Category: homelessness

homelessness, King County, Police

As Burien Countersues Over Homelessness Ban, Another Unsheltered Person Dies Downtown
Burien’s map showing where unsheltered people are banned at all times is misleading in one key respect—most of the light-gray areas (which are not restricted) do not include public spaces large enough for people to set up tents or sleep without violating other city rules, so the actual restricted area is much larger than the map suggests.

By Erica C. Barnett

On Thursday, the city of Burien sued King County and the King County Sheriff’s Office for breach of contract, seeking to force the sheriff’s office to drop their own federal lawsuit against the city. In its complaint, the city claims the sheriff’s office breached an agreement to provide police services to the city by refusing to enforce a recently passed camping ban.

That law prohibits people from sleeping or possessing “indicia of camping,” such as sleeping bags, in public spaces at all hours of the day or night unless there are no shelter beds available. It also bars homeless people from “living” within a 500-foot radius of all parks, libraries, schools, day cares, and other public facilities under any circumstances—effectively banishing them from most of the city.

Two weeks ago, King County Sheriff Cole-Tindall filed a lawsuit against the city, claiming the ban on “camping” violates the constitutional rights affirmed in a landmark case called Martin v. Boise, which prevents cities from banishing homeless people from public spaces unless adequate shelter is available. Burien has claimed shelter is “available”—just not in Burien. A group of unsheltered Burien residents also recently sued the city, charging that new “camping” ban violates the state constitution.

On Friday, another unsheltered man died in downtown, reportedly of an overdose, PubliCola has learned—the second death in the encampment in less than two weeks, and the first since the city announced it was terminating its contract with REACH, which provided outreach and case management to people living unsheltered in Burien. The King County Medical Examiner’s Office did not immediately have more information about the death.

In a statement announcing the lawsuit, the city said the county had had “placed its judgment over that of Burien’s duly elected officials; denied the City of Burien its authority to assist and protect Burien residents, businesses, and property; prevented Burien’s City Manager from providing direction to the contract police as stated in the Interlocal Agreement [between Burien and the county]; and interfered with Burien’s effort to provide guidance for the unhoused within the city’s boundaries.”

A spokesman for the sheriff’s office said, “The constitutionality of Burien’s anti-camping ordinance is squarely before the federal court.  Burien’s attempt to avoid a binding judgment by filing a lawsuit in Snohomish County is just a misguided distraction as we await decision from the federal court.”

A spokesperson for the city of Burien responded to PubliCola’s questions by sending a link to a web page the city has set up about the lawsuit.

The lawsuit asks the Snohomish County court to require King County to drop its lawsuit against the city, participate in a resolution process that could force the sheriff’s office to enforce the law, and pay the city damages and attorney’s fees.

Those fees could be substantial, because Burien has hired a large downtown Seattle law firm, Williams, Kastner & Gibbs PLLC, to represent them. It’s unclear how much Burien has budgeted for the case, including attorneys’ fees and other costs the city could incur if it loses; as the city’s chief executive, City Manager Adolfo Bailon can issue contracts of up to $50,000 without a public process or council approval. The city faces a $2 million budget cliff next year.

Burien City Manager Called 911 Dozens of Times 

Over the last year, Burien’s approach to homelessness has seemed to focus primarily on making the city an inhospitable place to live. For the last year, the city has swept a group of unsheltered people from location to location while delaying action on a shelter that would provide them with a place to go.

City officials have also tolerated  individual actions designed to drive homeless people out—or participated themselves.

Public records shared with PubliCola reveal that City Manager Bailon called 911 at least 45 times last year. PubliCola has reviewed summaries for 10 of these calls, which all concern people located just outside Burien’s downtown library and City Hall. In one call, Bailon reported seeing a person with their head “under a towel” and three tents set up in violation of the city’s encampment ban; in another, he told the 911 operator he had been watching a man wandering around and yelling for a while but had finally called in because his “butt [was] exposed.” Another call involved a man “adjusting his pants a lot but pulling them lower and lower” while kids played nearby; in another, Bailon reported seeing people in the park with “bongs, foil, etc.”

Last month, City Councilmember Linda Akey was caught on video berating a group of unsheltered people outside her downtown condo, yelling, “I live here and you do not belong here and threatening to call the police.

And, more recently, Taproot Church—whose mission is “to glorify God and enjoy him forever by making disciples of Jesus Christ”—set up a large spotlight in its parking lot and aimed it at the group of tents; the light, which is powered by a noisy generator, reportedly floods the encampment all night.

