Tag: Compassion Seattle

City Council, Courts, Elections, Equity, homelessness, Morning Fizz, race

Judge Strikes Homelessness Charter Amendment from Ballot; King County Equity Now Gets New City Contract

1. Late Friday afternoon, King County Superior Court Judge Christine Shaffer struck Charter Amendment 29, the “Compassion Seattle” homelessness initiative, from the November ballot, agreeing with opponents of the measure that it went beyond the scope of the initiative process. Specifically, Shaffer said, the amendment attempted to overrule the city of Seattle’s authority to determine its own homelessness and land-use policies—authority granted to local jurisdictions by the state legislature that cannot, she said, be overturned by an initiative at the local level.

The amendment, if adopted, would require the city council to spend a minimum of 12 percent of its general fund revenues on homelessness, dictating further that in the first year, that money would have to pay for 2,000 new units of “emergency housing” (shelter). It would also change local land use and zoning laws by requiring the city to waive code requirements, regulations, and fees to “urgently site” the projects it would mandate.

The groups that sued to remove the proposal from the ballot, including the Seattle/King County Coalition on Homelessness and the ACLU of Washington, argued that the voters of Seattle lack the authority to overturn these sort of legislative decisions, and that the amendment would effectively undo the agreement the city and county made to create the new King County Regional Homelessness Authority. Judge Shaffer agreed.

“There’s a direct effort in Charter Amendment 29 to control the city’s budgetary authority and that is not disputed in this record, any more than the efforts to control zoning and land use is disputed,” Shaffer said. “These are measures specifically required by Charter Amendment 29, and they both are outside the scope of a proper initiative in a way that is not even close. There are so many prior Supreme Court cases on both those topics.”

In arguing for the amendment, Compassion Seattle’s attorney Tom Ahearne said the court should let the proposal move forward and give opponents a chance to challenge it if and when it’s adopted. “When thousands of voters have signed a petition, opponents should not be able to hold the people’s measure hostage, merely because it opposes the policy or raises questions about the measure’s validity,” he said. “Instead of rushing to suppress the vote, this court should allow citizens to consider this charter amendment in November, and if citizens adopt it, allow the plaintiffs’ claims to be fully litigated and resolved through the trial court and appellate process.”

Judge Shaffer said she personally liked the solutions proposed in the amendment, and might vote for it if it was on the ballot. “But as judge,” she continued, “it cannot stand, and I am required to strike it from the ballot.”

“Judge Shaffer’s ruling affirms well-established limits to the local initiative process and recognizes the importance of the proper functioning of our democratic systems,” ACLU of Washington staff attorney Breanne Schuster said in a statement. “We are pleased that CA 29 will not stand as an impediment to solutions that meaningfully address our housing crisis and do not punish people for trying to meet their basic life-sustaining needs like shelter, sleep, and food.”

In a statement issued after the ruling, the Compassion Seattle campaign said that while they were “gratified that Judge Shaffer said that she would have voted for Charter Amendment 29 if given that option, we strongly disagree with her ruling today denying Seattle voters the opportunity to have their voices heard on the number one issue facing our city.” Because an appeal could not play out before the November election, the campaign continued, “We can still make our voices heard in the elections for Mayor, City Council, and City Attorney. In each race, the difference between the candidates is defined by who supports what the Charter Amendment was attempting to accomplish and who does not.”

2. Last month, Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan and the city’s Human Services Department (HSD) announced that 33 community organizations would share the $10.4 million set aside to invest in “community safety capacity building,” one of many simultaneous efforts to support non-law enforcement approaches to public safety sparked by last summer’s protests.

One of the groups that will receive funds is King County Equity Now (KCEN), the coalition-turned-nonprofit that led the push for a city-wide participatory budgeting program—and, when the council supported their plan, took the reins of the Black Brilliance Research Project, intended to lay the foundations for public-safety-focused participatory budgeting in Seattle. KCEN’s brief tenure as a city sub-contractor ended ignominiously when the project’s head researchers left the organization because of alleged financial mismanagement, as well as alleged mistreatment of queer researchers and researchers born outside Seattle. The group lost their city subcontract, and the research project finished weeks later without KCEN.

