Tag: King County Jail

King County, Mayor Harrell

Agreement Between City, King County Would Allow More Jail Bookings from Across the City

By Erica C. Barnett

Mayor Bruce Harrell announced on Friday that the city and King County have reached a deal to “give Seattle access to 135 jail beds and lift booking restrictions for misdemeanor crimes prioritized by the City of Seattle.”

The new agreement would cost Seattle about $4 million more each year than the current jail contract, which elected officials such as City Council president Sara Nelson have called a waste of money, given that the county has placed limits on the number of beds the city can use.

The downtown jail has been understaffed since at least 2020, a situation that has required a reduction in the jail’s daily population in order to maintain safety. Currently, there are just under 900 people incarcerated at the downtown jail; allowing the city to max out its jail space would increase this population, requiring guards to oversee more people without additional staff. According to the announcement, the county has agreed to lift booking restrictions for certain misdemeanors, such as drug possession.

The county already lifted booking restrictions for misdemeanors committed in the downtown area; this change would open up jail beds for people accused of misdemeanors across the city. According to the mayor’s office, the city has been using, on average, about 75 beds, so the announcement means that about 60 more people arrested by Seattle police could end up at the jail at any given time. People accused of misdemeanors are generally released within a day or two and remain free while awaiting trial.

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It’s unclear what impact this agreement will have on the city’s tentative interlocal agreement with SCORE jail in Des Moines, which the city council approved earlier this year. As we noted in our coverage of the agreement, there are many logistical issues that would have to be worked out before the city could begin transferring people to the South King County facility, including transportation, access to public defenders, and a complex communications link between the Seattle Municipal Court and the jail, which has no affiliation with the city or King County.

Although we predicted ,after the city council vote, that agreement with SCORE may have been a bargaining chip to get the county to release more beds, Harrell spokesman Jamie Housen said the agreement with King County has no bearing on the separate agreement to rent 20 beds at SCORE.  “We continue to work through logistics and operational policies with SCORE,” Housen said.

Asked for a copy of the agreement, Housen said it was not finished and would be available next week. We have reached out to Constantine’s office and will update this post when we hear back.

Drugs, King County, Mayor Harrell, Police

County Jail Will Begin Booking Again for Drug Use, Other Misdemeanors In the “Downtown Activation Zone”

By Erica C. Barnett

The King County Department of Adult and Juvenile Detention has agreed to begin booking people arrested for simple misdemeanors, such as violating a recently passed law criminalizing public drug use and possession, at the request of interim Seattle Police Chief Sue Rahr, PubliCola has learned. The new policy will only apply to people arrested in the so-called Downtown Activation Zone, which stretches from the Chinatown-International District to the Denny Triangle, north of Belltown.

According to the mayor’s office, the agreement is no different than other agreements with the county to jail people committing otherwise non-bookable misdemeanors in special “emphasis areas” like the corner of 12th and Jackson; however, the downtown zone is orders of magnitude larger than prior emphasis areas, and the change in policy has no end date, unlike hot spot policing efforts.

Since the COVID pandemic, the jail has not been booking people arrested for most misdemeanors. Initially, the jail stopped booking because of health concerns; more recently, the King County Department of Adult and Juvenile Detention has restricting bookings because of a chronic shortage of guards at the downtown jail.

According to SPD spokesman Eric Muñoz, the new policy is already in effect, and officers have been given authority to use their “discretion” to decide which people to book into jail and which to divert to other non-law-enforcement options, such as the CARE Team, We Deliver Care, and LEAD. Muñoz said officers haven’t been directed to focus on any offense in particular. The jail currently books people accused of driving under the influence and domestic violence, as well as people identified by City Attorney Ann Davison’s office as “high utilizers” of the court system.

“It really will come down to the individual officer and the discretionary decision they make,” Muñoz said. “Obviously, downtown, we do have prolific drug use, so I imagine a lot of officers will make that arrest, but we do have a CARE program, we have diversion, so there are a lot of options. So it will come down to the discretion of the officer.”

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Sending people to jail is unlikely to have a significant impact on drug use and other misdemeanors downtown, because the vast majority of people jailed for misdemeanors are in jail for three days or less. According to numbers provided by the DAJD, among this group of people held for short periods, the average stay is 1.2 days, or just over 24 hours.

The average daily population of the downtown jail is typically somewhere between 800 and 900 people, with another 600 or so in the Maleng Regional Justice Center in Kent. DAJD spokesman Noah Haglund said the department is “approaching the upper for the number of jail residents we can safely house with current staffing.” The department hopes to hire another 70 corrections officers for the jail, which is down from a shortfall of about 100 officers for most of last year.

