Mayor Bruce Harrell’s proposed 2025-26 SDOT budget (PDF) had to be written assuming the 2015 Move Seattle Levy will expire at the end of 2024 without a replacement. So it is a grim look at how SDOT’s work would be gutted if voters do not approve the Seattle Transportation Levy (Proposition 1) on the November ballot.
“With fewer financial resources available, SDOT will focus on capital project delivery for existing work and commitments made in the levy,” the budget overview notes. “Less will be spent on maintenance and preservation of assets (roads, bridges, transit, pedestrian and bike facilities), while innovations and system enhancements will be delayed to a future time when more resources are available. This slowing of maintenance and asset preservation work will affect transportation safety, mobility of goods and services, and climate and environmental goals.”
The expiring levy has provided $103 million per year, and the only way to craft a budget without that $103 million is to slash pretty much everything. The result is a budget that focuses on the non-optional functions of the department like moving bridge operations, emergency weather response, court-mandated accessibility fixes, some safety elements of the Vision Zero program, fixing dangerous road deterioration, and keeping lines painted. Investments to get ahead on road maintenance, expand the bike network, maintain or improve trails, fully rebuild roadways (rather than simply adding yet more patches), complete seismic retrofits for bridges, provide bus and streetcar operating costs, or build new sidewalks would all be slashed hard. SDOT staffing would also be reduced, which would harm the effectiveness of essentially every department team.
To offset a relatively tiny amount of the levy funds, the city will double the number of automated enforcement cameras like school zone speed cameras (this is actually a good thing and would be used to provide dedicated funds to school zone safety projects) and increase street use fees by more than 25%.
Because some final Move Seattle Levy projects will continue into 2025, the budget still includes funding for some significant Move Seattle projects like the E Marginal Way rebuild and RapidRide J projects that have been delayed past the end of 2024. But these funds will likely not be ongoing beyond those projects.
Worse, the city’s general fund does not have the capacity to save SDOT’s budget if needed. Mayor Harrell’s proposed budget includes wide-ranging cuts, and is precariously propped up only by redirecting excess funds from the JumpStart payroll tax that were initially supposed to go to affordable housing. Regardless of where you stand on those larger budget questions, the reality is that the city is not in a position to prop up SDOT if the November levy fails.
But there is good news: None of this needs to happen. Passing the Seattle Transportation Levy will not only prevent the cuts described above, it will add an additional $90.5 million per year on top of the expiring Move Seattle Levy’s annual contribution to make even better progress on paving, street safety, bike lanes, sidewalks, accessibility, freight, climate initiatives and more. Even after adjusting for inflation, November’s levy would still be a 55% increase in annual transportation funding. After years of disruptions due to the Trump administration’s reluctance to send funds to our “sanctuary city,” Mayor Durkan’s years of indecisive leadership, and the pandemic, SDOT has finally been playing catch-up in recent years to deliver a flurry of Move Seattle promises. The RapidRide J project is breaking ground, RapidRide G just opened, bridges across the city are getting important maintenance, protected bike lanes are opening downtown as well as in south Seattle on MLK Way and Beacon Hill. SDOT is a department showing the people that despite disappointments in the first half of the Move Seattle Levy’s time, they are now prepared to deliver projects effectively and at the advanced rate that the Seattle Transportation Levy would require over the next eight years.
The decision for voters in November is stark. Do we want to stop forward progress on transportation, instead doing little more than keeping the lights on at SDOT while roads fall further into disrepair and death and injury rates climb unabated? Or do we want to invest to actually make progress on maintenance after decades of falling behind while also showing the rest of the country what is possible when a city takes funding for walking and biking safety seriously?
If you want to help get out the vote for Seattle’s Proposition 1 fill out this form on the Keep Seattle Moving campaign page. They need folks to make calls, knock on doors, leaflet at events, host house parties, etc. In 2015, safe streets advocates were a major piece of the on-the-ground effort to get the Move Seattle Levy over the top. Let’s do it again.
Comments
8 responses to “Proposed 2025 Seattle budget shows why passing the transportation levy in November is so important”
“… doing little more than keeping the lights on at SDOT while roads fall further into disrepair and death and injury rates climb unabated?”
What an extortion racket, it sounds like the kind of thing Trump would come up with. “If you want to see your precious bike lane again, then I suggest you approve a billion or two to help us keep the SUVs moving. And just don’t worry your pretty little head about the ongoing climate damage and reinforcement of car-dominated status quo. And if we’re feeling generous, maybe we’ll actually spend five cents on the dollar for bikes this time instead of pulling another Durkan bait-and-switch.”
