Tag: King County Council

King County, Police

King County Council Committee Recommends Replacing Law Enforcement Oversight Director

OLEO Staff - King County

By Paul Kiefer

On Tuesday, a majority of the Metropolitan King County Council’s Employment and Administration Committee (which includes all nine council members) voted not to extend the contract of Office of Law Enforcement Oversight (OLEO) Director Deborah Jacobs, as well as to accept the findings of an independent investigation into allegations that Jacobs made a series of inappropriate or discriminatory comments to her staff over the course of her four years with the county.

Council chair Claudia Balducci announced that she would introduce the proposal ending Jacobs’ contract in a press release on Monday evening. In her statement, Balducci praised Jacobs’ work as OLEO director, writing that she “has worked diligently to fulfill OLEO’s mission to hold the King County Sheriff’s Office (KCSO) accountable for providing fair and just police services.” However, Balducci added that based on the findings of an outside investigation into claims made against Jacobs by OLEO staff, the office would “benefit from new leadership.”

The council hired the law firm Ogden, Murphy and Wallace to conduct the investigation earlier this year after a number of employees accused her of making inappropriate comments. The investigating attorney, Karen Sutherland, concluded that Jacobs had engaged in conduct  “inconsistent” with council policies against harassment and discrimination in five instances, and found that three other complaints were unfounded or unsupported by evidence.

Sutherland added that she found no evidence of “criminal misconduct” by Jacobs.

The five complaints Sutherland found convincing included an incident in which Jacobs apparently dismissed an applicant for a public relations position as “just a white male” (hiring decisions based on race are illegal in Washington), and one in which she said she could only imagine a white man as OLEO deputy director.

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Two other claims were connected to non-work social events. In one case, Jacobs said she could not invite any of her employees to her annual women-only Roe v. Wade anniversary party so as not to exclude a male employee. In another, Jacobs said she would not invite her employees to a social event so as not to single out an employee who was single. In the fifth and final instance, Jacobs reportedly praised an employee for his “race and size,” claiming it helped him gain the trust of sheriff’s officers. That employee told Sutherland that he’s struggled with weight-related insecurity for much of his life, but added that he didn’t feel comfortable telling Jacobs that her comments had been hurtful.

In a response to the investigation she sent to council members in July, Jacobs acknowledged that she had “used some terms that are not appropriate even when used casually and with no ill intent,” adding that in response to the complaints, she has “actively sought to alter [her] language choices.”

However, Jacobs said some of the findings of the investigation took her comments out of context. For example, Jacobs wrote she made her comment that OLEO could only be headed by a white man “with a sense of irony and deep frustration.” As evidence, she pointed to the fact that she promoted Adrienne Wat, an Asian woman, to the position not long after she made the comment. Continue reading “King County Council Committee Recommends Replacing Law Enforcement Oversight Director” →

City Council, homelessness, King County, Mayor Durkan

As County Heads Into Homelessness Vote, City Council Considers Putting On the Brakes

As King County’s Regional Policy Committee heads into a vote on the much-altered regional homelessness authority proposal on Thursday morning, the fate of the plan remains far from clear. Although the proposal has enough votes to pass the RPC, Seattle City Council members have expressed major concerns, and could ultimately end up sending the county, Seattle, and suburban cities back to the drawing board. The RPC, King County Council, and Seattle City Council all have to vote to approve the plan for it to go into effect.

Council member Deborah Juarez, who sits on the RPC, will reportedly vote for the plan tomorrow morning but will make a formal statement that the city has outstanding concerns about the plan. (Juarez did not immediately return a request for comment Wednesday night). The city council will discuss potential amendments to the plan itself at their meeting tomorrow afternoon, and could introduce amendments formally on December 12, four days before the deadline to move the proposal forward this year. If the council amends the plan, negotiations with the county will start all over again next year.

A majority of the King County Council, with the approval of Mayor Jenny Durkan and King County Executive Dow Constantine, have agreed on significant changes to the proposal—which has been in the works for most of the last year—over the last few weeks.

Seattle council members, as well as representatives for Human Service Department employees who will eventually work for the new authority, have raised concerns about what they consider a rush to pass the dramatically altered proposal before they’ve had a chance to consider the impacts of the changes. Perhaps most significantly, the new plan would shift budgeting and policy authority away from a board of experts and onto a panel of elected officials, including representatives of suburban cities that aren’t paying into the plan. Seattle has pledged to pay for $73 million, or 57 percent, of the new authority’s budget.

