Tag: Burien

homelessness, human services

Burien Assails Church For Hosting Homeless People Displaced by City Sweeps

By Erica C. Barnett

The Burien City Council capped off 2023 by holding an executive session last Monday to discuss “litigation or legal risks” associated with a new church-based encampment in the city, whose nighttime outdoor sleeping ban went into effect December 1. After the city swept a longstanding encampment where many of Burien’s unsheltered residents had been living, a number of people moved into a structured encampment at Oasis Home Church that has been operating since November 1.

Burien City Manager Adolfo Bailon, along with City Attorney Garmon Newsom II, has insisted that the encampment can’t operate without a temporary use permit would limit encampment operations to no more than 60 days in any calendar year.

“Oasis Home Church remains in violation of  the city’s zoning codes,” which do not allow encampments, Bailon said at last week’s council meeting. “Oasis Home Church continues to refuse to acknowledge the rights afforded to the city of Burien to protect public health and safety. … The city is not aware of how, if at all, public safety is being addressed at Oasis Home Church. We do not know of any protections in place to protect the people in the encampment and at the community at large.”

In a letter dated November 30—the day before Burien’s sweeping encampment ban went into effect—Burien assistant city attorney Ndiabou Diagana explained why the city believes it can restrict a church from hosting a homeless encampment, which is explicitly allowed under state law. Acknowledging that the state law supercedes city codes, Diagana argued that the city still has the right to require a temporary use permit because the law only prohibits cities from enforcing laws that pose a “substantial burden” on their free exercise of religion (emphasis in letter.)

One irony of the city’s decision to challenge the encampment so publicly is that many council members who voted for the sleeping ban have repeatedly said that religious and private charities, not the government, should bear the burden of helping homeless people in the city.

“Asking for a temporary use permit to know how, where, how long, and in what fashion the encampment will be run is reasonable, within Burien’s Washington State Constitution Article XI, Section 11 authority to protect health and safety, and not a substantial burden,” Diagana wrote. “Even Washington’s Religious Freedom provision prohibits practices inconsistent with peace and safety. The temporary use permit is a tool that municipalities use to ensure peace and safety.”

The thing supposedly threatening “peace and safety,” in this case, is an encampment intended to provide some sanctuary and safety for people who are homeless in a city that has effectively banned homelessness, which is precisely the type of situation that led to the law allowing churches to host encampments in the first place. One irony of the city’s decision to challenge the encampment so publicly is that many council members who voted for the sleeping ban have repeatedly said that religious and private charities, not the government, should bear the burden of helping homeless people in the city.

Oasis Home Church’s lead pastor, Mark Miller, did not respond to a request for an interview.

In its letter, the city also argued that the two-month limitation shouldn’t be a problem for the church, since the encampment’s supporters have already said it would be temporary. But this is being cute: If the church agreed to a 60-day limitation, it would have to shut the shelter down on December 30, just one month after Burien’s encampment ban went into effect.

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The city declined to respond to a list of questions from PubliCola; a spokeswoman said the city could not comment on legal matters. It’s unclear if the city plans to sue the church or the Burien Community Support Coalition, a nonprofit started by Councilmember Cydney Moore. Moore, who lost her reelection bid, was excluded from the executive session because, according to City Attorney Newsom, she would be a “party” to any future legal action.

Before joining most of the council in closed session, Newsom accused Moore of misrepresenting her connection to the encampment, charging that she “denied entry to a member of the press who was attempting to enter this site.” The “member of the press” Newsom was referring to was Jonathan Choe, a self-appointed provocateur and staffer for the right-wing Discovery Institute who takes iPhone videos of himself confronting homeless people and activists and posts them on X. Choe’s video of his encounter with Moore shows him attempting to enter the fenced encampment and Moore asking him to leave.

Laws against trespassing, along with basic ethical standards, generally prevent members of the press (and general public) from non-consensually entering privately operated shelters, sanctioned encampments, transitional housing for domestic violence victims, and other places where homeless and formerly homeless people live.

homelessness, human services

In Divided, Last-Minute Vote, Burien Says “Yes” to County’s $1 Million Shelter Offer
Burien City Manager Adolfo Bailon and City Attorney Garmon Newsom II

By Erica C. Barnett

The Burien City Council voted Monday night to take King County up on a six-month-old offer to provide $1 million and 35 Pallet shelters, voting 4-3 to accept the money and locate the temporary shelter on a vacant lot owned by Seattle City Light. The late-night vote, which came almost literally at the 11th hour, just barely met the November 27 deadline set by King County for Burien to or lose the funding, provided through a federal ARPA grant.

