Burien city officials escalated the drama over the city’s total ban on “living” outdoors last week after King County Sheriff Patti Cole-Tindall sued the city for what she called the city’s “unconstitutional” new law. As we reported last week, City Manager Adolfo Bailon immediately responded to the lawsuit by instructing employees to stop paying the sheriff’s office, which serves as Burien’s police department. (The move makes Burien, ironically, the first local city to actually defund its police.) Bailon also canceled the city’s recently signed homelessness outreach contract with REACH, leaving Burien without any professional homeless outreach services.
On Thursday, a man died in an encampment in downtown Burien; his body was discovered by outreach workers from REACH. Burien officials immediately politicized the tragedy.
Speaking to the B-Town Blog, Burien Mayor Kevin Schilling lashed out at Cole-Tindall and a nonprofit run by a former city council member that ran a short-lived sanctuary encampment at a local church. Schilling said the man’s death, from an overdose, was a “direct result of the Sheriff’s Department and the County Executive suing us so they don’t have to enforce our common sense tent regulating measure, as well as not enforcing drug laws in the Downtown core. … I sure hope the Sheriff and County Executive staff taking their roles seriously, and stop wasting taxpayer time and money with their stunts that are leading to deaths.”
“We do not have capacity to provide continual management and oversight of conduct in encampments of unhoused persons that have been part of the community for the entire time I have worked with the City.”—Burien Police Chief Ted Boe
The new ban on “living” in public spaces includes appearing in public with any “indicia of camping,” including blankets, sleeping bags, and cooking equipment.”
The sheriff’s department has repeatedly told city officials that their priority is 911 calls and serious crimes, not the presence of homeless people in Burien. In a deposition last week, Burien Police Chief Ted Boe said his deputies spend most of their time responding to emergency calls, which “means we do not have capacity to provide continual management and oversight of conduct in encampments of unhoused persons that have been part of the community for the entire time I have worked with the City.”
Boe, who has been Burien’s police chief since 2018, said he had no issues getting people living unsheltered in Burien to “voluntarily move” when asked— until the city council hired Bailon in 2022.
Starting that year, Boe said, Bailon “put continual pressure on me to redeploy resources away from other public safety matters such as 911 calls and to address several non-criminal aspects of camping. I requested he provide support for addressing non-criminal behaviors to prevent police from being responsible for managing camp rules.”
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Boe also revealed that during a recent conversation with Bailon, the city manager told him he “would be demanding that I be removed as the City’s Chief” and replaced by someone who would be willing to accede to Bailon’s demands.
Another option the city is reportedly considering: Hiring their own police force, and ditching their contract with the county. This, however, would almost certainly be more expensive than the county contract. When the city looked into creating its own police force in 2011, a consultant concluded that it would cost between 12 and 35 percent more for the city to fund a similar level of service. Policing makes up about 45 per cent of Burien’s annual general-fund budget.
“I have grown to love this community and it is upsetting to have this assignment taken away for doing what I not only believe is right, but what I think our courts expect me to do as a police leader in Washington,” Boe said in his deposition.
At tonight’s Burien City Council meeting, the council will discuss a proposal to take away federal ARPA dollars that the council allocated to a day center for homeless Burien residents at Highline United Methodist Church last year. Opponents of providing shelter and services to homeless Burien residents have made similar arguments against providing them an indoor space to be (and access services) during the day, claiming that they will bring drugs and violence into the area.
Burien City Councilmembers Hugo Garcia and Linda Akey
By Erica C. Barnett
This post has been updated with a comment from King County about enforcement by the King County Sheriff’s Office.
Burien, the Seattle suburb that recently banned sleeping outdoors at night in the vast majority of the city, tightened the vise on the city’s homeless residents last night by making it a misdemeanor to “camp” outdoors on any public property in the city, including all sidewalks. The new ban expands on an earlier (and already much-amended) law that allowed people to sleep at night in public spaces where camping wasn’t “explicitly prohibited,” including some sidewalks in downtown Burien.
The city council passed the new sleeping ban 5-2 last night after a brief debate.
The hastily proposed amendment came just one week after PubliCola was first to publish a video in which Councilmember Linda Akey ranting at homeless people who had set up tents on the sidewalk outside her condo building downtown, telling them that she had the “authority” as a homeowner to call the police on them. In the video, which made it all the way to the Daily Mail, Akey can be seen roaming up and down between the tents, telling people to go somewhere else because “I live here and you do not belong here.”
