Harger: Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson’s gutsy budget got buried by her office’s Bite of Seattle mess

I was getting ready to write something I’ve never written before: an all-praise column about Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson.

I’ve been critical of a lot of her policies. They often come across as ideology-driven, sometimes very much so. My beef has always been with the policies, though. When I interviewed her last year, Katie Wilson the person was warm and thoughtful.

And on Tuesday, she made one of the gutsiest decisions I’ve seen a politician with power make around here in a long time: a 2027-2028 Seattle budget with $50 million in painful cuts and no major new taxes.

Then, the same day, two more stories broke. Seattle Police Department Assistant Chief Tyrone Davis testified that the mayor’s office held up a police press conference on the night of the Bite of Seattle shooting so the mayor could be in it. And KIRO Newsradio found her office passed off a quote from King County Prosecuting Attorney Leesa Manion as an endorsement of a gun violence plan the prosecutor’s office says it never saw.

So much for the all-praise edition.

There’s an old parable about two wolves. It goes something like this: a grandfather tells his grandson there are two wolves fighting inside every one of us, one good and one bad. The boy asks which one wins. The grandfather says, “The one you feed.”

There are two wolves in the Seattle mayor’s office right now. Let’s start with the good one.

Seattle budget: Katie Wilson cuts $50 million with no major new taxes

Wilson’s two-year budget proposal runs $9.1 billion, and it closes the gap with cuts instead of new revenue. That’s after months of talk that she was looking at every option available to raise money.

She says she inherited a general fund deficit of about $175 million, a hole that had been, in her words, “papered over rather than faced head-on.”

Her line on it: “We cannot keep kicking the can down the road, because there is no more road.”

She says the budget balances for the first time since the pandemic began and stays balanced through 2030, without touching reserves. The cuts eliminate 128 city positions. Most of them are empty openings nobody will miss. But Wilson says 15 are filled, and those are real people, each, as she put it, “with a family budget of their own.” Fifteen out of a city workforce this size can sound like a rounding error. It won’t feel like one around 15 kitchen tables this fall.

Some Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) maintenance projects will get pushed back too, and Wilson admitted that won’t be painless. A local capital gains tax is still under consideration for later, so call this a “no” for this year.

Seattle Public Schools says it’s broke. Downtown Seattle isn’t far behind

It took guts because the money really is gone. Seattle Public Schools Superintendent Ben Shuldiner put it plainly last month: “It’s difficult because we’re broke.”

It stands to reason the city surrounding that district faces the same reality. About a third of downtown office space sits empty, and the King County Assessor says the city’s most valuable skyscrapers have lost $3.7 billion in value since 2022. That tax bill doesn’t vanish, either. The city still collects its full property tax levy, so whatever those towers stop paying has to come from somewhere, and some of it lands on everyone else’s property, including your house. Downtown lost about 13,000 jobs in 2025, according to the Downtown Seattle Association.

Seattle is a microcosm of a struggling national economy, with our own particular set of self-inflicted economic injuries. Many of those wounds happened years before Wilson took charge.

Seattle police hiring gets 66 more officers. Bring back the recruiting bonus

One line pleasantly surprised me. Wilson wants to fully fund the Seattle Police Department (SPD) hiring plan, enough to reach 1,250 officers. That’s 66 more than this year’s budget allowed, from a mayor I didn’t expect to lead on police staffing.

One can argue this doesn’t go far enough in terms of hiring, but it’s good to see there aren’t further cutbacks.

Katie Wilson’s good-news day: a former PR pro saw the timing coming

My KIRO Newsradio colleague Luke Duecy spent years working in public relations before coming back over to the journalism side. So on Tuesday morning, before any of this broke, Luke called it. He said the mayor’s office could use a budget announcement to bury bad news about the Bite of Seattle review coming out the same day.

It’s one of the oldest moves in the book: drop your good news the same day the bad news lands and let it soak up the headlines.

What neither of us saw coming was the business with the prosecutor’s quote. Borrowing someone else’s credibility to make your plan look bigger than it is? That one’s straight out of the textbook, too.

Bite of Seattle shooting: Thousands hid for hours. The mayor’s office asked police to wait

On July 26, a shooting at the Bite of Seattle at Seattle Center killed three people and wounded four. Seattle police officers ran toward the gunfire and had a shooter in custody within 20 to 30 seconds. They evacuated thousands of people without a single injury.

But thousands of other people had no idea what was happening. Many were hiding, terrified, with a second suspect still on the loose. Some had just seen people shot. They waited for someone official to tell them whether it was safe to come out.

Nobody did. Not for five hours. There was no emergency alert. One vendor told reporters he got no direct information until he was told to leave the next morning.