But after several months out of the spotlight, KCEN is making its quiet return to the world of city contracting. With the new grant, KCEN says it will partner with “incredible local Black-led housing service providers, like First Place Schools [a charter school provider] and Monica’s Place,” a housing development in the Central District, to conduct another research project. KCEN initially asked for $789,391; however, HSD capped grants at $585,410 because of the volume of applications. The group will have a new fiscal sponsor—Parents for Student Success, a nonprofit cofounded by King County Equity Now board chair Dawn Mason.

This second project will include “an inventory of Black community resources, hubs, places to tap in, needs, current and potential Black partnerships, current policies successes, failures, and gaps to address anti-gentrification and spatial community toward building holistic support,” according to KCEN’s response to the city’s request for proposals. The core question that would guide KCEN’s proposed research—”what does community safety and wellness look like for you in place?”—is nearly identical to the central question of the Black Brilliance Research Project. The results of the research, they wrote in their proposal, would help them and their partners create “scalable, replicable anti-gentrification models.”

The organization asked for funds to pay existing staff, to hire more people to work on the new research project, and to pay for consultants, office space, and supplies.

Since the organization’s unwilling exit from the Black Brilliance Research Project, KCEN has focused on anti-gentrification projects; the group is an offshoot of the Africatown Community Land Trust, which focuses largely on land acquisition in the Central District.

During the Black Brilliance Research Project, measuring the success of multiple wide-ranging research teams became a key challenge for KCEN. In their latest grant application, KCEN says they will track their project’s success by assessing the number and “effectiveness” of their community meetings and workshops, the “thoroughness” of their partnerships and the “quality and reach of community-led research,” among other metrics.

Elections, homelessness, housing, human services, The C Is for Crank

The C Is for Crank: Correcting the Record on Compassion Seattle
Image via seattle.gov

By Erica C. Barnett

In November, Seattle voters will (almost certainly) vote on whether to adopt Charter Amendment 29, an initiative that would require the city to divert public funds to add 2,000 new shelter beds while keeping parks and streets “clear of encampments,” according to the text of the amendment. The campaign is called Compassion Seattle, a name that suggests that by passing the initiative, voters will be supporting a compassionate approach to the crisis of unsheltered homelessness across the city.

In reality, the measure is an unfunded mandate that would force the city to create 2,000 new shelter “units” (beds) at the lowest possible cost, by diverting money from other city functions into a new fund aimed at moving unsheltered people out of places where they are visible and into places where they can’t be seen—”clearing” parks for housed people to use while spending the usual pittance to house, treat, and serve people with complicated needs.

Because initiative supporters are claiming that the measure will finally fix homelessness in Seattle, it’s extremely important to distinguish between what the charter amendment actually says and what supporters claim it would do. Here’s a cheat sheet to help inform your vote this fall.

Claim 1: Charter Amendment 29 will require the city to build housing and provide needed services, including addiction treatment and mental health care, for thousands of unsheltered Seattle residents.

Compassion Seattle leader Jon Scholes, director of the Downtown Seattle Association, said during a recent forum that the amendment “mandates…  that we invest in treatment, mental health and emergency housing and the set of services that we know are important to bringing people inside.”

This claim is simply false.

In fact, Charter Amendment 29 does not mandate any city spending on treatment, mental health care, or any specific “set of services.” Instead, it says the city “shall help fund low-barrier, rapid-access, mental health and substance use disorder treatment and services” in conjunction with King County—something the city already does through its annual budget and will continue to do as a major funder of the King County Regional Homelessness Authority.

Claim 2: We don’t need additional funding to fix homelessness; it’s just a matter of priorities.