The expanded ban, which one public commenter referred to as a “survival ban,” prohibits people from sleeping or setting down items like tarps, blankets, and cooking equipment at any time of day on any public property in Burien. (Almost as if it was being sarcastic, the law says it’s fine for homeless people to sleep in apartments and other types of homes.)
“This reads like a middle-schooler’s parody of a Fox News story,” one resident, Paul Hood, said of the legislation.
Although the law includes a now-standard exemption saying police can’t arrest or move people if there’s no available shelter, it defines shelter so broadly that a bed 15 miles away in Seattle would probably qualify, as would a church-based shelter that required a person to enter treatment or participate in a religious program; under the existing and amended law, people whose addiction or mental illness makes staying in congregate or sober shelters untenable could be arrested for violating the law.
To accommodate the possibility, however remote, that people might end up sleeping in certain areas because no shelter was available, the ordinance also explicitly bans “camping,” under any circumstances, within 500 feet of schools, daycares, libraries, and parks, on the justification that “the Burien community has vociferously asserted that the significant increase in unhoused individuals has resulted in an incredible increase in crime and public indecency, and has made the use of libraries, sidewalks, and other public places uninviting if not dangerous.”
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The new law gives Burien’s city manager, Adolfo Bailon, absolute authority to add any amount of city land to the “areas protected from unhoused encampments” without any public discussion or legislative approval. Bailon, as we’ve reported, received a critical performance evaluation and improvement plan last year, but has refused to release it to the public; late last year, the firm that evaluated Bailon resigned their contract with the city because, in their view, the city had failed to take its recommendations seriously or “take constructive action” to address Bailon’s performance.
Three homeless Burien residents, along with the Seattle/King County Coalition on Homelessness, have sued the city over the previous version of the ban, arguing that it violates the state constitutional ban on cruel punishment, among other violations. SKCCH director Alison Eisinger said the plaintiffs’ attorneys are currently amending the complaint to reflect the new, even more restrictive ban.
“Burien residents told their city council in public comment that history will not look kindly on those who wrote and passed this law and drew the outrageous map, and we agree,” Eisinger said. “Our co-plaintiffs and others braved snow and freezing temperatures outside while five council members pretended that excluding people from their community means helping them.”
The bill makes creative use of “whereas” clauses, ordinarily used to cite facts that justify a piece of legislation. In lieu of facts, the law asserts political views, using unsourced, unsubstantiated, and sometimes outrageous claims to make the case that homeless people are a uniquely menacing threat to “the Burien community,” meaning Burien’s housed residents.
One clause cites “allegations of sex trafficking, sexual assaults, drug use, thefts, and trespasses in or near unhoused encampments” as a justification for the ban; another claims that “the Burien community, including business owners and residents, has demanded that the Burien City Council and law enforcement address this significant increase in crime.” A third asserts, again without evidence, that “young girls” are being “taken into tents” by predatory homeless people.
“If council wants to adopt this ordinance, there may not be the votes to prevent it,” said Councilmember Sarah Moore, who—along with Councilmember Hugo Garcia—voted “no.” “But please consider if you want [the whereas clauses] in our recorded history.”
“It’s really hard to be here and have your entire community turn their backs on you. I grew up in this town. My last listed address is here. I had my daughter in this town and I graduated [in] this town, and it’s crazy watching y’all just try to push us out.”
Many public commenters who opposed the ban noted that they, too, are part of the Burien community, and often outnumber anti-homeless voices at city council meetings. “This reads like a middle-schooler’s parody of a Fox News story,” one resident, Paul Hood, said of the legislation.
Others noted that the buildings the legislation purports to “protect,” using buffers similar to those that keep sex offenders from living in most areas, are closed at night—people aren’t using the library or going to school at 10pm, making the specific justification for the “protection areas” patently absurd. (Homeless people are still allowed to exist in Burien libraries and parks during daytime hours, for now.)
In fact, most of the commenters at Monday night’s meeting opposed the ban, including several residents of an encampment outside City Hall whose names were called while they were outside, laying tarps over their belongings as a heavy snow began to fall.