City Council, homelessness, King County, Morning Fizz

Morning Fizz: COVID at City Hall, Why “Consolidation” Won’t Fix the City Budget, and More on Burien’s Efforts to Kill a Church Encampment

1. Seattle City Councilmember Bob Kettle recently contracted COVID after coming in to his City Hall office while a family member was home sick with the highly infectious disease. During the period when he was not yet testing positive, he and his staff continued to work at City Hall without wearing masks, according to sources on the floor.

Although Kettle told PubliCola that he personally stayed home for a week after his first positive COVID test (including five days after his symptoms receded), his presence on the second floor during the time when his family member was sick unnerved at least one council member, Tammy Morales, who wrote in an email to the city clerk and council HR, “I just learned that a couple folks on the floor are home with Covid. Can I ask you to send around our policies to remind folks WHEN TO STAY HOME.”

According to a staffer for his office, Kettle “took multiple tests and the moment he received a positive result, he immediately began to work from home, and followed the five-day protocol once he received a negative test(s).” The city asks employees to isolate for five days after a positive test and stay home if they still have symptoms; however, even asymptomatic people can be contagious. Kettle and a staffer confirmed that no one else in his office contracted COVID from him.

Council president Sara Nelson and other council members have frequently touted the benefits of in-person work to council members and their staff as well as the recovery of downtown businesses. The council now holds all its meetings in person; previously, some council members attended remotely, including one council member with a young child and one who is immunocompromised.

Saka and Strauss are correct that the city has arborists in multiple departments. It has a total of two: One in the Parks Department, and one in SDOT. It’s unclear how moving both positions into one department or the other would save the city money.

2. Facing the largest budget shortfall in recent history, many city council members have latched on to the idea that city departments are inefficient and full of costly redundancies—a problem council budget committee chair Dan Strauss has recently taken to illustrating with the example of city arborists. “We have multiple different departments that have arborists,” Strauss said at a committee meeting last month, and “I think it makes more sense to have them all in one department.”

Earlier this week, Councilmember Rob Saka took up the mantle, calling the city’s many arborists the “canonical example” of the need for “consolidation” at the city on an episode of the Seattle Channel’s “City Inside/Out,” which features panel discussions with city council members.

“Do we need 17 different departments with arborists, or can they sit under one [department]—parks, for example, or whatever it is. But we need to better consolidate our functions, services, our lines of business, avoid duplication of efforts, [and] I think we’ll achieve some some great savings through that,” Saka said.

Curious, we looked to see how many arborists the city has and in how many different departments. As it turns out, Saka and Strauss are correct that the city has arborists in multiple departments. It has a total of two: One in the Parks Department, and one in SDOT. It’s unclear how moving both positions into one department or the other would save the city money.

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3. As PubliCola reported late last year, Burien City Manager Adolfo Bailon failed to inform the city council about a letter from Deputy King County Executive Shannon Braddock telling him the city needed to come up with a plan to spend $1 million the county was offering to build a shelter or lose the money.

Bailon sat on the letter for a week before telling the full council about it, claiming he was too busy responding to to emails opposing a temporary encampment at a local church that was run by a nonprofit started by then-council member Cydney Moore.

Although Bailon later changed his story, documents obtained through a records request show that he did spend a great deal of time responding to opponents of the encampment and raising questions about its legality. Those emails included:

• A note to the Burien fire chief asking him if the city could ensure that all the tents at the encampment would be “flame retardant”;

• An email to Burien Police Chief Ted Boe asking him to send an officer to a meeting to refute “potentially false claims” by the encampment’s sponsor that sex offenders would be barred from the encampment (which they were);

• An email warning the superintendent of the Highline Public School District about the church encampment’s “proximity to Highline High School” and claiming that the encampment violated city law;

• At least seven emails to people who wrote him to oppose the encampment, saying he was “very sorry to hear” about the problems the encampment would cause them and encouraging them to attend an upcoming meeting where they could express their opposition.

The encampment closed in February.

 

 

City Council, homelessness, human services, Mayor Harrell

As List of Finalists for KCRHA Director Comes Together, Council Raises Questions About Agency’s Future
A breakdown of the KCRHA’s budget, which could face additional cuts this year.

