More Cameras, Less Money

[00:00:10] Hello and welcome to the latest edition of Seattle Nice, the only podcast that tells you what's really happening in Seattle politics. I'm David Hyde with Erica C. Barnett of Publicola taping Wednesday afternoon right after another huge U.S. Senate race has been called. This is the biggest flip, I'm pretty sure, from red to blue that we've seen in the Senate so far. And Erica, all I can say is pick another protein.

[00:00:34] You know, I don't watch a lot of the ads, so I am more aware of that as a meme than an actual ad. I did watch a great ad the other day, though. It was on Talking Points Memo. It was the mayor of Grenada, Mississippi, talking, doing a Where is Cindy, meaning Cindy Hyde-Smith bit. And it was just so delightful. And man, there are some great accents in Mississippi. So, yeah, I... And you are from Mississippi.

[00:01:02] I am from Meridian, Mississippi. And so this is... I mean, I cannot tell you how unexpected this is. I mean, I've been like duh of the day, obviously. But I mean, I just never would imagine... And I'm from Mississippi and Texas.

[00:01:19] And I would say I am much more surprised by Mississippi electing a black senator, a black Democratic senator, Cindy Hyde-Smith getting thrown out on her racist, white ass. And yeah, I'm just... No relation. I'm just going to say no relation. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Hi. So, yeah, it's a really... I mean, it's been an exciting week to watch that go down.

[00:01:48] And you said they called it today. So that's great. They just called it. We're taping Wednesday afternoon. Sandeep Kaushik, best campaign ad of the season? Pick another protein? Or thoughts about that race? No, I think that may well be the best campaign ad that I've seen this season. It was brilliant and kind of devastating and funny. And it definitely... I'm not even sure that they put it up on TV as much as he just posted it online and it kind of went viral, if I remember this right.

[00:02:17] But anyway, yes, everybody saw it. It was funny. And it clearly helped him win. I will also say, though, that, you know, if you watch his other videos and stuff, he's... Yes, he's a black man in Mississippi. He is not a Seattle progressive, right? He kind of talks about how his dad worked for Ronald Reagan and he was a prosecutor. Well, yeah, I mean, dude, like I said, I'm from Mississippi. I think we all understand the difference between Mississippi and Seattle. Reagan won by 20... Trump won by 23 points there. I'm just looking.

[00:02:46] The last time Mississippi elected a Democrat to the Senate, 1947. So that's before even Sandeep and I were born, I'm pretty sure. All right, Erica C. Barnett, we are going to be talking, though, about Seattle politics today. Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson having announced her plans to expand the city's CCTV system. Following the release of this long-anticipated audit of our surveillance system, commissioned by Mayor Wilson and conducted by something called the Policing Project, which is basically

[00:03:16] one of these independent research centers. This one housed at NYU. And their focus is on police oversight and civil liberties. And this is basically giving Seattle some advice about how to better strengthen sort of government oversight of our CCTV system, right? So what are the highlights and why did the mayor respond the way that she did? Yeah, well, I mean, the high-level highlight, I think, is that the mayor had clearly made up her mind before this report came out.

[00:03:45] The report was not designed to say yes or no to our cameras. It was designed to sort of poke at some of the flaws, talk about what needs to be done to ensure civil liberties and sort of identify, you know, whether these things are effective and whether they can be protected from access by bad actors like ICE, like law enforcement in other states.

[00:04:12] And, you know, I mean, I would say it was a very mixed bag, the report itself. The mayor spun it in a certain way yesterday when she announced that she's turning the cameras on at Soto and that she's going to expand into the Central District and Capitol Hill. But, you know, it found that there is no way to prevent ICE or anybody else, any other law enforcement agency or a really person from getting footage if they want it. You can just file a records request.