Not only does Charter Amendment 29 fail to prescribe any specific solutions, it provides no new funding to address homelessness. Instead, it requires the city to set aside 12 percent of its existing general fund, which works out to a reallocation of about $18 million a year based on recent budgets, to support “the human services and homeless programs and services of the City.”

That’s right—all of the human services programs the city runs, which include youth and community safety programs, programs to combat domestic violence, services for elderly and disabled people, child care programs, funding for the Nurse Family Partnership, and, starting this year, a new division that will take over some functions of the police department. So if you hear an initiative supporter saying it will add another $18 million to homelessness programs, tell them it doesn’t—it creates a generic “human services” fund that can be spent for any human services purpose.

And even if every penny of the reallocated $18 million went to homelessness, it would barely scratch the surface of the problem. Nonetheless, initiative proponents continue to claim that $18 million would be enough to pay for comprehensive care, including individual housing and shelter.

DSA director Jon Scholes has even claimed the amendment would enable the city to expand JustCARE, a gold-standard program that provides hotel rooms and intensive case management to unsheltered people who are having a negative impact on neighborhoods, to every part of the city. That’s an empty promise.

Claim 3: Compassion Seattle will fund hotels and evidence-based, high-quality services throughout the city.

DSA director Scholes has even claimed the amendment would enable the city to expand JustCARE, a gold-standard program that provides hotel rooms and intensive case management to unsheltered people who are having a negative impact on neighborhoods, to every part of the city. That’s an empty promise, because JustCARE isn’t cheap—certainly not cheap enough to provide hotel rooms, case management, and comprehensive wraparound services on a budget of $18 million a year.

Do the math: At $50,000 a person (the amount JustCARE supporters say the program would cost “at scale“), annual funding of $18 million would be enough to serve an additional 360 people. The initiative claims it will get 2,000 people off the streets in the first year alone. There’s simply no way supporters can justify the promises they’re making about the quality of care their budget-adjusting measure will pay for.

Claim 4: Charter Amendment 29 will require the city to finally invest in real housing solutions for unsheltered people.

Supporters, including several mayoral candidates, have said they’re backing the initiative because it represents a new commitment to housing, forcing the city to provide individual shelter rooms and permanent supportive housing to people living outdoors. Mayoral candidate Jessyn Farrell, for example, told the Seattle Times she considers the measure “the consensus path of what we need to do around homelessness,” because it would require “interim housing, more services, more permanent supportive housing.”

Looking just at the prescriptive language of the measure, it’s clear that what it actually requires is new shelter—which the measure euphemistically describes as “emergency housing”—not housing.

This is a common misinterpretation of what Charter Amendment 29 would do. The amendment includes a lot of words about providing appropriate services and permanent, individualized housing options, but that language is aspirational (“it is City policy to…”); it doesn’t implement any actual policy. In fact, much of what’s in the amendment is already city policy, including a section stipulating that the city supports housing and services that are “tailored to individual needs and cultural differences.” (For example, HSD already has policies in place committing the department to provide culturally responsive services to diverse populations.) Saying that something is city policy and mandating spending on specific solutions are very different things.

Looking just at the prescriptive language of the measure, it’s clear that what it actually requires is new shelter—which the measure euphemistically describes as “emergency housing”—not housing.

Thousands of shelter beds might put homelessness out of sight for groups like the DSA that are concerned about the impacts of tents on businesses, but it doesn’t solve the problem, which is that thousands of people in our region lack a permanent place to live. City and regional leaders have known for many years that the old shelter-first model is an ineffective way to get people housed, which is why “housing first” is now considered a best practice. And the proposal doesn’t mandate spending on services beyond what the city is already doing. Continue reading “The C Is for Crank: Correcting the Record on Compassion Seattle” →

Elections, homelessness, human services, Morning Fizz

Intruders Halt City’s Shelter Plans; Compassion Seattle Calls Opponents “Disingenuous” Liars

1. The city’s plan to move about 40 people living temporarily at Seattle Center’s Exhibition Hall into a longtime shelter nearby has hit a snag.