The Burien council has been debating what to do about the encampment, whose residents the city has repeatedly swept from place to place, since March. In September, the council prohibited homeless people from sleeping outdoors at night; that ban goes into effect on December 1.

The money will be administered through the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, which will choose a shelter provider through a competitive bidding process that, according to KCRHA spokeswoman Anne Martens, typically takes about three months. The Low-Income Housing Institute, a nonprofit that operates many tiny house villages around the region, has sent its chief strategy officer, Jon Grant, to testify in favor of the agreement at recent Burien City Council meetings, but Grant said the shelter and housing agency has not decided yet if they’ll bid on the project.

Asked about next steps, KCRHA, King County, the city of Burien, Seattle City Light, and the Seattle Human Services Department all gave different versions of the same response: They’ll have to meet and hammer out the details, so stay tuned.

One of the most important of those details is a lease between KCRHA and the city of Seattle for the use of City Light site, which a City Light spokesperson said “has not yet been negotiated [or] received.” Burien city manager Adolfo Bailon has declined to answer Burien council members’ questions about the site, claiming it would be premature to provide details before the council approved the plan to put the shelter at that location.

According to a spokesman for the Seattle Human Services Department, if the city receives a formal proposal from KCRHA, “HSD will work with KCRHA and the City of Burien to discuss next steps including potential terms and costs associated with use of the site.”

Last week, the council deadlocked over the City Light location and another potential shelter site in Boulevard Park, a low-income neighborhood near SeaTac Airport. Monday’s meeting was a hail-Mary, and a bit of a fluke: At the end of last week’s meeting, just three council members voted to support Councilmember Cydney Moore’s motion to hold one last meeting to discuss the offer, but because three others abstained (with Deputy Mayor Kevin Schilling voting “no”), Moore’s motion passed.

Councilmember Stephanie Mora—who said last week that she would not attend Monday’s meeting because she doesn’t think the government should play a role in addressing homelessness—attempted to enhance this language with an amendment saying no one could enter the site if they were “under the influence” of drugs or alcohol.

Proponents of the Boulevard Park site argued that it had plenty of access to services and food thanks to the presence of two bus lines and a nearby Dollar Tree. Opponents countered that the site was poorly served by transit, lacked access to services, and would subject tiny house village residents to particulate and noise pollution from planes overhead.  The council had already voted against allowing the shelter on a piece of city-owned land in downtown Burien, which would have given residents access to homeless services, multiple bus lines, and several full-service grocery stores.

The City Light site, Moore noted Monday, was a “compromise” between a piece of city-owned land in downtown Burien that the council had previously rejected and the Boulevard Park location, which came with its own significant baggage. Councilmember Hugo Garcia, who supported the original downtown Burien site, said the council majority’s proposal to put the shelter in a low-income, majority-minority neighborhood “smacks of white supremacy.”

“I personally don’t feel that this is necessarily ideal, but in the spirit of compromising to find something that we can move forward with I am willing to accept these terms,” Moore said.

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The “terms” Moore was referring to included a stipulation that residents can’t drink alcohol or use illegal drugs on site or in the surrounding neighborhood, among many other parameters. Councilmember Stephanie Mora—who said last week that she would not attend Monday’s meeting because she doesn’t think the government should play a role in addressing homelessness—attempted to enhance this language with an amendment saying no one could enter the site if they were “under the influence” of drugs or alcohol.

Although Mora’s amendment passed, the KCRHA, not Burien, will actually set the terms of its request for proposals for the site, and it’s extremely unlikely that the KCRHA, the city of Seattle, or any homeless service provider would agree to such stringent terms.

In an email to city manager Adolfo Bailon last Wednesday, KCRHA intergovernmental relations manager Nigel Herbig attempted to explain this—noting, for example, that while KCRHA can set broad parameters for shelter providers, such as “congregate or noncongregate,” shelter providers have the authority to establish their own rules. LIHI and other shelter providers do ban drug and alcohol use at some of their locations and have behavioral codes of conduct, but they don’t restrict access to shelter based on whether a shelter resident is “under the influence”—a standard that could require drug testing every person entering a site.