[00:04:41] It recommended retaining some of the evidence that SPD keeps for less time. Right now they keep evidence, you know, footage that they consider evidence in storage indefinitely. And it recommended that SPD, you know, or that the city require a warrant whenever SPD wants to go back and retrospectively track someone's movements. And the mayor kind of did not make that recommendation and kind of brushed a question about it aside

[00:05:09] yesterday, saying that the city doesn't do that anyway. So there's nothing to worry about. Right. So there's no data showing that there's been civil liberties abuses. But the NYU report is basically saying there's the potential for abuse here. And that's something the city should have thought more hard, more, more about. Yeah, there's two. Just to be clear, that's two different things. So the ICE being able to get access or whoever being able to get access is one thing. And the warrants, if they want to attract people using footage over time, like in the past,

[00:05:39] if they want to go back and see where someone has been, the recommendation was that they should have to get a warrant because that's a search. And the city is not doing that. And just before we go to Sundeep, you say mixed bag. They said some positive things about Seattle. And then the mayor did adopt like a number of the recommendations. Right. There are some that they didn't, but there are quite a few that they actually did adopt. Right. Well, I would say that the mayor is proposing to adopt a lot of them. I mean, a lot of these are SPD policies that they have to change.

[00:06:08] And a couple of the things that she mentioned that she's going to be doing as sort of action items are things like requiring a dashboard to show how the RTCC is being used and requiring SPD to develop its own surveillance policy. Those have been recommendations at the city level since 2024, and SPD has not done them. So I think that we should all be a little bit skeptical about any recommendation that SPD

[00:06:36] do something because they have not taken any action on those, you know, at this point, very old recommendations about these cameras. So a lot of it kind of hinges on SPD's willingness to move forward with these recommendations themselves. Sandy, the mayor's decided to expand our system. What do you think of the report or that decision? Well, I don't I agree with Erica. It wasn't a huge surprise. I think she's been signaling for a while that she was inclined to turn the cameras back on.

[00:07:06] That is obviously a shift from what she ran on last year as a kind of ardent foe of the cameras. But I think the decision she ultimately made was both good politics for her and good policy and not without consequence or cost for her. But obviously, it pisses off a certain element of her base. Right. That are ardently anti-camera. I would put Erica in that category. I'm very pro-parnacy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:07:33] And are inclined to kind of dismiss any of the benefits that the cameras provide. But but that said, I think politically, there's strong support broadly for for the use of this kind of technology. We've seen that in some polling recently. It's we've seen ballot measures about expanding camera usage in similar cities like San Francisco that passed significantly, you know, overwhelmingly.

[00:07:59] So I think that politically it was it was a smart decision on her part. And then in terms of the policy itself, yeah, add some additional guardrails. There's going to be some stuff that they'll do there. But at the end of the day, like I strongly believe that cameras do have a significant impact on helping them solve crimes. I've actually been to the real time crime center not that long ago.

[00:08:28] I did a visit there and kind of saw the way they work. It was quite impressive, I thought. So so I think from a policy perspective, she would have if she had not turned these cameras on and you saw some kind of rise in crime and stuff like that. Or there was a they started clearing fewer cases or anything of that sort. You would have had to wear that stuff. So I think I think she made the right decision.

[00:08:53] So, Erica, this study, the authors talk a little bit about effectiveness, but it's basically a civil liberty study. It's not really designed to say, yes, you should expand the system. It's not designed to say how effective these cameras are at preventing crime or how effective they are at solving crimes. So in that sense, I mean, it's interesting. Sandy's bringing that up. But the timing here of expanding the system, there is another report coming out next year in 2027. So, yeah. So that's my question.

[00:09:20] You know, what do you think about the timing here with the decision to expand the system? And in your response to Sandy? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I want to just quickly say, you know, Sandy says that he feels they're effective. The report actually did talk about the evidence that RTCCs are effective. There's about 300 of these systems. That's the real time crime center you was talking to Sandy, if you were just talking about.

[00:09:42] And that's kind of distinguished from just the cameras because it's layered in with all this other data and all these other capabilities that police have to track people and to look at the scene of a crime and, you know, things that they can do in real time. The report said that there is very thin evidence that they actually aid in solving crimes and preventing or deterring them. And they said that the evidence on CCTV cameras just by themselves is is very mixed. And that's consistent.

[00:10:11] I mean, CCTV cameras have been around since the 60s. Real time crime centers have been around, you know, a shorter period of time. But there's lots of other cities that have them. And, you know, and there's just there is not a whole lot of evidence. I mean, it feels like there should be to a lot of supporters. And I think a lot of supporters will just say, well, it's obvious that they work. But I mean, looking at the evidence, this report did not agree with that.

