Category: Addiction

Addiction, Elections, homelessness, King County

UPDATED: Initiative Would Criminalize Sleeping Outdoors in King County
From the website of the King County Quality of Life Coalition

By Erica C. Barnett

Editor’s note: This post has been updated with comments from initiative backer Saul Spady and reposted.

Saul Spady—Dick’s Burgers scion, anti-tax election activist (twice over), and KIRO radio fill-in host—has filed an initiative that would criminalize “unauthorized camping and storage of personal property” in unincorporated King County. The proposal, which Spady has dubbed “the Compassionate Public Safety Act,” would make sleeping outdoors or “storing” property in public a misdemeanor; similar to the total sleeping ban in Burien, the initiative would give police power to arrest people who fall asleep in public.

The ballot language, approved by the King County Prosecutor’s Office, says the measure “would not be enforced when overnight shelter is unavailable,” then lists exceptions to that rule that would allow police to make arrests if they determine the person sleeping “poses a substantial danger to any person, an immediate threat and/or risk of harm to public health or safety, or a disruption to vital government services.”

“I think camping bans are part of promoting better policy, which is a commitment to saying, in our community, we would much rather you go to shelter or rehab or housing,” Spady told PubliCola on Wednesday. “This is supposed to put the fire underneath [elected officials] to open those shelter beds and partner with [groups like] LEAD or The More We Love or Mary’s Place to create a more direct solution.”

The carveouts in the proposed ballot measure are similar to the exemptions included in Seattle’s official policy on encampments, which guarantees unsheltered people 72 hours’ notice before a sweep unless they or their belongings constitute an “immediate hazard or obstruction.”

For years, the city has interpreted that exemption very broadly to allow sweeps of tents in public spaces, including parks, sidewalks, and planting strips—basically, anywhere housed people might complain about the presence of homeless people.

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In a press release announcing the initiative and the creation of a new group called the Quality of Life Coalition earlier this month, initiative supporter and Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic said, “As an avowed independent and music fan, I know the world is coming to Seattle looking for the soul of our music scene and quite often they find graffiti, addiction and in-action [sic]. … [This is the first step toward making King County safe, livable, and worthy of our incredible cultural legacy I’m proud to be a part of.”

The Quality of Life Coalition also plans to propose an initiative that would force anyone who “commits three crimes linked to addiction, such as OD’ing, theft, or public drug use” (note: overdosing is not a crime) into mandatory six-month rehab, and one that would impose mandatory five-year jail sentences for any drug dealer who “is not an addict.”

Although Spady said service providers have told him there are more than enough available shelter beds for everyone experiencing homelessness in unincorporated King County, he added that the coalition’s long-term plans include “adding 2,500 short-term beds across the region.”

Spady acknowledged that it’s hard to discern which people selling drugs are addicts, versus “somebody who’s sober doing something that kills people,” but noted that a mandatory five-year minimum sentence for dealing drugs is less than the 10-year minimum proposed by the Trump administration.

Asked about the probably astronomical cost of funding mandatory long-term residential treatment for every person who overdoses or commits addiction-related misdemeanors three time, Spady argued that addiction, crime, and the cost to send firefighters to reverse overdoses create “costs to society that are spiraling. If you want the [reason] why I’m doing this, my fear is that Seattle is a lot closer to Detroit in the 80s and 90s than we think, and our  magic economic spaceship that never runs out of money could break.”

The ideas Spady is proposing—three-strikes laws for overdoses, punishing public drug use through what amounts to involuntary commitment—may seem out of step with King County values. But they aren’t much different from the policy City Attorney Ann Davison endorsed toward drug users last year, saying that anyone who overdoses three times should be arrested and thrown in jail.

Spady’s group is collecting signatures now. They’ll need around 6,800 valid signatures to get the measure on a future ballot.

Addiction, Elections, homelessness

Initiative Would Criminalize Sleeping Outdoors in King County
From the website of the King County Quality of Life Coalition

By Erica C. Barnett

Saul Spady—Dick’s Burgers scion, anti-tax election activist (twice over), and KIRO radio fill-in host—has filed an initiative that would criminalize “unauthorized camping and storage of personal property” in unincorporated King County. The proposal, which Spady has dubbed “the Compassionate Public Safety Act,” would make sleeping outdoors or “storing” property in public a misdemeanor; modeled after a similar total sleeping ban in Burien, the initiative would give police power to arrest people who fall asleep in public.

The ballot language, approved by the King County Prosecutor’s Office, says the measure “would not be enforced when overnight shelter is unavailable,” then lists exceptions to that rule that would allow police to make arrests if they determine the person sleeping “poses a substantial danger to any person, an immediate threat and/or risk of harm to public health or safety, or a disruption to vital government services.”

