Glad to see the city supporting the police Union we need to tiple the police in Seattle

UNION STRONG!!!

1: there’s absolutely no evidence to support The Stranger’s assertion that Ben Noble is “fiscally conservative,” unless “fiscally conservative” means “someone who is a non-partisan numbers guy who has shown to be really good at his job.” Hannah should really try to not lie constantly in articles she writes.

2: police and fire unions have the right to binding arbitration under state law because they are barred from striking. Other unions don’t have binding arbitration. This gives LE and FF unions far more leverage in negotiations, because arbitrators are generally fairly labor friendly, and the negotiations revolve around comparables. LE and FF consistently get higher percentage pay increases than other public sector unions because of this system and because the public prioritizes their work over other jobs. Any article that throws out a percentage raise without adding this sort of important context is intentionally misleading, which is not surprising because these days almost everything The Stranger posts is either misleading or a lie.

none of these people deserve a raise. maybe the ones powerwashing piss off the sidewalk, but other than that...nah.

Why does TS keep acting like the city has these magical progressive revenue buckets they can tap into to fill the gap. A progressive income tax is illegal and the legislature just approved the initiative to completely take it off the table. The choices for new revenue are going to be increasing the jumpstart tax, levying a capital gains tax on top of the state tax, raising the sales tax or pushing out a property tax levy. None of those are great solutions as two of them are regressive in nature and the other two are volatile and could hurt long term revenue projections. It seems like they'll have to increase jumpstart and remove the rules limiting it's use to dig out of this hole the previous spend happy council created.

The city budget deficit will be solved by Council President Nelson without raising taxes, fees, and fines. That is leadership.
Reducing 24 human resources in city government to probably four hr's, that is still too many HR's.

Merging the nine city agencies that deal with trees in the city, and other bloated and redundant functions in city government. Almost everything the city does has multiple agencies doing the same work.

Nelson also said that some city services will be CUT. Music to my ears. Go bold Sara et al.