[00:10:33] Does it just on that point, does it make sense to make a distinction between saying the system like we haven't established that the system is effective or ineffective? Like there's not enough evidence kind of either way is really what the report says. Right. And it looks like other systems, too. That's the thin evidence. It's not right. It's not about ours. It's about the 300 or so other ones that already exist across the nation.

[00:10:58] And the other thing that they found just quickly is that the city of Seattle, SPD, does claim that, you know, that this has been incredibly effective. And they have quite a bit of, you know, I would say propaganda out there. I would say data.

[00:11:13] Well, I mean, their data, quote unquote, shows, and this was also addressed in the report, that, for example, SPD says that 17 homicides have been assisted, like solving 17 homicides have involved using the cameras. But when they looked at those 17 examples, NYU found that the definition SPD was using for assisted was incredibly loose and it was a correlation.

[00:11:39] So, for example, if anybody looked at a camera at any point, that was considered a successful intervention involving the cameras. And SPD uses that to say that it couldn't have happened without the cameras. But the report found that's not true. Well, there's been clear use in multiple homicide cases of camera footage in prosecutions in King County.

[00:12:00] Right. And, you know, and obviously when I was visiting the real time crime center, they were talking about some of the cases where camera footage was used both to apprehend suspects and also then used by prosecutors when they're making cases. So, well, I mean, again, we've talked about this. There's data in San Francisco. We've talked about this at a finitum, but I do just want to say, again, there's a distinction.

[00:12:28] Cameras owned by businesses and private people are a different thing than police cameras and cameras. As camera footage, of course, is constantly used in, you know, in solving crimes, particularly, you know, surveillance footage. If you have somebody rob a place, you know, you look at the surveillance footage like that is not what we're talking about. We're talking about whether these police cameras, had they not been there, would the crime not have been solved? Would the person not have been apprehended?

[00:12:56] And I mean, that has not been proven. I mean, I did the real time crime center to you, Sandy. Right. But you're basically saying, again, it's like this absence of evidence doesn't show the system doesn't work. It just says we have insufficient evidence. It may well be working. You know, they just weren't able to say they're going to look at this. And they're saying wait for the Pennsylvania study in part, right? I wasn't at the press conference. I don't know. Yeah. OK. Yeah. So that's coming out next year. That's coming out next year.

[00:13:23] That's supposed to show sort of whether whether there's been efficacy. And, you know, and there was some pressure on the mayor to not make this decision before that that comes out. But obviously, I mean, like like we said at the top, I mean, I think she had already made her decision a long time ago. Where was that pressure coming from? On her for her? From privacy advocates and also some on the city council. Yeah. Why do you think she made the decision? Why do you both said that you said something, you know, or it's something you guess or where's that coming from?

[00:13:52] For one thing, a draft of this NYU report has been circulating at City Hall for at least several weeks now because I heard about it from people a couple of weeks ago, at least saying that they had seen the draft and that that there was nothing in there that was going to preclude them from turning the cameras. So so you mean it was out before the election? I thought we were told that it wasn't out. Well, it wasn't out, but there was it wasn't out. But there was a draft. Yeah.

[00:14:22] NYU turned in an initial draft. And I don't know how much the draft changed to the final report. I didn't see it or anything, but I but I heard about it. It's so off point to me. The mayor has really emphasized and she did this in the press conference. Then she had a whole social media video about it, that this is not flock. And she sort of awkwardly said flock. No, which I think she meant fuck. No, that was like a pun or something. I don't know who wrote the script for her.

[00:14:51] Hey, Katie, getting edgy here. I mean, if she was trying it, it didn't work. Well, it's like, you know, it reminds me of those stupid signs that were everywhere in neighborhoods that were like, slow the flock down for a while. This had nothing to do with flock cameras. It was just trying to get people to not drive so fast. Anyway, what were we talking about? Oh, yeah. She made this big point that they're not flock cameras.

[00:15:20] They're Axon cameras. And Axon is more responsible, she said at the press conference. And the report actually talks about that explicitly and says there's an I interviewed the NYU Policing Project group about this. And what they told me was there's there's no difference between these two companies. It's just that they just focus on different sectors of surveillance. So, you know, flock does more ALPR license plate reader cameras.

