Spokane to move to two-year budget cycle in change intended to promote long-term thinking

Spokane is moving to a two-year budget cycle, emulating the state Legislature, after a 6-1 vote Monday by the Spokane City Council.

Councilman Jonathan Bingle was the sole vote in opposition, though this was due to procedural disagreements with the change being approved through the emergency ordinance process. He noted that he agreed with the change itself.

Until now, the city has operated on annual budgets that had to be approved at the end of each year. The city’s $1.2 billion 2024 budget, for instance, was approved last November.

Starting this year, a two-year budget will have to be approved every other year. City leaders have until December to approve a balanced budget spanning both 2025 and 2026. During those two-year budgets, check-ins are expected between the mayoral administration and the Spokane City Council every six months for anticipated budget adjustments.

The change will, in itself, do little to fix the current budget woes facing the city, which has to cut spending or raise taxes and fees to fill a roughly $50 million deficit going into 2025. In an executive summary Mayor Lisa Brown presented to Council in April, the mayor suggested the city will have to lay off 50 police officers and 30 firefighters, plus an additional 70 employees across other departments, if taxes were not raised.

A proposal for a major permanent tax increase that had been slated for the November ballot was pulled in early May, and there has not been public action on the issue in recent weeks.

But both conservative and liberal city leaders agree that forcing Spokane’s municipal government to balance its budget two years out at a time will reduce some of the short-term thinking and stop-gap maneuvers that contributed to the size of the current fiscal hole.

The change has been championed by Councilman Michael Cathcart, who in January listed a shift to biennial budget as his top priority for the year, and more recently by Brown.

“You avoid gimmickry in how you solve your budget problems,” Cathcart said in a recent interview. “When you have to make sure your budget balances over that two-year horizon, it’s a lot more challenging to only consider the short-term … that’s how we’ve ended up in this circumstance, with short-term thinking.”

By law, city governments must approve balanced budgets. Until now, however, Spokane’s elected leaders, like those in most cities in the state, have only had to figure out how to get through the next year, which Cathcart argues makes it easier and at times politically expedient to patch over impending budget woes that eventually cause real financial pain.

In the past, Spokane’s Chief Financial Officer Matt Boston has noted that delayed debt service payments, deferred maintenance and one-time federal funding sources have been used to get Spokane’s budget through to the next year, allowing elected leaders to avoid the difficult cuts or tax and fee increases that would eventually be necessary.

In an interview, Brown also noted that the change could help cut down on the amount of time each year that city staff spend preparing for upcoming budget proposals.

“You no sooner have a budget done than you’re starting to work on the next one again,” she said.