Category: Seattle magazine

Addiction, City Hall, criminal justice, Drugs, homelessness, Police, Poverty, Seattle magazine

Meet Seattle’s Reformer-in-Chief, Lisa Daugaard

This story first ran in the print and online editions of Seattle Magazine.

Image credit: Hayley Young, Seattle Magazine

It’s a little before 10 a.m. in the courtroom of King County Superior Court Judge Veronica Alicea-Galván, and the crowd is getting restless. Dozens of spectators, many wearing red scarves to indicate their opposition to supervised drug consumption sites, are murmuring quietly, waiting for Alicea-Galván to emerge from her chambers. Advocates say the sites—safe spaces for people to consume illegal drugs and access medical care and treatment—will save lives and put drug users on the road to recovery; opponents say they will enable drug users and lead to crime.

What’s at stake today is a ruling on an initiative, filed by Bothell City Council member Joshua Freed, that would preemptively ban the controversial sites throughout King County.

Suddenly, Lisa Daugaard, the 5-foot-2, 51-year-old director of the nonprofit Public Defender Association (PDA), which advocates for criminal justice and drug policy reform, bounds from her seat in the second row and makes a beeline for Freed, who is sitting at the defendants’ table. Before Freed can process what’s happening, Daugaard is pumping his hand, politely forcing the antidrug activist (he once told KVI-AM’s Dori Monson that safe consumption sites would make Seattle a magnet for the nation’s heroin users) into a bit of friendly courtroom small talk.

Daugaard’s friendliness is strategic. “I always go talk to the opposite side,” she says, laughing. “It’s a way of saying, ‘I’m not afraid of you. I get where you’re coming from.’”

For Daugaard, who has spent decades waging legal battles on behalf of people with few advocates in the criminal justice system, maintaining an open dialogue with the “opposite side” is a key part of the formula that has helped her win some of the most significant political and legal victories for civil rights in Seattle of the past 20 years.

The era isn’t long past when Seattle police officers set up “buy-and-bust” operations (undercover stings in which an officer buys drugs from a suspect, then arrests him) to put addicts behind bars, arrested people for sitting on the sidewalk and seized people’s cars for failing to pay their parking tickets. Today, that kind of draconian enforcement is unheard-of, and Daugaard is a big part of the reason why.

As Seattle has shifted leftward (from a place where people were arrested for smoking weed in parks to one where the big drug debate is about safe consumption sites), Daugaard’s focus has shifted, too. Instead of fighting on behalf of individuals against overreaching police, she’s advocating for policies that “advance the common interests of people who have suffered a lot of harm as a consequence of traditional policing,” such as progressive drug policy reform, and fighting against homeless encampment sweeps and for increased civilian involvement in how the Seattle Police Department conducts its business.

Daugaard cut her teeth as an activist during the South African apartheid era, when she was a grad student at Cornell. She found defending activists arrested and expelled during the anti-apartheid movement more interesting—and transformative—than writing her thesis on the criminalization of homelessness, and she decided to go to law school to pursue “a career trajectory where [activism] was the work rather than a distraction from the work.”

She has been at the center of many of the key civil rights battles of the past two decades, starting in the early 2000s, when thousands of low-income Seattleites lost their cars due to an initiative called “Operation Impound.” Daugaard, then a founding attorney of the PDA’s Racial Disparity Project, which worked to promote police accountability and reduce racially biased policing, says it took her a while to connect the dots between the thousands of seemingly routine license suspensions and the impoundment cases she came across through her work. The cases seemed unrelated—a litany of individual injustices.

“I knew the relationship between race, poverty and the justice system, but before I worked in public defense, I hadn’t realized the systematic way in which people of color were being deprived, as a generation, of the ability to drive,” Daugaard says. Over time, however, Daugaard started to see a pattern: Poor people, overwhelmingly people of color, were losing their licenses over moving and equipment violations or unpaid parking tickets, then losing their cars under a city law that allowed the city to seize the car of anyone caught driving it whose license had been suspended. This fed a cycle of poverty, as people who couldn’t afford to pay their tickets lost their cars, and then, with no way to get to work, their jobs.

 

“She’s an organizer, an analyst, an advocate, a strategist, an academic, an orator, a social worker and a spin doctor. You don’t come across that very often.”—Seattle City Council member Lisa Herbold

 

Supporters of Operation Impound presented the issue as a simple question of personal responsibility, but Daugaard, along with a community group called Drive to Survive, reframed the impoundment law as an assault on the rights of low-income people and people of color. They packed public meetings with people who had lost their cars, putting a human face on what had been a fairly obscure administrative issue. And they won. By the early 2000s, Operation Impound was a thing of the past.

This kind of no-holds-barred, uncompromising activism earned Daugaard accolades from unlikely corners. “Nobody I’ve met in my professional career can negotiate as effectively, and has the stamina and persistence that Lisa has,” says Scott Lindsay, a former candidate for city attorney who worked as a criminal justice adviser to former Mayor Ed Murray. City Council member Lisa Herbold, who worked with Daugaard on numerous issues when she was an aide to former council member Nick Licata, describes her as the full package. “She’s an organizer, an analyst, an advocate, a strategist, an academic, an orator, a social worker and a spin doctor. You don’t come across that very often,” Herbold says.