[00:15:46] Axon is, you know, currently more into body cameras and these surveillance cameras. But they're both trying to be what they what they said was the Apple, meaning the company of surveillance tech. There's no difference. Not one is not better than the other, they told me, and one is not really different than the other. And so this kind of big distinction, you know, Axon used to be known as Taser. They changed their name because Taser's got a bad rap for very good reasons. And yeah, I mean, I just I don't think there's any difference at all.

[00:16:17] I think it's a weird distinction to be in the sense that, like, if there's a federal subpoena, either one of these companies could be subject to that or what have you. Yeah, there's probably back doors into both of them. I mean, you know, it's they're just they're not and one is not a more responsible actor than the other necessarily. There's just it's just that flock has a bad reputation. So we want to not be associated with that. I think we should be worried about the civil liberties issues here. And I'm glad the mayor's sort of grappling with it.

[00:16:45] I totally get that you're still raising these kinds of concerns because I don't think they just go away automatically. But I'm like wondering this is kind of a weird question, but our standard of evidence for the potential abuse of these cameras is that it could happen. It hasn't happened, but it's something we were worried could happen in Seattle potentially versus like you say, well, we haven't proven that they work.

[00:17:07] So are you holding the kind of proof of their their public safety value to a higher evidentiary standard than you are the civil liberties standard? And if so, why? Well, first, I'd say we don't know that they have been used that way. There has not been a subpoena. Records requests can be anonymous. So, I mean, literally a person. It's the potential for abuse as opposed to proven abuse. That's true. But what I'm saying is that you are asserting that it has never happened.

[00:17:36] And I'm just I'm just pushing back on that a little because it is quite easy to get this stuff. Are we saying privacy is a more important value than the potential public safety benefit of having them? Like, is that what we're saying? The unproven public safety benefit? Yes, I do think privacy is. Unproven in both cases. But anyway, Sandeep. Yeah. Well, I don't know where to go with that. I mean, yeah, I just I think that, like, you know, it's not debate club.

[00:18:02] Like, you know, I I think that privacy is a is a really I mean, it's a value that is enshrined in the Fourth Amendment. And, you know, and I I don't know. I don't know how strongly to say it. It is a core value of the United States that, you know, we're not subject to unlawful search and seizure at all times. And so. So, yeah, I do think that that is is I mean, here's the thing. We have not had cameras until now.

[00:18:30] Seattle is one of the safest big cities in the country. Crime has been going down dramatically here and across the country. So if we were in a crisis situation with violent crime and, you know, and muggings and things like that happening everywhere and crime going up and there was a real need to, you know, privacy be damned, put cameras everywhere. Then that would be a different situation.

[00:18:58] Now, I don't think there is a real need to put cameras everywhere at any point, but I'm just saying, what is the what is the argument that this is necessary? Hey, Seattle nice listeners. Seattle politics got you low. We'll get high with Uncle Ikes. Pissed at the mayor? Relax with a dollar joint.

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[00:19:57] I will just say this. Even with this expansion that the mayor is just authorized with the scale of the police cameras, Erica, as you were talking about, which are different from private business owned cameras. So some of those do plug into the system. Right. They are in there is some integration of private cameras into the kind of CC, the real time crime center system. But anyway, the scale of the number of cameras here is way smaller than a lot of other places.

[00:20:23] I think San Francisco has 600, you know, city owned police run sort of cameras. We're on a much lower level than that, even with the expansion. Well, we have I mean, depending on how you count the cameras, I guess, you know, we have about 500. And in every every city, I mean, Seattle often does things after other cities do. And after other cities, for example, start turning off their cameras, which cities across the country are doing. And we're we're saying let's start expanding. That's how the expansion starts.

[00:20:52] And that's how we get to thousands. Oh, I think there's going to be a conversation about expanding and further. That's what I'm saying. I think it's just getting started now. And we're way behind other cities and other cities are turning their cameras off because they've seen the risks and they've seen the downsides. And we're just we're just like, let's try what everybody else has done and see if it goes better for us. Well, this idea that everybody's turning their cameras off. I know. I mean, there's some flock stuff that's happening. Yes. Flock related.

