This morning Budget Chair Sally Bagshaw published her initial balancing package, incorporating a portfolio of self-balancing changes to the Mayor’s proposed budget based on last week’s proposals by Council members that received consensus support.

Last’s night’s election results show that Initiative 976 will likely pass; it will blow a $35 million hole in the city budget that will need to get addressed in the next three weeks, making the initial balancing package very much a work in progress. That said, anything that didn’t make it in at this point is very unlikely to find its way in later as the Council struggles to find tens of millions of dollars.

With that context, here’s what made the cut so far.

Some of the things that didn’t make the cut include:

studying municipal broadband suing the city’s water pipes as conduits.

renegotiating the city’s solid-waste contracts to move to every-other-week collection (though don’t expect Council member Herbold to give up on this idea).

building out a childcare center in City Hall.

a $600,000 study on the value of human services work.

a proposed study on a new treatment program for meth addiction.

Changes to the Navigation Team. Neither a proposal to gut it, nor a proposal to expand it, survived.

A proposal by Council member Sawant to plan to make all transit in Seattle free.

major cuts to SPD hiring and emphasis patrols. SPD officer staffing is unchanged, and the emphasis patrol funding remains in the budget.

The initial balancing package is far from the final word on the 2020 budget, even without the passage of I-976; the Council will hold one more discussion next week in which Council members will have one more chance to convince their colleagues to support their budget change proposals that weren’t included in the balancing package; however, from this point on any proposed changes must be “self-balancing” in that they must also identfy additional revenues or cost savings to fully offset any additional spending.

Speaking of budget… If you find my reporting valuable, please consider making a financial contribution to support my work. Even just $1 a month helps.

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