Erica C. Barnett

The future of the King County Regional Homelessness Authority came under scrutiny during a council meeting on Wednesday, just two days before a selection committee is scheduled to get its first look at a list of finalists to head up the embattled agency.

One name that may be on that list is that of KCRHA interim director Darrell Powell. Powell, the former chief financial officer for United Way of King County and Mayor Bruce Harrell’s pick for the interim role. Powell has reportedly applied for the permanent position, which has been vacant since the last CEO, Marc Dones, resigned last year. He replaced Helen Howell, who became interim CEO last May, in January.

The company that’s leading the search for a new CEO, Nonprofit Professionals Advisory Group (NPAG), has narrowed the list down to about a dozen candidates, whose names have not been made public, and will present the list to a search committee for further narrowing on Friday. The search process has been slow and opaque; NPAG only got around to posting a job description in January, eight months after Dones announced their resignation, and the search committee was reportedly uninspired by an early list of potential candidates.

If Powell—who did not respond to a request for an interview—became the permanent director, Harrell would have a long-term ally at the very top of an agency whose work he has frequently criticized and whose authority he recently reduced, by removing the KCRHA’s authority over encampment outreach and homelessness prevention and returning those contracts to the city’s Human Services Department.

The city council, including many of its six new members, appears to agree with Harrell about the need to claw back control over the KCRHA, which receives a little less than half its funding from the city. During a presentation by Powell and KCRHA staffer Jeff Simms on Wednesday, council members expressed support for Harrell’s decision to take over KCRHA’s outreach and prevention contracts and suggested the primary problem with the agency is that its governing structure is too confusing and unaccountable.

Specifically, council members said the KCRHA has too many boards—”three, plural?” Councilmember Rob Saka confirmed with Simms—and that one solution might be eliminating the implementation board, which is made up of unelected homelessness experts. “When you reference plural, rather than singular, I think therein lies the problem,” Saka said.

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Council President Sara Nelson also criticized the implementation board and suggested that as “non-elected people,” they had little incentive to spend city funding wisely.

“These are non-elected people, who are not accountable to their constituents for resources, that are making the budget, and then the governing committee is expected to basically essentially rubber stamp so that the providers—very important—can get paid,” Nelson said. “And so that really does need to be cleaned up. And that’ll be quite a process and that can only take place in the interlocal agreement,” which established the authority and created its governing structure.

Nelson wasn’t on the council at the time, but there was actually a huge debate over the two-board structure when the council was helping to craft the interlocal agreement; the original plan, proposed by city and county leaders, was to set up a public development authority governed by an 11-member board of homelessness experts, overseen by a separate “steering committee” made up of elected officials.

Through compromises over time, elected officials gradually secured some direct control over the authority, eventually landing on a structure in which co-equal governing and implementation boards, made up of elected officials and people with policy expertise and experience, respectively, make decisions about the KCRHA and adopt its budget. The implementation board is made up of 13 experts on various aspects of the homelessness system, including people with direct experience of homelessness. The third board, which oversees the local continuum of care, is required by federal law and serves as a subcommittee to the implementation board.

“We are looking at the this being up for renewal at the end of the year, and I think we all want it to work, but we have to be honest about where it didn’t work and how we’re going to make it work going forward. When we look at what’s happening on the street, we don’t see any improvement. We only see things getting worse.”—Seattle City Councilmember Cathy Moore

The original justification for leaving most decisions in the hands of experts, rather than elected officials, was that they would be less influenced by prevailing political winds—less inclined, for instance, to make major budget changes based on voter complaints about encampments or media reports suggesting the agency is in disarray. (Like this column by Danny Westneat questioning the wisdom of the regional approach, which two councilmembers cited during Wednesday’s meeting.)

The KCRHA’s interlocal agreement expires at the end of this year, a date human services committee chair Cathy Moore called a “juncture” for the agency. “We are looking at the this being up for renewal at the end of the year, and I think we all want it to work, but we have to be honest about where it didn’t work and how we’re going to make it work going forward,” Moore said. “When we look at what’s happening on the street, we don’t see any improvement. We only see things getting worse.”

Simms pointed out that the agreement (and thus KCRHA) will continue automatically unless the city decides to unilaterally withdraw from the authority. If that happened, it would effectively end the agency and trigger the return of all homelessness contracts back to the government entities that oversaw them before 2020, including the city.