Haglund added that it’s ” impossible to predict an exact number of jail residents we can house, since staffing numbers are always in flux. Our capacity varies day-to-day based on factors such as the number of people we are guarding in the hospital as well as court appearances and medical appointments outside the jail that require transports. Also, the need to separate people into different housing units based on gender, medical needs, or behavioral problems means that some housing units won’t be completely full but will still require the same number of staff to operate.”

The decision is separate from Mayor Bruce Harrell’s decision this week to move forward on a contract with the South Correctional Entity, a jail in Des Moines where the city hopes to send misdemeanor defendants from Seattle. According to an internal SPD memo, the city plans to use SCORE to jail people who commit misdemeanors outside downtown.

A spokesperson for Harrell said that “booking in the King County Jail will remain the preferred option for the City. Prior to beginning bookings at SCORE, the City will create clear policies providing guidance on which crimes and detainees may be booked at SCORE.”

At least six people have died at SCORE in just over a year. Under the proposed interlocal agreement between the city and SCORE, Seattle would have to pay to transport inmates from Des Moines to downtown Seattle for all court hearings, which are frequent in misdemeanor cases. King County ended its short-lived contract with SCORE last year.

Through a contract that has not been “rebased,” or updated to account for inflation and capital costs since 2017, the city pays for about 195 beds in the downtown jail, of which about 80 were filled, on average, last month. In the past, the city and county have agreed to use some of the funding for unused beds for health and housing programs, and last year, the council voted to place a proviso, or hold, on $3 million of the jail bed funding with the intent of putting that money toward inflation on future jail costs or other, non-jail purposes.

Earlier this week, Council President Sara Nelson said that when she learned only 80 city-funded beds were full, her response was “I want my money back.” However, Haglund says that because the city hasn’t been paying the true cost of those beds, “there is no underspend, no money to return.”

“While the city’s bed use is lower than the total outlined in the contract, they have not been paying what it actually costs the county to house people they bring to the jail,” Haglund said. If they had and were being billed at the actual cost to the county, even at their current lower billable population, they would be paying a similar amount as what they’re paying now. There is no underspend, no money to return.”

City Council, criminal justice, Drugs, Police

“A Shameful Legacy of Defund the Police”: Council Blames Protests, COVID for Current Public Safety Issues

Interim Police Chief Sue Rahr says she supports a new kind of secure detention for drug users, while City Attorney Davison blames jail booking restrictions for persistent problems downtown.

By Erica C. Barnett

Members of the Seattle City Council outdid each other calling for more police, more jail, and harsher punishments for people, like those who sell drugs, who “need to be contained,” as Councilmember Bob Kettle put it, during a meeting of the council’s public safety committee Tuesday morning.

Rob Saka, for instance, blamed the city’s current public safety issues on events from four years ago (and the fact that the King County Jail isn’t booking people for most misdemeanors, but more on that in a second). “The public safety challenges that we’re experiencing today are a shameful legacy of the Defund the Police movement,” Saka said. “And that was wrong then and it’s wrong now. And you know, from my perspective, defund is dead. It is not the dominant, controlling policy narrative dominating our policy discussions.”

After describing his “disadvantaged background,” Saka suggested that school closures during the COVID pandemic were also partly to blame. “There’s no way I would be here the dais right now if I had to rely on remote learning, adding that schools needed to be “the last to close and the first to reopen” during COVID.

Maritza Rivera, not to be outdone, said it made her “really angry” that people selling drugs in Magnuson Park, in her district, aren’t being arrested and jailed. “We need to be booking drug dealers, who are causing the most harm, and then diverting the users who actually need services,” she said. (Research indicates that nearly nine in ten people who sell drugs are also drug users.) “There’s a high school, there’s an elementary and a middle school off of Aurora, and these kids are getting solicited” by sex workers, Rivera added. 

Not to be outdone, Council President Sara Nelson said she was “shocked” by the fact that the average daily population at the jail is currently about 80, down from a pre-pandemic average of around 180 to 280. The jail imposed booking restrictions during the pandemic, and has kept those restrictions ever since because there are not enough jail guards to maintain safety standards with a higher inmate population. “I want my money back, basically,” Nelson said.

The purpose of the briefing was for interim Chief Rahr, Davison, and CARE (911) Department Chief Amy Smith—who had just received the committee’s unanimous vote for appointment as permanent chief—to update the council on the “criminal justice ecosystem.”