After this year’s elections, the Burien City Council will have a five-member supermajority of members who support the city’s hard-line approach to homelessness. King County’s money will run out in a year, but it’s likely that additional funding will materialize if the shelter is successful and the next council doesn’t oppose keeping the shelter open.

A poison-pill amendment, also by Mora, that would have shuttered the shelter as soon as the million dollars ran out, effectively barring outside funding for the shelter, failed.

Grant, of LIHI, said his agency “would need to see the details before deciding to move forward with an application”; their questions, he said, include when the program would end and whether LIHI would be required to use the Pallet-branded shelters that were part of the county’s initial offer, or if they could bring in their own stick-built “tiny houses,” which are larger and more homey than Pallet’s utilitarian sheds.

homelessness, human services, King County

Faced With Monday Deadline to Lose $1 Million for Shelter, Burien Takes No Action
Burien City Manager Adolfo Bailon

By Erica C. Barnett

Facing a November 27 deadline to take action on a longstanding offer of $1 million and 35 Pallet shelters from King County, the Burien City Council decided last night to do nothing.

Well, not exactly nothing: After rejecting two potential locations for a tiny shelter village—a city-owned lot in downtown Burien that currently serves as storage for a Toyota dealership and a property owned by Seattle City Light—the council voted to ask the county for an extension on the deadline to use the money, which has been available to Burien for the last six months.

UPDATE: On Tuesday afternoon, Deputy King County Executive Shannon Braddock formally declined Burien City Manager Adolfo Bailon’s request for a deadline extension. In an email, Braddock noted that the county originally started working with Burien to site a shelter in the city in March, after the city evicted an encampment from its original location outside City Hall, and formalized its $1 million offer in June.

“Since our conversations began, the only requirement to utilize this offer has been for the city to identify a location and willing property owner to site the Pallet shelters,” Braddock wrote. “We have identified funding, shelter resources, and off-set parking capacity. To the best of our understanding as of today, the city has not yet identified any location or property owner, including city-owned property, to utilize what we have secured in response to the original request for assistance.” The council will hold a special meeting next Monday, the day the deadline expires, for a final discussion, but the months-long deadlock is unlikely to change.

ORIGINAL POST CONTINUES: The votes on both locations deadlocked 3-3-1, with Councilmember Jimmy Matta—ordinarily part of the four-member anti-shelter majority—abstaining. “I’m not going to make a call for any of the sites until we as a community come together and have a real conversation,” Matta said.

A third proposal to build a temporary Pallet shelter or tiny house village on a vacant lot in Boulevard Park—a low-income food desert with minimal services—failed, after Mayor Sofia Aragon could not get anyone to second it. As Councilmember Cydney Moore noted Monday, the Boulevard Park location is directly in a flight path, with noise levels frequently exceeding 80 decibels.

Aragon also proposed a code of conduct for any future temporary shelter that would prohibit people living in the tiny structures from drinking or using drugs, including marijuana, and would bar anyone convicted of a sex offense, but because her motion to consider the code of conduct violated parliamentary procedure, it didn’t get a hearing, either.

“I don’t believe that it should be the government that has a say or even touches homelessness. I think that should be [done by the] private sector. It should be the organizations that are funded on their own that are able to come up with funding on their own to do this, which is why I don’t support accepting the King County money.”—Burien City Councilmember Stephanie Mora

Although the Boulevard Park location didn’t get a formal vote, it would have likely failed by a similar margin as the other two locations, since conservative council member Stephanie Mora indicated she would not vote for any proposal to accept the money from King County, including the Boulevard Park location supported by her council allies.

“I don’t believe that it should be the government that has a say or even touches homelessness. I think that should be [done by the] private sector,” Mora said. “It should be the organizations that are funded on their own that are able to come up with funding on their own to do this, which is why I don’t support accepting the King County money.”

Moore attempted to bring the council back at some point before next Monday—the county’s deadline for Burien to use the money—but Aragon, Matta, and Deputy Mayor Kevin Schilling all said they would be too busy with Thanksgiving obligations. (Mora said she would not attend any meeting to discuss the matter further, period.) If the county does not grant an extension, the council will meet next Monday night.

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Instead, they asked the county for another week to discuss options, though it’s not clear what could possibly break the six-month-long logjam. If Burien decides it doesn’t want the million dollars, the county will offer it to other South King County cities through a competitive bidding process.