Before the KCRHA was created, homelessness contracts were under a division of the Human Services Department called Homelessness Strategy and Investments, which was subsequently (and messily) disbanded. HSD recently created a new homelessness division with its own director, suggesting a potential return to the old model.

It’s unclear how this would be an improvement (one reason for the whole “regional approach” concept in the first place was that it would consolidate city and county contracts under one authority) but a number of current elected officials seem to believe it might be—egged on, perhaps, by the mayor’s office, which has been bearish on the KCRHA since Harrell took office.

On Wednesday, several council members expressed the view that suburban cities need to “step up” and contribute financially to the regional authority so that Seattle can reduce its contribution; Saka, previously an attorney for Meta, likened Seattle’s initial heavy investment to a round of “seed funding” that would eventually lead to greater investments from other cities and a “draw down” in investments from Seattle.

This is a baked-in issue with the regional approach—why would a suburban city that disagrees with KCRHA’s progressive approach to homelessness give money to the authority when they could be spending it on encampment sweeps?—but suburban contributions were never going to make up a huge chunk of the KCRHA’s budget anyway, since their budgets are so much smaller than either Seattle or King County.

Although the council will soon be making major decisions about the KCRHA’s budget—which could face cuts this year to help close an estimated $230 million budget gap—it’s clear they still have a steep learning curve. (The meeting was one in a series of City 101-style briefings that have filled the council’s schedule since six new members took office in January).

After Simms told councilmembers that there is currently about one housing unit available for every 34 homeless people “nominated” for housing, for instance, Nelson suggested that “part of the problem is the demand, because people aren’t moving on from permanent supportive housing, perhaps because they don’t have the supports to be able to do so” from the agencies that provide their case management, she said. Permanent supportive housing, Simms pointed out, is a specialized housing type set aside for people with severe, usually lifelong, disabilities; “permanent” is a key part of the concept, and people aren’t expected to “move on.”

Other council members appeared unaware that people don’t generally flock to an encampment once they hear it’s being removed; that KCRHA gets people into housing, not just shelter; that the city’s Unified Care Team holds near-monopoly access to tiny house villages; and that the KCRHA doesn’t decide how to spend the city’s money, but administers a list of contracts that remains largely unchanged since the city was in charge of them.

homelessness, Mayor Harrell, Morning Fizz, Police

KCRHA Plans to Ask City for Budget Increase, SPD Command Staff Loses Sole Female Officer

1. Earlier this year, Mayor Bruce Harrell asked the King County Regional Homelessness Authority to come up with potential budget cuts of 2 to 5 percent in response to a $230 million projected city budget deficit next year; the city, which pays for more than half the KCRHA’s budget, contributed $109 million to the homelessness agency’s budget last year.

Although the KCRHA provided the city with a list of potential cuts earlier this year, the agency is asking its implementation and governing boards to approve a budget proposal that would include a $25 million “stabilization” increase as well as $2.3 million for two new programs: A new tiny house village and a new “overflow” shelter that could serve between 30 and 50 people a night when other shelters are full. About half this request would come from the city; the rest would come from King County, the KCRHA’s other primary funder.

Last month, city officials announced that they would be taking over homelessness prevention and outreach contracts previously administered by the KCRHA, a move some homeless advocates called an abandonment of the regional approach to homelessness embodied in the KCRHA. Those programs totaled almost $12 million. Accounting for this transfer, the KCRHA is asking the city for $112 million.

Without those funds, KCRHA staff told the agency’s implementation board last week, the agency would be unable to pay for commitments like inflationary pay increases, and would have to cut a number of existing programs that face a “funding cliff” next year. “Based on information obtained from potentially-affected agencies in the summer of 2023,” an agency budget memo says, “KCRHA estimates a likely loss of as many as 300 shelter beds and the inability to prevent homelessness for over 265 additional households.”

Programs that could be cut or eliminated if the city fails to fund them include the Benu Community House, a men’s shelter in the Central District that specializes in serving Black men; staffing and services at several Low Income Housing Institute-run tiny house villages; and several projects funded with short-term federal COVID funds since 2021, including 169 shelter beds, two outreach agencies, and a day center.

During last week’s implementation board meeting, board member Simha Reddy called the budget outlook “really sobering” and “a little bit scary. … We need to ask for a significant increase in funds just to hold steady in terms of services mentioned, at a time when our primary funders are facing difficult, difficult budgets. And I’m really, really worried that they will not be able to meet these kind of stabilization requests that we have.”

