Seattle leaders say a new countywide tax formula shortchanges the city — and after a week of slogans, we finally have an actual dollar fight worth having. This is Seattle Politics and Urbanism Daily. Today: the tax split, real SPD staffing numbers, and the HB 1110 bill report — for once, documents instead of vision decks. Three days of design memos, and somebody finally put money on the table. Good. Let's audit the allocation, not the adjectives. Devin's been waiting all week for a verb. Start us with the tax — Ryan Packer at The Urbanist broke the pushback. So what's the actual split? Seattle leaders are on record saying the city loses out — I want to know who drafted the formula that cuts the biggest tax base in the county. Exactly. And per Packer, it's worth tracking who's leading that pushback — and who's gone conveniently quiet on it. The quiet ones always tell you the most. Same move as the Sound Transit vote last week — everybody loves the project, nobody owns the money after the vote. And there's a real cost here. If Seattle's share shrinks, what funds the permitting and the upzone push everybody's been branding all week? Right — you can promise 'faster' all day, but if the tax formula starves your permit office, faster is just a press release. Let's get a number on the page. The SPD Q1 staffing PDF — 43 hires against 31 planned, 20 separations against 27. Net plus 19 ahead of plan. Plus 19 on the spreadsheet. Cool. Now show me the response times in that same report, because nobody's quoting those. Right — the headcount line and the performance section may not tell the same story. The idea that staffing is the bottleneck only holds if the metrics that matter move with the hires. We saw this with transit — the visible win and the real win aren't the same thing. Hiring ahead of plan is great. Did anyone's 911 call get answered faster? That's the test. At least the separations got predictable — twenty instead of twenty-seven. That part of the June 11 question actually has an answer now. And HB 1110 is finally in the rundown — the middle-housing mandate everybody's been leaning on without naming. Does it actually bind Seattle, or is the actual standard buried in the back half? We've got the bill report itself now, so we can pin down the state floor instead of gesturing at 'state law.' My test is simple — does it close the displacement-risk carve-out, or leave Seattle the trapdoor to slow-walk the upzones anyway? Preemption only matters if it preempts the dodge. Two fiscal fights and a state mandate, all competing for the same council bandwidth on a Friday. We'll work through all of it — stay with us. Here's Ryan Packer at The Urbanist:
Seattle elected officials are pushing back on an expected King County provision that could result in the city losing out on millions of dollars in funding annually. The 0.1% countywide sales tax proposal would fund transportation investments across the county – although potentially shortchanging Seattle – pending the results of a vote of the King County Council scheduled Friday.
Finally a fight with actual dollar signs. Ryan Packer at The Urbanist has it — a 0.1% countywide sales tax goes before the King County Council Friday, and Seattle leaders say the formula shortchanges the city by several million a year. Several million a year — and the board that drew this up is all nine county councilmembers sitting as a transportation benefit district. So Seattle's getting outvoted by people whose roads this is actually meant to fix. Right, that's the structure. Fifteen hundred miles of unincorporated county road, deferred maintenance, flooding damage from last year — real needs. So is 'Seattle pays in, county roads get the money' a bug, or is that the whole design? It's the design, Sarah. And here's my actual worry — if Seattle's share gets cut, that's money the city doesn't have to pair with all the upzone talk we've been chewing on all week. You can't permit faster on a budget somebody else just trimmed. So who's leading the pushback, and who's gone quiet? Packer names city leaders 'clamoring' — but with a vote Friday, today is for counting heads, not collecting quotes. I want to know which councilmembers actually show up to fight the formula. Clamoring. Great. You know what doesn't change a sales tax split? Clamoring. Show me an amendment with a number on it before Friday or it's just noise into the void. Seattle officials keep pointing to sworn officer headcount as the public safety number. But what does it actually capture — and how do we tell whether staffing is improving, not just looking better on paper? Start with the definition. 'Sworn officers' means officers with full arrest powers. That's the number SPD reports to the council, and it doesn't include civilian employees, volunteers, or alternative responders. The city's Q1 2026 staffing report was on the Public Safety Committee agenda this month alongside overtime and performance metrics — per the June 9 Seattle Channel hearing — so City Hall is already treating those as linked. Zoom out, and the hiring pool is rough: Washington ranked 51st, dead last among all 50 states and D.C., for officer recruitment, according to KOMO News reporting on Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs data. That's the pipeline Seattle is pulling from. Then there's the SPOG contract ratified in late 2025. It raised officer pay, which the city said would help retention, but it also put new limits on when civilian CARE responders can take calls, per The Urbanist. Overtime also reflects what happens when a civilian program can't absorb the call volume it was built for. To know whether staffing is really recovering, the dashboard has to include net sworn headcount, attrition, overtime, and actual response times — because you can grow the number and still burn out the officers you have. So if the SPOG contract keeps CARE responders from taking calls they're qualified for, is SPD's overtime bill basically subsidizing a labor deal that limits cheaper alternatives? That's basically what CARE chief Amy Barden argued in February — she called it 'unacceptable to waste even a dollar' in this budget environment, per the Seattle Times. CARE has 32 responders and is expanding toward 48, but much of the clinical work they're qualified for is still largely off-limits under the SPOG contract. So sworn headcount can't be the whole dashboard. Watch whether the Q1 metrics report the council got this month shows response times tightening — and whether the city tries to renegotiate those scope limits before the next budget cycle. Lawfilesext writes:
Requires certain cities planning under the Growth Management Act to authorize minimum development densities in residential zones. Establishes requirements for middle housing development regulations. Requires the Department of Commerce to provide technical assistance to cities in implementing the requirements and to develop model middle housing ordinances.