A memo from the city council’s central staff explained the differences between the original plan and the new proposal, which has emerged over the past few weeks.  I’ve outlined the changes before, but here are a few of the most significant:

• The new plan would create a 12-member governing board made up primarily of elected officials from Seattle (three members), King County (three members), the Sound Cities Association of suburban cities (three members), plus three members with lived experience of homelessness, one of whom must live outside Seattle. Previously, this group was known as the steering committee and would have had seven or eight members, including two with lived experience.

The changes would mean that, in theory, the board could have as few as three Seattle representatives—compared to a minimum of four suburban representatives— despite the fact that Seattle is contributing 57 percent of the funding for the new authority while suburban cities are contributing nothing. Potential amendments could change some of the geographic requirements to give Seattle more mandatory representation on the board.

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• A lower-level “implementation board” made up of experts and people with lived experience would be appointed by the governing board and a new advisory committee.

This board would be stripped of most of the authority it had in the original plan, proposing budgets and policy plans that could then be amended by as few as six members of the 12-member governing board. (For example, if only the minimum quorum of nine members showed up to a meeting, a six-member supermajority of that quorum could vote its preferred policies through. Even if all 12 members were present and voting, the nine elected officials could overrule the three members with lived experience on any vote.) The only decision that would require more than this six-vote minimum is a vote to fire the executive director. Potential amendments, hinted at in the council memo, might make it more difficult for the board of elected officials to amend budget and policy decisions.

• The new plan requires “sub-regional planning” (meaning that suburban cities can have localized plans with policies that differ from Seattle’s) and removes a mandate that these plans be evidence-based and informed by race and social justice principles, in line with a still-incomplete Regional Action Plan. Low-barrier shelters and Housing First policies are examples of evidence-based practices that some suburban cities may be reluctant to embrace. “Given the exclusion of such language, it is possible that a five-year plan that includes sub-regional planning will not reflect a uniform, defragmented approach to ending homelessness,” the central staff memo says. A potential amendment might require these sub-regional plans to align with the goals and principles of the RAP.

The council memo also suggests that in lieu of approving the new proposal or adopting amendments in the next week—the council has scheduled its last special homelessness committee meeting for December 12, with a final vote on December 16—council members could adopt a resolution committing to continue work on the plan in 2020 and directing the city’s Human Services Department to move forward on the 2020 contracting process with the county.

Delaying until next year would mean that outgoing homelessness committee chair Sally Bagshaw wouldn’t get to vote on the final plan (which she characterized as “all good” at a briefing earlier this week), and would force the county to regroup and hold additional public meetings as well. But a month or two of delay could give the city a chance to take a closer look at a plan that looks far less “transformative” than proponents of regional governance—who’ve been pushing for major governance changes not for months, but years—have hoped.

homelessness, King County

Questions Raised about Accountability and Goals of New Regional Homelessness Authority

King County Council members and officials from suburban cities raised new concerns yesterday about a proposal to merge the city of Seattle and King County’s homelessness programs into a single agency during Wednesday’s meeting of the county Regional Policy Committee, which county council members as well as representatives from Seattle and several suburban cities. In addition to questions about whether the new body will be too “Seattle-centric,” officials pressed county staffers on two key points: Will this new agency make real strides toward addressing “root causes” and actually solving homelessness? And will its governing board be accountable to … well, anyone?

The first question was posed most pointedly by King County Council chair Rod Dembowski, who is on the fence about whether to support the restructure. Looking back to the five “root causes” of homelessness that were identified at the end of the lengthy One Table process, Dembowski asked county Department of Community and Human Services director Leo Flor if it was accurate to say that the regional consolidation “Will not play in a meaningful way to addressing those root causes; rather it is narrowly tailored to the crisis response to folks living unsheltered.” Flor responded, “You are exactly correct,” adding that if programs addressing root causes can be thought of as branches of primary care, “what we are describing and proposing is a more efficient and consolidated emergency room.”

“What improvement in people’s lives would you expect to see if we did what the executive and mayor were asking us to do?” Dembowski pressed.

“Consistent improvement on a problem that’s been hard to improve consistently,” Flor responded.