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Rahr, who has identified hiring more police officers as her primary goal, said the city should help applicants make it past the initial hurdles by adopting a police hiring test that’s more “low-barrier” than the one the city currently uses. Rahr’s comments seemed like an explicit swipe at the Public Safety Civil Service Commission, which has strongly supported keeping the current test, which was designed to help weed out people who are temperamentally unqualified to be officers.

“I know that [the PSCSC] believe  deep in their soul that the test they’re using now is extremely important,” Rahr said, but “my experience in police hiring is the first initial screening test doesn’t need to go that deep, because we’re literally just trying to make sure people have the minimum qualifications, [and then] we have a deep backgrounding process.”

In the competition for police officer applicants, she continued, “the agency that makes that removes the most barriers to get in the door is going to have a larger pool.”

As we’ve reported, the PSCSC supports the current test, developed in collaboration with SPD in response to the 2012 federal consent decree, because it was designed to help weed out candidates who would have problems adhering to Seattle’s constitutional policing requirements. Last week, the PSCSC announced that more people applied and passed the exam in June than in any month since 2019.

Davison said that in her view, the reason crime has gotten so bad downtown is that poliec—who now have the authority, thanks to a law adopted last year, to arrest people for misdemeanor drug use—still can’t book people into the downtown jail for misdemeanors like drug possession, smashing windows, or animal cruelty.

Wait—animal cruelty? Davison said she brought up animals because animal cruelty is often a precursor to domestic violence*, and it’s important to catch it early to prevent young people from becoming abusers in the future. Davison did not explain how being locked up in the King County Jail rehabilitates people who commit misdemeanor animal abuse (harming animals is also a gross misdemeanor and a felony, depending on the extent of the abuse), although she did say she was specifically referring to “early interventions” for young people.

Saka called the booking restrictions “a real head-scratcher,” and said that without the threat of jail, there is “no deterrence whatsoever to any crime—zero.” Criminals, he continued, “can violently smash a business’s window without fear of being booked, to spend a night in jail to think about that. … And animal cruelty—they locked Michael Vick up for years for animal cruelty, and in the city of Seattle, someone can’t spend a night in jail? They can freely abuse an animal. We need to do better.” (Vick was convicted of multiple felonies stemming from his involvement in a dog-fighting ring, and served 21 months in federal prison.)

Rivera said she was “super angry that we’re paying for service that we’re not getting,” referring to county jail beds. “We are not trying to jail folks that have addiction—we need to help these folks—but we need to get the people that are causing the most harm, that are taking advantage of our vulnerable populations, and these people need to be in jail.”

Davison did point out that people who wind up in her “high-utilizers initiative” can be booked into jail under an agreement between Seattle and the county.

On Tuesday, Mayor Bruce Harrell proposed a new contract with SCORE, the regional jail in Des Moines, to incarcerate people accused of misdemeanors in Seattle.

The potential contract is controversial. In May, members of the union that represents staff for the King County Department of Public Defense sent a letter to city officials, including the council, opposing the contract, arguing that the regional jail makes it difficult for people to speak to their attorneys and get to court hearings in Seattle, diminishing the quality of representation they receive. As we’ve reported, six people have died in custody at SCORE in just over a year, including at least one from malnutrition and dehydration; SCORE contracts its medical service out to a private company, Wellpath. King County halted its own pilot program to transfer inmates to SCORE last year.

Rahr said she would also support a “third” kind of secure detention facility for people who commit drug-related crimes, including public drug use, separate from jail or diversion programs like LEAD.

“There are some people who are too medically fragile to be booked in jail, but they’re also too dangerous to be left in an emergency room or be left in a community,” Rahr said after the meeting. “If we had a place to take them that was secure, where they could get the medical intervention they need, particularly for people who are on fentanyl… we could significantly improve the conditions on the street” while also getting people “stabilized and connected with the services they need.”

Asked, after the meeting, about her comment that she wanted the city’s money back, Nelson said, “I do want to make sure that the terms of the contract that we have with the jail are being fulfilled. If we are paying for jail services and we are not getting them, what’s the deal? We need some place to take the people who are perpetrating crimes against my constituents.”

In previous years, the city has clawed back funding that would otherwise have paid for empty jail beds and repurposed it for community-based health and housing programs. During the 2022 budget process, the council voted to place a proviso, or hold, on $3 million the city would have otherwise spent on jail beds it wasn’t using, with the intent of putting that money toward inflation on future jail beds or to other, non-jail purposes. Nelson voted against the amendment.