I’ve covered a lot of mass shootings in my career. In every one, police got in front of a microphone fast, even if only to say what they knew: one suspect in custody, another being sought, here’s where it’s safe to go. In those first hours, that information is the difference between a family staying hidden and a family getting home.

So why the silence here? Part of it was a missing chain of command. Then-Police Chief Shon Barnes was at a conference in Dallas. Nearly an hour after the shooting, he texted his command staff, “I don’t know who is in charge.” Davis answered within a minute that he was.

The mayor’s office, meanwhile, was working a different problem. SPD’s own texts showed the mayor’s public safety director, Alison Holcomb, writing at 9:38 p.m.: “I’ve been keeping her away from the scene and HMC, but I don’t want media thinking she’s absent.” Four minutes later: “Mayor’s on her way. Please wait for her.”

That’s four hours after the shooting, and the concern on the record is how the mayor’s absence would look.

SPD’s after-action review put it in plain terms: “Senior and elected officials distracted sworn staff from completing timely public safety information and on-scene decision-making.” At Tuesday’s Seattle City Council Public Safety Committee meeting, Davis added that SPD had an earlier press conference set for 7:30 p.m., and Wilson’s deputy mayor, Brian Surratt, directed police to pause it so the mayor could take part. In Davis’s words, “it delayed the press conference longer.”

And when information did come from the mayor’s office, it was wrong. Wilson later acknowledged that her office’s early word, that two suspects were in custody, was incorrect.

Gov. Bob Ferguson didn’t wait for the council hearing to make sure nobody pinned it on him. The same morning the Public Safety Committee was set to hear the review, his office posted a statement saying it’s “not clear which elected officials are being referred to.” Then it laid out a timeline. The governor’s only contact with SPD that night was a 9 p.m. Teams briefing he was invited to, about three hours after the shooting, lasting about 20 minutes. Nothing else, the statement says, “until the press conference later that night.”

When the governor starts issuing timestamps, the finger-pointing has begun.

Weeks ago, Wilson said her office’s review found “real gaps,” and that “the public should have heard sooner about outstanding suspects and the status of the Seattle Center campus.”

All true. She just left out that her own office was one of the gaps.

Mayors show up after tragedies. That’s part of the job. But people were hiding at Seattle Center, and they needed that press conference a lot more than they needed the mayor standing in it. The after-action review points to the fix: separate the police chief’s tactical job from serving as the mayor’s liaison, and give an on-scene spokesperson standing authority to issue public safety alerts. Her office says new communication rules are already in place. Good. They should have come with a straight account of what happened.

King County Prosecutor Leesa Manion’s quote ended up selling the mayor’s gun violence plan

Luke also broke the other story Tuesday. The mayor’s office appears to have misrepresented the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office’s support for Wilson’s new gun violence reduction plan.

Manion gave a quote backing the city’s Community Assisted Response and Engagement (CARE) Department taking over gun violence intervention work, on the condition that it run in full. It ended up on the mayor’s blog as an endorsement of Wilson’s entire plan. The prosecutor’s office says it never saw that plan, and its staff learned the details from TV news.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office, another key partner on gun violence, says it never got a draft either, and was never asked for a quote.

When KIRO asked, a Wilson spokesperson insisted the prosecutor “provided quotes for our media release related to the mayor’s gun violence reduction plan.” The prosecutor’s office says it never signed on to that. The mayor’s office still hasn’t answered follow-up questions.

The prosecutor’s office was gracious about it. No hard feelings, it says, and it wants the mayor to succeed.

So do I. That’s what makes this so maddening.

Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson has a budget win. Her office keeps stepping on it

I’ll dig into the budget’s fine print soon enough, and I’m sure I’ll hit a few lines that make me go, “you gotta be kidding me.” She’ll have different priorities than I do. Than you do. But the budget shows there’s at least some shared reality about where Seattle is.

For all my criticism, I’m rooting for her. This city needs its mayor to succeed.

She just put out a budget that earned praise from across the spectrum. That’s a win. The move is to take it and stack another one on top. Instead, on the day the budget gets released, we learn her office paused a police briefing so she could be in it, and we also learn she borrowed the county prosecutor’s name for a plan it never showed her. Stuff like that makes people doubt the good calls, too.

And it might be time for a hard look at who’s in the room with her. Good advisors protect a mayor from her worst instincts. The ones around her right now keep handing her a shovel.

It’s a tough budget, and plenty of people will be disappointed by what it cuts. But it shows she understands the reality of the city’s economic situation. That took guts.

Now feed that wolf, the one with guts, and maybe next time I’ll get to write the all-praise edition.

Charlie Harger is the host of “Seattle’s Morning News” on KIRO Newsradio. You can read more of his stories and commentaries here. Follow Charlie on X and email him here. 

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