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The other issue was about governance—specifically, the structure of the two boards that will sit atop the new regional authority like tiers of a layer cake. The smaller of two boards would be a steering committee made up of up to six elected officials and two people who have experienced homelessness, whose duties would be limited to confirming members of the governing board that would actually be in charge of the agency; approving that board’s five-year plan and budget without amendment; and confirming or removing governing board members, all by a majority of a plurality vote. (In other words, if four or five members showed up to a meeting, three members would constitute a majority of those present). Continue reading “Questions Raised about Accountability and Goals of New Regional Homelessness Authority” →

Guest Contributor, housing, King County, labor

Guest Editorial: Spend County Revenues on Housing, Not a $180 Million Stadium Subsidy
SafecoFieldTop.jpg
Image via Wikimedia Commons

The following is a guest editorial about a proposal by King County Executive Dow Constantine to spend $180 million in hotel/motel tax revenues on maintenance and capital improvements to Safeco Field, on which the Seattle Mariners’ lease is about to expire. The Mariners, and Constantine, have argued that the county has an obligation to spend future hotel/motel tax revenues on the stadium; housing advocates have countered that a larger portion of the lodging tax should be spent on affordable, transit-oriented housing. The King County Council meets this morning to discuss, and possibly vote on, the proposal.

Later this morning, the King County Council could decide how to allocate the remaining 25 percent of the county lodging tax revenues. Council members face a stark choice: Use the dollars for affordable housing or offer a $180 million subsidy to a private corporation. The highest value of public and economic benefit the County can create with this revenue is to invest in affordable housing, community development, and good jobs.

Demand for affordable housing in our region is at an all-time high, which is why we should use lodging tax revenues to help address homelessness and promote affordability. To maximize economic benefit from the hotel/motel tax, the County should also create high quality jobs for our communities by utilizing community workforce agreements with housing developers or local housing authorities. These agreements help create apprentice opportunities and ensure dollars flow to the pockets of lower-income workers, which creates a greater economic benefit since low-income households spend a greater percentage of their income on goods and services than higher-income households do.

Multi-billion-dollar for-profit corporations asking for public subsidies must prove that these resources are better spent on their enterprises than other compelling public needs, like affordable housing. And they must commit to transparency and accountability with regard to how those resources are used. The Mariners are a successful team that many people love and support. Yet, for continued public investment, they must demonstrate exactly what they need public resources for and how it will support good jobs in the region. To date, the Mariners ownership have simply not met this benchmark.

Recent letters from Craig Kinzer (current) and Terrence Carroll (former), members of the Public Facilities District (the committee that has been in lease negotiations with the Mariners) reveal that the proposed lease is simply a bad deal that should be revisited.

The Mariners are a successful team that many people love and support. Yet, for continued public investment, they must demonstrate exactly what they need public resources for and how it will support good jobs in the region. To date, the Mariners ownership have simply not met this benchmark.

The Mariners’ owners even want to do away with the annual requirement that they publicize financial information about where the public dollars go, so we won’t know until after the fact whether the dollars were used appropriately. The new lease deal must include financial transparency so that the public can understand how investment in a stadium would maximize public benefit and support good jobs. Instead of a win-win deal for the public, the lease and subsidy appear to be a win-more for the Mariners ownership.

We recommend the following uses and requirements of the County’s lodging taxes.

1. The vast majority of the remaining 25 percent of future lodging tax revenue should be committed to affordable housing. Funding should also be considered for community-based economic development that creates even more jobs and stability for communities at risk of displacement. By investing in community development, we will create good jobs, apprenticeship opportunities, and net income for our communities as families find more money in their pockets for basic needs.

2. Any projects funded by lodging tax revenues must be covered by a community workforce agreement (CWA) that guarantees good jobs, worker retention, high-quality apprenticeship opportunities, and a priority to hire local residents most in need of those opportunities. Both the City of Seattle and King County have highly successful priority hire programs that show tremendous public value when done right.

3. Any use of lodging tax revenues must have the highest level of transparency and accountability. While nonprofit housing developers typically must account for every public dime that they spend, we do not apply the same scrutiny to private corporations that receive public resources. Any money that goes to the ball park should require that the Mariners ownership open their books to the public and show the number and quality of jobs that they are creating with public support.

As a result of our upside-down tax code, where low-income people pay up to seven times more of their income in taxes as the top one percent, state and local revenues for needed services and community development are scarce. We must take care on how our region allocates funds, and ensure that new investments maximize public and economic benefit. Like the other groups who are also interested in these funds, the Mariners must demonstrate clear need and a clear financial case for their request.