These carveouts are similar to the exemptions included in Seattle’s official policy on encampments, which guarantees unsheltered people 72 hours’ notice before a sweep unless they or their belongings constitute an “immediate hazard or obstruction.” For years, the city has interpreted that exemption very broadly to allow sweeps of tents in public spaces, including parks, sidewalks, and planting strips—basically, anywhere housed people might complain about the presence of homeless people.

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Spady did not respond to a request for an interview. In a press release announcing the initiative and the creation of a new group called the Quality of Life Coalition earlier this month, initiative supporter and Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic said, “As an avowed independent and music fan, I know the world is coming to Seattle looking for the soul of our music scene and quite often they find graffiti, addiction and in-action [sic]. … [This is the first step toward making King County safe, livable, and worthy of our incredible cultural legacy I’m proud to be a part of.”

The Quality of Life Coalition also plans to propose an initiative that would force anyone who “commits three crimes linked to addiction, such as OD’ing, theft, or public drug use” (note: overdosing is not a crime) into mandatory six-month rehab, and one that would impose mandatory five-year jail sentences for any drug dealer who “is not an addict.”

Sounds nuts to you, maybe, even logistically impossible—how are dealers supposed to prove they’re addicted, exactly, and how would King County jails handle the influx of low-level dealers who’d get swept up in such a law? But it’s not much different from the policy City Attorney Ann Davison endorsed toward drug users last year, saying that anyone who overdoses three times should be arrested and thrown in jail. Spady’s group is collecting signatures now.

Addiction, homelessness, podcasts, Trump

Seattle Nice: Is Trump’s Executive Order the End of Housing First?

By Erica C. Barnett

Freaked out about the Trump Administration’s latest executive order, which calls for “ending crime and disorder on America’s streets” by ending Housing First, arresting people with addiction and mental illness, and punishing people for sleeping outside?

Our guest on Seattle Nice this week, Lisa Daugaard, says people should read past the scary headlines and the tough-guy hyperbole of Trump’s press release and look at what the executive order actually does. Daugaard, the co-executive director of Purpose Dignity Action (formerly the Public Defender Association), is a longtime proponent of housing first—the theory that stable housing is a prerequisite for long-lasting recovery. After reading the order, she told us she believes it was written by people who knew what they were doing.

For one thing, the order doesn’t explicitly call for defunding anything, except (entirely theoretical—that is, nonexistent) federally funded programs whose purpose is “only [to] facilitate illegal drug use and its attendant harm.” Although the order does call for more civil commitment, it doesn’t change the law in places like Washington State, which already has laws allowing involuntary commitment in some circumstances. In some circumstances, Daugaard said, the order holds out the possibility of more funding for evidence-based programs.

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“They’re certainly trying to accomplish some turning of the ship, and I think in most respects … this is not terribly problematic, if maybe not problematic at all, and maybe holds out the prospect of increased resources in areas where we really need those,” Daugaard said. “So I think in general, people are responding to the politics and not to the language of the actual order, and that that’s understandable, but maybe not wise.”

I pushed back a bit on Daugaard’s apparent optimism—which, to be clear, does not apply to the entire Trump Administration and its policy apparatus—noting that even if smart people who care about health and human services wrote it with the intention of making it as harmless as possible, the Trump Administration is unpredictable and has a history of not following the law. Sandeep added that right-wing activists are already portraying the order as a devastating loss for “the homelessness industrial complex.”

Daugaard said left-leaning activists and leaders shouldn’t take the bait. “We need to define ourselves as largely aligned with the values that this order enunciates and lower the temperature by saying that’s the [what the order calls for is] the work we want to do,” she said. “We don’t want to leave people camping in public. We don’t want to foster lifelong drug use with a low ceiling on people’s recovery capacity. And we need additional resources to make that a reality.”

Addiction, podcasts, Police

Seattle Nice: Sara Nelson Proposes Funding Treatment With New Public Safety Sales Tax

By Erica C. Barnett

On this week’s podcast, Sandeep and I discussed Council President Sara Nelson’s “Pathways to Recovery” resolution, which—if passed—will commit up to 25 percent of a planned local sales tax increase to addiction treatment services.

Flanked by treatment providers and business representatives, along with more politically outré groups like The More We Love and We Heart Seattle, Nelson announced the proposal last week. At a press conference in Pioneer Square, the council president—who’s up for reelection this year—said she was committed to funding treatment of all kinds with the 0.1 percent tax increase, which is expected to raise more than $35 million a year.

The state legislature gave cities and counties the authority to pass the sales tax for public safety earlier this year.

We took a close look at what the council president is proposing to fund and the backroom politics swirling around the proposal (including Mayor Bruce Harrell’s tepid response). And we discussed at how this proposed new public spending fits into the city’s overall budget picture and priorities.