*And certainly not, as we cynically assumed, because Seattle residents care more about dogs than human beings trapped in the carceral system.

criminal justice, Drugs, King County, Mayor Harrell, Police, Uncategorized

Another Death at SCORE, as Seattle Considers Contract With South King County Jail
Photo by Andrew Engelson

By Andrew Engelson

In March, a 21-year-old woman, Makena Buckland, died while in custody of the South Correctional Entity (SCORE), a jail in Des Moines owned and operated by six cities in South King County. This marks the fifth death in custody at the jail in a span of a little over a year—a high number for a jail that houses between 600 and 850 inmates per year.

According to Bellevue Police Department spokesman Seth Tyler, Buckland turned herself in to the jail on February 29 on a warrant issued by BPD. The King County Medical Examiner’s Office says Buckland died in custody on March 4, and that cause of death is still under investigation.

The death was first reported on in an article in March by Sound Publishing, which operates community newspapers in South King County. SCORE did not post a notice of the death on its website, and has also removed previous press releases about the prior four deaths from its website.

Last year, a woman died of malnutrition at SCORE – raising questions about medical care at the jail, which is provided by a national company thatw was the subject of Congressional hearings in December and which been accused of widespread incidents of negligence, insufficient staffing, and substandard care. King County ended a short-lived agreement to house inmates at SCORE last year.

SCORE director Devon Schrum declined to comment on Buckland’s death, saying, “The process of investigating an unexpected fatality and preparing a report of that investigation is governed by state statute and I cannot provide further comment.”

SCORE has still not filed reports on two of the four deaths last year with the Washington State Department of Health, even though all jails in the state are required to file these reports within 120 days of an incident.

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City attorney Ann Davison and Mayor Bruce Harrell are reportedly considering a contract with either SCORE or the Issaquah jail for booking low-level offenses, such as violations of a recently passed law making public drug use or possession a misdemeanor. The King County Correctional Center in downtown Seattle, in a policy that began during the pandemic and continues, is not booking people for misdemeanors, except for assaults, violations of protection orders, DUIs, and sex crimes.

In a statement, Davison told PubliCola she wants to explore options for jailing people accused of less serious misdemeanors because King County’s booking restrictions “are having a significant impact on public safety and the operation of the criminal justice system at the Seattle Municipal Court. Residents and business owners are rightfully fed up with seeing no accountability for the same people committing the same crimes day after day. It is time for the City to explore all options to restore jail capacity for misdemeanor crime.”

Harrell spokesman Jamie Housen said the mayor is “continuing to explore strategies that enhance safety” downtown, and that “contracting with new jails is not a required component of these approaches.”

At least two people died while in custody at the Issaquah jail, a 72-bed facility, last year. According to the King County Medical Examiner’s Office, Kevin Wiley, a 43-year-old man, and 48-year-old David McGrath both died of acute fentanyl intoxication.

Seattle City Councilmember Bob Kettle, who chairs the council’s Public Safety Committee, did not comment specifically on proposals to book misdemeanors at SCORE or the Issaquah jail, but said his committee would ask questions about any contract between the city and other jails. “I’m more than happy to ask those questions because it’s about good governance. It’s about doing the due diligence,” he said. “Those questions should not be just limited to SCORE. We also need to consider: What is the state of the King County Jail?”

SCORE has made something of a cottage industry out of serving as a holding place for people charged with misdemeanors across the Puget Sound area. Though it was created to serve the cities of Auburn, Burien, Des Moines, Renton, SeaTac, and Tukwila it has also signed interlocal agreements with 41 other municipalities across the region, some as far away as Bellingham and San Juan County.

According to San Juan County Sheriff Eric Peter, his county sends all of its misdemeanor bookings to SCORE, a four-hour drive and ferry ride away. Peter said the sheriff’s office on San Juan Island only has two small holding cells and doesn’t have staff to hold inmates for more than three days. He said a corrections officer shuttles those in custody between the islands and South King County

“This agreement was put in place before I took over,” said Peter, who was elected in 2022. “We haven’t had any complaints about it,” he said of the arrangement.

SEIU 925, the union that represents public defenders, earlier this month wrote a letter to the mayor’s office and city council outlining its concerns with a potential contract between Seattle and SCORE, concluding, “Our union strongly urges against the City of Seattle contracting with SCORE.” The letter listed numerous problems their attorneys have encountered at the jail including only one small room for lawyers to meet with clients; spotty wifi and lack of cellphone service; access only granted to those with a state bar card, not support staff; and poor transportation services to court appearances, which “has led to missed hearings and instances where defendants did not have suitable interpretation.