[00:21:19] But again, I don't think Axon is better or worse than flock. And a lot of the flock stuff, as you said earlier, is about license plate reading cameras, which is different from some of what we're talking about. But anyway. But anyway, yeah, I think we should. Well, yeah, we should move on. I'll just say we do have one of the highest property crime rates in the country. It's a quality of life issue. It's just one of the things that we need to be balancing when we're talking about, you know, public safety and stuff.

[00:21:48] But SPD explicitly has said that they only plan to use these for violent and serious crimes. Now, that's undefined. But I mean, they're not going to be, you know, turning on a camera to find out who stole your car, most likely. Oh, well, that's too bad if your car gets stolen. All right. Well, yeah. Anyway, that's that's the system that got turned off. Erica, you've got a couple things to say this week about Dan Strauss.

[00:22:13] I just want to start by mentioning there is this vote after Katie Wilson vetoed his RV legislation. I don't think we have to go into all the details about that necessarily, but the vote's coming up on Thursday. And at this point, it's expected to not be overridden because Rob Saka has flipped his vote. But I got this email from Dan Strauss saying, action alert, write your city council people.

[00:22:39] So is there any any chance of this piece of the RV legislation being salvaged? Like, what do you think? Well, yeah. So this is one of five different bills and then one resolution that Katie Wilson vetoed. I mean, I am so curious to see how many people would respond to a city council member's action alert by emailing the rest of the city council. I never know quite why they do that.

[00:23:05] But, yeah, I mean, I think unless Saka flips again, which I doubt he's going to, it's just going to be a long meeting with a lot of debate. But it's not going to get overridden. I will say, well, it seems like this vote is almost certainly destined to fail. Right. That the mayor's veto will be upheld.

[00:23:25] But I think my sense is that Dan thinks it's good politics for him to continue to kind of highlight the fact that he's fighting this veto on her part and pushing to get it overridden. And even if it goes down, I think he sees that as an issue that works in his favor. Right. And I actually did. I saw the mayor briefly on Wednesday morning of last week. Right.

[00:23:51] The day after the election, I was I was over Channel 13 and she came into she was doing her victory lap on the transit measure. And, you know, I just said to her, like, we talked very, very briefly about the cameras. And I said to her, you know, I mean, I'm sorry about the RV override stuff. And I said to her, I don't know about the politics of this for you. I'm kind of curious to see how this plays out. And she said, oh, I think the politics of this are in my favor. So or something to that effect.

[00:24:21] I'm paraphrasing her. But but, you know, she had a you know, she seemed very confident that this was a good decision politically on her part. I think Dan Strauss and some of the council members think the opposite. We'll see. So what is going to happen with RVs under the mayor's plan? In case folks don't remember, we hadn't fully informed, assuming this veto does not get overridden where the RV is going to go next year. There's a plan to open. So the Glassyard Commons is about to open.

[00:24:48] And that's an RV safe lot that I think has space for 80 or 90 RVs. The budget includes funding for another RV safe lot of about the same size. And so that's a lot. I mean, if you get 160 RVs off the streets, that is a significant number. I have been told by supporters that that might be enough to get all the RVs off the streets. I do not think that's true.

[00:25:17] I think there's way more. But but that is kind of where they're starting at is let's get let's get about 150 folks will go into tiny house village shelters. And then the idea is that from there they're supposed to go into housing. And of course, that's always the bottleneck, as we always talk about. So that's in this. This is in Rob Sokka's district, right? The the that lot. In in West Seattle, Glassyard Commons.

[00:25:44] Yeah, it's in it's in his district and his district has, you know, a ton of industrial areas, which is currently where RVs are allowed to park overnight. So he's got Rob Sokka has a disproportionate amount of RVs in West Seattle and Soto. And he's on board with this plan, it sounds like. So, yeah, sorry, Sandy. I just want to say that. But so and he's on board with this plan. Go ahead. From the get go, I've wondered whether Strauss's legislation was really fully cooked when he brought it forward.