Prior to last night’s meeting, the city appeared to be teeing up the Boulevard Park location as the preferred alternative.

In a memo purporting to weigh the pros and cons of each option, City Manager Adolfo Bailon used cherry-picked and inaccurate information to make the decision seem obvious, relying on assumptions and unsourced claims about how much a shelter at each location would cost, the ease of obtaining each location, and the kind of access each site would provide to transit, food, and services.

For example, the memo suggested that if the city accepted the money, it would be forced to eliminate specific public safety and human services programs from its budget in the future, including programs aimed at preventing youth violence, feeding people, improving downtown safety, and providing mental health services. Cities can’t actually constrain future budgets in this way, and every item on the list seemed purposefully to suggest that helping unsheltered people would mean abandoning other, more worthy Burien residents.

The city manager’s memo did not include the cost of leasing the other two sites, which are not city-owned, or include this additional expense in the sections describing the pros and cons of these locations. On Monday, Bailon said he had no idea how much renting either the privately owned Boulevard Park lot or the City Light lot would cost.

The memo also included incomplete or inaccurate descriptions of each of the three potential shelter locations. It claims, for instance, that the Boulevard Park site has a “Walk Score” of 68, based partly on its exceptional access to “food sources.” However, the actual Walk Score for the site is 56—”somewhat walkable”—and the only source of nearby food or beverages is a Dollar Tree, which does not offer any fresh or healthy food, and a liquor store.

Dismissing concerns about the lack of healthy food at this location on Monday night, Aragon said, “There’s food there. It may not be a full blown grocery store, which the neighborhood definitely needs. But there is food available there [from] either mini marts or the Dollar Tree.”

The nearest full-service grocery store, a Red Apple, is two miles and a 40-minute walk away. In contrast, the city-owned lot in downtown Burien is five minutes from three full-service grocery stores and 500 feet from the Burien Transit Center.

Bailon’s memo also made a number of unsourced assumptions about the financial impact of each location, including a claim that ending the lease with the Toyota dealership would cost “tens of thousands of dollars” in lost taxes and “potential loss of jobs”—which appears to assume the dealership would close if it had to move its cars 500 feet away to a secure covered parking lot at the transit center.

In fact, while Burien would lose $24,000 a year in lease revenue if the Toyota dealer no longer rented the lot, the dealer would save the same amount, because King County would provide its lot for free. That amount, notably, is less than half the size of a contract Bailon signed with a controversial nonprofit that provides private sweeps and distributed homeless people’s private information to police and sympathetic councilmembers less than a month ago.

Nor did the memo mention the cost of leasing the other two sites, which are not city-owned, or include this additional expense in the sections describing the pros and cons of these locations. On Monday, Bailon said he had no idea how much renting either the privately owned Boulevard Park lot or the City Light lot would cost, claiming he could not even inquire about cost until the council chose a location and “authorized me to negotiate on behalf of the city.” Bailon also suggested Seattle might “say [that] 50 percent of whatever housing units are built at the location will be for the city of Seattle, but did not provide any reason for this estimate.

A spokeswoman for the city of Burien declined to respond to a detailed list of questions on Monday.

A spokesman for King County Executive Dow Constantine could not immediately say how the county planned to respond to the Burien City Council’s request for an extension on the county’s six-month-old offer.

homelessness, King County

As Deadline to Use or Lose $1 Million in Shelter Funding Looms, Top Burien Official Offers New Explanation for Failing to Inform Some on Council

By Erica C. Barnett

Burien city manager Adolfo Bailon offered a novel explanation last night for why he failed to inform the full city council about a November 27 deadline for using $1 million in shelter funding from the county: He had, contrary to his previous claim, opened and responded to the email from Deputy County Executive Shannon Braddock, but he had “left it [marked] unopened to deal with the following week.”

The email then got buried, Bailon said, underneath a pile of messages about a sanctioned encampment at a church proposed by a nonprofit headed by Councilmember Cydney Moore, and he was unable to get back around to it until the next Friday, November 3, when he finally told the rest of the council. The encampment proposal “monopolized our time and led to a number of different things occurring” last week, Bailon said.

Aragon confirmed during the meeting that she was also aware of the deadline last week and had discussed it with Bailon during their agenda-setting meeting on Wednesday. It’s unclear which other council members besides Aragon, if any, also knew about the deadline before Bailon informed the full council in an email on November 3.