Many of the King County Councilmembers have not yet decided how to prioritize investments from the lodging tax. Now is the time to let them know that housing, good jobs and meeting community needs is the highest priority.

Nicole Vallestero Keenan-Lai is the Executive Director at Puget Sound Sage. She has more than a decade of experience in research, advocacy, civic engagement, racial justice organizing, social services, and community and business outreach.

David Rolf is the founding president of SEIU 775, which represents more than 45,000 long-term care workers in the Pacific Northwest. He serves as an International Vice President of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU).

Misha Werschkul is the executive director of the Washington State Budget & Policy Center, where she guides the organization’s strategic vision and ensures its position as a leading voice shaping the debate around budget priorities.
Elections, homelessness, housing, King County, Morning Crank, Poverty, Taxes

Afternoon Crank: Competing for a Limited Number of Units

1. While the city of Seattle was debating over the merits of the head tax last week, the King County Auditor’s Office quietly released a report on the region’s response to homelessness that concluded, among other things, that “rapid rehousing”—which provides short-term rent vouchers to low-income households to find housing in the private market—isn’t working in King County. The city of Seattle’s adopted Pathways Home approach to homelessness suggests investing heavily in rapid rehousing, which assumes that formerly homeless people will be able to pay full market rent on a private apartment within just a few months of receiving their vouchers.

For this system to work, either: a) formerly homeless people must get jobs that pay enough to afford full market rent in Seattle, currently over* $1,600 for a one-bedroom apartment, before their three-to-12-month vouchers run out, or b) formerly homeless people must find housing that will still be affordable after they no longer have the subsidy. The problem, the King County report found, is that there are only about 470 private units available throughout the entire county, on average, that are affordable to people making just 30 percent of the area median income—and the competition for those units includes not just the hundreds of rapid rehousing clients who are currently looking for housing at any given time, but all the other low-income people seeking affordable housing in King County. Seattle’s Pathways Home plan would dramatically increase the number of rapid rehousing clients competing for those same several hundred units.

“Given market constraints, difficulties facilitating housing move-ins could limit rapid rehousing success,” the auditor’s report says. “As local funders increase their funding for RRH, it is possible that move-in rates will go down as more households compete for a limited number of units. Given the importance of client move-ins to later success, if this occurs additional funding spent on RRH may have diminishing benefits relative to its costs.” Additionally, the report notes that a proposed “housing resource center” to link landlords and low-income clients seeking housing with vouchers has not materialized since a consultant to the city of Seattle, Focus Strategies, recommended establishing such a center in 2016. In a tight housing market, with rents perpetually on the increase, landlords have little incentive to go out of their way to seek out low-income voucher recipients as potential renters.

2. Learn to trust the Crank: As I predicted when he initially announced his candidacy at the end of April, former King County Democrats chair Bailey Stober, who was ousted as both chair of the King County Democrats and spokesman for King County Assessor John Wilson after separate investigations concluded that he had engaged in unprofessional conduct as head of the Democrats by, among other things, bullying an employee, pressuring her to drink excessively, and calling her demeaning and sexist names, will not run for state legislature in the 47th District.

Fresh off his ouster from his $98,000-a-year job at King County, and with a $37,700 county payoff in hand, Stober told the Seattle Times‘ Jim Brunner that he planned to run for the state house seat currently held by Republican Mark Hargrove. Stober’s splashy “surprise” announcement (his word) came just days before a candidate with broad Democratic support, Debra Entenman, was planning to announce, a fact that was widely known in local Democratic Party circles. In a self-congratulatory Facebook announcement/press release, Stober said that he decided not to run after “conversations with friends, family, and supporters,” as well as “informal internal polling.” Stober went on to say that his “many supporters” had “weathered nasty phone calls and texts; awful online comments; and rude emails from those who opposed my candidacy. We chose not to respond in kind. They went low and my supporters went high.” In addition to routinely calling his employee a “bitch” “both verbally and in writing,” the official King County report found that Stober “made inappropriate and offensive statements about women,” “did state that Republicans could ‘suck his cock,'” and “more likely than not” referred to state Democratic Party chair Tina Podlodowski as “bitch, cunt, and ‘Waddles.'”

3. On Monday morning, Gov. Jay Inslee and Secretary of State Kim Wyman announced $1.2 million in funding for prepaid-postage ballots for the 2018 election. The only county that won’t receive state funding? King County, which funded postage-paid ballots for the 2018 elections, at a cost of $600,000, over Wyman’s objections last week. 

