Seattle Budget Tweaks Would Add Transit Security Czar, Rescue Waterfront Streetcars

City budget season in Seattle hit full stride this week with the release of dozens of proposed tweaks to Mayor Bruce Harrell’s initial budget for 2026. The amendments now on the table earmark funds for priority projects, even as Harrell’s budget already piled on a significant amount of new spending that is expected to add to a projected budget deficit set to loom in 2027.

Thanks to a slightly better-than-expected revenue forecast update this month, the Council has an additional $1.6 million to spend on priorities within the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT). But the total number of potential budget amendments significantly outpaces that small revenue increase, which queues up a lot of haggling in the week ahead.

On November 5, Council Budget Committee chair Dan Strauss will release a proposed balancing package, in which amendments must match available revenue. November 6 will mark the council’s second and final public hearing on the budget. A final vote will come before Thanksgiving.

You can review all of the proposed amendments here and filter by sponsor or department.

Few earmarks for district priorities

As with any budget season, many amendments either set aside existing funding for try and grab a slice of that additional $1.6 million to fund specific projects within councilmembers’ districts. But there are fewer than you might expect, with a majority of the council not submitting any amendments to SDOT’s budget.

Chair Strauss, who represents District 6, put in the highest number of requests. He proposes a hold on $500,000 to conduct freight planning in Ballard and the Duwamish Valley, and on $1.25 million for upgrades to the 6th Avenue NW neighborhood greenway and on 8th and 14th Avenue NW. Strauss also wants to spend $1.25 million for the “development” of the Leary Triangle at 9th Avenue NW and NW 48th Street.

Transportation committee chair and D1 Councilmember Rob Saka has put forward amendments that would earmark $200,000 for pedestrian improvements in Admiral Junction — building off a proposal by a West Seattle urbanist suggesting ways to improve the neighborhood — and $250,000 to advance designs for SW Roxbury Street repairs at the city’s southern border. Saka also wants to use $75,000 for a transit study in SoDo, timed to look at needs in the neighborhood during the World Cup and during upcoming construction on the West Seattle and Ballard light rail projects.

D3 Councilmember Joy Hollingsworth submitted two small amendments, requesting $20,000 for safety improvements around Madison Park Beach and $10,000 for upkeep on the E Harrison Street End beach, also known as “hidden beach.”

With a few weeks left in the budget process, there may be some last-minute provisos that seek to hold additional funding for specific projects, but right now those requests are fairly lopsided toward D1 and D6.

Rob Saka wants Seattle to have a “chief transit security and safety officer”

The issue of safety and security on transit in Seattle has been front-and-center since the murder of Metro bus operator Shawn Yim last December while he was on duty in the U District. Throughout this year, King County has been considering safety overhauls via a dedicated transit safety and security task force, which released a set of recommendations earlier this fall. The lion’s share of those recommendations will fall to King County to implement, though there is an increased acknowledgement that better cooperation with the jurisdictions that Metro runs through will be needed to improve safety outcomes.

Now Rob Saka is proposing to create a dedicated position at the City of Seattle to oversee transit safety issues, despite the fact that the city only owns two small transit systems, the Seattle Streetcar and the Seattle Monorail. The funding for such a position would come out of Seattle’s 2020 transit funding ballot measure, explicitly diverting dollars away from the transit service that the city purchases from Metro.

Seattle’s $1.55 billion transportation levy already included $9 million for transit security, on top of funding Saka earmarked funding in last year’s budget for transit security. It remains unclear what exactly that funding was used for, given the fact that King County’s security budget dwarfs the amounts Seattle is discussing.

“This is not a person that would be staffed and supported to be tasked with riding on every single bus, the hundreds that travel through the city or trains, rather, at any given time, but it’s a programmatic level set of investments with the goal of keeping our transit riders and operators safe,” Saka said Wednesday. “Key features of this role would basically involve coordination: coordination across city departments, internally here within the City of Seattle government, coordination between King County and the Sound Transit. A key component of this role and remit would be to implement recommendations from the recent King County Regional Transit Safety Task Force.”

In a press release sent Tuesday, Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) head Greg Woodfill praised the proposal.

“Initiatives that support a safe experience on our transit services and at transit stops are a necessity that our passengers and operators both expect and deserve,” Woodfill said. “I believe funding a position and program within the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) is an important next step to supporting regional collaboration and solutions. This investment demonstrates Seattle’s commitment to helping our region implement the King County Regional Transit Safety Implementation Plan recommendations. Thank you again Chair Saka for your support for those that use and operate our regional transportation system.”