Intruders have repeatedly broken into the Seattle City Light-owned building, formerly the site of DESC’s 100-bed Queen Anne Men’s Shelter, while it has been unoccupied during the pandemic. The break-ins include at least two incidents that resulted in calls to the Seattle Police Department.

The building was supposed to reopen as a shelter this week for some of the 70 or so people being displaced from Exhibition Hall, which opened as a temporary “deintensification” shelter during the pandemic and is set to close permanently at the end of this month. Instead, the city says they’re still assessing the damage and deciding how to clean up the mess.

According to a police report on April 28, officers responding to a call about some “high/intox[icated]” people occupying the building discovered that “numerous” people “had barricaded the front door with assorted items [so that] the doors would not be able to be opened.”

In addition to “debris and garbage” and “biohazards” (a common euphemism for human waste), a spokeswoman for Seattle City Light said that “the status of various mechanical and electrical elements of the building need additional assessment.” Camille Monzon-Richards, the director of the Seattle Indian Center—which was supposed to take over the building from DESC this month—was more direct. “Vandals broke in and pretty much obliterated the place,” she said.

It’s unclear how people initially accessed the building, which is now patrolled by Phoenix Security, a private security firm. According to a police report on April 28, officers responding to a call about some “high/intox[icated]” people occupying the building discovered that “numerous” people “had barricaded the front door with assorted items [so that] the doors would not be able to be opened.” The supervisor of the building said he told the people inside that they weren’t allowed to be there, and that they responded that “The Exhibition Hall [shelter] said we could be in here.”

“No subjects exited willingly,” the report continues. “A building search was conducted and all the subjects trespassing inside were removed and identified.”

Despite the security patrols, people continued to access and occupy the onetime shelter, resulting in at least two more calls to police in May and June.

The real estate and developer-funded campaign used similar “we shall overcome”-style rhetoric in another recent email.

Noah Fay, director of housing programs at DESC, said his agency is working to find shelter spots for every person who’s been staying at Exhibition Hall, including DESC’s Navigation Center in the International District. “We’re actively securing spots for them,” Fay said, and “we’re quite confident we’ll have a spot that’s going to work for everyone,” either at the Navigation Center or at another site, such as a new Salvation Army congregate shelter inside a former Tesla dealership in SoDo.

It’s unclear when the Queen Anne shelter might be habitable again. “Early estimates indicate it will take weeks for this work to be completed,” the City Light spokeswoman said. The city would not confirm that the Seattle Indian Center will take over the space once repairs are completed, although both Fay and Monzon-Richard said that was the plan.

2. The million-dollar Compassion Seattle campaign continued to portray itself as a besieged underdog this week, sending a message to supporters urging them to collect as many signatures as possible for the charter amendment on homelessness by this Friday, the deadline for the group to gather 33,000 valid signatures from registered Seattle voters. Continue reading “Intruders Halt City’s Shelter Plans; Compassion Seattle Calls Opponents “Disingenuous” Liars” →

Courts, Elections, homelessness, legislature, Morning Crank, Police, Taxes

State Goes on Offensive to Save Capital Gains Tax, Police Oversight Group Considers Candidate Forum, and Compassion Seattle Plays Victim

1. Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson filed a motion Tuesday seeking to have a Douglas County judge throw out two lawsuits against the capital gains tax. Ferguson argues in his motion that the plaintiffs filed the suits for political reasons and don’t have grounds to sue because they don’t know yet if they’d be subject to the tax.

The capital gains tax bill (SB 5096) imposes a 7 percent tax on profits of $250,000 or more from the sale of intangible financial assets, such as stocks and bonds. The bill would go into effect in 2022, but the state would not collect taxes until January 2023. Roughly 7,000 Washington taxpayers would be subject to the tax, which would generate $415 million for the state in its first year.