[00:26:12] We've talked about this in the past, like, were they going to have the resources and the enforcement mechanisms and stuff to make, you know, the language that they're putting into these ordinances an actual reality on the streets of Seattle? That's a big question mark in my mind. But now when we had this additional wrinkle that the this permitting piece got was vetoed by the mayor, in part because you said they weren't ready to operationalize anything like that. Right.

[00:26:36] They didn't have the resources to really make that work, which sounds right to me. Right. It just didn't feel cooked on that front. But I don't quite understand now how these, I guess, four pieces of legislation are now going to work without the fifth piece. I mean, I don't I'd have to go and look and see exactly what all the four do. But I don't think that they were dependent on this. I know they're not directly dependent, but yeah.

[00:27:02] But, you know, presumably these were all meant to be integrated in one sort of sort of whole. I mean, kind of. There's there's stuff in there. I mean, one of the ones that jumped out to me and that people in the homelessness advocacy community also did not like was and it passed and Katie Wilson did not veto.

[00:27:22] It was this new definition of junk vehicles, which I would say is totally separate from the RV permitting thing, as were, I believe, most of the other pieces of legislation. But I mean, that basically says that it expands the definition of a junk vehicle so that, you know, if your car has a certain number of problems with it, it can just be towed and taken away.

[00:27:47] I mean, whether you know whether it runs or not, it's you know, there's just it expands a list of things that can cause your car to be your car or RV or whatever to get junked. And as somebody who's owned a shitty car in the past that I couldn't afford to fix for a while, you know, the idea of losing my transportation really sucked.

[00:28:06] And and, you know, and so I can I can sympathize with people who say that, you know, somebody is living in their car and it has a mirror missing and the windshield's cracked. They shouldn't have to lose their only asset over that. I have to say what I kind of like about this is it's voluntary. We're going to see, like how many people decide that they want to use these lots. How does it look? How does the system work? I mean, it seems like it's a it's kind of an interim step.

[00:28:34] If they wanted to introduce other legislation in the future, they always can. So, you know, it seems like kind of incrementalism in a good way to me, Sandeep Kashuk. I don't know. I don't know. Like I said, again, I had real concerns that this legislation, which is quite complicated about setting up a system to deal with RVs, which has been a huge and persistent problem for a decade plus now. And previous efforts to try to address the RV issues have kind of flopped.

[00:29:00] And, you know, they've tried lots before and they turned out to be very expensive and and and they didn't work out super well. And the one near my house worked out great. It just had to shut down to be a pickleball palace. And that was always right. Yes. Right. Nothing comes out of pickleball in Seattle. I mean, well, fortunately, fortunately, homeless people love pickleball. So it worked out for everybody. OK, OK. All right.

[00:29:23] Well, let's speaking of Dan Strauss, let's talk a little bit about the budget and what Strauss is up to and what the budgetary relations are now between the mayor's office and the city council. Well, Dan Strauss, I just published a piece today, Wednesday, about Strauss, who's the budget chair and his efforts to kind of rush the budget through this year faster than ever. And I would say last year, different mayor.

[00:29:50] But the budget process was incredibly chaotic. There was so little transparency. It was impossible to know what the fuck was going on. And I mean, to the point that, you know, budget amendments were being verbalized, written in real time and printed out in council chambers so that the only way you could even read them was to be in the room and grab one of those hot off the presses, literally, you know, pieces of paper.

[00:30:20] So I anticipate something like that is probably going to happen this year because Strauss wants to wrap up the entire budget process by Friday. That's going to be the only day that the council can deliberate on any of his many, many new amendments that he is introducing, sponsored solely by him that no one's seen before. He just dumped a bunch of stuff in the consent package. There's stuff in the consent package that there's not consensus on.

[00:30:43] And then, of course, you know, the big picture is the council and Strauss in particular is throwing a hissy fit over the mayor's budget, which, you know, was, as we've discussed, small C conservative. It cut some things that the council added in the past with one time funds that were unsustainable. And it just is more sustainable than the way the council prefers to budget or at least this council.

