Category: Morning Fizz

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.

City Council, labor, Mayor Harrell, Morning Fizz, Police

Officer Who Killed Pedestrian Got Recruitment Bonus, Decent Wages for City Workers Will Add Tens of Millions to Budget Gap

1. Kevin Dave, the officer who struck and killed 23-year-old student Jaahnavi Kandula in January 2023, was part of the cohort of new recruits who received $15,000 bonuses under the first of former mayor Jenny Durkan’s police recruitment programs. The plan, adopted in February 2019, provided $7,500 to new police recruits and $15,000 to officers transferring “laterally” from other departments. Dave was previously an officer in Tucson, Arizona, but was fired from that previous position in 2013 after failing to meet minimum standards during his 18-month probation period.

Dave’s personnel file, obtained by PubliCola reporter Andrew Engelson, indicates he received the $7,500 bonus in two payments in exchange for agreeing to stay at the department for three years after his hire date in November 2019.

Durkan, along with then-police chief Carmen Best, argued for hiring bonuses in 2019, 2020, and 2021 on the grounds that they would help SPD recruit a younger, more diverse cohort of police officers. Dave, a white man, checked “I choose not to disclose this information” next to demographic questions about his race and gender—an unusual move (in 2023, all 41 SPD recruits provided this information) that, if widely adopted, would muddy SPD’s demographic data and could make the department appear more diverse than it is.

SPD could announce how it will discipline Dave, as well as Daniel Auderer—the Seattle Police Officers Guild vice president caught on tape laughing over Kandula’s death—as early as this Friday. Last week, Seattle City Attorney Ann Davison announced she was giving Dave a traffic ticket for second-degree negligent driving, an infraction.

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2. A text-based poll sent to Seattle residents this week asked about how the Seattle City Council should close a $230 million budget gap this year, along with a list of quality-of-life questions that reflect items the city could prioritize for funding or target for cuts. Among questions about policing, homelessness, and crime, the poll included a number of questions about the state of downtown Seattle—a top priority for Mayor Bruce Harrell and business groups like the Seattle Metro Chamber—and taxes.

One question asked whether, after “rais[ing] taxes to fund new programs and initiatives” for several years, the city should “maintain the spending levels and programs in place today and raise new taxes to cover this $230 million deficit” or ” work to offset the deficit by prioritizing government basics, supporting our city’s most vulnerable residents, and reducing non-critical spending before considering tax increases.” Other questions ask whether respondents would feel safe visiting downtown Seattle during the day and at night; “how much impact … closing encampments in parks, on sidewalks, and on other public right of ways would have on improving quality of life in Seattle”; and whether they agree that “Downtown Seattle cannot fully recover until the homelessness and public safety problems are addressed.”

It’s unclear who is behind this poll, which mentions the city council but not the mayor. Harrell has indicated he does not plan to propose any new taxes to close the budget gap, and city departments are already making plans for significant budget cuts amid an ongoing hiring freeze.

3. Meanwhile, Harrell announced that he and the Coalition of City Unions have reached a tentative agreement that will provide a retroactive pay increase, known as a wage adjustment, of 5 percent for 2023 and a 4.5 percent wage adjustment for this year, for a total increase of 9.7 percent this year. (Because the 4.5 percent is an increase above the adjusted 2023 amount, the total works out to 9.7 percent rather than 9.5—math!) The final agreement, as we’ve reported, is a victory for the city unions, which dismissed Harrell’s initial 1 percent proposal as “insulting” and spent much of the last year fighting to increase it.

The final step is approval by the city council, which now includes several members who have suggested the city “has a spending problem” rather than a structural budget problem. Departments are reportedly coming up with plans to lay off employees if the mayor and council stick with their promises to eliminate the budget shortfall without raising new revenues. The new labor contracts are expected to add tens of millions of dollars to the budget this year and in 2025.

Courts, Elections, Morning Fizz, Police, public safety

City Attorney Disqualifies Judge from Criminal Cases, Issues Traffic Ticket to Officer Who Killed Student With His SUV

1. City attorney Ann Davison made two significant announcements via late-afternoon press release on Friday. First, she announced that the city’s criminal division chief, Natalie Walton-Anderson—whose last day was Friday—has issued a “standing affidavit of prejudice” against Seattle Municipal Judge Pooja Vaddadi disqualifying her from hearing criminal cases brought by the city attorney’s office.