The board will vote on the budget proposal in April; historically, the board has adopted the proposed budget without making alterations.

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2. When challenged about gender discrimination and parity in the Seattle Police Department, Mayor Bruce Harrell and Police Chief Adrian Diaz frequently mention that there are many women in leadership at SPD—recently telling PubliCola, for instance, that “half of the department’s command staff are women.” When the mayor’s spokesman made that comment, the number was actually five out of 13, including just one sworn officer, assistant chief Lesley Cordner.

Now that Cordner, a 35-year veteran of the department, is retiring—and leaving SPD’s command staff with no sworn women—how did Diaz choose to thank her? By sending out an all-staff email misspelling her name.  “Please take a moment to watch this heartfelt and congratulatory video, as we celebrate and honor the career of Assistant Chief, Leslie Cordner,” Diaz wrote. About ten minutes later, he sent a second email identical to the first, but with Cordner’s name corrected.

Last year, Cordner reportedly left SPD’s Before the Badge program, where she was one of the program leaders, because of one of the instructors’ views on what he called the LGBTQ “lifestyle,” including his opposition to same-sex marriage. Before the Badge is SPD’s marquee program designed to prepare new recruits to work with diverse communities in Seattle.

homelessness, King County

Burien Officials Make Threats, Cast Blame—But Continue to Defend Their Ban on “Living” in Public

By Erica C. Barnett

Burien city officials escalated the drama over the city’s total ban on “living” outdoors last week after King County Sheriff Patti Cole-Tindall sued the city for what she called the city’s “unconstitutional” new law. As we reported last week, City Manager Adolfo Bailon immediately responded to the lawsuit by instructing employees to stop paying the sheriff’s office, which serves as Burien’s police department. (The move makes Burien, ironically, the first local city to actually defund its police.) Bailon also canceled the city’s recently signed homelessness outreach contract with REACH, leaving Burien without any professional homeless outreach services.

On Thursday, a man died in an encampment in downtown Burien; his body was discovered by outreach workers from REACH. Burien officials  immediately politicized the tragedy.

Speaking to the B-Town Blog, Burien Mayor Kevin Schilling lashed out at Cole-Tindall and a nonprofit run by a former city council member that ran a short-lived sanctuary encampment at a local church. Schilling said the man’s death, from an overdose, was a “direct result of the Sheriff’s Department and the County Executive suing us so they don’t have to enforce our common sense tent regulating measure, as well as not enforcing drug laws in the Downtown core. … I sure hope the Sheriff and County Executive staff taking their roles seriously, and stop wasting taxpayer time and money with their stunts that are leading to deaths.”

“We do not have capacity to provide continual management and oversight of conduct in encampments of unhoused persons that have been part of the community for the entire time I have worked with the City.”—Burien Police Chief Ted Boe

The new ban on “living” in public spaces includes appearing in public with any “indicia of camping,” including blankets, sleeping bags, and cooking equipment.”

The sheriff’s department has repeatedly told city officials that their priority is 911 calls and serious crimes, not the presence of homeless people in Burien. In a deposition last week, Burien Police Chief Ted Boe said his deputies spend most of their time responding to emergency calls, which “means we do not have capacity to provide continual management and oversight of conduct in encampments of unhoused persons that have been part of the community for the entire time I have worked with the City.”

Boe, who has been Burien’s police chief since 2018, said he had no issues getting people living unsheltered in Burien to “voluntarily move” when asked— until the city council hired Bailon in 2022.

Starting that year, Boe said, Bailon “put continual pressure on me to redeploy resources away from other public safety matters such as 911 calls and to address several non-criminal aspects of camping. I requested he provide support for addressing non-criminal behaviors to prevent police from being responsible for managing camp rules.”

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Boe also revealed that during a recent conversation with Bailon, the city manager told him he “would be demanding that I be removed as the City’s Chief” and replaced by someone who would be willing to accede to Bailon’s demands.

Another option the city is reportedly considering: Hiring their own police force, and ditching their contract with the county. This, however, would almost certainly be more expensive than the county contract. When the city looked into creating its own police force in 2011, a consultant concluded that it would cost between 12 and 35 percent more for the city to fund a similar level of service. Policing makes up about 45 per cent of Burien’s annual general-fund budget.

“I have grown to love this community and it is upsetting to have this assignment taken away for doing what I not only believe is right, but what I think our courts expect me to do as a police leader in Washington,” Boe said in his deposition.