As we reported on Monday, Bailon initially said that he had not seen or responded to the time-sensitive email until a full week after it landed in his inbox, a claim PubliCola revealed as false after obtaining Bailon’s response to Braddock from King County, sent shortly after he received the letter informing him of the new deadline.

Since March, the Burien council has been debating how to respond to a group of several dozen unsheltered people who the city initially swept from a site next to City Hall and the downtown Burien library and who have since been swept from place to place. King County offered the city $1 million and 35 Pallet shelters, which can each hold two people, back in June, suggesting that the shelters go on a piece of city-owned land that currently serves as excess inventory storage for a local Toyota dealer; under the deal, the county would provide space in its own garage for the cars. In July, the council’s four-member majority voted to reject that offer, and in September, the council enacted a nighttime “camping” ban.

As we reported on Monday, Bailon initially said that he had not seen or responded to the time-sensitive email until a full week after it landed in his inbox, a claim PubliCola revealed as false after obtaining Bailon’s response to Braddock from King County, sent shortly after he received the letter informing him of the new deadline.

“I am sorry to share with you that the email from Shannon Braddock went unopened and became lost until today due to the more than 150 email messages that I have received since Sunday regarding the proposed encampment at Oasis Church,” Bailon wrote in an email to the full council and the city attorney. “I have since reviewed all unopened email messages.”

Moore challenged Bailon on his changing story, noting that by withholding the information from certain council members, Bailon deprived the council of a full week—out of four until the deadline—to secure a location for the shelter King County has been offering to fund since June. “I would like to know why the misinformation was given to council that the letter wasn’t read or open until Friday,” Moore said. However, she was interrupted repeatedly by Bailon and Aragon, who said Moore was stirring up irrelevant “drama” and creating a “distraction” from important issues.

Bailon said Moore’s claim that he had withheld information from certain councilmembers was “tantamount to slander,” and the council almost went into a closed executive session on the grounds that Moore was threatening legal action against the city.

Instead, the council meeting continued until a public commenter who opposes the encampment ban, Jennifer Fichamba, suggested Bailon should resign and return to California, where he lived before taking the job in Burien, because he lacked “compassion” for homeless residents and had “not done due diligence to understand what our community is about.”

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This led Councilmember Kevin Schilling to suggest Fichamba, an outspoken advocate for immigrant rights, was racist for saying “our Hispanic city manager [should] go back to California” and demanding that she apologize. “I am ashamed at what I just heard!” Schilling yelled. As the room erupted, Aragon shut down the meeting, clearing the chambers for 10 minutes before returning with a warning that the council could end the meeting and reconvene in private if people didn’t behave.

This wasn’t the first time in recent weeks that members of the pro-sweeps council majority had accused someone on the other side of the issue of being racist. Earlier this year, Councilmember Hugo Garcia, one of three council members who have voted against efforts to crack down on Burien’s unsheltered residents, expressed his opposition to a potential new encampment site in Boulevard Park. The fact that the council majority wanted to move people from a wealthy, white neighborhood into a poor, Black and brown one “reeks of white supremacy,” Garcia said. Both Schilling and Councilmember Stephanie Mora expressed shock at Garcia’s comment, and Mora called for Garcia to be censured for his “very racist remark.”

The city council has two more council meetings scheduled before the county’s deadline, including one on November 27. The $1 million is time-limited federal money; if Burien doesn’t come up with a plan by the deadline, the county will make it available to other jurisdictions through a standard bidding process.

Density, Development, homelessness, housing, King County, land use

Use $1 Million in Shelter Funding We Offered or Lose It, County Tells Burien

 

Burien City Manager Adolfo Bailon and City Attorney Garmon Newsom II

By Erica C. Barnett

Editor’s note: This post has been updated and re-published as an individual post due to length.

UPDATE: Although Burien City Manager Adolfo Bailon told City Council members that it took him a week to notice an email from King County imposing a November 27 deadline for $1 million in homelessness funding, emails provided by King County reveal that this claim was not true.

As we reported Friday, Bailon claimed that he failed to notice an email from Deputy County Executive Shannon Braddock sent at 11:56 am on Friday, October 27, because of 150 subsequent emails about a church-based sanctioned encampment proposed the following Sunday. The nonprofit that proposed the encampment is associated with Councilmember Cydney Moore, who has opposed encampment sweeps and voted against the city’s recently-passed “camping ban.”