[00:31:12] Hi, Seattle Nice listeners. Sandeep here asking you to consider getting involved with the Block Table Seattle. Every month at the Rabbit Box at Pipe Place Market, the Block Table convenes a happy hour conversation on timely topics of local interest with a wide range of newsmakers, civic leaders and elected officials. If gathering in a casual setting to engage with smart people about topics of civic interest sounds good to you, please consider attending.

[00:31:38] To find out more, visit www.theblocktable.com and be sure to sign up for the email list to get alerts about each month's event. Thanks. I hope to see you there. Yeah, I mean, I'll say when you, you know, this is now probably a week ago, though things have been moving fast, as Erica says, on the budgeting stuff. And the process does seem really rushed.

[00:32:03] But I think it was probably a little over a week ago that council members put in their desired additions on top of the mayor's budget. And the list was massive. I mean, council members were thrown, you know, like it probably averaged about $20 million in additions a piece. Oh, it was way more than that. Yeah, yeah. Way, way more. I want to say it was like $80 million and a ton of that.

[00:32:29] I wrote about it like more than $40 million was just was one time funding for things that were obviously ongoing. In aggregate, it was $80 million. But I'm saying each council member was thrown in like $20 million. Well, can I amend that, though? I would say that like that is not true. I mean, Joy Hollingsworth had a lot of stuff. Dan Strauss had a ton of stuff. Yeah, Dionne had like $29 million. And I got the list. Yeah, and Rob Sokka added a lot.

[00:32:55] But I will give credit to Maritza Rivera, who has been the voice of reason, I would say, on this council. I mean, in addition to Dionne Foster, you know, in terms of just like where are we getting all this money from? How are we going to keep funding this stuff after next year or 2028 when, you know, funding only goes through there so that you can balance a budget using these, you know, typical budget tricks? And so she didn't add a ton of stuff. So it's a little unfair to say they all did. I would say some were a lot worse than others.

[00:33:25] No, that's true. There was a lot of variance. And it was basically when I looked at the list, it was Maritza and Deborah Juarez had, you know, kind of $3 million. And, you know, basically fairly, you know, routine kind of additions. But then some of the other ones were, yeah, $20 to $30 million each other. Stupid fucking district funds. I mean, I'm sorry. Like, they need to get rid of those. Right. So anyway. Okay. Anyway, we can talk more about that. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:33:53] No, I will just say that we should talk about that more. But I will say the upshot of this is that it just has felt to me like here we have this damn socialist mayor. Supposedly, you know, all she cares about is like raising taxes and spending lots of money. And yet she put forward a pretty responsible budget proposal. And I feel like she's looked like the adult in the room through this process where she's trying to hold the line on, you know, sustainable budgeting and not spending beyond our means.

[00:34:22] And then we're seeing, I don't know, Dan's been Dan sort of denounced her budget as an austerity budget. He used the word austerity at one point, I think. And so Mayor Wilson's austerity budget. Yeah, we'll see what comes out the other end of this thing. But right now, I don't know. Like, like, I think she wins on the politics of this one. I don't know that she wins on the politics of the RV thing, despite her confidence in that. But on this one, I think, you know, she's looking pretty good right now. Okay. Can I just say what the district fund is since I mentioned it? Yes, please do.

[00:34:52] It's a stupid fucking thing that Rob Socker got in the budget that they gave themselves last year. Remember, it's $7 million a year, so $1 million for each council district to just spend on whatever little, you know, precious projects that they want to spend on. It's transportation projects.

[00:35:11] So it's basically taking money away from SDOT, which is an executive department, and handing these little slush funds to each little council member to give out in their – well, they're not little – to give out in their little fiefdoms. How about that? And it is so silly. It's unnecessary. I mean, if this is what we're doing, like, why not give every council member a special budget for, you know, the arts and a special budget for whatever they're interested in?

[00:35:40] That's just not how the budget works. And anyway, it's $14 million in the two-year budget. And they funded it this time with one-time funds, of course, but it's going to be ongoing unless the council changes its mind. And the upshot of all this is potentially, like, multimillion-dollar budget deficits in a couple years, right? I mean, they're setting themselves up for some real fucking pain that, you know, they may not be here to see, some of them. But, you know, that's what's going to happen. This has become a pattern, right?