Daugaard’s status as a child prodigy—she started classes at the University of Washington at age 12, leaving at age 17 to study at Cornell and earn a law degree at Yale—is one of the first things people mention when talking about her. But her longtime employee and close friend Patricia Sully, who works at the PDA running a drug policy group called VOCAL (Voices of Community Activists and Leaders), argues that it’s the least interesting thing about her. The two met shortly after Sully graduated from law school, when they were both working with legal teams defending clients arrested during the Occupy Seattle protests. What’s most unusual about Daugaard, Sully says, is her ability to relate to a wide variety of people. “There’s no one I’ve met who is as comfortable being in a board room and talking to people in suits, and walking straight from that board room into an encampment and having a totally authentic relationship to the people in that encampment.”

Daugaard hasn’t always been so comfortable working both sides of the fence. In her early days as a public defender, some issues just seemed black and white—you either supported taking away people’s cars because they were poor or you didn’t.

But in 2005, when the PDA was fighting the police department over buy-and-busts, an SPD precinct commander challenged Daugaard to come up with a better plan, and she realized she didn’t have one. “That was a wake-up call for me,” she says. Instead of fighting the cops, she realized she needed to work with them; and instead of dismissing neighborhood concerns about public safety, she needed to find a solution that addressed those concerns.

That epiphany led to the development of a program that has become a model for criminal-justice reform around the nation. Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (LEAD), which began as a grant-funded pilot project in Belltown and has expanded throughout downtown and to the Chinatown/International District and the East Precinct area (Capitol Hill, the Central District and Little Saigon), gave beat cops the opportunity to offer people engaged in drug activity an alternative to arrest.

“Ten years ago, she might have thought [prosecutors] were the enemy, and now we’re important partners. She’s a formidable adversary, but she’s an even better friend.” —King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg

 

Instead of cycling through jail again and again, those people can enroll in LEAD, where they are connected to mental health and drug counseling, housing assistance, and education and job opportunities, among other services. Crucially, LEAD doesn’t require that participants stop engaging in whatever criminal behavior made them eligible for the program; instead, it gives people stuck in the cycle of addiction opportunities to access a better life, while recognizing that transformation doesn’t happen overnight. The program has been shown to reduce recidivism by as much as 60 percent. It’s also made arrests for minor drug possession essentially a thing of the past. “It’s a genuine paradigm shift,” Daugaard says.

King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg, initially a LEAD skeptic, says Daugaard didn’t just convince him to give her long-shot proposal a try; she changed his mind about how the criminal justice system should respond to drug-related offenses. “She’s taught me a lot about harm reduction and how a community-based response can be a lot more effective than just dragging someone into the courtroom, where we don’t have the tools to change people who are in a drug-dependent state,” Satterberg says. “Ten years ago, she might have thought [prosecutors] were the enemy, and now we’re important partners. She’s a formidable adversary, but she’s an even better friend.”

Today, Daugaard believes that the way to reach consensus on contentious issues is to identify the 90 percent of the issue on which both sides agree—the “goals and values” that underlie the two sides’ common search for a solution. As for the 10 percent where there’s fundamental disagreement? Set that aside, Daugaard says, and “by the time you’re done, the 10 percent has been transformed. That’s the formula, and it always works.”

It certainly worked with LEAD. Since the program launched in 2011, the question for the city hasn’t been whether to expand the program outside central Seattle, but which neighborhood will get it first.

Daugaard believes her 90 percent approach will work with safe drug consumption sites, too. The common ground is a shared desire to do something about the opioid epidemic; the experiment will be a single safe consumption site in a neighborhood that supports it; and the measure of success will be how quickly other parts of the city and region start clamoring for safe consumption sites of their own.

Sully says working for Daugaard has changed her attitude toward political adversaries. “People have legitimate concerns, and we need to actually grapple with that,” Sully says.

But Daugaard’s willingness to compromise has its limits, and it has caused friction with some allies.

As co-chair (from 2013‒2016) and now a commissioner of the Community Police Commission (CPC)—the civilian group charged with overseeing the implementation of police reform in Seattle—Daugaard says she saw the city make good strides toward police accountability. However, she has clashed with city attorney Pete Holmes over the role of the CPC and how much power it should have over the police department. Holmes, Daugaard says, “inexplicably chose not to work in support of the approach to the police reform process that community leaders wanted to take.”

The police-accountability issue helped drive a wedge between the longtime allies, so much so that during last November’s election, Daugaard endorsed Holmes’ opponent, Scott Lindsay (Holmes was reelected). While Holmes is quick to acknowledge Daugaard’s success in pushing through reforms like LEAD, he takes issue with what he calls a “take-no-prisoners approach” once she’s decided how things should go.

“If you’re not completely on board with every element of her program, then you’re the enemy,” he says. As for her endorsement of his opponent, Holmes says: “People are going to have to think that if you’re going to work with Lisa, remember that she may turn on you, even if it’s a good-faith disagreement.”

Daugaard says her dispute with Holmes wasn’t personal, and she doesn’t regret her endorsement. “I did so for specific reasons based on how the last four years actually went,” she says bluntly. Despite Holmes’ dark assessment of the way she does business, Daugaard does not think the relationship is beyond repair. “I have told him I’m glad to work with him during his new term,” she says. “Hopefully, he will prove I was wrong.”

labor, Seattle magazine

As Labor Loses Clout Nationwide, This Seattle Health Care Workers’ Union Keeps Thriving

This story originally ran in the December 2017 issue of Seattle Magazine.