“These are only some of the examples in our ongoing labor complaints against King County due to working conditions at SCORE,” the letter said. “Not only do these barriers interfere with the constitutionally protected right to an attorney, they delay moving defendants through the criminal legal system in a timely way, leading to overcrowding and wait lists.”

 

criminal justice, Elections, homelessness, Media

Jail Guard Falsified Security Check Prior to Inmate Suicide; Candidate Proposes Shipping Homeless Out of Seattle

1. King County Jail Guard Falsified Records Surrounding Inmate Suicide

A correctional officer at the King County jail in downtown Seattle failed to do a required security check less than two hours before a 47-year-old man with “a history of mental health issues” committed suicide in his cell last year, then falsified a record to make it appear that he had performed the check, PubliCola has learned.

Disciplinary records from the Department of Adult and Juvenile Detention confirm that the guard, Emmanuel Palaita, did perform a check about an hour before the inmate, Keith Denegal, was found dead in his cell in the early morning of February 20, 2022. However, Palaita failed to do the previous mandatory check, leaving Denegal alone in his cell for more than an hour and a half, in violation of jail rules requiring checks at least once an hour. An investigator concluded that Palaita’s “failure to act endangered the safety of the inmate population he was responsible for.”

Because of the fraudulent log, investigators found Palaita had violated department policy, falsified documents, caused loss or injury to the county or public, and breached jail security. He was never disciplined, however, because he left his shift and never came back, going on leave for several weeks before turning in his official resignation more than a month after walking off the job. According to DAJD spokesman Noah Haglund, Palaita never responded to notices about the internal investigation, and declined a hearing after the investigation to clear his name.

Because Palaita falsified a DAJD record, the department forwarded his name to the King County Prosecutor’s office for inclusion on the county’s Brady list—a list of law enforcement officers whose testimony in court is suspect because they have a history of dishonesty.

Since 2021, nine people have died “unexpectedly” at the jail, including five who committed suicide. Haglund said the department “has taken several important steps since last year to protect jail residents against self-harm,” including retrofits to remove gaps between beds and walls, limiting the distribution of over the counter medication, and increased suicide prevention training.

Since 2021, eight DAJD employees have been disciplined for falsifying security checks, Haglund said.

Because Palaita falsified a DAJD record, the department forwarded his name to the King County Prosecutor’s office for inclusion on the county’s Brady list—a list of law enforcement officers whose testimony in court is suspect because they have a history of dishonesty.

PubliCola has also determined that after Palaita left the county last February, he applied to be a Seattle firefighter, although it does not appear the department has hired him. According to records maintained by the city’s Public Safety Civil Service Commission, Palaita passed all the tests required for placement on the Seattle Fire Department’s Firefighter Register, one of the first steps toward becoming a firefighter in Seattle, and he will remain on the list until June 2024.

We have reached out to the fire department for more information about Palaita’s application and whether the department takes the Brady list into consideration when hiring firefighters.

2.  Here’s a Bold New Idea from Westneat’s Favorite Candidate: “Triage” Homeless People Into “Open Space” in King County

On Wednesday, the Seattle Times’ Danny Westneat posted a layup column lightly mocking “the good, the bad, the bizarre ideas” coming from some of the candidates who are unlikely to make it through this year’s August 1 primary. Among the “out-there ideas” Westneat chose for mockery: Taxing spray paint to stop graffiti; building campgrounds for homeless people around the city, including one where people could use fentanyl (“imagine the community meetings,” Westneat snorts) and using AI to audit city departments for waste. “Their ideas,” Westneat chuckles, are like “Seattle satire.”

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Given his interest in oddball ideas, it’s strange that Westneat—who says he’s been attending forums and debates all around the city—failed to mention any of the bold new proposals from a candidate he helped boost to prominence two years ago: Kenneth Wilson, who’s running for the open seat in District 4. In 2021, when Wilson was running against council incumbent Teresa Mosqueda, Westneat wrote that he, “stands out in the crowd”  being “being boring and competent.” Westneat was thoroughly charmed by Wilson’s “dorky” engineer vibe, and praised him for his back-to-basics campaign focused on “mismanagement,” government waste, and “building housing for the homeless faster.”