The email exchange shows that Bailon responded to Braddock shortly after receiving the email last month, confirming receipt of her letter about the new November 27 deadline and saying he would speak to Mayor Sofia Aragon and council members “about the timeline set for selecting a location, and deadlines established by the federal government regarding the commitment and use of ARPA funds,” and “hope[d] to have more news to share with you soon.”

Aragon (a city council member serving as mayor) was included on the email, so was presumably aware of Bailon’s response by last week. It’s unclear whether Bailon let other allies on the council know about the $1 million deadline before claiming the email was “unopened” and “lost” one week after he opened and responded to it.

This email chain directly contradicts Bailon’s claim, made in an email to the entire council and Burien’s city attorney on November 3, that “the email from Shannon Braddock went unopened and became lost until today due to the more than 150 email messages that I have received since Sunday regarding the proposed encampment at Oasis Church. I have since reviewed all unopened email message.”

Bailon, in short, opened Braddock’s message and responded to it but did not inform the full council until a full week later, then claimed he hadn’t seen the email because his inbox was jammed with messages about a proposal from a council member with whom he has frequently clashed.

We have contacted the city’s spokesperson for a response to the new information.

ORIGINAL POST:

King County has given the city of Burien a deadline of November 27 to use or lose the $1 million the county offered to build a shelter in the city back in early June.

The initial offer included 35 Pallet shelters, which can accommodate up to two people each, along with a land swap in which the county would provide garage space to a Toyota dealer who is currently renting a city-owned parking lot to store his excess inventory, and in exchange Burien would host the shelter at that site. The Burien City Council voted down that offer in July, and since then has proposed and rejected several other sites, including a spot at the end of a SeaTac airport runway that the Port of Seattle said was “not an option for any sort of residential or housing use.”

In an email to Burien councilmembers on Friday, Burien City Manager Adolfo Bailon blamed his failure to open the Deputy County Executive’s message about the $1 million until today—a full week after he received it last Friday—on “the more than 150 emails I have received since Sunday regarding the proposed encampment at Oasis Church.” It’s unclear why constituent emails that started coming in on Sunday would make it impossible to open an email sent the previous Friday.

In a letter dated October 27, Deputy King County Executive Shannon Braddock told City Manager Adolfo Bailon and Mayor Sofia Aragon that while the county “appreciate[s] the City’s work to find a suitable location,” the source of the $1 million is time-limited federal American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds that need to be used before they expires. “[I]f the City of Burien has not identified a suitable location by November 27, 2023, we will choose to allocate this money to support homelessness response through a different process and withdraw the current offer. The new process will still allow Burien to potentially receive the funding, but is not a guarantee of funding.”

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In an email to Burien councilmembers on Friday, Bailon characterized the letter as “a 30-day notice of intent to withdraw its offer.”

He also blamed his failure to open the Deputy County Executive’s message about the $1 million until today—a full week after he received it last Friday—on “the more than 150 emails I have received since Sunday regarding the proposed encampment at Oasis Church.” It’s unclear why constituent emails sent over the course of a week beginning last Sunday would make it impossible to open an email about a $1 million contribution from the county since the previous Friday.

As we reported yesterday, a nonprofit run by Burien City Councilmember Cydney Moore reached an agreement with the church to open a temporary clean and sober encampment at the church.

The city has shown that it will fast-track funding for projects that have the support of the council majority and the city manager. On Monday, as I reported this morning, Bailon signed a no-bid, contract with Discover Burien, a business group that is expected to subcontract with The More We Love—a controversial nonprofit run by a Kirkland real estate broker named Kristine Moreland—to respond to encampments in the city and “serve as [the Burien Police Department’s] primary de-escalation effort.”

homelessness

Burien Signs $49,000 Contract for Encampment Response, with Controversial Private Sweeps Provider Doing the Work
Image via City of Burien

Editor’s note: This post has been updated and expanded since this morning.

Editor’s note 2: This post has been updated on Friday, November 3 to include a link to the contract and more details about its terms.

By Erica C. Barnett

The city of Burien has signed a two-month, $49,000 contract with Discover Burien, a local business association, which—according to multiple sources—will hire a controversial nonprofit called The More We Love as a subcontractor to respond to and remove encampments in the city. The city would only officially confirm the contract with Discover Burien, but the city council has been publicly discussing the contract with The More We Love for months.