They need to come up with a funding mechanism for all this fantastically expensive car infrastructure that draws from car tabs or gas taxes, not the general population; and I am sure they’ll figure out how to do that sooner or later. Meanwhile I’ll be voting no.
exactly. ive voted for every previous one,
it t his levy feels more like perpetuating an abusive relationship than actually supporting safety.
I disagree with both of you. Voting “no” gets you… nothing.
I am thinking beyond bikes. If it means my house and my street gets an actual sidewalk, I’m voting for it. If it means the SUV’s are further constrained into less lanes, I’m voting for it. 5% of something is much more than 0% of nothing. Plus I can then say “I told you so”.
This is compromise, not extortion. Some funding for this, some for that, now we all work together to get it passed. The mayor needed to win over the Port, labor unions, downtown businesses and safety advocacy organizations, and so that’s what they did. Safety advocates made a lot of noise during the development process and got the safety funding portions increased, which is also how the system is supposed to work.
This levy includes funding for exactly zero new or expanded roads. It does include a lot more funding for paving roads, but the Seattle Transportation Plan says the city should build out any planned bike, transit and pedestrian improvements when they do that paving work. And I think we can agree that Seattle has a lot of roads that could use repaving. Do I wish more of the paving costs were covered by car-related fees? Sure. But Seattle is already at or near the state’s limit for car tabs. With the taxing options available, property tax is probably the best fit we have. Do I worry that the city might spend paving money while sidestepping the recommended safety upgrades? Of course I do! That’s always a threat, and advocates will need to keep a close eye on things like always.
This is city politics, and I think safe streets advocates did well to make this as good as was politically feasible. You can always want something better, but if you want to actually see it happen then you need to find compromises and partnerships along the way. As I’ve made clear, I think this levy is a very good deal for safe streets in our city.
“This is compromise, not extortion. Some funding for this, some for that …”
Do we actually have enforceable levels of funding for bike infrastructure, or are we just throwing ourselves on the mercy of the mayor and SDOT again, and praying that they’re feeling beneficent when it’s time to build the projects. Sorry, but after all the bike lane swindles by mayors like Durkan, I don’t think we can afford to just hand over that kind of discretion again. Concrete and enforceable levels of funding for bike infrastructure would be the difference for me between compromise and extortion. If memory serves, Council passed some “Shall Build” language after Durkan’s little maneuver on the 35th NE repaving, but from reading your analyses of the levy proposal, I don’t get the impression that it’s much to hang our hats on.
Also, we need to be taking a longer view of the distorting effects of this type of funding mechanism, and the self-fulfilling prophecy that everyone drives everywhere, so it must be ok to tax everyone for car infrastructure. Congestion tolling is another possible revenue source that would be a lot more appropriate than property tax, and it’s well past time to start having these larger conversations instead of kicking the can down the road over and over. I would give up four years of “progress” under the ridiculous status quo to set us up for forty years of urban transportation policy that actually befits a city like Seattle.
It’s a no vote from me.
SDOT has not proven that it is able to be a good steward of this public trust and money — and nowhere is this more crystal clear than in SE Seattle, where I live. It’s truly demoralizing that it’s 2024 and there still isn’t a single safe, reasonably direct bike route from the Rainier Valley to downtown. It’s 2024 and both Rainier and MLK are still nightmares to cross on foot or bike at nearly any intersection. It’s 2024 and Vision Zero feels like an afterthought, not a guiding principle.
I’m not under any illusion that denying SDOT the levy funding is going to magically fix those things. I just don’t see a path forward for reform at SDOT. This department needs to be abolished and reconstituted, not given a bigger bank account.
You know abolishing SDOT is not going to happen. I understand your frustrations, but denying this levy will not settle any grudges with them. It will just make things even worse.
This levy will make biking in SE Seattle better. It’s baked into the plans. Might the city bail yet again after making these promises? Of course they could. But we gotta keep trying to make it happen. There’s too much at stake to give up.
For example, this levy includes funding for the most difficult and expensive stretch of Rainier Ave between Jackson and MLK. That connection is the big one for Rainier Valley access to downtown and beyond. We will need to fight hard for bike lanes to be included, but without this funding there’s no hope that this project will happen. We would need the Feds or the state to bless us with a grant or something, but I’m not holding out for that. The funding makes it so we actually have something we can advocate for.
If you want the city to make cycling better, then voting no on this levy makes absolutely no sense. There is no path forward in which this loses and Seattle somehow invests in even more bike lanes later. If this fails in a Presidential, high-turnout year, they aren’t coming back to voters in a lower-turnout year with an even more ambitious levy with less money for road paving and more money for bike lanes. This isn’t the 2007 Roads and Transit measure. If this doesn’t pass, they will come back to voters with a smaller and more boring measure that does little more than keep the lights on at SDOT. And we’ll spend the rest of the 2020s fighting over table scraps and wishing we had funding to actually build out safety improvements at scale.