At tonight’s Burien City Council meeting, the council will discuss a proposal to take away federal ARPA dollars that the council allocated to a day center for homeless Burien residents at Highline United Methodist Church last year. Opponents of providing shelter and services to homeless Burien residents have made similar arguments against providing them an indoor space to be (and access services) during the day, claiming that they will bring drugs and violence into the area.

City Council, homelessness, Mayor Harrell, Opinion, Police

The New City Council Is Just Asking Questions

By Erica C. Barnett

As I’ve noted previously, with some frustration, the Seattle City Council—which includes six brand-new members and a council president with just two years’ experience—is still spending most of its public meeting time getting up to speed on various city departments and offices do.

This slow-moving crash course in Civics 101 is probably necessary, since most of the new council members have never worked in or around City Hall, but the endless PowerPoint parade does give the impression the council has nothing urgent on its plate, even as a $230 million budget shortfall looms.

One thing the new council has been doing plenty of is asking questions. Although many are rhetorical or more-a-comment-than-a-question (looking at you, Rob Saka), they still say a lot about what the council hopes to do whenever they get around to governing full-time. Here are a few examples, from who recent council briefings about housing, homelessness, and public safety.

Sara Nelson wants to know if the problem with police hiring is the exams.

Nelson, a former council aide and two-year council veteran, pressed the director of the city’s two Civil Service Commissions, Andrea Scheele, about the city’s contract with the National Testing Network, a company the city uses to test new recruits’ knowledge, skills, and aptitude for the job, suggesting that the city should consider picking another vendor that could move applicants through the hiring process faster. The Public Safety Civil Service Commission administers tests for applicants for SPD and Seattle Fire Department applicants.

The city “invested heavily” in helping to develop the NTN test, Scheele noted, after a judge put the city under federal oversight amid allegations of bias and excessive use of force in 2012. (The US Department of Justice terminated most of that consent decree last year).  “The exam was tailored to assess a candidate’s cognitive abilities, but also to evaluate candidates’ skills and abilities related to judgment, appropriate human interactions, and integrity and ethics,” Scheele said.

“I don’t get a sense of urgency, frankly, when I’m listening to your presentation. And that’s not acceptable. You’re here to serve the city, the citizens of the city, and the citizens of the city deserve to have police officers put on the streets as quickly as possible.”—Councilmember Cathy Moore, speaking to Public Safety Civil Service Commission director Andrea Scheele

About a month and a half ago, Scheele added, Mayor Bruce Harrell asked the PSCSC to “consider either adding or switching to” a test from a company called Public Safety Testing. Currently, between 60 and 65 percent of applicants either drop out during the testing phase or fail the NTN test, Scheele said. According to the Seattle Times, 90 percent of applicants pass the PST test.

Cathy Moore wonders if the problem with police hiring is that civil servants have no “sense of urgency.”

During her presentation, Scheele noted that the PSCSC now provides a list of candidates who have passed the application test to SPD, but said it would take another full-time employee to accelerate that process to every two weeks or faster. Currently, the two civil service commissions have three staff.

“I just think we’re moving way too slowly, and basically what I see here is a bureaucracy that’s clunky,” Moore responded. “We need to go faster. There’s no reason that we should be waiting to [administer exams and] send [SPD] a list of eligible candidates every six to eight weeks.”

“I don’t get a sense of urgency, frankly, when I’m listening to your presentation. And that’s not acceptable,” Moore said.

Scheele said the reason the PSCSC would need another employee to speed up the testing process is because the commission would have to stop processing test scores in batches—a change that would speed things up from the applicants’ perspective, but would add a new inefficiency at the end of the process. Moore said Scheele’s answer was “not satisfactory,” and told her to come back to the council in 30 days with “concrete steps that you’ve taken, because this is just too slow.”

“You’re here to serve the city, the citizens of the city, and the citizens of the city deserve to have police officers put on the streets as quickly as possible. Obviously, they need to be qualified, and we need to go through this process,” Moore continued. “Although there’s some question about whether we actually do need to, but nonetheless, this is where we are. So we have to light a fire under our our civil servants’ feet, because you are here to serve the city of Seattle.”

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Sara Nelson wants to know if we could subsidize cops’ housing (and day care, and cars, and college, and child care…)

Police officers in Seattle make a starting salary of around $83,000 before overtime and hiring bonuses, but could Seattle do more?