County council chairman Joe McDermott, a Democrat (the council is officially nonpartisan but includes de facto Democratic and Republican caucuses), says he was “really disappointed” that Inslee and Wyman decided to keep King County on the hook for paying for its own prepaid ballots, particularly given Wyman’s objection that the decision should be left up to the state legislature.

“She was against it before she was for it,” McDermott told me yesterday. Wyman’s office, McDermott says, “wasn’t working on the issue last year in the legislature, and yet all of a sudden she can find emergency money and appeal to the governor when King County takes the lead.”

In their announcement yesterday, Wyman and Inslee said they will “ask” the legislature to reimburse King County for the $600,000 it will spend on postage-paid ballots this year, but that funding is far from guaranteed. Still, McDermott says their decision to backfill funding for postage-paid ballots for Washington’s remaining 38 counties could set a precedent that will create pressure on legislators to take action next year. If the state believes it’s important to make it easier for people to vote in 2018, he says, “why would they argue that they’re not going to do it in the future? If it’s valuable this year, it should be valuable going forward.”

4. Dozens of waterfront condo owners spoke this afternoon against a proposed Local Improvement District, which has been in the works since the Greg Nickels administration, which many called an illegal tax on homeowners for the benefit of corporate landowners on the downtown waterfront. The one-time assessment, which homeowners could choose to pay over 20 years, is based on the increase in waterfront property values that the city anticipates will result from park and street improvements that the LID will pay for. Several homeowners who spoke this afternoon said they rarely or never visit the downtown waterfront despite living inside the LID assessment district, either because they live too far away (one condo owner said he lived on Fifth Avenue, and considered the hill leading down to the waterfront “too steep” to traverse) or because the waterfront is always clogged with tourists. Another, homeowner Jonathan Mark, said the city was failing to account for the decrease in property values that could result from “turning Alaskan Way into a freight highway.”

The median assessment on residential property owners, who own about 13 percent of the property that would be subject to the assessment, would be $2,379, according to the city’s Office of the Waterfront.

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Elections, homelessness, human services, King County, Morning Crank

Morning Crank: Bags and Bags of Shredded Ballots
DSC00114
The new version looks just like a mailbox.

1. The King County council voted 7-2—with one Republican, Pete Von Reichbauer, joining the council’s six Democrats—to spend up to $381,000 next year on postage-paid ballots for this year’s midterm and general elections. King County voters have voted exclusively by mail, or by dropping their ballots at designated drop boxes, since 2009, but it has been voters’ responsibility to buy stamps for their ballots. Voting rights advocates have argued that the postage requirement is burdensome for younger voters (who are less likely to have stamps) and very low-income voters (for whom a 49-cent stamp represents a real impediment to voting); those who oppose providing postage say that it’s voters’ responsibility to make the minimal effort required to buy a stamp, and that those who feel they can’t afford it can just trek to their nearest ballot box.

Before the measure passed, County Council members Kathy Lambert and Reagan Dunn offered several amendments that would have watered down or placed conditions on the legislation, including a proposal by Lambert to clarify that the county measure did not set any “precedent” for the rest of the state. Lambert argued that if voters in King County were able to vote more easily than voters in the rest of the state, it would put other counties, particularly more rural counties with fewer resources that are “hanging on by their fingernails,” at a disadvantage—essentially the same argument offered by Republican Secretary of State Kim Wyman when she urged the council to reject the measure one week ago. That amendment failed, as did another Lambert proposal that would have required the county elections office to turn around a complicated report about turnout and ballot box usage three days after the November election was certified. Another, from Republican Reagan Dunn, would put language on the outside of every prepaid ballot encouraging people to put stamps on their ballot anyway, ostensibly in an effort to save King County money. Although King County Elections director Julie Wise made it clear that Dunn’s amendment would almost certainly cost the county far more than it saves (election workers would have to pore over hundreds of thousands of ballots by hand, photocopy them, and mail them to the post office for a refund), the amendment actually passed, after Dunn said the language in his amendment left some wiggle room for the county to reject the idea if it cost too much.

