordinators and victim advocates.
• Increase funding slightly at the Department of Planning and Development, which has been cut by more than 175 positions over the past two years. DPD's response time to permit requests increased to nine weeks last year; McGinn said increasing the agency's budget would help keep permit times down to two weeks.
• Take another look at parking meter rates, which haven't produced the additional revenues the city projected when it changed rates citywide last year. Interestingly, revenues actually increased in areas like downtown Seattle where rates were raised---contradicting dire predictions that higher rates would deter people from driving to the central city.
Meanwhile, revenues actually fell in areas where rates went down---indicating, in Goldberg's words, that "unless you go to zero, price is not the driver or the only influencing factor in these neighborhoods.
"Based on this study, we are adding a level of granularity to the application of how we implement parking meter rates for 2012," Goldberg said. Translation: The city may increase rates on high-demand streets like the Ave, while decreasing rates for nearby neighborhood streets where demand for parking is lower.
I'll have more to say about the budget later today, including the challenges McGinn's proposal will likely face when it goes before the city council. You can read all the juicy details for yourself here starting at 2:00 pm.
McGinn's proposed budget would close an estimated $18 million revenue shortfall by making cuts to departments across the city, consolidating the Office of Economic Development and the Office of Housing (which we wrote about last week), limiting hours at many community centers, and laying off just over 82 full-time city employees with a focus on management-level positions (17 percent of those who will lose their jobs are senior-level managers and strategic advisors).
Specifically, the proposal, which McGinn outlined to reporters on Friday, would:
• Change the way the city operates community centers, keeping more heavily used centers open longer and reducing hours at centers that are used by fewer people. "We can no longer take a cookie cutter approach to allocating community center hours," McGinn said Friday. "Where facilities are being used more heavily, we can expand those hours. Where they're being used less heavily," the city will reduce hours, McGinn said. It remains unclear specifically which services will be preserved and which users they serve; community centers serve not just kids and families but also seniors and disabled individuals.
• Spend the money from an insurance settlement on the former Sunny Jim's peanut butter factory, a facility located on city land that burned down last year, fixing roofs at six city-owned buildings. Previously , that money was earmarked to pay for a permanent homeless shelter at the decommissioned Fire Station 39 in Lake City. However, that proposal proved controversial among neighborhood residents, and the mayor's budget would make shelter planning part of the city's long-term capital improvement planning process (in effect, putting it off indefinitely), as PubliCola reported last week.
Asked why the money was no longer earmarked to house the homeless, McGinn told PubliCola Friday, "We had not seen that there had been any coalescing with the council over what the proposed solution was." Because the insurance settlement is a budget item, spending it on the proposed homeless shelter would require a supermajority vote of seven council members.
"We were hearing concerns that [council members] didn't think that was the best use of $950,000. Rather than leave that insurance money use sitting there waiting [for agreement], we're going to put money into the roof repair now. We're prepared to work with the council when we do coalesce around a solution."
"If you don't take care of the leaky roof, it's going to cost you more money in the long run."
• Keep library hours the same in 2012 as in 2011. Library hours have been a major priority among advocates for seniors and city council members. Previous budgets have already reduced library hours to threadbare levels---many branch libraries are now closed on Fridays and Sundays, and even the downtown library is open only a few hours on Sundays.
• Merge the offices of Housing and Economic Development for a savings of $338,000. Asked whether that was enough money to justify eliminating an entire department (OH director Rick Hooper's job would be cut under McGinn's budget proposal), McGinn responded, "These two departments have a history of working together. Of the $338,000 saved, we're going to reinvest $210,000 back into housing programs, targeting the low-income rental program," which has lost funding in recent years due to cuts in the federal community development block grant program.
• Invest $1.9 million, or about 0.25 percent of the city's total general-fund budget, into the city's rainy day fund, which pays for unanticipated financial emergencies. City council members have questioned whether 2012 is the right year to set aside money from the budget, given that the city still faces a revenue shortfall, and will vote on whether to set the money aside as part of the budget process later this year.
Asked whether the city should be setting money aside even as it cuts people's jobs, city finance director Beth Goldberg said Friday, "The recession ended two years ago. What is different about the great recession and the recovery from the great recession is that we're not seeing the robust revenue growth that we had in the past. That is the new reality. So to wait until 2013---I don't think it's going to get any easier for 2013 or 2014. ... We need to start building that discipline in now."
• Substantially cut the number of staffers at the Seattle Department of Transportation and restructure SDOT maintenance workers' schedules so they will no longer get overtime pay for working over the weekend, when most road repairs take place. The SDOT union, McGinn says, has agreed to reduce its overtime by 95 percent.
• Invest more than a million dollars in long-term transit planning---planning that, not surprisingly, McGinn has indicated would include planning for rail (light rail or streetcar) to Ballard and possibly West Seattle. "Now, some might say that this is not the right time for new transit investments," McGinn said this morning, "and I have to say, I agree. The time was about two decades ago."
• Save $6 million by not building a new jail in Seattle, part of a joint agreement announced earlier this year between King County and the city. Quoting Jesse Jackson, McGinn said at Seattle Central this morning, "He said we should invest in Penn State, not the state pen, and he was right."
• Continue to put off additional police hiring; instead of adding officers, McGinn said Friday , SPD will start "maintenance hiring" next year to backfill the number of officers the department has lost through attrition. It's unclear whether the city will be able to recruit and hire new officers at the rate it will need to in order to replace those who leave every year. Initially, the city had planned to hire 30 new officers every year starting in 2008 to implement the Neighborhood Policing Plan adopted that year
"There was a push to continue to increase the number of positions over time, and our budget doesn't allow us to do that," McGinn said Friday. "When you look at key outcomes of the Neighborhood Policing Plan ... we're exceeding the targets," including 911 response times, the amount of time officers spend on patrol, crime rates, and the number of backup vehicles. McGinn's budget would also preserve funding for SPD's crime prevention coordinators and victim advocates.
• Increase funding slightly at the Department of Planning and Development, which has been cut by more than 175 positions over the past two years. DPD's response time to permit requests increased to nine weeks last year; McGinn said increasing the agency's budget would help keep permit times down to two weeks.
• Take another look at parking meter rates, which haven't produced the additional revenues the city projected when it changed rates citywide last year. Interestingly, revenues actually increased in areas like downtown Seattle where rates were raised---contradicting dire predictions that higher rates would deter people from driving to the central city.
Meanwhile, revenues actually fell in areas where rates went down---indicating, in Goldberg's words, that "unless you go to zero, price is not the driver or the only influencing factor in these neighborhoods.
"Based on this study, we are adding a level of granularity to the application of how we implement parking meter rates for 2012," Goldberg said. Translation: The city may increase rates on high-demand streets like the Ave, while decreasing rates for nearby neighborhood streets where demand for parking is lower.
I'll have more to say about the budget later today, including the challenges McGinn's proposal will likely face when it goes before the city council. You can read all the juicy details for yourself here starting at 2:00 pm.