The affidavit is a kind of peremptory challenge, similar to the challenges attorneys can make to disqualify jurors at at trial; in addition to the standing order, the city attorney’s office has to file an individual challenge in every case they want removed from Vaddadi’s courtroom.

In an internal memo about Vaddadi, Walton-Anderson said she often reversed other judges’ findings of probable cause or failed to find probable cause “in situations where, clearly, probable cause exists,” releasing people accused of DUI and domestic violence without considering their criminal history or the severity of the offense.

Additionally, Walton-Anderson said in a statement, “The resounding input from attorneys that have appeared in her courtroom is that her decisions demonstrate a complete lack of understanding, or perhaps even intentional disregard, of the evidence rules, even on basic issues.”

Vaddadi worked as a public defender for 10 months before challenging then-presiding judge Adam Eisenberg in 2022.

Filing a blanket affidavit of prejudice against a sitting judge is essentially the nuclear option, which is one reason the city attorney’s office hasn’t exercised it in recent memory. Pete Holmes, the former city attorney, considered filing one against Ed McKenna, a politically conservative former judge whom Holmes accused of violating the rules of judicial conduct, but didn’t—reportedly because it would be an extraordinary act against a separately elected official. The King County Department of Public Defense, however, did, arguing that McKenna was biased against defendants and disqualifying him from cases repeatedly during his final two years in office.

The blanket affidavit isn’t technically permanent, since the city attorney’s office could just stop filing individual affidavits, but it will force the court to move Vaddadi to an assignment that doesn’t involve deciding criminal cases, like hearing challenges to traffic infractions. We have reached out to Vaddadi, the city attorney’s office, and municipal court presiding Judge Faye Chess, and will post an update when there’s more to report.

2. Also on Friday evening, Davison announced that her office will be issuing a traffic ticket to Kevin Dave, the officer who struck and killed 23-year-old student Jaahnavi Kandula in a crosswalk while driving 74 miles an hour—three times the speed limit. The infraction, second-degree negligent driving, carries a fine of up to $5,000. The city attorney will not file criminal misdemeanor charges against Dave.

Last week, as PubliCola reported, the King County Prosecutor’s Office announced that it would not file vehicular homicide charges against Dave because he was responding to a “legitimate, life-threatening call” as he sped down Dexter Avenue. That call was an “overdose” to which the police later said Dave was responding “as a paramedic,” suggesting he had to get there right away. However, as we reported last year, the caller was awake, lucid, and standing outside his apartment building as he told 911 operators he was afraid he had taken too much cocaine.

County prosecutors also said the fact that Kandula stepped into the crosswalk while Dave gunned his SUV in her direction could serve as a defense at trial, where Dave’s attorneys could argue it was a “superseding cause” that contributed to Kandula’s death. In its legal analysis, the county prosecutor’s office noted that the standard of proof for reckless driving—”willful or wanton disregard” for safety—is higher than the requirement for vehicular homicide, which only requires that a person is driving in a “reckless manner.”

Morning Fizz, Police

SPD Kills Facebook Comments, Attorneys for Cops in Manny Ellis Case Solicit Clients by Boasting About Acquittal


1. The Seattle Police Department has shut down comments on its Facebook page, so that—for the first time since SPD set the page up in 2011—the public can no longer weigh in on its actions and policies on Facebook. This means, for example, that the public can’t weigh in on SPD’s current “featured post” spinning a damning report on discrimination against women as a sign of “fantastic” progress in the department.

According to SPD general counsel Rebecca Boatright, SPD shut down comments after 13 years because they were concerned that people would report emergencies or crimes in the unmonitored comments threads.

Other city departments, such as the CARE (911) Department, Human Services, Emergency Management, and the Fire Department, allow comments on their Facebook pages; SPD appears to be the only department that has shut down this form of public feedback.

