No Drama McGinn
I come to do something that is practically unheard of in Seattle’s corporate media, or for that matter over Seattle water coolers. (Do any offices still have water coolers?) I come to praise Seattle mayor Mike McGinn.
Such a statement necessitates immediate caveats. McGinn has certainly made mistakes, and some of his actions I find profoundly irritating. (His eagerness to punish people for driving cars without a concomitant increase in public transit funding, for example. Some people can’t meet all their transportation needs by bicycle. And his apologetics for SPD’s endemic abusiveness.)
But McGinn hasn’t gotten much credit for many of the things that he’s done right. And for a fine counterexample about how elected officials aren’t getting it right, we need only turn this month to Olympia.
There, Governor Christine Gregoire and a badly divided state legislature have wrestled with a $2 billion revenue shortfall caused by a combination of a bad economy and an antiquated tax structure. The legislature are in a special session to address that budget deficit; as soon as they figure out a way to deal with it, they’ll have to come back in January and create a new biennial budget that will be even more grim. And while the details of the various proposals and counter-proposals vary, there’s no doubt that the final product is going to hurt a lot of people.
There’s no “fat” and “waste” left to cut, no “greater efficiency” to be gained, no clever reforms that will “do more with less.” That’s all been done already. What’s left is doing left with less. Abolishing the Disability Lifeline cash grants that keep the severely unemployable afloat. Wiping out the Basic Health Plan. Failing the state’s constitutional mandate to adequately fund K-12 education, and placing higher education beyond the financial reach of the middle class. Those are the sorts of “solutions” Olympia is considering.
Guess what? Three weeks ago, the city of Seattle passed its budget. Not a budget fix for this year, like Olympia’s now scrambling to enact. Next year’s budget.
They did it in lean economic times while keeping services for society’s most vulnerable largely intact. Unlike Olympia. They did it even though the money coming from Olympia and the feds to help support all manner of programs is drying up. And the template for that budget was created by our much-reviled mayor.
To be sure, the Seattle budget has its pain. Seventy-four city workers will be laid off, and another 85 unfilled positions are to be eliminated. Once again there will be unpaid furloughs. Our quality of life took a few hits. But McGinn and city council managed to find cuts without creating more homeless, without defunding critical services, and without crippling our long-term investment in our city.
Now, this isn’t all McGinn’s doing. City council had its usual tweaks. And our city has some major structural advantges over the state when it comes to passing a balanced budget.
The most obvious is that there’s no Eyman-induced supermajority requirement to pass any kind of a fee or tax increase, and half of city council doesn’t belong to a political party that’s philosophically opposed to any revenue increase, no matter how desperately needed. This means that McGinn and the council can do things like raising parking rates or park fees (as it did last year) without going to the voters. You can debate the wisdom of any particular policy, but at least it’s a tool the mayor and council have available to help bridge a revenue shortfall.
Also, too, Seattle voters are almost unique in our willingness to pass tax increases when they appear on our ballot. It’s not an automatic; just last month, voters rejected a spectacularly poorly thought out $60 car tab increase. But we also approved, with a 64 percent majority, a doubling of the city’s Families and Education Levy. In a recession.
Seattle voters will almost always approve taxes for essential services. That’s why the city has long engaged in the political trick of putting the less popular stuff in its operating budget and shuffling the everybody-loves-them puppies and flowers issues onto the ballot. Olympia can do that, too, but the results are a lot less certain.
Finally, Seattle simply has a healthier tax structure than the state does. While both city and state rely a lot on sales taxes, more of the city’s other revenue comes from sources that aren’t as vulnerable to economic downturn.
All that said, Mayor McGinn’s 2012 budget still did a far better job of protecting citizens from the impact of hard times than the state is going to do; and city council took the plan and passed it more or less intact. McGinn took some political risks that Christine Gregoire hasn’t been willing to take — even though it’s McGinn who’s up for reelection. And the most notable thing about the result is that so few people seem to have noticed. –Geov Parrish