One who made it back in just as the comment period was winding up, Marina, almost didn’t get to speak. Deputy mayor Stephanie Mora tried repeatedly to shut her down, telling her she was out of order and did not have the right to speak. After several people in the crowd intervened—pointing out that Robert’s Rules of Order allow people to speak at the end of the meeting if they weren’t in the room when their name was called—Marina spoke for two minutes as Mora stared off in another direction. Here’s some of what she said:
It’s really hard to be here and have your entire community turn their backs on you. I grew up in this town. My last listed address is here. I had my daughter in this town and I graduated [in] this town, and it’s crazy watching y’all just try to push us out. … We’re waiting here for any kind of help. But you guys don’t want us here. The cops told us the other day to keep walking north. They’re the ones who shuffled us into the alleyway in the first place.
[Homelessness] can happen to anybody. I lost everything so fast, and I was trying my hardest not to. I feel like most of us are maybe just a couple bad steps away from being homeless. And we need help. And I thought y’all had the money to help us. We don’t want to be out here like this. All my friends, my family, they’re out there right now, covered in snow under tarps, miserable, cold, and completely alone. … I have nerve damage in my fingers from the cold. … Some of our people are really sick and they’re not getting the help that they need. They’re out here fighting demons, because that’s what they’re treated like. We’re treated like trash around here and that’s just not nice.
When Oasis Home Church opened a temporary encampment for homeless residents last December, Marina noted, she didn’t have to sleep on public property. The city threatened a lawsuit to stop the church from hosting the encampment.
The ban, which the city passed as an “emergency” ordinance, goes into effect immediately.
UPDATE: The King County Sheriff’s Office told the city of Burien it would not enforce the new camping ban, prompting the city to issue a statement attacking the county for “claiming the authority to decide the constitutionality of existing laws and potentially politicizing an important public safety issue”—as if a ban on homeless people existing at night was not political, and as if the existence of homeless people was an inherent public safety threat to housed Burien residents.
Asked how the King County Sheriff’s Office, which serves as the police department for Burien, plans to enforce the expanded ban, a spokesperson for King County said, “Burien adopted this ordinance with minimal notice to the public and no outreach to King County, which provides law enforcement services to Burien by contract. This is atypical. It is unclear why this measure was adopted as an emergency ordinance when prior versions of the same ordinance allowed for full public input and debate. It is crucial for law enforcement to follow constitutional norms when enforcing any law. King County is currently evaluating the ordinance to ensure that it fits within the proper mission of the Sheriff’s office.”
Recently elected Burien City Councilmember Linda Akey was caught on tape confronting a group of unsheltered people last week outside her condo building in downtown Burien. The group, who had set up tents on the sidewalk under the building’s awning, are among dozens now sleeping on sidewalks around Burien after the council imposed a daytime encampment ban that requires people to pick up sleeping bags, tents, backpacks, and other “indicae of camping” by 6:00 every morning.
In the video, Akey can be seen telling people that they are “trespassing” and threatening to call the police on them if they don’t move their tents at least five feet away from her building and onto the public portion of the sidewalk. Every tent shown in the video appears to be well over five feet from the building.
“I have authority. I have authority. I live here and you do not belong here,” Akey says. “You’ve gotta move all the tents out of here. We will call the police,” she continues.
In an email, Akey said she was “not acting in any capacity as a government official” in the video, “but as a homeowner. I want to work toward positive solutions. I recognize I may look angry and I apologize for raising my voice.”
“Get away from here, move away from here. If you don’t want my attitude, then leave, take your tent. Residents live up here. … I live here and you do not belong here.”
“On the night in question, I approached individuals camped on the sidewalk, informing them of condo policies and city ordinances,” Akey continued. “While I empathize with their challenges, ensuring everyone’s safety is a top priority.”
In the video, as some of the people on the sidewalk begin to heckle Akey—”take your drunk ass home,’ one says—Akey continues: “I’m trying to help you. I’m trying to help you, okay? And everybody out by 6 am, okay? I want all tents gone by 6 am. If you need to start at 5am to do that, then you do that. You can laugh at me all you want, but the law says 6 am.”