The public safety funding doesn’t have to go to police, and it does not include any rules against “supplantation,” meaning that the city could use it to fund existing public safety programs and free up that money for other services. King County is considering its own 0.1-cent sales tax increase that could theoretically free up county funding for human-services programs most at risk from local funding shortfalls and federal funding cuts.

Sandeep and I agreed that if the city is going to increase the sales tax—a regressive tax that falls hardest on the poorest Seattle residents—it should all go to expanding treatment options, not more funding for cops.

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However, given city officials’ current fervor for hiring more police, it seems likely that any plan Harrell proposes for the tax will include new funding for SPD, even if Harrell agrees to some amount of treatment funding. There’s also the question of what kind of treatment will get funded with the potential windfall. The presence of many evidence-based treatment providers and referral agencies—including Evergreen Treatment Services, the Downtown Emergency Service Center, and Purpose, Dignity, Action—offered some reassurance that Nelson’s plan will help people with addiction, rather than funneling more city dollars to high-barrier programs.

We also debated whether the city’s projected $250 million revenue shortfall really represents a budget shortfall of that size. Sandeep argued that the city has tons of money left over at the end of every year, while I cautioned that declining revenues (from sources like the JumpStart payroll tax and taxes on real-estate sales) represent a real problem regardless of whether city departments could, and should, spend their budgets more effectively.

The mayor and city council will likely take up the sales tax proposal as part of their budget discussions this coming fall.

Addiction, City Council, Mayor Harrell, Taxes

Local Public Safety Sales Tax Increase Could Include Some Treatment Funding (In Addition to Cops)
L-R: Ballard Alliance director Mike Stewart, Evergreen Treatment Services CEO Steve Woolworth, Council President Sara Nelson, We Heart Seattle director Andrea Suarez, Purpose Dignity Action deputy director Brandi McNeil

By Erica C. Barnett

Standing in Occidental Square on Tuesday morning, City Councilmember Sara Nelson announced a proposal to earmark 25 percent of a forthcoming one-cent sales tax increase to “evidence-based treatment” programs for people with addictions, name-checking Lakeside Milam, the residential treatment center in Kirkland, as an example.

“What I’m fighting for is simple, and it’s to put treatment at the heart and the center of the city’s policy agenda,” Nelson said. “We can’t keep deferring investments in treatment while watching the same people cycle through homelessness, overdose, emergency roomsm and jail over and over and over again.”

Nelson’s office estimated that a 0.1-cent sales tax would bring in about $35 million each year, or a little under $9 million for treatment programs. “When we invest in getting people off the street and into treatment, we prevent crime, reduce emergency room responses and make every neighborhood safer,” Nelson said.

Purpose Dignity Action, which runs the LEAD diversion program and the CoLEAD encampment resolution program, showed up to support Nelson’s proposal. The group, which hasn’t always seen eye to eye with Nelson, has adapted repeatedly to Seattle’s changing political climate, most recently embracing changes to the city’s drug laws that effectively forced LEAD to reverse its approach and go back to partnering directly with police to get new clients, rather than relying on community referrals, which don’t require an arrest.

“To be clear, any serious public safety system must prioritize how we responded with complex behavioral problems, especially when those needs are contributing to harm or distress in neighborhoods and business districts,” PDA deputy director Brandi McNeil said Tuesday. “Ignoring that reality only prolongs the cycle. Confronting it head on is how we build safer, healthier communities.”

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The state legislature gave cities and counties the authority to pass a 0.1-cent tax increase for public safety, including behavioral health care programs, earlier this year, and King County is considering its own version of the tax. Unlike a separate proposal to increase business and occupation taxes on gross receipts above $2 million, the sales tax does not require voter approval; if both taxes pass, Seattle’s cumulative sales tax will rise to 10.55 percent, the highest combined sales tax in the country.

“Lending support for a sales tax increase is not something that I take lightly,” Evergreen Treatment Services director Steve Woolworth said. “However, if this tax to support public safety is adopted, I strongly support dedicating a portion of the revenue to funding low barrier shelter services, jail diversion and alternative response, and the coupling of behavioral health, permanent, and supportive housing.”

Nelson has expressed skepticism about harm reduction and housing first programs in the past, arguing that it’s time to “move beyond the harm reduction phase” toward abstinence-based recovery, which advocates often shorthand as “recovery” to distinguish it from models that try to reduce harm from drug use without conditioning treatment on total abstinence.

And although Tuesday’s speakers all represented groups that embrace harm reduction alongside traditional sobriety-oriented treatment like that offered at Lakeside-Milam, Nelson was flanked by a much larger contingent of allies from “treatment first” groups like We Heart Seattle, Battlefield Addiction, and The More We Love, whose leaders Nelson thanked in her remarks.