“I like the voters’ drop boxes [because] it’s not shredded, I know it’s in, it’s going to get counted, and I know that there are very few people that are going to handle it.”—King County Council member Kathy Lambert  

Before the final vote, Lambert  offered a strange, last-ditch anecdote to explain why she opposed voting by mail. “I pay my property taxes in person,” Lambert began, because one year when she sent them by mail—she knows it was her anniversary, she said, because she was about to go to Hawaii—and they never made it to the tax assessor’s office. When she went to the post office to find out what had happened, she said, “they brought me out two huge bags of mail that had been shredded, and they said, ‘If you find your check in here, you can take it out and prove that you have found it.’ I hope that we won’t find out later on that there are bags and bags of shredded ballots that have gotten caught in the machinery,” Lambert continued. “I like the voters’ drop boxes [because] it’s not shredded, I know it’s in, it’s going to get counted, and I know that there are very few people that are going to handle it.”

Lambert did not note that voters can track their ballots, and find out whether theirs was counted or “shredded,” at the King County Elections website.

2. A rumor was circulating yesterday that ousted King County Democrats chair (AKA ousted King County Assessor’s office spokesman) Bailey Stober will announce today (or this week) that he is not running for 47th District state representative, despite announcing that he plans to do so in an interview with the Seattle Times. As I reported last week, Stober’s announcement came just two days before Debra Entenman, a deputy field director for Congressman Adam Smith, was planning to formally announce that she would seek the same position with the full support of the House Democratic Campaign Committee. The announcement gave Stober some positive press shortly after he was forced out of two positions of power when four separate investigations concluded he had engaged in sexual harassment, bullying, and multiple acts of workplace and financial misconduct. (Each of the investigations upheld a different combination of allegations).

Stober received a $37,700 settlement from King County in exchange for resigning from his $98,000-a-year position, from which he had been on fully paid leave for most of 2018. On Friday, he posted a photo on Facebook of what he said was his brand-new jeep. “New life new car 💁🏽‍♂️😏 #adulting,” the caption read.

3. Three low-barrier shelters run by the Downtown Emergency Service Center, which were all scheduled to shut down this month, will stay open for the rest of the year, though their fate after that remains uncertain. The shelters—an overnight men’s shelter on Lower Queen Anne, the Kerner-Scott House for mentally ill women in South Lake Union, and DESC’s auxiliary shelter at the Morrison Hotel downtown—lost funding under the new “Pathways Home” approach to funding homeless services, which prioritizes 24/7 “enhanced” shelters over traditional overnight shelters and withholds funding (see page 7) from agencies that fail to move at least 40 percent of their clients from emergency shelter into permanent housing. When the city issued grants under the new criteria, it increased DESC’s overall funding but eliminated funding for the three overnight shelters. All told, about 163 shelter beds were scheduled to disappear in May unless DESC could come up with the money to keep them open or another operator stepped forward.

Oddly, the decision to close at least one of the shelters does not appear to have been strictly about money, but about DESC itself. According to a letter HSD sent to concerned community members in mid-April, the city had “HSD reached out to Salvation Army to discuss the possibility of taking over operations of the Roy Street Queen Anne shelter in June when the DESC contract ends. Salvation Army has agreed and is going to have a May-Dec contract so there is some overlap time during the transition.  Shifting operations to the Salvation Army would have required a special budget allocation from the City Council to keep the shelter running under new management for the rest of the year.

DESC’s overall budget request included significant pay increases for all of the agency’s staff, who are unionized but remain notoriously underpaid, even by human service provider standards. DESC’s $8.6 million budget request for its enhanced shelter program included more than $6 million for salaries and benefits—enough to raise an entry-level counselor’s wages from $15.45 an hour to $19.53 and to boost case managers’ salaries from a high of about $38,000 to $44,550 a year. Even those higher salaries remain paltry by private-market standards, but by proposing to implement the raises all at once, DESC inflated its budget request dramatically at precisely the time when the city was looking to cut “fat” from the system and reward programs that promised fast results and cost savings for the city.

The good news for DESC (and the men and women) who use its overnight shelters) is that funding for the shelters appears to be secure for at least the rest of 2018. The bad news is that the reprieve is temporary, and major issues, including low salaries for shelter workers, remain unresolved.

If you enjoy the work I do here at The C Is for Crank, please consider becoming a sustaining supporter of the site or making a one-time contribution! For just $5, $10, or $20 a month (or whatever you can give), you can help keep this site going, and help me continue to dedicate the many hours it takes to bring you stories like this one every week. This site is funded entirely by contributions from readers, which pay for the time I put into reporting and writing for this blog and on social media, as well as reporting-related and office expenses. Thank you for reading, and I’m truly grateful for your support.