There’s a draft of an open letter to Mayor Katie Wilson and the Seattle City Council that’s been making the rounds on social media and racking up signatures over the past few days. The request: divert $8 million from SPD’s $68 million proposed budget increase and give that money to the arts. The reasoning? Art activations and cultural programming placed throughout the city should be considered a form of public-safety infrastructure.
It’s a compelling argument, particularly in light of Wilson’s newly released 2027–28 proposed budget, which purports to prioritize “stability, safety, and affordability,” with more than half of its total $9.1 billion in proposed spending allocated to public safety.
The letter, drafted by a group of Seattle artists, cultural workers, and community stakeholders and spearheaded by artist and community organizer Julie Chang Schulman, was published as a Google document last Tuesday. It points to Seattle’s 2026 World Cup-related arts events as evidence of what that scale of art funding can accomplish. According to the city, $3.6 million was distributed through 120 grants that supported 80 public art projects and cultural activations. Of that amount, $2.3 million was earmarked by the Office of Arts & Culture (OAC) for specifically FIFA-related summer events. Those investments paid off over the summer, the letter argues, with community-led public activations contributing to Seattle’s first zero-homicide June since 1970.
“This summer proved a critical reality: art and cultural placemaking is public safety infrastructure,” the letter states. “Such a massive expansion of the SPD budget is the wrong approach, particularly when the department is not suffering from a lack of resources, but rather from a bottleneck created by its own union’s policies.”
The letter specifically points to the ongoing efforts of the Seattle Police Officers Guild (SPOG) to hinder the efficacy of the Community Assisted Response and Engagement (CARE) Department, an unarmed police alternative that responds to non-violent 911 calls. Despite Wilson’s support of CARE—under her administration, the number of CARE responders has jumped from 24 to 40—SPOG continues to weaponize its contract to limit the types of calls CARE can respond to, claiming that it takes away from police jobs. The letter argues that community-based safety measures—including art programs and activations—conducted by trusted community members don’t merely put a Band-Aid on the problem; they work to intervene at the root, breaking cycles of violence.
The letter does not mince words: “We have a better model right in front of us. If we can fund community activation for FIFA and our summer tourists, we can—and must—do it for the people who call Seattle home year-round.”
Schulman, who has been sharing the document on Instagram, is active in the local arts and civic community. She is co-executive steward at Forever Safe Spaces / On The Block Seattle, founder of Seattle Artist Coalition for Equitable Development, and co-chair of the Capitol Hill Arts District steering committee.
The letter has drawn nearly 400 individual signers at the time of publication, spanning Seattle’s arts and cultural community as well as organizers, small-business owners, educators, and community advocates.
For Schulman, the argument is grounded in first-hand experience. Organizations she works with, including On the Block, received increased support through the city’s 2026 arts funding, distributed via the Capitol Hill Arts District.
“But this convo isn’t about one org,” Schulman told me over Instagram. “The impact in our direct community was transformative, [but most] activations were limited to Pioneer Square. Imagine if they were not limited to [the] World Cup [and] downtown, and artists and orgs could activate in place?” Schulman imagines what an art activation proposal could do in Little Saigon, a neighborhood where violent crime has increased in the last few years. She’s confident the neighborhood has “community members with creative solutions” who lack resources to implement them.
What could $8 million actually buy the community?
The amount would be more than double OAC’s 2025–26 funding for these type of placemaking projects—things like farmers-market-style events, Pride festivals and watch parties, community cycling activations, and guided walking tours by Vanishing Seattle / Street Trees of Seattle—extending the reach of such an investment well beyond downtown. The letter doesn’t specify exactly how the $8 million might be distributed, but we can surmise. For context, the current Arts in Parks program offers individual awards ranging from $2,000 to $8,000. At $8,000 per grant, $8 million could theoretically fund 1,000 grants. At $2,000 per grant, it could fund 4,000. (For reference, in 2026, Arts in Parks funded 33 grants, with a total budget of $216,000.)
That’s a lot of artists. But is redirecting $8 million from SPD’s budget actually feasible?
Eight million dollars represents around a measly 1.4 percent of SPD’s proposed annual $556 million budget—an increase of 14 percent compared to 2025. However, most of that budget increase is already spoken for. Approximately $53.8 million would go toward the costs associated with the recently negotiated SPOG contract, including wage increases. A large chunk of the rest—approximately $12.6 million—would go toward fully funding 66 officers hired in 2026, whose salaries were not accounted for in this year’s budget.
The desired $8 million would likely need to be absorbed through cuts made elsewhere throughout the SPD. Budget cuts made in the summer of 2020—including reductions in sworn patrol officers and recruitment spending—demonstrated it’s more than possible to trim the fat when there’s a will.
The overarching question is straightforward: If the city is willing to spend millions on public safety, what counts as public-safety spending? And what if some of that money went toward creating the conditions that make people want to be in public spaces in the first place?
Even without the hypothetical $8 million in redirected funds, there’s some good news for the arts in Wilson’s budget. She protected existing arts funding from being cut to help address the $175 million general fund budget deficit. Instead, the proposal includes additional funding for the OAC over the biennium, including an increase in grant awards to account for the rising cost of living for artists (cheers, all around), expanded funding for Creative Advantage (arts education in Seattle Public Schools), additional money to maintain the Civic Art Collection, and one-time funding to continue the arts programing at King Street Station.
That’s great. (I can hear audible sighs of relief wafting from King Street.) But the letter makes an argument that seems pretty damn reasonable: If the mayor’s budget recognizes that arts programming is worth protecting—and even expanding—why can’t Seattle make a World Cup-scale investment in local arts an ongoing strategy, rather than a one-off game plan designed around sports tourism?
Please, tell me. I’d like to know.
Back in March, I wrote about Mayor Katie Wilson’s Arts, Culture, and Creative Economy Transition Team and their ambitious but not-at-all-crazy ideas for generating increased funding for the arts. Among the team’s goals (and a constant quest for policymakers and artists alike) was finding ways to cement Seattle’s civic identity as an arts city.
Putting money where your mouth is—by putting money directly into artists’ hands—is the most effective way to do that. Artists don’t have a guild like SPOG to advocate for hundreds of millions of dollars on their behalf. If Seattle is serious about thinking of public safety as more than police response, then the letter’s authors are posing a serious question that deserves a real conversation. Is Seattle going to treat the $3.6 million it spent on World Cup-related creative placemaking as an exceptional expense, or is it a preview of what a city that actually wants to be an arts city might look like year-round?
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