“SPD’s decision to disable the comment functionality on its social media feeds was a risk mitigation decision informed by experiences shared by other agencies, wherein members of the public had used comment feeds for purposes of reporting crimes, complaints, or to otherwise provide notice or information that could give rise to a duty to act,” Boatright said. “Because SPD does not have the capacity to monitor comment feeds, and as the City has dedicated avenues for members of the public to provide commentary or report crimes or concerns, we made the decision to disable this particular medium,” Boatright said.

Boatright recently weighed in on the 30×30 report, condemning “negative headlines” as “clickbait” obscuring a positive story about the “honest brokers interested in an honest discussion. … Real change comes from within. Follow the data, lean into the science,” she wrote. Police chief Adrian Diaz “loved” (clicked the heart emoji response button on) the post, which Boatright later deleted.

A scan of recent public comments submitted prior to the comment shutdown shows that most commenters were complimentary, with a few using the comments to criticize SPD—in an otherwise laudatory thread about a Seattle Police Foundation barbecue, for example, a commenter wrote that an officer “almost struck me with his police cruiser, some hero 🚦🤦‍♂️.”

Critics in the comment threads also sometimes mentioned officer Daniel Auderer’s laughing comment, caught on his body camera, that 23-year-old pedestrian Jaahnavi Kandula’s life had “limited value”; Kandula was killed in a crosswalk by a speeding officer, Kevin Dave, a little over a year ago.

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SPD’s social media policy describes the kind of comments the department can remove or ban, but does not speak specifically to the issue of a total prohibition on public comments.

Enoka Herat, an attorney with the ACLU of Washington, said that while government agencies can’t selectively block people on social media or delete comments, they have the right to eliminate comments altogether. “While the reasoning behind closing Facebook comments could be problematic, the First Amendment does not require departments open comments on their Facebook page, as long as they take comments elsewhere and are not selectively banning comments on certain topics or from certain people,” Harat said.

For now, SPD’s Twitter profile still allows replies.

UPDATE: As of Friday morning, Police Chief Adrian Diaz had partially turned off replies on his X/Twitter account, allowing only people he mentions directly or “verified” users who have paid $8 a month for extra features on the site to respond to his posts. 

2. Puget Law Group—the firm whose attorneys represented Tacoma police officer Matthew Collins, one of three officers charged with killing 33-year-old Manny Ellis in 2020—boasted about their role in securing an acquittal for Collins and the other officers in a mailer advertising their firm to potential clients in Seattle this week.

“Dear Valued Community Member,” the letter begins. “You may have followed the trial of the three Tacoma Police Officers who were wrongfully charged with killing Manuel Ellis.”

The letter, signed by managing partner Casey Arbenz, continues:

My firm had the distinct privilege of defending Tacoma Police Officer Matthew Collins at trial. As you likely heard, after more than three months of trial, all three officers were found Not Guilty of murder and manslaughter charges. ... While we are committed advocates to anyone facing a criminal charge or who is injured due to the negligence of others, we are also strong supporters of all our first responders. We review cases every day where police, firefighters, medics, and others put their lives on the line to assist the citizens of our community. We are forever grateful for the work our first responders do.

Ellis was walking home on March 3, 2020, when he encountered the three officers, who beat him, pushed him into the sidewalk, Tased him repeatedly, hogtied him, and forced his head into a spit hood while he protested that he couldn’t breathe. A jury acquitted all three officers, who were later paid $500,000 each to leave the department. Their attorneys, who claimed he died from a meth overdose and a preexisting heart condition, are asking the state to pay them millions of dollars for their work on the case, which they characterize as a case of “self-defense.”

City Council, Crime, Mayor Harrell, Morning Fizz, Police, public safety

Police Budget Fizz: Hiring Falls Short, Shotspotter Gains Support, Burgess Misrepresents Jane Jacobs
Overtime costs at SPD continued to increase this year.

1. The Seattle Police Department is, once again, falling fall short of its annual hiring goals, and would have to increase hiring by nearly two-thirds to hit the goals it has set for 2024, despite receiving full funding for its recruitment and retention plan, which included recruitment bonuses of up to $30,000, last year. City Council central staff presented the numbers at a council budget committee meeting last week. At the end of the year, according to current projections, SPD will have lost another 27 net officers, once both new hires and departures are factored in.