Three days after the legislature passed the bill, the Freedom Foundation, a conservative think tank, challenged the law in court. Less than a month later, former attorney general Rob McKenna, along with the Washington Farm Bureau, filed a second lawsuit against the bill. Both suits were filed in conservative Douglas County.

The lawsuits say taxing capital gains is unconstitutional because capital gains are property, and all property must be taxed at a uniform rate in Washington because of a 1933 state Supreme Court decision.

However, Democrats have argued that the capital gains tax is an excise (sales) tax, not a property tax, because it is triggered by the sale of financial assets.

Ferguson argued that the plaintiffs have asked the court to settle a political dispute, rather than a legal one, noting that they “are suffering no legal harm from the tax they challenge and ask this Court to issue a purely advisory political opinion.” He also argued that the lawsuits are preemptive and speculative, since the plaintiffs don’t know whether they’ll even have to pay the tax when it goes into effect in 2023.

The state Supreme Court is also hearing arguments for a lawsuit against the state’s 2019 bank business and occupation tax (HB 2167), which was also filed by McKenna. Washington State Solicitor General Noah Purcell argued at the court on May 25 that state law prohibits lawsuits against taxes until they have gone into effect. If the court sides with Purcell, the lawsuits against the capital gains tax might have to wait until state residents actually pay the tax, which wouldn’t be until 2023 at the earliest.

State Sen. Jamie Pedersen (D-43, Seattle) said that if the court dismisses the lawsuits, it will only delay the inevitable: having the state Supreme Court reviewing the law. Democrats want the court to review the tax because they believe the court would overturn the previous ruling declaring income a form of property, which would blow the doors open for an income tax.

The next hearing for the cases is set for July 13 at 10am, with Douglas County Superior Court Judge Brian Huber presiding.

2. The future of the Seattle Police Department is front-and-center in the upcoming elections, but some members of Seattle’s Community Police Commission (CPC)—the branch of the city’s police oversight system tasked with gathering community input on police reforms—are wary of wading into electoral politics.

Reverend Harriet Walden, the commission’s longest-serving member, also opposed the candidate forum. “It’s not part of our mission,” she said.

During the CPC meeting Wednesday, CPC communications director Jesse Franz described plans that are already underway for a general election forum that the CPC plans to co-host alongside a community organization involved in criminal justice reform, such as Choose 180 or Community Passageways.

But some prominent members of the commission pushed back on the plan. Suzette Dickerson, who will represent the CPC during contract negotiations with the Seattle Police Officers Guild next year, argued that hosting a candidate forum was outside the scope of the CPC’s responsibilities. From her perspective, the commission’s role is to be a sounding board for Seattle residents’ opinions on reforms to SPD; “stepping into the political arena,” she argued, would undermine public trust in the commission.

Reverend Harriet Walden, the commission’s longest-serving member, also opposed the candidate forum. “It’s not part of our mission,” she said, adding that she isn’t confident that the CPC would allow community groups opposed to downsizing SPD to have a voice in the forum. “I think that we’re headed down a path to help social engineer the defunding the police department,” she said.

The commission’s current leaders, however, supported the idea. “To me, holding a candidate forum seems within the scope of ensuring that the community is informed about what accountability may or may not look like, in particular candidates minds,” said CPC co-chair LaRond Baker.

Though the CPC can’t endorse candidates, the commission is not a neutral player in the police oversight sphere: It recommends reforms to SPD and Seattle’s police oversight system. Recent CPC recommendations have included a ban on tear gas and removing limits on the number of civilian investigators in the Office of Police Accountability. The success of those recommendations depends on the support of the mayor, the council, and the police chief, which gives the CPC a clear stake in the outcome of the election.

“Opponents have been using increasingly violent tactics against our signature collection teams,” the solicitation for funds claims. “We must persevere, and we need your help to ensure we reach 33,060 signatures by June 25.”