It’s 10:30 on a Friday morning in September, and the crowd at the Washington State Convention Center in Seattle is on its feet, cheering uproariously as the keynote speaker bounds out onto the stage, “I Am the Fire” by Halestorm blaring over the loudspeakers. Many of the people in the darkened ballroom are sleep-deprived, having arrived by bus late last night or in the early morning hours. But you wouldn’t know it to watch them now—hundreds of them, mostly women of color, wearing Service Employees International Union (SEIU) purple and clapping noisemakers as SEIU 775 president David Rolf emerges to deliver a characteristic barn-burning speech.

“When we were born, 15 years ago, if you worked full-time as a caregiver, you were under the federal poverty line. By the end of this new contract, if you work full-time as a caregiver, you will not be under the federal poverty line!” Rolf thunders. “It doesn’t mean we’ve reached the promised land. It doesn’t mean we’re living in the lap of luxury, checking in to the Four Seasons, flying around in our jets. But what a difference the union can make!”

What a difference 15 years can make. Since SEIU 775 was chartered in 2002—after a bruising legislative battle that culminated in a ballot measure, Initiative 775, giving home care workers the right to unionize, and for the union to negotiate with the state on its members’ behalf—it’s grown from a scrappy, unconventional union representing 1,600 long-term caregivers to arguably the most influential labor organization in state and local politics with 45,000 members, including home care providers, nursing home employees and adult day health care workers. (The group also represents about 1,000 workers in Montana.) That growth has happened during a time when unions’ memberships and influence have been declining precipitously nationwide; currently, just 7 percent of private sector workers belong to a union. Today, SEIU’s members contribute 3.2 percent of their paychecks to the union, which uses the money to negotiate for a contract on their behalf and lobby for other pro-worker policies.

In that time, SEIU’s political agenda has also expanded, from an advocate for low-wage, often isolated workers caring for elderly and disabled clients in their homes to a force to be reckoned with on issues ranging from fast-food workers’ wages to Seattle zoning laws.

Rolf has been there through it all. When the 775 chapter was started, Rolf says, home care aides made minimum wage—$7.18 an hour—with no benefits. Although these workers are hired by individuals, they’re paid by Medicaid through a contract with the state, which sets their wages. As individual employees who worked inside private homes, they lacked the ability to organize for better working conditions—until the union came along.

Over time, using tactics such as flooding lawmakers’ fax machines with messages and blocking the door to the governor’s office, that changed, as SEIU 775 won higher wages from the state Legislature, passed an initiative requiring paid training for home care workers and fought back efforts by what Rolf calls “radical extreme groups” to interfere with union organizing.

Sitting in his office in Pioneer Square, the youthful, 48-year-old Rolf recounts war stories from the union’s early years. Like in 2003, when then state Senate majority leader Jim West of Spokane denounced home care workers as “perpetual pathetics,” prompting the union to stage a prayer vigil in front of his house. The following year, when West was running for mayor of Spokane, SEIU 775 sent workers door to door to get out the vote in low-turnout Republican districts helping West win and clearing the way for a more union-friendly Republican, Bill Finkbeiner, to take his place in the Legislature.

“We weren’t necessarily polite, but neither were they,” Rolf says of legislators. “The state had made a set of policy decisions to keep these women in a state of life-threatening poverty as a condition of them being caregivers. Now we had a union. We had some hope. Expectations were raised, and people wanted the Legislature to do the right thing.”

Sherry Byrum, a home care worker whose goddaughter has spina bifida and needs round-the-clock care, has been a member of SEIU 775 since its early days. She says the work that home health workers do is important, but that isn’t reflected in their wages and benefits. “I’ve seen people lose their homes because they couldn’t pay their medical bills when they got hurt on the job,” Byrum says. “A lot of people do [these jobs] pretty much 24/7, 365 days a year.”

SEIU’s tactics—including confronting legislators directly—have been so effective that they’re now mimicked by other unions and community groups. They’ve also been willing to support union-friendly legislators across traditional party lines, endorsing Republicans like former state Sen. Steve Litzow, former state Sen. Don Benton and the late Sen. Andy Hill.

Teresa Mosqueda, a lobbyist for the Washington State Labor Council and a candidate for Position 8 on the Seattle City Council (election results were not available at press time), says these tactics have served a larger purpose: forcing legislators to recognize that marginalized workers are professionals and a force to be reckoned with. “I think when those in power can kind of close their doors, we have to figure out a way for our voices to be heard through those doors or through the walls, and I think they have done a really good job of that,” Mosqueda says.

Over the past 15 years, SEIU 775 has expanded its portfolio significantly beyond its original mission, throwing its considerable weight around on issues ranging from public subsidies for sports arenas (2006’s Initiative 91, which the union supported) to former Seattle Mayor Ed Murray’s Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda (in a Seattle Times op-ed, Rolf described opponents’ position as “selfishness raised to an art form”).

Perhaps no battle has so defined SEIU 775 to the public as the fight for a $15-an-hour minimum wage, which began with contract baggage handlers at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport and expanded to fast-food workers in Seattle. It culminated in a joint business-labor agreement to bring a phased-in $15/hour minimum wage to Seattle. (Rolf even wrote a book about it, called The Fight for $15.) After victory at Sea-Tac, where an SEIU-backed minimum-wage initiative passed by a mere 77 votes in 2013, the battle moved to Seattle, where fast-food worker strikes and mass demonstrations led then Mayor Murray to put together a joint business-labor task force that crafted a compromise bill that would phase in a $15/hour minimum wage over several years. Rolf served on that task force.

“The fight for $15 originated in an industry outside our own, but we joyfully embraced it and took it up as our cause,” Rolf says. “And whether it’s housing policy or tax policy or immigration policy or Black Lives Matter or subsidies to basketball teams, we’ve always tried to be a civically conscious organization and to not only be on the cutting edges of the industry and issues in our direct line of sight, but also income inequality as a whole.”