During last year’s budget deliberations, in which the council eliminated funding for 80 vacant and unfillable positions, SPD predicted that by the end of September, it would have hired 82 new officers, out of 120 total this year. Instead, the department had hired just 46. Of those, just six were fully trained “lateral” hires from other departments—24 fewer than SPD predicted.

Despite losing officers year after year, SPD continues to predict robust hiring; next year, for example, SPD says it expects to hire 120 new officers and lose 120, for a net gain of 15 officers. If the city funds this plan and the department fails to hire all 120, that money will be left over for other, unrelated priorities—which is exactly what happened this year.

Mayor Bruce Harrell’s 2024 budget proposal for SPD uses $8.1 million in salary “savings” from unfulfilled 2023 hiring projections to pay for $6.3 million in unanticipated overtime—necessitated, SPD says, by the staffing shortage. That leaves $1.8 million in free-floating revenues, which the mayor has proposed spending on new surveillance technology, including a gunshot detection system the council rejected last year.

However, Burgess misunderstands Jane Jacobs’ point about the need for ‘eyes on the street’ when he claims that 24-hour camera and audio surveillance will “complement” the city’s efforts to make Seattle’s sidewalks feel safe for everyone. Jacobs advocated for “wholesome” and “casual” oversight of city sidewalks, not 24/7 remote surveillance by police.

Several council members took exception to providing SPD with an ongoing slush fund that is expected to grow year after year as positions stay vacant but funded. Councilmember Lisa Herbold said she planned to propose a proviso, or spending limitation, on SPD’s salary savings, an idea that prompted Councilmember Sara Nelson to counter that SPD could finally hit its recruiting targets this year, so “now is not the time to be discussing reducing money” for the department.

Much of the city’s spending on overtime was to pay for police to direct traffic at events, including concerts (Beyonce, Taylor Swift), sporting events, and visits from politicians, including President Biden, Police Chief Adrian Diaz told the council.

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2. The aforementioned gunshot-locator system is back on the table again after the council rejected it last year, and most of the council now seems to be on board. What has changed? Nothing, materially, unless you count the fact that the mayor’s office now plans to add CCTV camera surveillance to the mix—and the fact that former council member Burgess, rather than the mayor’s recently ousted niece Monisha Harrell, is now the deputy mayor overseeing police and public safety.

Burgess, a longtime public-safety hawk who argued for tough-on-crime policies as a council member, said he was inspired to take another crack at Shotspotter—an audio monitoring system that alerts human audio experts when it detects any gunshot-like sound—while driving to a shooting in the parking lot of a Safeway store in Rainier Beach earlier this year.

“I asked the chief,  ‘What else should we be doing to suppress this gun violence which is increasing dramatically in our city?'” Burgess told the council. “And we had a conversation about the various interventions we could employ, including cameras in specific places. And I think that was kind of one of the beginning points of the conversation.” (Shotspotter is the most commonly used gunshot locator system, so the name is used generically to describe all such systems.)

In August, SPD signed a $2.6 million contract with the Seattle marketing firm Copacino Fujikado to create an “SPD recruitment brand” and produce video, online, radio, and social media ads for the department.

“Gun violence… happens all over the city, but it is very concentrated in very specific places,” Burgess said. “And we’re keenly aware of that. And those places deserve the city government to do what we can to stop that gun violence. The same with human trafficking.” Initially, depending on cost, SPD plans to place the cameras and acoustic devices on Third Avenue downtown, Belltown, and/or Aurora Avenue North, but the cameras could move depending on need, according to the mayor’s office. Harrell’s office has asked for an “omnibus” approval of the technology, so that once it passes a mandatory review and receives a Surveillance Impact Report, the systems can be moved to other neighborhoods without an additional review.

Civil liberties and racial justice advocates have argued that focusing surveillance on specific neighborhoods and communities puts police on high alert in those areas, leading to unnecessary stops in communities that have long been subject to overpolicing.