At this point in the tape, a person tells Akey, who has walked behind a tent in the foreground, to “get away from my tent.” She responds, “Oh, no—get out from under where I live. … Get away from here, move away from here. If you don’t want my attitude, then leave, take your tent. Residents live up here.” The video shows Akey pointing up at her building. “I live here. I live here. All these people live here. All these residents. All these residents. All these residents. … I live here and you do not belong here.”
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Prior to the adoption of the new law, people living unsheltered in Burien were allowed to stay in public spaces other than parks.
The law says that people can’t be swept from a location unless shelter is available, but does not specify where this “available” shelter has to be. It also allows police to arrest or sweep people who can’t go into available shelter because of “voluntary” actions like active addiction and behavioral health conditions that lead to—as the law puts —”unruly” behavior.
Burien has no year-round shelters for the general population, and the council and city manager repeatedlystalled efforts to open a King County-funded tiny house village somewhere in the city before finally accepting the offer late last year.
When the city began enforcing the new “camping” ban last fall, it scattered the residents of a large encampment on Ambaum Blvd. throughout the city—including back into downtown Burien, where an encampment sweep in March of last year set off a series of events that led to the encampment ban. Akey lives less than a block from the original encampment.
In a second video, one encampment resident calls the experience of looking for housing “a loop you never escape from” while Akey repeats, “I want to get you housing, I want to get you help” and asks them what she can do (“do you mind if we get a shower?” one asks) before telling them, “This is not the place for you to live.”
Near the end of the video, a partially obscured Akey can be seen in an argument with one person, who claims she put her hands on them. “Let’s do it. Right now,” Akey says. “You want to live underneath other people? You guys don’t have to live here. You can live somewhere else. You can accept services. You can turn off the camera.”
In another video that appears to have been taken after the first, the man accompanying Akey (who appears, based on social media photos, to be her husband) tells the group, “you’ve been offered [housing] multiple times,” and claims that “there are programs for everybody.” Several encampment residents respond that this isn’t true—one calls the experience of looking for housing “a loop you never escape from”—while Akey repeats “I want to get you housing, I want to get you help” and asks them what she can do (“do you mind if we get a shower?” one says, laughing) before repeating, “This is not the place for you to live.”
In her email, Akey said her “primary concern is the well-being of all involved. I believe a multi-faceted approach involving residents, social services, and relevant authorities is crucial to address homelessness and addiction.
“One promising strategy is [criminal legal system] diversion programs, which often become more readily available when existing laws are enforced fairly and consistently,” Akey said. “By enforcing existing laws, we can ensure a safer environment for everyone in our community while also providing pathways to support and rehabilitation for those experiencing homelessness and addiction.”
The LEAD program has a contract to offer people accused of several specific misdemeanors, such as drug possession and theft, to bypass the criminal legal system and enroll in case management. The program is not designed as an off-ramp from arrest and prosecution for sleeping outdoors.
Prior to her election, Akey was a frequent public commenter at Burien City Council meetings. In September, when the council passed the encampment ban, she testified that allowing people to sleep outside is a way of “enabling” people. “I know some people reject help; however … sometimes rock bottom helps a person decide their life is unmanageable and that they need help.”
Three homeless Burien residents have sued the city of Burien over its camping ban, arguing that the law criminalizes homelessness.
Burien threatened legal action against a church-based encampment created in response to the city’s camping ban. Image via Sunnydale Village Sanctioned Encampment GoFundMe.
By Erica C. Barnett
The Seattle/King County Coalition on Homelessness and three homeless Burien residents, represented by the Northwest Justice Project, filed a lawsuit against the city of Burien on Wednesday over the city’s “camping” ban, which makes it a misdemeanor to sleep, prepare food, use items like sleeping bags or backpacks, or otherwise “live” in public spaces in the city.
The ordinance does say police can’t enforce the law if there is no shelter “available,” but doesn’t explain what “available” means, or how broad of a geographic area that term encompasses. Currently, there are no year-round nighttime shelter beds in Burien, so the city has been referring people to shelter out of town, essentially deporting its own homeless population to places like Kent, Auburn, and Seattle. “By criminalizing the very act of being homeless in the City of Burien, the City of Burien is attempting to banish homeless individuals from the City of Burien,” the lawsuit says.