SEIU 775’s rise, of course, has not been without controversy. Other progressive groups have grumbled that the union—and Rolf in particular—gets more than its share of credit for battles that were won by coalitions, not individual unions or their charismatic leaders. Former Seattle City Council member Nick Licata, who had a front-row seat for the $15 wage debate at city hall, says SEIU’s work on the minimum wage was “necessary, but not sufficient” to pass the compromise. “[United Food and Commercial Workers] and the Economic Opportunity Institute [a progressive think tank] also played major roles, and I don’t think it would have happened without all of them,” Licata says.

Conservative groups have also taken aim at the union. The Freedom Foundation, a think tank that describes its mission as “advanc[ing] individual liberty, free enterprise, and limited, accountable government,” has spent years waging legal war against SEIU 775, seeking to tame its influence by convincing its members to stop paying their dues, which would cripple the group’s influence in Olympia and Seattle. For years, the Freedom Foundation has been Wile E. Coyote to SEIU’s Roadrunner, almost forcing the union into a corner, only to be outsmarted at the last moment with an unexpected roadblock.

In 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that mandatory union fees violated the free speech rights of home health care workers in Illinois, dealing a blow to unions like SEIU 775 that represent “quasi-public” employees. SEIU has since made union dues voluntary, but the Freedom Foundation and other conservative groups argue that they haven’t done enough to let their members know they can opt out. In 2014, the Freedom Foundation began canvassing SEIU’s members to urge them to stop paying dues, and SEIU lost a lawsuit seeking to keep its membership list private.

The twist? In 2016, the union struck back with Initiative 1501. While it was billed on the ballot as an initiative to protect seniors from abuse and privacy violations, what it actually does is exempt SEIU’s membership list from state public disclosure law. It was approved by 71 percent of voters.  “Initiative 1501 was one of the most effective ballot measures that any of us have ever seen,” says Maxford Nelsen, director of labor policy for the Freedom Foundation. “I’m not surprised that it passed by the margin it did, but it’s probably fair to say that the vast majority of voters were not cued in to the details of the measure.”

Rolf says the tactics of groups like the Freedom Foundation give SEIU no choice but to get, as Nelsen puts it, “clever.” “When people knock on your door and say you should drop out of the union, is it because someone’s paying them to help you save $30 a month on union dues,” Rolf asks rhetorically, “or is it because they have an agenda that’s about undermining the only democratic voice that workers in our country still have?”

That voice, as anyone who has observed the U.S. economy in the past 50 years knows, is shrinking, and SEIU is not exempt from the larger forces that are making that happen, including an increasingly fractured workforce, the rise of involuntary part-time and contract work, and the growing divide between information-sector millionaires and the workforce that serves them lattes and picks up their trash. The U.S. labor movement formed at a time when most people worked for large companies and most industries were unionized; today, in a globalized economy that places shareholder value above all else, that system no longer functions the way it did.

Rolf argues that like all unions, SEIU will have to adapt and figure out new ways to organize if it hopes to survive in the 21st-century economy. Going back, he insists, is not an option. “Every time unions get smaller, the middle class gets smaller,” he told the crowd at the convention center. “For 40 years, American workers have been getting screwed because they don’t have the collective power to stand up for ourselves, and our failed system of industrial relations, built for the factory economy of 1935, is just not going to cut it in the 21st century. We have to invent something new.”

Rolf doesn’t know exactly what that will look like, but his work organizing a disenfranchised group of independent contractors into a statewide powerhouse has convinced him that even in an increasingly fractured 21st-century economy, unions will be part of that solution.

City Hall, gender, Mayor Durkan, Seattle magazine, Transit, Urbanism

How Mayor Durkan Could Surprise Seattle

A version of this piece originally ran at Seattle Magazine.

When Jenny Durkan and Cary Moon emerged as the top two vote-getters in the August primary election, there was no longer any question that Seattle would elect a female mayor. But when Durkan emerged victorious, with a commanding 56 percent of the vote, many were wondering if the first woman mayor in nearly 100 years would merely be more of the same. (Bertha Knight Landes, the first female mayor of a major American city, ended her single two-year term in 1928, when she was beaten by a man whose primary platform plank was that he was not a woman. No woman has come close to being elected mayor of Seattle since.)

“Murray 2.0” was a tag that dogged Durkan throughout the campaign, and the new mayor has been pilloried by Seattle’s left, with some justification, for being the “establishment” candidate—the one with money, backing from big businesses like Amazon and Comcast, and insider connections (her sister Ryan is a land-use attorney with many major local clients, her brother Jamie was a prominent Seattle lobbyist, and her brother Tim works for the city.)

Durkan has flinched at the “establishment” label—pointing to her work as an early advocate for marriage equality (Durkan is gay) as well as her support for undocumented immigrants as US attorney under former President Obama—but will it stick? She has four years to answer that question; in the meantime, here are some ways we think Durkan could—not will, but could—surprise Seattle:

By actually sticking to her promise to be the mayor “of the people, not of City Hall.”

On her first day as mayor, Durkan attended ceremonial swearing-in ceremonies from Delridge to Phinney, Ridgeand was officially sworn in several miles south of city hall, at the Ethiopian Community Center in Rainier Beach. If she keeps her commitment to be out in the neighborhoods, listening to neighborhood concerns personally instead of sending emissaries to meetings that are likely to get hot (as her predecessor Murray often did), she will build valuable trust, especially in communities that feel they lack a voice at city hall, like the East African immigrants of South Seattle or renters getting priced out of neighborhoods across the city.