Shotspotter has been around for decades; closed-circuit cameras have been around even longer. There’s little evidence that cameras have any impact on violent crime, although they do seem to deter some thefts; multiple studies have found little to no evidence that Shotspotter works to reduce crime, prevent crime, or solve crimes after the fact. (Notably, many recent Seattle shootings have happened in locations that were under camera surveillance.)

“Mayor Harrell grew up in the CD and attended Garfield High, where there was another shooting last week leading to a lockdown, so I trust he’s listening to the community and wouldn’t be putting this forward again unless people living in the areas where people are dying really want this,” Councilmember Sara Nelson said.

Councilmembers Andrew Lewis and Dan Strauss, who have each tried to shake off a soft-on-crime image as they run for reelection, both said they now support funding Shotspotter, which they opposed last year, along with CCTV surveillance. Lewis, who represents downtown, compared the proposal to other “place-based strategies” like the Third Avenue Project, which is overseen by Purpose Dignity Action, the same group that operates LEAD. “I think that that this is a really innovative way for us to try to enhance, with limited resources, our presence in some of these areas,” Lewis said.

Nelson, meanwhile, said she needed no further convincing that Shotspotter is needed, citing the support of three Black women who lost children to gun violence, as well as Harrell’s personal roots in the Central District, as evidence that Seattle’s Black community supports the plan. “Mayor Harrell grew up in the CD and attended Garfield High, where there was another shooting last week leading to a lockdown, so I trust he’s listening to the community and wouldn’t be putting this forward again unless people living in the areas where people are dying really want this,” Nelson said.

3. The police department is turning to ads and other paid media in an attempt to woo new and transferring officers. In August, SPD signed a $2.6 million contract with the marketing firm Copacino Fujikado to create an “SPD recruitment brand” and produce video, online, radio, and social media ads for the department. The firm, which is based in Seattle, has previously produced marketing campaigns for Sound Transit, the Downtown Seattle Association, and Visit Seattle, among others.

4. In his memo supporting Shotspotter, Burgess quoted pioneering urbanist Jane Jacobs, who wrote in The Death and Life of Great American Cities about the need for mutual surveillance among many people co-existing on busy, vibrant neighborhood streets—a co-existence she assumed would also include police.

However, Burgess misunderstands Jacobs’ point about the need for “eyes on the street” when he claims that 24-hour camera and audio surveillance will “complement” the city’s efforts to make Seattle’s sidewalks feel safe for everyone. Jacobs advocated for “wholesome” and “casual” oversight of city sidewalks, not 24/7 remote surveillance by police. In fact, in that same 1961 book, Jacobs warns about overpolicing on the sidewalks near public housing projects, writing that the problem wasn’t lack of police, but lack of legitimate, legal reasons for people to be on the sidewalk. “No amount of police can enforce civilization where the normal, casual enforcement of it has broken down,” she wrote.

homelessness, Morning Fizz

Former KCRHA Leader Now Sees “Significant Issues” With Medicaid Funding for Homelessness; Lived Experience Coalition Weighs In on Report on Hotel Program It Ran

1. The city of Seattle has amended its $60,000 contract with former King County Homelessness Authority CEO Marc Dones, who was supposed to spend the latter half of this year coming up with ways to maximize the use of Medicaid funding for homelessness programs.

The latest iteration of the contract directs Dones to come up with “recommendations with respect to the local federal unsheltered initiative “All Inside” … [including] considerations for the local initiative’s statement of work, actionable workplan and performance plan,” in addition to the work Dones has already done on Medicaid. In an email on August 7 titled “Landscape to Date,” Dones concluded that there were several “significant” but “solvable” challenges to billing Medicaid for homeless services.

All Inside is a Biden Administration program that provides technical assistance to cities, including Seattle; it does not include additional funding for housing or services.

The pivot is particularly striking given Dones’ previous advocacy for using Medicaid Foundational Community Supports funds to pay for Partnership for Zero—a privately funded effort to end unsheltered homelessness downtown that folded, after housing 230 people, this month. Dones was so bullish on the program that they predicted it would pay for at least 85 percent of Partnership for Zero’s services by next year, brushing aside concerns from homeless service providers and elected officials that the program is complex, highly restrictive, and expensive to administer.