The law, SKCCH director Alison Eisinger said, “makes it impossible for [unsheltered] people to be in Burien. And what we’ve seen … is that far more effort has gone into drafting and writing and arguing about this unconstitutional ordinance than has gone into answering the question, where should Burien residents who don’t have homes find safety, stability, and support?”
“What this ordinance is trying to do is banish them for being homeless,” NJP attorney Scott Crain said. “The effect of the ordinance appears to be to sweep people out of Burien entirely.”
According to the lawsuit, Burien’s law violates several provisions of the Washington State constitution, including the state prohibition on cruel punishment, the right to due process, the right of homeless people to be “free from disturbance in their private affairs,” and the privileges and immunities clause, which prohibits discrimination.
Of all the attempts to criminalize homelessness across Washington state, “The Burien ordinance certainly stands out in its vagueness, but also its breadth, Crain said. Even many of the officials who drafted and voted for the law offered conflicting explanations about what it does and when it applies, Eisinger noted. “This law and its intent are nearly incomprehensible,” she said.
The ordinance, which bans people from “camping, dwelling, lodging, residing, or living on nonresidential public property” at all hours of the day (with an exception for unspecified “permits”), amounts to “an intent to banish homeless people” from the city, because it deprives them of the ability to protect themselves from the elements or do things necessary to live, like sleep, Crain said—plus, if taken literally, it could prohibit people from having picnics in city parks, because it bans all “cooking equipment use or storage” in public spaces.
Somewhat unusually, both the Burien and Bellevue law give police the authority to arrest unsheltered people if, in an officer’s opinion, they’re engaged in “voluntary actions such as intoxication, drug use, unruly or assaultive behavior, or violation of shelter rules.” According to NJP attorney Scott Crain, “That is unconstitutional cruel punishment, in the sense that there is no shelter for somebody because of their disability.”
The ordinance does include a vaguely worded exception for “permitted” encampments in public spaces, but these appear to be theoretical; in months of debate about whether to allow a single 35-unit pallet shelter anywhere in the city, Burien officials have not publicly discussed permitting an encampment on public property, much less permitted one. As the lawsuit notes, Burien’s homeless residents remain at constant risk (and must live in fear) of being displaced and losing their personal belongings in sweeps.
The city started enforcing the sleeping ban on December 1, when police swept an encampment on Ambaum Way. Although no one was arrested, the city did not offer shelter to everyone, telling some encampment residents they should seek out shelter in Seattle, about an hour’s bus ride away. When some took refuge at a church nearby, the city threatened to sue because the church lacked a temporary-use permit for the encampment.
“The City of Burien has not released plans or guidance to homeless individuals in the City of Burien, explaining the steps the City of Burien intends to take to enforce the ordinance, where individuals are permitted to camp, or how shelter offerings will be made available,” the lawsuit says. “Moreover, the City of Burien has yet to release plans explaining how it intends to ascertain available shelter capacity on any given night and which shelters it will consider in making such a determination.”
A spokeswoman for the city of Burien said she could not comment on pending litigation.
As we’ve reported, Burien’s ordinance is modeled on a similar ordinance in the city of Bellevue, and raises some of the same issues around people’s right to survive in public. (One key difference is that Bellevue, unlike Burien, does have a year-round men’s shelter.) Both ordinances criminalize sleeping outdoors if shelter is unavailable, and empower police to enforce the law.
Somewhat unusually, both the Burien and Bellevue law give police the authority to arrest unsheltered people if, in an officer’s opinion, they’re engaged in “voluntary actions such as intoxication, drug use, unruly or assaultive behavior, or violation of shelter rules”—a provision that suggests disabilities like substance use disorder and mental illness are voluntary choices, Crain said. “That is also unconstitutional cruel punishment, in the sense that there is no shelter for somebody because of their disability.”
Because this lawsuit is based on the state constitution, which has stronger protections against cruel punishment than the US constitution, Crain says it won’t be directly affected if the US Supreme Court effectively overturns the landmark Martin v. Boise ruling, in which the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that cities can’t force homeless people to move if there is no shelter available. Seattle City Attorney Ann Davison wrote an amicus brief asking the Supreme Court to overrule the Ninth Circuit in that case, Grants Pass v. Johnson, and allow cities to conduct sweeps without offering shelter.
A consulting firm that conducted a six-month performance evaluation for Burien City Manager Adolfo Bailon terminated its contract with the city in late December, telling city officials that continuing the contract would be “more detrimental than beneficial” to their reputation.