City manager Adolfo Bailon has the authority to sign contracts under $50,000 without seeking approval from the city council. The contract is signed by Bailon and Debra George, the director of Discover Burien.

The More We Love is a recently formed nonprofit founded and run by Kirkland mortgage broker Kristine Moreland, whose prior experience with homelessness involves volunteering with Union Gospel Mission, a religious nonprofit that runs a shelter in downtown Seattle, and offering paid encampment “sweeps” at a rate of $515 for each person removed.

The owner of Grocery Outlet property where a group of unsheltered people had relocated after an earlier sweep paid Moreland’s group to remove them from his property earlier this year. In emails to city officials obtained by PubliCola, Moreland has disparaged longstanding outreach and case management groups like REACH and implied that she had access to resources that mainstream homeless groups do not. However, there is little evidence for Moreland’s claims, and experienced outreach providers working in the city say the population of the encampment hasn’t significantly changed over the seven months since the city swept the group from its original location outside Burien City Hall.

The Burien spokesperson did not respond to questions about why the city is not contracting directly with The More We Love, as originally proposed. However, the issue of insurance has come up repeatedly in public meetings about the proposal, and The More We Love may not have the minimum $2 million commercial insurance policy required to contract with the city.

The contract focuses on the encampment’s latest location, at Ambaum Blvd. SW and SW 120th St, along with any “other Burien sites requiring services/support.” The three-page scope of work is vague and does not include any performance metrics or deliverables— routine components  of typical homeless service contracts. Instead, it says the subcontractor—that is, The More We Love—will perform a  “general intake of all camp residents,” “communicate with all partners performing work as necessary,” and “identify options for shelter” that are, at a minimum, “indoors.”

According to the contract, the subcontractor will also “serve as [the Burien Police Department’s] primary de-escalation effort” and be “the primary conveyer of ordinance-specific information to campers that affect the unhoused community.”

In September, the Burien City Council passed an ordinance banning unsheltered people from sleeping in the city overnight. After that vote, Councilmember Sarah Moore—who opposed the ban—asked for a public briefing before Bailon signed the potential contract, which at least some city council members still haven’t seen.  Although a four-member council majority has expressed support for paying Moreland’s group to remove encampments, a public hearing would have provided an opportunity for dissenting council members and the public to weigh in and ask questions about the contract.

George, the director of Discover Burien, is also the founder and operator of a local animal shelter called Burien CARES. If that name sounds familiar, it’s because the group rented a city-owned lot—at the bargain-basement price of $185 a month—where unsheltered people had moved after an encampment sweep in March and promptly forced them to leave. The city charged Burien CARES bargain-basement rent—just $185 a month—and the land is now a dog park.

Burien CARES founder and director Debra George, meanwhile, was recently sued by three of the animal shelter’s employees, who alleged that their job duties routinely required them to work more than 40 hours a week, without additional pay, and that one of the three employees was improperly classified as an overtime-exempt manager.

George was recently sued by three of Burien CARES’ employees, who alleged that they were routinely required to work more than 40 hours a week, without additional pay, in order to perform their duties, and that one of the three employees was improperly classified as an overtime-exempt manager.

The “animal control and shelter operations were chronically understaffed,” the lawsuit claims, “and the operation and maintenance of both required Plaintiffs to regularly work more than 40 hours per week, even though Defendant George indicated they would never be paid for overtime hours.”

In her response, George denied most of the allegations, and said the three employees would often show up late and leave early to keep from going over 40 hours a week, “because they were told repeatedly that overtime was not authorized.” The response also argues that George was not the workers’ employer or supervisor, but a fellow employee of Burien CARES; however, George founded and incorporated the organization, serves as its only registered agent, and is the group’s primary governor—a person with authority to make decisions on behalf of a business.

As we’ve reported, The More We Love’s Moreland was sanctioned in 2020 for violating consumer mortgage lending laws, and was allowed to keep her license in exchange for fines that she subsequently failed to pay. Additionally, she has faced criminal and civil charges related to an alleged DUI and unpaid credit card bills. Earlier this year, she distributed a detailed spreadsheet containing personal details and sensitive medical information about dozens of homeless individuals to political allies, police, and the real estate investor who paid her group to sweep the Grocery Outlet property.