Providers raised every one of the issues Dones identified as part of their contract with the city when the KCRHA tied the future of Partnership for Zero to Medicaid funding earlier this year, but were largely ignored. 

In their latest update, Dones identified “four significant issues” with using Medicaid to fund homeless services. First, Dones wrote, agencies often have to spend a lot of time and staff resources documenting and administering programs in order to get reimbursed. Second, Dones wrote, agencies have to spend a lot of time “chasing” clients to collect billable hours, creating a “significant gap in what is called the ‘billable units of service’ and requir[ing] agencies to fund activities that are related to enrolled clients with no path to reimbursement.”

The third issue Dones identified is that FCS is not a reliable source of funds for behavioral health services. And the fourth was that Medicaid reimburses agencies slowly and often rejects claims for minor or technical reasons, making it hard for providers without large cash reserves to use it as a reliable source of funding.

Providers raised every one of these issues when the KCRHA tied the future of Partnership for Zero to Medicaid funding earlier this year, but were largely ignored.

Dones has completed approximately half of their 240-hour contract, according to a schedule of “deliverables” included in the contract document. So far, Dones has produced a timeline and scope of work, a 600-word email describing the “landscape to date,” a 450-word email containing a “Draft Assessment” of All Inside, and a list of five stakeholders to talk to about various topics, including the “intersection of public transit and homelessness,” “intersection of organized crime and encampments,” and “pro social public space activation to prevent encampments.”

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2. The final version of a report documenting what went wrong with a hotel program run by the Lived Experience Coalition reaches substantially the same conclusions as an early draft PubliCola covered back in August, but does include a number of notes contributed by the LEC, which has blamed budget missteps that led to the collapse of the program primarily on its then-fiscal sponsor, Building Changes, and the KCRHA.

As we reported last month, the report, by independent consultant Courtney Noble, concluded that the LEC was in over its head when it accepted $1 million in federal funding to run the hotel-based shelter program, which was the advocacy group’s first such contract. Noble also reported that other factors, including a lack of transparency from Building Changes and a hostile relationship with the KCRHA and Dones, contributed to the program’s failure.

In footnotes to the report, the LEC said the audit itself should go through a racial equity analysis “due to the fact that the audit was conducted by a single individual of a particular racial background and socioeconomic class” who may have unconscious bias. Additionally, the LEC objected to the consultant’s suggestion that conflict between “personalities”—at a minimum, Dones, LEC director LaMont Green, and Building Changes director Daniel Zavala—contributed to the collapse of the hotel program.  

The final report now emphasizes systemic issues and removes references to the LEC’s initial proposal, which included hot meals, mass shelter, and supplies in addition to the hotel rooms that were the core of the LEC’s final contract. It also softens suggestions that the Lived Experience Coalition should participate in the regional Homelessness Management Information, a central clearinghouse for information about people who interact with the homelessness system, in order to access federal Emergency Food and Shelter Program funds in the future.

The LEC has said that gathering the kind of data required to participate in HMIS would re-traumatize their clients; additionally, according to the final report, they “believed that KCRHA leadership was retributive, and wanted to punish them for stepping out of their advocacy lane to run the hoteling program. LEC maintained that they were still not a direct service provider, and believed that participating in HMIS would strengthen KCRHA’s argument that they were.”

In footnotes to the report, the LEC said the audit itself should go through a racial equity analysis “due to the fact that the audit was conducted by a single individual of a particular racial background and socioeconomic class” who may have unconscious bias. Additionally, the LEC objected to the consultant’s suggestion that conflict between “personalities”—at a minimum, Dones, LEC director LaMont Green, and Building Changes director Daniel Zavala—contributed to the collapse of the hotel program.

“It has historically been an issue when poor white, black, brown, and indigenous people come together to speak truth and organize to urgently improve failing systems resulting in the dehumanization, pain, suffering, and early death of our unhoused neighbors that the systems do not want to be accountable and then turn to tactics such as defunding, gaslighting, and mischaracterizing their work,” the LEC wrote.

Finally, the LEC said it’s inaccurate to call the hotel program a failure. “The program did not fail, it served over 400 people during a time period when we saw record deaths among those experiencing homelessness,” the group’s final footnote says.