Now that Mayor Harrell’s proposed 2025 budget for the City of Seattle has been out for a couple of weeks, we’ve had time to discover some of the places that he has chosen to make some cuts. Unfortunately, it appears that one sacrificial lamb is government transparency.
Exhibit 1 is Harrell’s plan for the Seattle Channel, the city’s award-winning public-access channel. It broadcasts and streams City Council meetings, Mayoral speeches, city officials’ press conferences, and a variety of other public meetings and events. But it goes far beyond that: the Seattle Channel also airs interviews with elected officials, candidate forums and debates over ballot initiatives, and civic discussions with community members and panels of journalists, many hosted by veteran journalist (and my colleague and collaborator) Brian Callanan. And it produces award-winning shows such as Art Zone with Nancy Guppy and Book Lust with Nancy Pearl, as well as a host of other deep-dives into Seattle’s unique cultural heritage.
As someone who has spent years reporting on Seattle city government, I can faithfully report that there are only a handful of things that our government does very well. The fire department is top-notch. The Office of Housing pulls off major miracles in stretching public dollars for affordable housing projects by leveraging matching funding from other sources. And then there is the Seattle Channel: well-produced by a talented crew, high-quality content, and thoroughly reliable. It is a unique and extremely valuable resource, used by journalists and citizens alike, to track what our city is up to. Seattle Channel is the envy of many other cities.
And Mayor Harrell is gutting it.
Harrell’s proposed budget slashes its budget by 22%, from $7.2 million this year to $5.6 million in 2025. It also lays off six hard-working media professionals on the Seattle Channel staff.
The purported reason for the cut is because the source of its funding, cable franchise fees, is on a long-term decline. The city charges two companies, Comcast and Wave, to offer cable television services in the city, because they use city infrastructure as the main part of their distribution network. But as viewers increasingly “cut the cord” and move to streaming content, the fees that the city collects have diminished.
So the city’s response has been to cut the Seattle Channel’s budget and headcount. According to city staff, with its reduced budget Seattle Channel will eliminate all programming except broadcasting press conferences and City Council meetings. Art Zone and Book Lust are gone. City Inside/Out is shut down. Nancy Guppy, Nancy Pearl, and Brian Callanan will be laid off, along with some of their co-workers.
There are three problems with this. First, it flies against the Mayor’s stated priorities in making budget cuts for next year, in which he said that he is prioritizing “preserving public facing functions” and focusing layoffs on “internal services.” Few things are more public-facing in city government than the Seattle Channel. The city has about 40 departments and 12,000 employees; of the 159 planned layoffs in Harrell’s proposed budget, six of them are coming from Seattle Channel.
The second problem is that this is neither new nor a surprise; city officials have been planning this for years. We know this because they wrote it down. Last year’s city budget document specifically projects $1.6 million in “future reductions” in the 2025 Seattle Channel budget – exactly the amount that Harrell is now proposing.
Jump back to the 2022 budget, and it forecast an even bigger cut for 2025: $2.4 million. Two years ago, the cable franchise fee revenues were expected to decline at an even faster rate than they currently are, so this year’s budget reduction is a bit smaller than earlier estimates.
Our elected officials knew this was coming, and they had years to find another source of funding to backstop the cable franchise fee revenues. And truly, this is a trivial amount of money – a rounding error – in the context of the $1.8 billion General Fund budget. Officials not only didn’t find other funding sources, but they also clearly documented their intent to reduce Seattle Channel’s budget further. They thought about it, and they made a choice.
While a city resolution passed in 2001 makes it clear that cable franchise fees must be spent on public-access broadcast and Internet programming, the converse is not true: nowhere does it say that ONLY cable franchise fees may be spent on the Seattle Channel. The Mayor and City Council are free to supplement the dwindling fee revenues with other funds.
Third problem: the cable franchise fees will likely continue to decrease, and the Mayor’s budget projects even larger budget cuts in 2026 and beyond. Today they are cutting the Seattle Channel back to just press conferences and Council meetings. Two years from now, those will be the next to go when there is no longer sufficient funding to sustain them.
The inescapable conclusion is that our elected officials have decided, consciously, that government transparency is not a priority – or perhaps not in their best interests – and are quietly, item by item, de-funding it.
There was a small piece of good news this week: Council President Sara Nelson sent out a press release saying that she is “exploring ways” to restore funding for the Seattle Channel when the Council proposes its amendments to the Mayor’s proposed budget in the coming weeks. That is far from a commitment, but it’s a start.
The city’s record on transparency issues is spotty at best. Public records offices are chronically under-funded and records requests take weeks, often months. Records “accidentally” disappear. Councilmembers routinely participate in meetings remotely via Zoom rather than show up and face their constituents. And now our elected officials intend to make it even harder for us to know what our government is up to. If they honor their role as public servants and believe that the people’s government should be transparent and accountable, this is their chance to fix this travesty, fully fund the Seattle Channel, and throw their support behind one of the true jewels in Seattle city government. It’s a small ask money-wise, but a crucial one for good governance.
A time-honored tradition is for the Seattle mayor to threaten to defund a popular program, such as the Seattle Channel, thus raising and testing support for it and giving the city council a heroic opportunity to find the money. Same is done in the annual charade in Congress to defund the National Endowment for the Arts.
Sure, but this one has been planned, in writing, for years and no one said a word. You may be right that Harrell is giving his pals on the Council a chance to be heroes by appearing to move forward with the cut, but the idea precedes him.
I agree with Kevin that this proposal is part of a broader trend in Seattle municipal government to reduce transparency and accountability. Work from home policies have definitely played into this, as has the deeply troubling decision a few years back to eliminate the online directory of contact information for all City of Seattle staffers.
Absolutely so, Sandeep, and it’s part of the impact of COVID and work-at-home.
It’s fascinating to think that such a small thing as eliminating the online directory for City staff would have a real impact, but it does lead to anonymity and isolation. Some City staff are great and really do respond to voicemail promptly but the majority don’t.
And then, of course there’s the difficulty with obtaining Public Records.
Ugh.
I confess to having been ignorant about the Seattle Channel but being a Comcast subscriber I decided to try to educate myself…. I quickly learned that you have to be a Seattle resident to get it, although cuts of it are available on UTube. Where I live, channel 21 is a slow-moving Edmonds Community College slideshow. Like many people, I’m interested in following what happens in Seattle since, like King County, it is a tail that wags the dog.
I’m moved to ask about the viewership numbers for the Seattle Channel? No argument about the information and government transparency it provides for (only) Seattle citizens, but I wonder if enough citizens are watching in numbers that warrant the multi-millions to produce a live cable broadcast? Wouldn’t it be a lot cheaper to record the important government content and put it up on a website so it could be viewed on demand? As far as the ancillary content, it may be great content, but if nobody’s really watching is it really worth producing?
They stream the live broadcast, and provide all of their programming on-demand.
https://seattlechannel.org/ So it’s all available, for free, to everyone.
Thanks for the education, Kevin. -Glad to learn this, which I didn’t pick up on from my ‘research’ this morning. Same question though. What level of eyeballs is all this getting and does it warrant the multi-million dollar expense of the writers, presenters, live production, cable broadcast, etc.? Is the viewership so low that this explains why it is on the chopping block and no one has said a word? Again, no argument about the value, but I wonder if going from $7.2 to $5.6 is more about viewership than limiting transparency, etc.?