On Friday, Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson signed an executive order intended to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the City’s operations while fostering the sustainability of its budget.
The executive order calls for the establishment of a cross-departmental work group that will work to strengthen the City’s operations and improve both the effectiveness and efficiency of the services it provides. The interdepartmental team is charged with delivering a set of recommendations of how to accomplish this by March 30th of next year.
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The list of possible topics for the team to discuss includes outcome-based budget evaluations, ways to streamline and track capital projects, implementing modern technology and money management practices, practicing risk management, and improving the City’s customer service.
“We live in a time right now where trust in government and institutions generally is very, very low,” Wilson said. “So, I believe that we really need to show that we can deliver.”
City Finance Director Dwight Dively, who held the position of Finance Director for the City for more than a decade before leaving for a 16-year stint as the director of King County's Office of Performance, Strategy and Budget, returned to work for the City earlier this year. Dively didn’t mince words about what he found upon his return.
"I left a city government that ran well," Dively said in a press release. "Coming back, I was struck by how much had changed, and not for the better. There is real work to do here, and I am glad to be part of doing it. Seattle residents trust us with their money and their services. Being a responsible steward of that trust is the job."
When The Urbanist asked for examples of current inefficiencies, Dively shared that right now, each City department has their own travel system, instead of utilizing a city-wide system that could both provide organizational discounts and more accountability. Another example mentioned was a lack of uniformity in the City trying to collect payments from insurance when a member of the public damages a City vehicle. Dively said that King County increased revenue more than $1 million per year through this practice.
City Budget Office Director Aly Pennucci offered another example, saying that some community service providers have contracts with multiple City departments. Having one streamlined contract per service provider would be more efficient for everyone.
Part of the work called for in the executive order will be ensuring the City has the right systems and technologies in place to optimize for efficiencies, whether that’s improving the experience of using the Find It, Fix It app, updating accounting rules, or making sure the Seattle Police Department is effectively tracking its officers’ overtime.
Dively told The Urbanist that the City doesn’t currently have an enterprise risk management program, which involves identifying the biggest risks in each department in order to manage those risks more effectively.
“In my opinion, we could save millions, if not tens of millions, of dollars every year, if we did [risk management] effectively,” Dively said.
Problems with Seattle’s budget
A structural deficit has loomed over the City for the past several years, with the Jumpstart payroll tax acting as the primary means of closing the gap on a year-by-year basis. The estimated deficit for 2027 stood at $175 million.
However, as part of beginning the work to improve city governance, Wilson said that her new proposed budget being released on Tuesday doesn’t have a projected deficit in either the general fund or the Jumpstart fund through 2030.
“Coming into the Mayor's Office, I was very aware that we were facing a structural deficit and that we could not keep lurching from shortfall to shortfall, year after year,” Wilson said. “As mayor, I am very committed to taking comprehensive action, not just to balance the budget for the next biennium, but to ensure the longer-term fiscal health of our city.”
Wilson served on the Seattle Revenue Stabilization Workgroup in 2023, a group that looked into new revenue options for the City, and she ran on a platform of being willing to raise new progressive revenue to continue providing City services. However, most of the options on the table for new progressive revenue, including a city-wide capital gains tax, cannot be implemented immediately, with the majority requiring action by the state legislature before they can be adopted.
“[The Mayor] will be transmitting a budget that is making big strides towards sustainability but doesn't solve all of the problems,” Pennucci said. “And one of the things that's been really clear to me in coming back to the City and and working on the budget from the executive branch is that we really need better tools and resources to support a more dynamic budget process that's really focused on how are we getting the best value out of every public dollar, and it needs to be more outcome focused.”
Pennucci shared that in developing the 2027-2028 biennial budget, the office tried to better align budgets to actual spending, looking at budget areas where there has been regular underspend and long term vacancies in order to stretch the City’s dollars further.
The executive order also suggests implementing outcomes-based budget evaluations, which will be led by the Innovation and Performance team in the City budget office. This approach could involve examining all city programs in a specific space to see which ones are having better outcomes, whether there is any overlap between programs, and whether it makes sense to put more money into fewer programs or spread the resources out among many.
Pennucci said her office wants to think carefully about how to measure performance and not use only quantitative methods. In order to do justice to the work, the office plans to only pick one or two program areas to start. Wilson added that it’s important to avoid being simplistic in measuring outcomes.
Wilson did agree that she would be willing to cut programs that aren’t effective.
“We're not talking about trying to whittle down the size of government,” Wilson said. “We're talking about, if we're evaluating programs and we're like: this is the way to solve this problem, then maybe it makes sense to shift some resources from other programs that aren't performing as well into expanding that, and that's just a value question.”
Sewer socialism
Wilson has spoken before about wanting to show that progressive governance can work, a value she shares with New York Mayor and fellow socialist Zohran Mamdani. Both mayors have evoked allusions to sewer socialism, a movement that focuses on improving public services.
In the first eight months of her term, Wilson has focused on several priorities aimed at improving public services and addressing affordability, including passing a large library levy, putting a transit measure onto the November ballot that would boost frequency on several bus routes, banning junk fees for renters, providing universal school meals, and developing legislation that would ban surveillance pricing on groceries.
Meanwhile, Seattle received the top ranking from The Athletic for its hosting of the World Cup this summer, had no homicides in the month of July, and had its busiest month of visitor foot traffic downtown – in August – since 2019. And Denny Way now has a new bus lane to speed up Route 8, a move applauded by urbanists.
At the same time, Wilson has had her challenges. She’s been criticized for pausing the installation of more surveillance cameras and failing to build a productive relationship with the City Council. She walked back her proposal for a two-year break on builder fees, and she’s had to scale back her goal of opening 4,000 new shelter beds during her first term. Her administration was lambasted by the media for several weeks after a delay in communicating to the public in the aftermath of the Bite of Seattle shooting, even though it appears that SPD held the greater responsibility for the confusion. And her decision to ask SPD’s former Chief Shon Barnes to resign was not universally popular.
This executive order places the focus back on the nuts and bolts of City government, which appear to have been neglected in recent years.
“Some of the very basic things that any organization, whether it's a government, a nonprofit, a business, needs to do well, we don't do well anymore,” Dively said.
Dively said that in addition to saving or reprioritizing dollars, this executive order will set into motion work to ensure the City is complying with all relevant rules and optimizing the resources it has.
Wilson said she wants to use every City dollar as effectively as possible, leaning into efficiency and fiscal responsibility. She knows those terms are generally right-coded but wants to show how they can be brought to bear by a progressive administration to yield positive results.
“For a long time [those terms have] often been used to mean something else,” Wilson said. “Starving government so that it doesn't actually function well, cutting safety net programs, and we're seeing maybe an extreme version of this with the Trump administration, kind of the reductio ad absurdum of this ideology, where you have [...] extreme fiscal irresponsibility paired with slashing services in the most cruel manner and really dismantling important parts of the government apparatus. So I believe that progressive cities like Seattle have both an opportunity and really a responsibility to lead in the other direction.”
The introduction of Wilson’s proposed 2027-2028 budget on Tuesday will kick off two months of discussion as city councilmembers debate what changes they wish to make to the proposal. Given elevated tensions between the Mayor’s Office and City Council, it might prove to be a contentious budget season.
The City Council will need to pass a balanced budget before the end of the year, although they generally make their final budget vote before Thanksgiving.
“This behind-the-scenes work is not flashy,” Wilson said. “But I am committed to leaving city government in better shape than I found it."
Amy Sundberg