“We have observed that the initial evaluation conducted for the City Manager was not met with the seriousness it deserved by several key stakeholders, and unfortunately, we have concerns that constructive action was not taken in response to the feedback presented in the evaluation report,” the contractor, Ethan Nash of Nash Consulting, told Burien’s senior human resources manager, Connie Roberts, in an email. The city has not released the full evaluation, which was reportedly critical of Bailon’s performance.
A majority of the Burien council supported Bailon over the last year as he shot down efforts to stand up a homeless shelter on land owned by the city, threatened legal action against a church that hosted homeless people on its property, and signed a no-bid contract for encampment removals with a controversial group that has no demonstrated track record or previous government contracts. Over the last year, Bailon also declined to share information about potential shelter solutions with the council and waited several days to share a time-sensitive email about a $1 million shelter offer from King County, leading some on the council to conclude he was withholding information deliberately.
Earlier this year, Burien resident Charles Schaefer—the former Burien Planning Commission chair the council removed from his position because he informed a group of displaced encampment residents about their legal right to sleep on city-owned property—requested all records summarizing the evaluation along with “council and staff feedback” on the evaluation. (After the city council ousted Schaefer, the entire Planning Commission resigned in protest).
In response to Schaefer’s request, the city provided a two-page summary written in August by then-mayor Sofia Aragon, which characterized Bailon’s performance as “mainly on track” and laid out six bullet-pointed goals. These included “institute quarterly Coffee with the City Manager meetings with various themes,” “present a realistic timeline for fiscal cliff measures, with staff input,” and two items related to “crisis communications.” The letter also says the city supports Bailon seeking a voluntary accreditation with the International City/County Management Association “to strengthen your skills in this role.”
In lieu of the council and staff feedback he requested, Schaefer received a list of exemptions to the state public disclosure act that, the city argued, rendered Bailon’s entire performance evaluation, including redacted or anonymized feedback from staff, categorically exempt from disclosure.
A state appeals court ruling found that a city manager’s position, specifically, is “not like that of other public employees” because the city manager functions as “the city’s chief executive officer, its leader, and a public figure.” In that case, the state appeals court found that the performance evaluation “was not exempt because it was of legitimate concern to the public.”
The exemptions the city claimed fell into two broad categories. First, the city said that every aspect of the evaluation itself was confidential and conducted in closed executive sessions, making any staff feedback, along with an evaluation worksheet exempt from disclosure. Second, the city claimed that disclosing any information about the evaluation would be “highly offensive” and an invasion of Bailon’s privacy, citing a 1993 case involving a school principal, in which a state appeals court ruled that performance evaluations are exempt from disclosure as long as they don’t include “specific instances of misconduct or public job performance.”
However, a subsequent court ruling involving a performance evaluation for the Spokane City Manager found that a city manager’s position, specifically, is “not like that of other public employees” because the city manager functions as “the city’s chief executive officer, its leader, and a public figure.” In that case, the state appeals court found that the performance evaluation “was not exempt because it was of legitimate concern to the public.”
In his letter ending the contract, Nash refers to a “recent Public Records Request” whose handling “raised concerns regarding our ability to guarantee the confidentiality of interviewees and survey participants. This situation has likely undermined the trust placed in our firm by those participating in the evaluation, thereby compromising the effectiveness of any future evaluations we might conduct.”
It’s unclear what records request Nash was referring to (including whether it was Schaefer’s); neither Nash nor a spokesperson for the city of Burien had responded to questions before this story posted. We’ve asked the city for more information about what “constructive action” the consultants recommended and will update this post if we hear back.
PubliCola has also requested a copy of Bailon’s full performance evaluation. Bailon’s initial base salary, according to the B-Town Blog, was $215,000. Previously, he was the town manager for Randolph, Vermont, a sleepy town that disbanded its police force in 2018. Prior to joining the city of Burien in 2022, he was up for similar positions in Grand Rapids, Michigan and Nogales, Arizona, where the city council decided not to hire him in November 2021.