3. In a fundraising email Tuesday, the Compassion Seattle campaign, which is gathering signatures to get its charter amendment on homelessness on the November ballot, claimed that several of its paid signature gatherers have been attacked by people who oppose the initiative.

“Opponents have been using increasingly violent tactics against our signature collection teams,” the solicitation for funds claims. “We must persevere, and we need your help to ensure we reach 33,060 signatures by June 25.” Continue reading “State Goes on Offensive to Save Capital Gains Tax, Police Oversight Group Considers Candidate Forum, and Compassion Seattle Plays Victim” →

City Council, Elections, homelessness, housing, Mayor Durkan, Morning Fizz

Effort to Expand Hotel Shelters Has Broad Support, Recycled Statements Replace False Endorsement Claims on Compassion Seattle Website

1. City council homelessness committee chair Andrew Lewis introduced legislation this week that would lift spending restrictions on $12 million the council allocated earlier this year for hotel-based shelters, in the hope that Mayor Jenny Durkan will finally agree to invest in JustCARE, a county-funded program that has been moving people from tents to hotels in the Chinatown/International District, or other hotel-based shelter programs.

The bill, which Lewis hopes to fast-track to a vote on June 14, “no longer makes seeking FEMA reimbursement a strict requirement” for the money, Lewis said Monday. As PubliCola has reported, Durkan has declined to seek federal FEMA dollars set aside for noncongregate shelters, such as hotels, arguing that this form of federal funding is a risky proposition.

Lewis told PubliCola the city could use a number of new, non-FEMA sources to pay for hotel rooms, including $40 million in unanticipated 2021 revenues, additional American Recovery Plan Act (ARPA) funding that’s coming next year, or the $10 million fund Seattle Rep. Nicole Macri created to provide an insurance policy for cities that open non-congregate shelters.

The Downtown Seattle Association and Seattle Metro Chamber are supporting the legislation, which Lewis has described as a way of improving the climate for workers and tourists downtown while actually helping people living unsheltered instead of sweeping them from place to place. Five council members, including socialist Kshama Sawant, are sponsors.

“There’s no such thing as a cheap program for people who have really really chronic public health challenges. There’s no way for us to say we’re only going to assist these people if it comes at a certain price point.”—Seattle Councilmember Andrew Lewis

“For all the talk about division in Seattle, and all the acrimony and everything else, this is an issue where the Chamber of Commerce will stand shoulder to shoulder with Kshama Sawant, and I think that speaks to the good work that this consortium of providers have done in creating the JustCARE model,” Lewis said.

JustCARE provides hotel-based shelter to unsheltered people with high needs and multiple barriers to housing and provides intensive case management and services to put them on a path to housing. Durkan’s office has frequently derided the approach as too expensive, claiming a per-client cost of well over $100,000, which the organizations behind the program dispute. Whatever the actual cost, Lewis said the city needs to “come to terms with the fact that there’s no such thing as a cheap program for people who have really really chronic public health challenges. There’s no way for us to say we’re only going to assist these people if it comes at a certain price point.”

Lewis said he hopes to pass the legislation, and for the mayor to spend the money, before Seattle’s economy officially reopens on June 30, when the statewide eviction ban is also scheduled to expire.

A spokeswoman for Durkan said the mayor’s office “won’t be able to comment until we’ve had time to review the legislation.”

2. Compassion Seattle, the group supporting a ballot measure that would impose an unfunded mandate for the city to build more temporary shelter beds in order to keep public spaces “open and clear of encampments,” was forced to take down its “endorsements” page last week because the homeless advocates and service providers listed there had not actually endorsed the measure. Tim Burgess and Seattle Chamber CEO Rachel Smith, who talked up the measure on a Geekwire panel last week, waved away the story, suggesting that the groups just had to go through their own endorsement “processes” before officially signing on.