[00:36:10] I mean, you know, and Erica has pointed this out in the stuff she's been writing. You know, and this was all through Bruce's administration. They were using – they were putting forward, you know, budgets that weren't balanced in the out years and that were running on, you know, one-time money or unsustainable sort of funding streams. And, yeah. So, you know, and the council's position seems to be why stop now? This seems great.

[00:36:40] Yeah, the city budget office, the director, Ali Panucci, sent out a memo, you know, basically saying, look, as the adult in the room, I am telling you, you know, on behalf of the executive of the mayor's office, that if you're going to add a bunch of one-time shit, we're going to cut it as soon as the one-time runs out.

[00:36:59] So you should expect that because if you want something to be lasting, you need to figure out a way to fund it in a lasting way, not do – not claim that you're going to do something ongoing only in 2027 and then do the same thing every year after that. It's just ridiculous. But governing under tight budgets isn't fun. And I want to put some stuff on the credit card. You can't give everybody everything. We need some presents for my district. It's not the FIAOA. It's not the FIAOA.

[00:37:24] So just one – can I make one more point about Strauss that comes up in this story? So he has a proposal to spend $2.5 million a year or to proviso it, so meaning take it out of the Seattle transit measure that just passed and spend it only on a bus route that goes to his house. And this is a bus route – or he doesn't go directly, but it's his bus route.

[00:37:47] And this is a bus route that goes to the Blue Ridge neighborhood of far northwest Ballard, a very single-family area that has extremely low ridership. And he is proposing to jump the prioritization list, which, of course, is like based on, you know, how many people ride this? How overcrowded is it? Is there an equity issue here? Is there housing here? And he wants to jump the list and pay for that bus route.

[00:38:14] Of course, once again, claiming it's going to be a one-time thing, but it's going to be ongoing. So that's $2.5 million a year. He also, on the other end of the scale, has a proposal that he says came from a petition of unidentified neighbors who listed a bunch of projects that they want. And so he is putting another proviso in the budget directing SDOT to spend money preventing left turns at this one intersection.

[00:38:39] And, I mean, it's just the little – the sort of – I don't want to say lack of respect for the budget process, but just this idea that, you know, every council member is, you know, in a position where they can hand out favors to people who they like or hand out favors to themselves is a really troubling trend. Troubling because SDOT has a plan for how it wants to spend this kind of money, right? There's actual bureaucrats sitting around. It's their fucking jobs to figure out where these bus lines should go.

[00:39:08] And then for council members to sort of willy-nilly override that, yeah, totally insane. I don't care that it's going to his house. It's just, like you say, low ridership. What the fuck? Anyway, Sandeep. Yeah, no, I was going to – not like – I would say this. It's not like SDOT's planning a sacrosanct and they get everything right and all of their, you know, kind of strategic decisions. But in this case, it's like it's laid out exactly how they do it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I 100% agree in situations like this.

[00:39:35] This is not good policy planning or saying, okay, we have some reason to believe SDOT got their thinking on this wrong and therefore, you know, this is just like – If it said this is a higher priority route – I mean, Dan Strauss, to his credit, you know, like build the light rail to Ballard. Maybe it's coming. I mean, he saw the truth there. All right. I'm just going to say thanks, both of you, for being here and go Mississippi. Mississippi and Alaska next probably, right?

[00:40:03] I never thought I'd say go Mississippi, but go Mississippi. Hey, yeah. We're looking forward next week for our audience here. Just to say we're looking forward next week to having a special guest. Spokane Mayor Lisa Brown is going to join us for a special kind of joint podcast of Seattle Nice and David's and my other podcast, Blue City Blues.

[00:40:27] But Lisa Brown, former leader in the state senate for many years and now been mayor of Spokane, where they're doing some pretty interesting stuff around homelessness, building housing, and stuff like that. So we'll kind of hear all the stuff that Seattle is getting wrong from the mayor of Spokane. And her old job at the state legislature, in case folks might remember, was she was Speaker of the House? Senate Majority Leader. Right. Senate Majority Leader.

[00:40:58] Right. Of course. All right. That's it for another edition of Seattle Nice. She's Erica C. Barnett. He's Sandeep Kaushik. I'm David Hyde. And thanks, everybody, so much for listening. Thank you.