By cleaning Murray’s house.

Durkan may have appointed Murray’s former chief of staff, Mike Fong, as her senior deputy mayor, but don’t let that fool you: Fong’s experience as a policy wonk and City Hall dealmaker long predates his time in the Murray office, spanning all the way back to 2001, when he worked as a policy staffer for the city council. Her other deputy mayor, Shefali Ranganathan, led the pro-transit Transportation Choices Coalition. The mayor has the ability to hire and fire the heads of more than two dozen city departments. This week, she announced the (voluntary) departure of police chief Kathleen O’Toole and the (requested) departure of City Light director Larry Weis. Scott Kubly, the head of the Department of Transportation, is already looking for jobs elsewhere. (Jesus Aguirre, the parks director, left shortly before Durkan took office.)

By implementing an activist agenda that includes compromise versions of policies Seattle’s left holds dear.

Some of her detractors scoffed when Durkan made free community college tuition a centerpiece of her campaign—her opponent Moon, for example, who immediately issued a statement calling for a progressive statewide income tax and capital gains tax to pay for education instead. Less than a week into her term, Durkan has already signed an executive order directing the city to come up with a plan to pay for the two-year-college proposal, and to begin implementing it in 2018, by expanding the number of credits that people in an existing program called 13th Year Promise can take for free. Other areas where Durkan could move fast: Implementing a new business tax or taxes on large employers—a proposal that came up late in this year’s budget cycle and failed to pass; expanding the families and education levy, which is up for another vote next year, to increase access to preschool; and moving forward with a safe drug consumption site in Seattle, which Durkan identified as a priority on the campaign trail.

By not being the new Ed Murray—and being the new Greg Nickels instead.

Below the marquee positions, Durkan’s day-one staff looks like the who’s who of the Nickels years, which ran from 2001 to 2009. There’s major initiatives director Kylie Rolf, Nickels’ onetime outreach coordinator; Andres Mantilla, also on Nickels’ outreach team; legislative affairs director Anthony Auriemma, who worked for Nickels late in his term; and office administrator Lyle Canceko, a former communications staffer for Nickels. Will surrounding herself with staffers for the former mayor, a competent centrist who was ousted after his muddled handling of a major snowstorm, make Durkan more likely to govern like Nickels, too? Hard to say—but during her kickoff in Rainier Beach, she did work in one snowstorm joke.

And finally: By surprising some of the transit advocates and urbanists who didn’t support her and being an effective advocate on the Sound Transit board.

No, Durkan isn’t likely to revisit the Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda—an Ed Murray initiative that irks many urbanists because it doesn’t increase density at all in single-family neighborhoods, which make up the vast majority of Seattle’s residential land. But during the campaign, when her opponent was promising to speed up light rail with a loan that Sound Transit said wouldn’t actually help them, Durkan offered her own plan to get the trains running to Ballard and West Seattle faster by expediting the permit and construction process and paying for better bus service in the meantime.

 

City Council, homelessness, Seattle magazine

City’s Homeless Spending Plan Cuts Downtown Restrooms, Laundry Facilities

This story originally appeared at Seattle Magazine. 

Source: Wikimedia Commons

On Monday, the city’s Human Services Department released a list of programs, operated by 30 local organizations and agencies, that will receive $34 million in restructured homeless service contracts. The announcement was the culmination of a years-long process to move the city toward performance-based human service contracting and to reward service providers that emphasize moving homeless Seattle residents into permanent housing quickly. Those that provide longer-term housing assistance or other services that aren’t strictly housing-related, like hygiene centers and overnight shelters, were deprioritized.

“I recognize this is a huge change, but it’s a huge change motivated by the scale of the need that we face on the streets of Seattle,” interim mayor Tim Burgess said Monday. (On Tuesday, Burgess was replaced by new Mayor Jenny Durkan.) “Business as usual is really not an option, because we’re not moving enough people off the street and into permanent housing.”

The funding changes announced on Monday could have a major, and highly visible, impact on downtown, because they eliminate or reduce funding for three downtown hubs where homeless people can use the restroom and shower: The Women’s Referral Center in Belltown, run by Catholic Community Services, the Urban Rest Stop, run by the Low Income Housing Institute (LIHI), and the Compass Housing Alliance’s Hygiene Center in Pioneer Square.

Without access to these restrooms during the day and (in Urban Rest Stop’s case) for part of the night, homeless advocates say unsheltered people will have no choice but to relieve themselves wherever they can—including alleys, parks and business doorways. “It’s going to be another sanitation nightmare,” LIHI director Sharon Lee predicts.

City Council Human Services and Public Health Committee chair Sally Bagshaw says she thinks that once new 24-hour shelters the city plans to fund get up and running, they’ll be able to fill the gaps left by the loss of the hygiene centers. “There are 22 enhanced shelters” in the funding plan, Bagshaw says, referring to shelters that offer case management and help getting into housing, “and of those, 21 have showers.”

Additionally, Bagshaw says, people who need to take a shower during the day already have access to showers at six of the city’s community centers (none of them downtown). “Is it perfect? No. But part of the goal here is to use our money in a way that’s going to move people through shelter and into permanent housing.”

According to the brief explanations the human services department provided for why it did not renew some grants, the hygiene centers’ missions were not directly focused on “moving people from homelessness to permanent housing” because they only provided basic hygiene services.