Text and phone messages obtained through a public records request suggest that Burien City Manager Adolfo Bailon actively involved himself in city contract negotiations to ensure that The More We Love, a group that conducts private encampment sweeps, received a contract to resolve encampments for the city. The group, run by Kirkland real-estate broker Kristine Moreland, became a subcontractor to the local business advocacy group Discover Burien after Moreland was apparently unable to secure the level of insurance the city requires for contractors.
Bailon has repeatedly distanced himself from the city’s actions on behalf of The More We Love, going so far as to note, in a memo to the Burien City Council in November, that the “City is not involved in the process to recruit or select a subcontractor.”
Even as he was claiming to be disconnected from the selection process, Bailon was in almost daily conversation with Moreland about the contract, exchanging at least 32 text messages with Moreland and talking to her on the phone at least eight times—for a total of nearly an hour—during the three-week period of October immediately before he signed the contract. At the end of the month, when it looked like the contract would collapse because Moreland’s group couldn’t get insurance, Bailon and city staff scrambled to switch the contract over to Discover Burien, with The More We Love as a subcontractor, sending a flurry of messages between the early morning and evening of November 1 to ensure that a new contract was drafted, executed, and signed that day.
“I am stuck on this to move forward with the contract. I just want to help the humans and move on,” The More We Love’s Kristine Moreland wrote. “I was unaware that Debra was taking 4K from her side. She didn’t disclose that to me when we said we were ready to sign. I am happy to meet her in the middle or see if you guys can bridge her need to get paid.”
The text messages between Moreland and Bailon consist mostly of back-and-forth discussion about the details of her contract, including when Moreland’s group will get paid. In one mid-October exchange, Moreland asked if she could invoice for future work immediately and get paid in 30 days, which she said would help her “float the insurance cost.”
After “checking with Finance,” Bailon responded: “We could accept an invoice right away, but couldn’t actually commence the process for payment. That is the initial response from Finance. We’re checking for more detail.” One minute later, Bailon added, “The bigger problem is that we have a process that pays for work performed instead of in-advance. Depending on the contract, [i]nvoices typically include a report of the work performed during the pay period.” This policy—perform the work, then get paid—is standard for human-services contracts in the city of Seattle, and ensures that contractors don’t take money and then fail to perform the work they were hired to do.
After Discover Burien told Moreland they would serve as lead contractor for The More We Love’s encampment work, there was apparently another wrinkle: Debra George, Discover Burien’s director, wanted $4,000 to administer the contract, and Moreland objected.
“I am stuck on this to move forward with the contract. I just want to help the humans and move on,” Moreland wrote. “I was unaware that Debra was taking 4K from her side. She didn’t disclose that to me when we said we were ready to sign. I am happy to meet her in the middle or see if you guys can bridge her need to get paid. Can we work together and move on so we can get to work. I appreciate you.” Later, Bailon told Moreland he had “‘I increased the amount to $48 k, per our discussion” (in fact, the contract was for $49,000); the city manager can sign a contract of up to $49,000 without a public process.
In November, the King County District Court issued a judgment against Moreland in favor of Bank of America, which sued her for allegedly failing to pay $33,000 in credit-card debt.
As we’ve reported, Moreland was sanctioned in 2020 for violating consumer mortgage lending laws, and was allowed to keep her license in exchange for tens of thousands of dollars in fines that she has since failed to pay. Additionally, she has faced criminal and civil charges related to an alleged DUI and unpaid bills; in November, the King County District Court issued a judgment against Moreland in favor of Bank of America, which sued her for allegedly failing to pay $33,000 in credit-card debt.. She also distributed private personal and medical information about various homeless people in Burien to city council members, the Burien police chief, and the owner of a real-estate company.
The flurry of activity (and sole-source contract) on Moreland’s behalf is in marked contrast to Bailon’s response to another potential contractor that wanted to work with the city to shelter Burien’s homeless population, the Low Income Housing Institute. LIHI submitted a proposal for a tiny-house village that Bailon dismissed as unrealistic, telling Burien Mayor Sofia Aragon that LIHI was “skating on thin ice” with the city because they emailed an “unsolicited” proposal to city officials. “I am unsure as to why LIHI has commenced a full-court press on this issue of a village (tiny home, pallet) in Burien, but their efforts have included attending nearly all Council meetings over the past two months,” he commented in an email to a city of Seattle staffer.
Burien banned sleeping in public during nighttime and early-morning hours; the ban went into effect November 1.
