Kudos to all the people, roughly 250, who showed up for last evening's public hearing on the proposed city budget for 2009-2010. Person after person, group after group demonstrated that Seattle is a place that cares about people who are "less fortunate." Speakers encouraged more shelter space, more dental services, more food, more housing, more recreation, more mentoring, more job training and more. A few people came with ideas about where to cut the budget. Unfortunately, they all came with the same difficult idea - cut the dollars for planning a possible new Seattle-based jail for misdemeanant offenders. I'll keep looking at that idea, but I'm not convinced we can totally do away with some kind of jail space for misdemeanants and King County says they're kicking us out of their jails in a few years.

Now all we have to do is add in great programs the Mayor left out when he delivered his version of the budget to Council in late September. Not too hard, right? Wrong. The Mayor's budget was built in the summer before the economy crashed. We'll learn next week what kind of impact the market meltdown will have on Seattle's tax revenues. It's likely bad, though. That means Council will have to cut heavily in order to get the budget back in balance and then cut more in order to make room for priorities the Mayor left out. The Mayor's draft budget if pretty tight, actually. However, I'd like to see more support for neighborhood plan updates, emergency food, and shelter.

Have you seen this site yet? Maybe you've seen a billboard or bus sign with the website and the slogan "These cuts can kill." The Washington State Nurses Association has come out with an aggressive campaign to remind people that the budget cuts at the local and state levels will kill more than just numbers on a sheet of paper. It's a great grassroots push to save services that benefit, sometimes invisibly, all of us. Immunizations, pre-natal care for high-risk moms, HIV testing and prevention, tuberculosis treatment, restaurant inspections, rat control, pandemic preparedness .... That's just the highlights.

We have a great public health system in Seattle and King County. The county's budget woes will push a knife deep into a system of services that keeps us all safe and healthy. It's unacceptable to cut away chunks of the system leaving uninsured people with even fewer health care options and the rest of us (the lucky insured people) at higher risk for disease.