Lee says that LIHI’s Urban Rest Stop, whose funding will be cut by nearly 50 percent, will have to reduce its hours, which are currently 5:30 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. “If you go in there at 5:30 in the morning, it’s packed full of people” showering, washing their clothes and getting ready for work, Lee says. “If you take that away from people, it’s going to lead to more problems and more misery.”

Lee points to a recent Hepatitis A outbreak in San Diego that resulted from a lack of access to showers, restrooms and handwashing facilities for homeless people in that city. The outbreak spread throughout the unsheltered population and is now being called an epidemic. According to a memo the King County public health department sent to service providers in September, “the disease is closely associated with unsafe water or food, inadequate sanitation and lack of access to hygiene services.” In another memo, the department noted, “Good hand-washing is essential.”

The lack of 24-hour public restrooms downtown is a longstanding issue: People have to relieve themselves somewhere and in the absence of public restrooms, they tend to do so wherever they can. The downtown business community, Lee predicts, “is going to be really affected, because no longer can a merchant say [to a homeless person], ‘Go down the street to the Urban Rest Stop.’”

The Downtown Seattle Association, which runs an outreach team of 10-plus people, also lost about half a million dollars a year, initially declined to comment. But after this story published, its senior media relations manager James Sido reached out with a statement.

“Given the concentration of homeless individuals living downtown, and our long-standing relationships with this population and other downtown stakeholders, we were understandably disappointed to learn that we will not be among those organizations receiving city funds as of Jan. 1,” he wrote. “We are currently considering an appeal, and also discussing the program’s future with staff and leadership. Without city funding, the size and scope of our outreach program must shift.”

Addiction, Drugs, King County, Seattle magazine

Families of Opiate Epidemic Victims Reach Different Conclusions on Safe Consumption Sites

This story appeared in Seattle Magazine.

For months, there had been red flags. In the past, 19-year-old Amber Roberts had always made plans with her father, Michael Roberts, for his birthday. But this year, she canceled at the last minute without explanation.

A few weeks earlier, the former Lake Washington High School student had broken things off with her longtime boyfriend, who lived in Oregon, claiming he was “smothering” her. And friends who partied with her had noticed changes, too. Earlier that month, one of them had texted Amber’s mom telling her that Amber—the girl who still hated needles so much that she took her dad with her when she had to get a shot—had been doing heroin for the past several months. Alarmed, Amber’s mom contacted Roberts, and they made a plan to get their daughter into treatment as soon as Amber returned from Paradiso, a two-day music festival held every year at the Gorge.

But Amber had a friend drive her home from Paradiso early, complaining that she was sick. (Roberts believes she was in heroin withdrawal.) She left her mom’s house for a while, then came back and went upstairs, telling her mom and stepdad she was feeling fine. Roberts still remembers the last text he got from his daughter. “She texted me at around midnight to say she was fine,” he recalls. “And she probably died right after that.”

Heroin can kill slowly or quickly. Many people live through overdose after overdose—saved, in many cases, by the overdose reversal drug naloxone—and experience periods of recovery interspersed with periodic relapses. Others, like Amber, use the drug for just a short time—in Amber’s case, about four months—before taking a last, fatal dose. Sometimes, Roberts says, he feels lucky compared to parents who watch their kids struggle with addiction for years and years. Then he remembers his daughter’s loyalty, her “indescribable laugh” and her love for her family, and he says, “We would take that [struggle] over anything, because at least there would be a chance to save her.”

Since Amber’s death, Roberts, who lives in Kirkland, and Amber’s mother, Kristen Bretthauer, have started Amber’s HOPE (Heroin, Opiate Prevention and Education), a group that works to raise awareness of opiate addiction among teenagers. He’s also become an outspoken advocate for supervised consumption sites—places where users can inject or smoke their drug of choice under medical supervision, with access to wound care, detox and treatment referrals, and overdose reversal and prevention. The goal of supervised consumption isn’t to “cure” addicts. But, as Roberts says, it “can save people’s lives. That’s the bottom line for me. Once you’ve gone through what I went through, you will do anything for other parents not to have that experience.”

So far, there’s only one supervised injection site in North America: Insite, in Vancouver, British Columbia, which has an average of 514 injection-room visits every day, according to program founder Liz Evans. (Insite’s facility only caters to injection drug users; most safe consumption sites also allow people to smoke drugs as well as inject them.) But the sites are common across Europe and they could soon be coming to King County. Last year, the 27-member King County Heroin and Prescription Opiate Addiction Task Force, which includes political leaders, medical experts, drug-policy reform advocates and the mayors of several suburban cities, recommended that the county open two supervised consumption sites as a three-year pilot project, including one in Seattle.

King County Executive Dow Constantine and Seattle Mayor Ed Murray convened the task force last year in response to sharp increases in both opioid addiction and overdose deaths. In 2015, the last year for which finalized data is available, 132 people died of heroin overdoses in King County, up from 99 just two years earlier. Meanwhile, since 2015, heroin, rather than alcohol, is the primary reason people enter detox programs in King County. The recommendation for supervised consumption sites was just one of the task force’s eight proposals, which also included increased access to medication-assisted treatment with buprenorphine, a drug that reduces opioid cravings; widespread distribution of naloxone, a nasal spray that can reverse overdoses; and increased spending on prevention programs. But of all the recommendations, safe consumption has been by far the most controversial.