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This week, Compassion Seattle updated its website, replacing the “endorsements” page with one called “What People Are Saying” that uses quotes from the leaders of homeless service organizations to strongly imply endorsement while no longer overtly claiming their support. The page now includes quotes from the leaders of Evergreen Treatment Services (which runs the REACH outreach program), the Downtown Emergency Service Center, and the Chief Seattle Club, all taken from an April 1 press release announcing the campaign.

The Chief Seattle Club said they do not plan to make an endorsement, and the director of DESC, Daniel Malone, said that although he “stands by the statement I made,” the group is “not working on a formal endorsement process right now.

3. On Tuesday, the ACLU of Washington announced their opposition to the initiative. In a statement, the civil-rights group said the measure focuses on “stopgap measures” like temporary shelter to get unhoused people out of public view while doing nothing to fund long-term solutions—most importantly, housing. Continue reading “Effort to Expand Hotel Shelters Has Broad Support, Recycled Statements Replace False Endorsement Claims on Compassion Seattle Website” →

Elections, homelessness, Mayor Durkan, Morning Fizz, Police

Compassion Seattle Predictions, Street Sink Challenges, and Another Durkan Task Force Releases Recommendations

1. At a panel discussion hosted by GeekWire last week, two prominent supporters of the “Compassion Seattle” charter amendment on homelessness said voters should not read anything into the fact that the group does not, as they initially claimed, have widespread support from Seattle homeless service providers.

Late last month, in a story first reported by PubliCola, the group was forced to take down its endorsement page because many of the homeless service providers listed on the site have not actually endorsed the measure. The charter amendment would require the city to fund new shelter beds and behavioral health care from existing resources while enshrining the city’s authority to sweep encampments in Seattle’s constitution.

“Not one of those nonprofit leaders has retracted the statements they made talking about the charter amendment and why it’s a good thing,” Compassion Seattle founder Tim Burgess said. Rachel Smith, CEO of the Seattle Metro Chamber, added, “Many organizations have a process to go through [for endorsements] so I don’t think that is indicative of where they may be. … All those organizations have made statements about how they informed the language, and I think their own words are what we should lean on when we talk about about how they think about this.”

Several service providers, including the Public Defender Association, the Downtown Emergency Service Center, and the Urban League of Seattle worked with Compassion Seattle to soften the language of the initiative, which originally focused primarily on removing unsheltered people from public spaces. However, it’s far from clear that any of these groups will formally endorse the measure.

2. One of the many challenges the city has cited to explain the slow rollout of public handwashing sinks is the difficulty of disposing “graywater”—the runoff from sinks, washing machines, and showers. Unlike stormwater runoff, which flows directly into Puget Sound through the city’s storm drains, graywater (like raw sewage) has to be cleaned and processed through the city’s sanitary or combined sewer system—there’s even a federal consent decree saying so.

If the street sinks program founders, it may be because the city chose to be inflexible not just on optional requirements, like graffiti-resistant materials, but on how it empowers street sink providers to comply with the law.

The city has awarded contracts to two groups, both contingent on solving the issue of graywater disposal along with a host of other issues. The Clean Hands Collective, led by Real Change, has proposed a simple basin, fed by a regular garden hose, that would drain into a planter filled with soil; Seattle Makers, a South Lake Union makerspace, has proposed letting the water in its “handwashing station” prototype drain into a 50-gallon tank, which they would either clean with chlorine tablets or haul away to an SPU facility for disposal.

“Basically, for version 1 of this, we’re going to have to take out the [dirty] bucket and replace it and we have to figure out where the city wants us to drive that bucket of water,” Devin Barich, a volunteer with Seattle Makers, said. Barich also said Makers was considering adding “cleaning tablets” to the dirty water in the hope that that would make the water clean enough to pour down the storm drain. Continue reading “Compassion Seattle Predictions, Street Sink Challenges, and Another Durkan Task Force Releases Recommendations” →