We Heart Seattle has not gotten any city contracts—yet—but The More We Love recently received nearly $600,000 after Councilmember Cathy Moore earmarked $1 million for the group. (The lower amount reflects the fact that the group didn’t sign its contract until earlier this month). The More We Love will use the money to expand its shelter in Renton, an abstinence-only facility that “exits” women and their children if they fail to to make it through abstinence-based treatment and stay sober after they graduate. In its contract, The More We Love calls this a “low-barrier, high-accountability” approach to helping victims of sexual exploitation and gender-based violence.

Just before Nelson’s press conference started, the US Senate passed a budget bill that will impose work requirements on Medicaid recipients, depriving millions of Americans of behavioral health care and treatment.

The state law giving cities the authority to pass public-safety sales taxes does not dictate how much has to go to police, behavioral health care, or other programs. In other words: There’s nothing in the authorizing legislation that says 100 percent of the money can’t go to behavioral health care, as opposed more spending on the police department, which already makes up an overwhelming plurality of the city’s budget. Nelson and Mayor Bruce Harrell are among the city’s most ardent proponents of police spending, so it’s unlikely that either will propose increasing the 25 percent cap in Nelson’s bill, though another city councilmember (hi, Alexis Mercedes Rinck!) could.

Asked if she had Harrell’s support for her proposal, Nelson said, “The mayor has indicated support of the principle, of the idea, and it will have to wait until we get closer to the to budget to figure out what, what the departments are proposing for reductions” before talking about how to spend the tax.

Asked if Harrell supported Nelson’s proposal, a spokesperson for the mayor said, “We’ll analyze this proposal in full when we receive it in the context of the overall budget, revenue solutions, and public safety needs.”

Addiction, City Council, Courts, Police, public disclosure

This Week on PubliCola: May 10, 2025

Ethics rules, a public records lawsuit, and a bar complaint against Seattle’s Republican city attorney.

Monday, May 5

Seattle Nice: New Hope for Fentanyl Users

On this week’s episode, Sandeep and I interviewed the Downtown Emergency Service Center’s medical experts about a breakthrough in treatment for opioid addiction that makes it easier for people who use fentanyl to start medication-assisted treatment, and more likely that they’ll stick with treatment once they start.

Minimum Wage Advocates Countersue Burien; Council Bill Says Conflict of Interest Recusals Are Bad for Democracy

In response to a lawsuit by the city of Burien claiming that the minimum wage ordinance recently passed by voters is confusing and unenforceable, proponents of the law countersued, alleging that Burien is ignoring the will of the voters. And, the Seattle City Council argues that recusing themselves from votes when they have financial conflicts of interest would deprive voters of representation.

Tuesday, May 6

Seattle Police Guild Sues Police Department Over Public Records Delays

We aren’t the only ones fed up with SPD’s delay tactic of “grouping” public disclosure requests filed by the same person and considering them one at a time; the Seattle Police Officers Guild also says SPD is using the policy to withhold records from requests dating back as far as 2020.

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Wednesday, May 7

The Most Common Reason for Past City Council Recusals: Owning Rental Property

As the council prepares to release themselves from longstanding ethics rules just in time for a vote on changes to landlord-tenant law (some council members are landlords and might have to abstain under the current code), we looked back at the relatively few times council members have recused themselves in the past. The most common financial conflict was—drumroll—being a landlord.

Thursday, May 8

County Council Gives Itself a Little ($315,000) Gift; Saka’s Effort to Divert Traffic Safety Funds to Sidewalks Fails

The King County Council added more than $300,000 to their district budgets to pay for unanticipated expenses at a time when the county faces a $160 million two-year shortfall. And Seattle Councilmember Rob Saka narrowly failed to convince his colleagues to use speed camera revenues on sidewalks rather than traffic safety projects.

At Ethics Meeting, Moore Says Changing Ethics Code Will Improve Representation and “Transparency”

At a meeting of the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission, Councilmember Cathy Moore responded to a dozen public comments opposing her proposal to weaken ethics rules, reiterating the claim that recusal was antidemocratic and adding that verbally disclosing a conflict of interest is more transparent than recusing oneself from a vote because of that conflict.

Municipal Court Judge Pooja Vaddadi Files Bar Complaint Against City Attorney Ann Davison and Her Former Criminal Chief

PubliCola exclusive: Seattle Municipal Court Judge Pooja Vaddadi, who’s been effectively prohibited from doing her job for the last year, filed a bar complaint against the city attorney and her former criminal division chief, charging that they fabricated and misrepresented evidence against her in their letter issuing a blanked affidavit of prejudice against her, preventing Vaddadi from hearing criminal cases.