Nelson and other council members think they could, starting with perks like housing subsidies, “take-home cars,” subsidized day care, medical benefits after retirement, and other goodies that aren’t available to other city employees.

Rob Saka, elected last year, siad the city should consider paying relocation assistance for police who move here from elsewhere; when he learned that the city already does this, Saka said, “that’s great—and then paired with an actual housing subsidy, I think that that will be the most impactful.” Los Angeles provides new recruits with a $12,000 annual housing subsidy for their first two years, but the subsidy is only for housing in the city; currently, most SPD officers live outside Seattle.

Rob Saka wants to know why Seattle prioritizes homeless people’s privacy.

Washington state law allows unsheltered people to opt out of putting their personal and medical information into the county’s tracking system for homeless services, the Homeless Management Information System (HMIS). A significant number of people choose to do so because of privacy concerns, since the information the county tracks includes detailed information about substance use, time spent in hospitals or jail, and information provided to case managers. This “opt out” option means that Seattle’s homelessness data is never perfect; shelter referrals, for instance, represent an undercount.

Saka, along with council newcomer Maritza Rivera, wanted to know if there was a way to get around these requirements in order to “run analytics capabilities and use services to help us make better informed decisions and monitor trends, get ahead of trends, [and] plan—better planning, better outcomes.”

Saka, a former attorney for Meta, said he was aware that “there are some some notable potential privacy and security challenges with collection of certain data. But just because that is the case, and just because … the same issue applies to various technologies, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t use them or adopt them. Let us have effective safeguards in place to to control for that. But we need strong data collection capabilities to help us make better data-informed decisions.”

Requiring people to opt in to HMIS in order to receive homeless services would require a change in state law, something Rivera suggested the the city should support in an upcoming legislative session.

“What I know is that when budget time comes around and the REACH [homeless outreach] coordinators come in, they yell, ‘Stop the sweeps! Stop the sweeps!’ and then they are making it easier to stay in these dangerous environments.”—City Council President Sara Nelson

Maritza Rivera wants to know why we let people say “no” to shelter.

Rivera also questioned why the city allows people to decide whether they want to go indoors based on what shelter is available—saying no, for example, if the only option is a mat on the floor in a mass shelter.

“We do need to prioritize getting people indoors, whether or not we’re able to—you know, the goal is their first choice, but if that’s not available, we nevertheless have to get folks indoors. … I feel it’s inhumane to leave people on the street regardless” of whether they get their choice of shelter, Rivera said.

Tanya Woo wants to know how the city can help police feel safer at encampment sweeps.

Woo, who lost her race against District 2 incumbent Tammy Morales before the council appointed her to a citywide seat in January, said she has seen plainclothes police officers show up at encampment removals in the past, but “most of the time they don’t attend these, because they’re afraid of interactions during protests or interactions with unhoused residents. So,” she asked, “is there is there a plan going forward and how to mitigate some of that during resolutions?” Woo heads up a volunteer night watch in the Chinatown/International District, and led a successful effort to prevent the expansion of a Salvation Army-run homeless shelter in SoDo.

Deputy Mayor Tiffany Washington, who was leading a presentation about the Unified Care Team (the city’s umbrella group for encampment response) said police do show up at every encampment removal, adding that “the issues are, 98 percent of the time, with the protesters and not the actual people that are unhoused at the site.”

Sara Nelson wants to know: Why do we even pay for homeless outreach, anyway?

Nelson, whose beer business was one of the first to place eco-blocks in the public right-of-way to keep people from parking their RVs there, singled out the outreach provider REACH in asking Washington what the city’s outreach contracts are for.

“When we talk about outreach, what is it really supposed to do? Because when I hear you say you said earlier, that we want our outreach providers to stay engaged week after week, and we hear that they meet people where they’re at to build trust—toward what end?” Nelson asked. “Because if they’re just if we’re just building trust so that they can stay in these dangerous situations, exactly what is the programmatic goal of our outreach investments?”

“What I know,” Nelson added, “is that when budget time comes around and the REACH coordinators come in, they yell, ‘Stop the sweeps! Stop the sweeps!’ and then they are making it easier to stay in these dangerous environments.”

Although Washington noted that outreach is “a critical part of the homelessness response system,” Nelson’s disparaging comments about REACH could be a preview of the city’s upcoming budget discussions, where spending on everything but police, fire, and 911 will be on the table for cuts.