So here's the document everyone's been gesturing at all week without naming. HB 1110 — the middle housing bill. It requires cities planning under the Growth Management Act to authorize minimum densities in what used to be single-family zones. And notice it's the second substitute version, routed through Appropriations without the Housing sub. The development standards aren't in the title — they're buried in the regulations section. Right, so does this actually bind Seattle to anything, or is it Commerce handing out model ordinances and hoping cities play along? Because my read is, there's usually a displacement-risk carve-out tucked in these things that lets a city slow-walk the whole mandate. Does the state floor close that trapdoor or leave it propped open? And the timing matters. We just hit the countywide tax fight where Seattle says the formula shortchanges it. If the city's revenue share gets cut, that's the same money you'd need to staff the permitting that makes this density real. A mandate with no money behind it. Tell cities to upzone, then starve the office that processes the applications. That's how 'authorized density' becomes a press release. Here's Greg Doss at West Seattle Blog:
SPD’s original 2025 Staffing Plan assumed 120 hires and 105 separations, which are fully funded in the 2025 Adopted Budget. SPD is now planning for between 12 and 49 additional hires and seven fewer separations in 2025.
Greg Doss's Q1 staffing report — and the numbers actually came in pretty good. 43 hires against a plan of 31, 20 separations against a planned 27. Net plus 19 ahead of schedule. Twelve more cops in the door, seven fewer walking out. That's the first quarter in years both metrics beat the plan at the same time. Right, and here's the part I want to sit with. We've been hearing for months that staffing is the bottleneck for public safety. This report has hires, separations, overtime — and performance metrics. The headcount line looks great. So does response time move? Because plus 19 above plan is a nice spreadsheet. A spreadsheet doesn't show up when somebody calls 911. And remember the hole we're climbing out of — deployable officers fell from about 1,339 in early 2020 to near 907 last year. A third of the in-service force, gone. Plus 19 in one quarter is real, but it's a dent. And the revised projection swings from 132 to 169 hires. That's a 37-officer spread. When your range is that wide, you're not projecting, you're hoping. the source writes:
Of Sound Transit 3’s $53.8 billion total budget, about half, or $27.7 billion would be funded by new taxes that voters will consider in November. These are: (1) a sales tax of 0.5 percent ($.50 on a $100 purchase) in addition to the 0.9 percent currently collected;
So here's the ST3 funding doc, now in the rundown — $53.8 billion total, with about $27.7 billion from new taxes voters approved. The package leaned on a half-percent sales tax, MVET, and 25 cents per thousand dollars of property value. Reading it next to the countywide tax fight, what jumps out is the same money question in a different vote. Voters approve a budget, and then the formula for who gets what becomes a separate brawl. And look at the section right after the dollars — it's the whole 'why does it take so long' explainer. Years of public involvement, alternatives identified, evaluated, narrowed. That's the part where the timeline goes to die. $27.7 billion in new taxes, and the document's reassurance is that there'll be lots of public meetings. The taxes are specific to the cent. The delivery date isn't anywhere on the page. Sure, this PDF covers funding and phase-in. It was never going to be a full schedule. But you're right that the precision is all on the revenue side and the vagueness is all on the build side. Got a tip, a correction, or a story idea for Seattle Politics and Urbanism Daily? Send it our way at seattledailyfix at lantern podcasts dot com. We'd love to hear from you.
You'll find links to every story we covered today in the show notes, so if something stuck with you, take a minute to read a little deeper.
That's Seattle Politics and Urbanism Daily for this Friday, June 12th. This is a Lantern Podcast.