Opponents, such as state Senator Mark Miloscia, who represents Federal Way, argue that safe consumption sites enable users and normalize drug use; he believes drug users need to “hit rock bottom, where they’re looking death in the eye…that’s how you change behavior.” Miloscia, a conservative Republican who has sponsored legislation that would ban safe consumption sites as well as a bill banning all homeless encampments in Seattle, argues that shame, not acceptance, is what keeps people from using drugs. Proponents counter that safe injection sites keep drug users alive—by offering medical care, teaching safer injection practices and monitoring users for overdoses—and provide them with tools and services that help them reintegrate into society, even if they aren’t ready to quit.

“These spaces are not just about drug use—they’re about really connecting folks to community and not just kicking them back out onto the street,” says Patricia Sully, an attorney with the Seattle Public Defender Association (PDA) and the coordinator for Voices of Community Activists and Leaders (VOCAL-WA). VOCAL-WA, which operates under the umbrella of the PDA, is a grassroots group of low-income people, drug users and community advocates who work to promote harm reduction. “Drug treatment itself might not be the only thing people need. Many people need connections to mental health services. Many, many people need connections to housing. And we know that all of those things really make a huge impact in someone’s quality of life,” Sully says.

Harley Lever is a neighborhood activist who ran for mayor in this year’s race and  founded the group Safe Seattle, which advocates against safe consumption sites. HeImage result for harley lever seattlesays the problem with that point of view is that the sites “could never scale to the enormity of the problem,” which is only growing as drugs like fentanyl make street heroin more unpredictable and lethal. “If you said, ‘What’s going to save more lives?’ I think the science will back me up and say widespread distribution of naloxone is going to save far more lives” than safe consumption sites, Lever says.

Safe Seattle advocates for naloxone distribution, but their main contribution to the debate over safe consumption sites has been advocating Initiative 27, which would ban safe consumption sites throughout King County. Editor’s note: Opponents of the initiative won a court ruling that could keep the initiative off the ballot, but proponents are expected to file an appeal. In the meantime, the King County Council has passed an alternative ballot measure to replace I-27 if proponents win on appeal; that measure would ask voters whether they support voting on supervised consumption sites at all, and, if they say yes, whether they support or oppose the sites.

Lever, like Roberts, came by his views on addiction the hard way. Two of his brothers, along with countless friends and relatives back in his hometown of Boston, have been addicted to heroin, and several have wound up in jail or died. One of Lever’s brothers has been clean for years; the other, an Army veteran who has spent years in and out of Veterans Administration (VA) rehabs, is now homeless and living, Lever says, on “borrowed time.”

“[My brother] has OD’ed four times in the last year, and every time he was saved by naloxone,” Lever says. “He’s been in this constant cycle of being in treatment, getting sober, living in sober housing—and then, almost every single time, right when he gets his check [from the VA], he goes and spends it and he’s back in that cycle.”

Although one of his brothers quit “cold turkey” and “turned his life around,” Lever has slim hopes for his homeless sibling. “We’ve tried everything. It’s been 15 years, and he’s been so lucky to survive, but we know one day we’ll get the call,” he says. The VA has provided Lever’s brother with a place to stabilize himself and access health care and treatment, and it has probably helped him stay alive this long. But it hasn’t gotten him sober.

While one argument against safe consumption sites is that anything that allows addicts to continue using is the wrong solution to the opioid crisis, there are other objections.

Some who are opposed to safe consumption sites say the sites will bring crime and addiction to neighborhoods where drugs and crime were not previously a problem, or worry that the sites simply enable addicts to “slowly kill themselves by taking drugs and harming their bodies,” as Republican King County Council member Kathy Lambert, who represents Sammamish, Redmond and Issaquah, said back in June.

But the Vancouver Insite experience has proven otherwise. Insite founder Evans says the amount of street disorder around the facility has declined significantly since it opened in 2003, and that Insite staffers have reversed more than 6,000 overdoses; in 14 years, not one person has died at the site. Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, where Insite is located, is a rough-edged but gentrifying neighborhood near the city’s Chinatown that has been plagued by drugs and crime for decades. Seattle has no real equivalent, since drug use here is more widely distributed throughout the city, which is one reason advocates here have argued for more than one safe consumption site.

That information, however, doesn’t sway opponents like Lever.

“The compassionate side of me says we shouldn’t be [pushing I-27], but the strategic side of me says we should, because we should be focusing on better solutions than safe injection sites.”

Ultimately, the initiative may be unnecessary. In June, a majority of the King County Council voted to prohibit funding in the amended 2017–2018 budget for supervised drug consumption sites except in cities that explicitly approve them, and to bar county funding for any site outside Seattle. The vote effectively means that a safe consumption site couldn’t open until 2019 at the earliest, because the only potential funding source for a site in Seattle, the countywide Mental Illness and Drug Dependency tax, is already spoken for.

Officials in Seattle have not identified a specific site, but City Council and County Council members who represent the city, such as King County Council member Jeanne Kohl-Welles of District 4 (which includes Ballard, Fremont, Crown Hill and Wallingford), have said it will not be in any neighborhood that doesn’t want it, making Capitol Hill a more likely location than, say, Magnolia.

Dave Upthegrove, a Democratic County Council member who represents Burien and other South King County suburbs, says that while there is a lot of misinformation about the risk of safe consumption sites, “people’s emotions are real, and we need to be respectful of people’s fears.” He adds, “Even folks who have experienced heroin addiction in their own families are divided.” He fully supports the sites, however, and supports Seattle becoming the first city in the region to have them.