Not only would amending the 2020 Seattle Transit Measure (STM) to allow spending on a security czar require a separate council vote, the amendment also envisions the council making a commitment to include dollars to fund this position in the 2026 renewal to the STM, being developed right now.

Councilmembers Bob Kettle and Mark Solomon have signed onto Saka’s proposal.

Golden Gardens shuttle?

Any car-free or car-light Seattleite trying to get to Golden Gardens Park in the summertime has noticed it exists in a black hole in the city’s transit network, owing to the park’s isolation from the rest of the city. A budget amendment from Dan Strauss would set aside $500,000 in existing funding at SDOT to pilot a shuttle from central Ballard to the park on weekend days during the summer months, for 12 hours a day.

A starting point for the shuttle isn’t yet known, with the terminus of the existing Route 44 at the Ballard Locks mentioned, along with the nearest connection to the RapidRide D Line at 15th Avenue NW and Market Street.

Seattle Parks already operates a summer shuttle in Magnolia’s Discovery Park, bringing users from the parking lot down to the beach, but this would be the first shuttle program explicitly designed to bring people from public transit to a park from outside. SDOT estimates that the transit service itself, likely contracted out to a vendor that isn’t King County Metro, would cost the city only $100,000 in 2026, but that the remainder of the request could be needed to upgrade facilities along the route like bus stops and rain shelters.

Rescuing the Benson streetcars

One lower-profile budget amendment put forward by Dan Strauss involves a small piece of Seattle’s transit history. From 1982 to 2005, the City operated a streetcar line along the waterfront that terminated in International District-Chinatown. Named after former Councilmember George Benson, the line utilized trams purchased from Melbourne, Australia. Five of those trams are still in storage today, after the Seattle Art Museum demolished their storage barn to construct the Olympic Sculpture Park and service was halted.

For years, an advocacy group called Friends of the Benson Trolleys have been trying to find a way to bring the Melbourne cars back onto the streets, retrofitting them to operate on either the First Hill or South Lake Union lines. When the Center City Connector was moving forward, this looked like more of a possibility, but with that project on ice, it seems less likely. As it stands, the lease on the storage space in Anacortes housing the trams is ending.

“These trolleys have been stored for historical preservation and are losing their place,” Strauss said Tuesday. “So if we would like to either somehow get them back on the tracks or into MOHAI, we need to assist in the next steps of them finding their new home, or they may be sold, I believe, to Tennessee. So, this just simply keeps the options open for us to be able to retain these in the City of Seattle, whether it’s on the rails or in a museum.”

Turning parking stalls into urban tree canopy?

After the issue of the city’s tree canopy dominated discussions of the city’s long-term growth plan throughout the year, an amendment from Alexis Mercedes Rinck would direct the city’s Office of Sustainability and the Environment to study how to utilize the thousands of on-street parking stalls around the city as locations to plant trees.

Urbanists have long been urging the city to explore planting trees in place of on-street parking, noting all of the benefits that could come from adding trees where they won’t compete for space against new housing and benefit pedestrians and cyclists.

“Seattle is currently about one-third pavement — more than 15,000 acres of asphalt and concrete. These are the streets that you and I own, and the City manages,” architect Ryan DiRaimo wrote in an op-ed in The Urbanist earlier this year. “Despite a population of 800,000 people, Seattle has only 460,000 cars registered. Counting off-street parking structures and lots, Seattle can park more than 1.6 million vehicles at any given time, aided by its 500,000 on-street parking spaces. We have an overwhelming surplus of parking and pavement, so why not use some of that space to plant some trees?”

Rinck apparently agrees, telling her colleagues Wednesday that the city’s streets aren’t doing their part to contribute to the city’s urban canopy.

“Throughout the Comprehensive Plan discussions, we heard loud and clear that we need a greater focus on our tree canopy to meet our goals and promote environmental justice,” Rinck. “And according to the 2021 tree canopy assessment report, we can’t achieve our tree planting goal without using city-owned land like parks and right-of-way. While this alone doesn’t get us to the 100% of our goal, this, of course, represents a major step in the right direction. We need an all hands on deck approach with the climate crisis bearing down on us. Right-of-way makes up 27% of the city’s land area and contributes nearly one quarter of the city’s tree canopy, at about 23%. But this gap demonstrates that right-of-way isn’t pulling its weight compared to our neighborhoods and our parks, which are over-performing compared to right-of-way.”

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