Roberts, who has been open about his own struggles with addiction, believes that the fears people have about drug users can only be addressed by destigmatizing addiction; more people also need to understand that even “good people” can get swept up by addiction. “There tends to be an attitude of ‘My child would never do that’; I really want to sway that view,” he says. “In one year, there were at least three overdoses at Amber’s high school. There’s just not enough awareness of the problem.”

With the dramatic increase of overdose deaths, he says, “there’s not going to be anyone around to deal with it anymore.”

Although Roberts and Lever—both King County residents whose families have been devastated by the impact of heroin addiction—have reached vastly different conclusions about how to solve the problem, they agree on this point.

“What I fear most is we’re going to die our way out of this epidemic,” Lever says.

The Europe Experience

Safe consumption sites are still rare in the United States, but they have a long history in Europe, where the first supervised injection site opened in Bern, Switzerland, in 1986. Since then, more than 75 such sites have opened across the continent: in Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Norway, Luxembourg, Denmark, Greece and France.

Although the services offered by safe consumption sites vary slightly from country to country (some are strictly safe injection sites; others provide medically assisted treatment right on site), the basics are the same: They include a safe space to consume illegal drugs indoors and under medical supervision, clean needles, basic medical care, and connections to addiction treatment and other health and social services.

Numerous studies across Europe have concluded that safe consumption/injection sites not only reduce risky behavior, such as sharing needles, but lower the number of overdose deaths in cities. Safe consumption sites also have been found to reduce the number of violent, property and nuisance crimes associated with street drug use, and increase the number of people who get into treatment—a result that holds true in North America, too, where more than 60 peer-reviewed studies have concluded that Insite, the safe consumption site in Vancouver, British Columbia, has increased the number of people seeking treatment without increasing crime.

Addiction, homelessness, housing, Seattle magazine

Navigation Center Has Housed Just Two People Since Opening in July

This story first appeared at Seattle Magazine. 

Late last month, the city’s Human Services Department released its first annual report on Pathways Home, a new framework for serving homeless residents that emphasizes “rapid rehousing” and submits service providers to new performance standards. Among other conclusions, the report found that the Navigation Center, a 75-bed shelter that serves people who don’t do well in traditional shelters, has struggled to place people into permanent housing within the 60-day time limit set by the city.

“People coming inside from being unsheltered have a big adjustment to make and multiple issues to address and many barriers to housing stability; the Navigation Center is finding that mapping out a strategy to get them housed could take more than 60 days,” the report says.

In fact, as of October, the Navigation Center had placed just two people into housing, according to the Downtown Emergency Service Center (DESC), which runs the Center. DESC’s director of administrative services, Greg Jenson, says that one of those clients is now in transitional housing and one went to live with family. According to the Pathways Home report, of the 105 clients who came through the center in its first six weeks, 32 have left, and “nearly half” of those “have refused to disclose or didn’t know where they were exiting to.”

DESC director Daniel Malone says the “biggest challenge” to placing clients in permanent housing isn’t just that the people the Navigation Center serves are hard to house; it’s that there simply aren’t enough places for Navigation Center clients to go.

 

The Navigation Center is designed to serve clients who are the “hardest to house”—people experiencing chronic homelessness who often face multiple barriers to finding a place to live, such as ongoing substance abuse and mental-health issues. It “was not designed to serve the needs of the higher-functioning individuals who are more likely to thrive in traditional shelter settings which have strict rule requirements,” Jackie St. Louis, the coordinator for the Navigation Team, says.

However, DESC director Daniel Malone says the “biggest challenge” to placing clients in permanent housing isn’t just that the people the Navigation Center serves are hard to house; it’s that there simply aren’t enough places for Navigation Center clients to go. “One thing that has been good is being able to identify people who have a natural priority for the limited housing that is available in the community,” by giving them an assessment that scores them on the number of barriers to housing they face, Malone says. But, he adds, “If we aren’t producing new housing, they’ll just be getting it instead of someone else.”

Seattle’s Navigation Center isn’t the first of its kind; that distinction goes to a low-barrier shelter by the same name in San Francisco, which also serves a hard-to-house clientele. In San Francisco, clients seeking permanent housing stay an average of 90 days, and that figure would likely be larger if the city didn’t set aside some low-income housing units specifically for Navigation Center clients, something Seattle does not do. Although Seattle officials were familiar with the challenges San Francisco faced in housing people through its Navigation Center, the city adopted a 60-day cap, predicting that Seattle’s Navigation Center would be able not only mimic but surpass San Francisco’s success.

The city’s Navigation Teams—groups of police and outreach workers who facilitate encampment removals—frequently refer encampment residents to the Navigation Center. According to a report issued by the Navigation Team itself earlier this month, the teams have sent about 75 people to the center this year.

Meg Olberding, a spokeswoman for the Human Services Department, says she’s confident that the city is sending people who want and will benefit from the services that the center provides. “HSD and DESC are satisfied that the right clients are being referred to the Navigation Center,” she says.

But Malone notes that DESC has “definitely heard from some people that they only came there because they were having to leave where they were staying out, and they hadn’t really decided for themselves that was something that they wanted yet.”

Malone cautions against reading too much into what happens at the Navigation Center in the first few months. “Has it changed the face of homelessness in less than three months? No,” he says. “There have definitely been some start-up issues, and we need to try different things out.”

In San Francisco, Navigation Centers have been successful at getting some homeless people off the street, but they’re hardly a panacea. The success or failure of Seattle’s Navigation Center will be measured not by how many hundreds of people it moves on to permanent housing, but by how many dozens.