So you’d think Wilson’s big idea this year would be right up Westneat’s alley. Wilson wants to fix homelessness with a “triage” system that will take homeless people off the streets of Seattle and relocate them to an as-yet-unidentified piece of land somewhere in King County, providing recycling bins for them to store their belongings while they “move along in the right path with us.”

“We could do something with triage, especially with King County and their big resources in land. And we would actually move and get these people on the path that’s away from drugs, it’s away from the challenges of the city,” Wilson said at a recent forum.

“There’s so many people in [Seattle] who’ve got mental issues and things like that,” he continued. “In King County, we have a lot of open space, beautiful areas where we can actually make a difference in people’s lives, get them away from the challenges that are making the addictions, causing some of the mental health spill-out, where the damage is coming to our community.”

Wilson, unlike the candidates Westneat poked fun at this week, has a decent shot of making it through the primary, thanks in part to the credibility Westneat’s column gave him during his first campaign. As of Wednesday, he had raised more money than any other candidate in his race.

criminal justice, housing, human services, King County

County Approves Controversial Jail Transfer, May Keep Veterans Levy Flat Despite Rising Costs

1. After hours of public comment opposing the transfer of 60 men from the downtown King County Jail to a regional jail in Des Moines called the South Correctional Entity (SCORE) yesterday, the King County Council approved the contract, with only Councilmembers Jeanne Kohl-Welles and Girmay Zahilay voting “no.”

County Executive Dow Constantine secured $3.5 for the transfer, which the county Department of Adult and Juvenile Detention has said will only include mentally and physically “healthy” men accused of low-level crimes, in last year’s budget, but the furor over the decision didn’t begin in earnest until this year, when legislation to move the first group of downtown jail residents came before the council.

The DAJD has said the transfer is necessary to improve safety and reduce workloads for guards at the downtown jail, where understaffing has become a chronic issue and where, as several council members noted Tuesday, some officers have resorted to sleeping at the jail during the brief time between their shifts. Opponents, including prison abolitionists and the union that represents employees at the county’s Department of Public Defense, argued that the move has the potential to endanger prison residents, limits their access to visitors and attorneys, and does little to solve the long-term issue of over-incarceration, including people who languish in jail waiting for competency restoration or because they can’t pay bail.

“[The DAJD has] worked tirelessly at making sure that the standards and the jails health services in a King County Correctional Facility are better than standards in most facilities throughout this country, Caedmon Cahill, policy director for the Seattle Office of Civil Rights, told the council. (Cahill was speaking as an individual, not a representative of OCR.) “That is why I have such concern with this council and the executive outsourcing this responsibility to another agency. I do not have faith that those that SCORE will come to you when they are not meeting your expectations.”

“We need to do more with getting our staffing in place, but we also need to take down this downtown jail. That can’t be done overnight, so we’re talking about short term solutions and long term solutions, but I don’t find the short term solutions really compelling.  We’re going to be asked to put in more money, and more money, and more money, and [never] get to the solutions.”—King County Councilmember Jeanne Kohl-Welles

But DAJD director Allen Nance said removing 60 people would make it easier for the department to ensure the safety of those who remain. “If we can move some people to SCORE, perhaps reduce the number of people that are in the in county jail by moving some folks to our [Regional Justice Center] facility, we can get to a place where we are no longer having to operate as much of the downtown jail as we have in the past, and we are in a better position to provide the level of service to the people who remain downtown in a way that is challenging for us to achieve today,” Nance said.

The agreement included several amendments that council members said would help mitigate its impact, including one sponsored by Councilmember Rod Dembowski that will require council approval for future transfers to SCORE and another, sponsored by council chair Dave Upthegrove, that will require the executive to get council approval for any future contract extensions.

Before the vote, Kohl-Welles, who will leave the council next year, said she expected that Constantine and the DAJD would be back with a request to expand the SCORE contract within a year. “We need to do more with getting our staffing in place,” she said. “But we also need to … take down this downtown jail,” something Constantine has pledged to do. “That can’t be done overnight, so we’re talking about short term solutions and long term solutions, but I don’t find the short term solutions really compelling.  We’re going to be asked to put in more money, and more money, and more money, and [never] get to the solutions.”

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2. The King County Regional Policy Committee, which includes elected officials from cities across the region as well as county council members, voted this week to put the six-year Veterans, Seniors, and Human Services Levy on the ballot in August without increasing the initial rate property owners will pay if the levy passes above the current 0.01 percent (10 cents for every $1,000 of property value). The levy pays for housing, behavioral health care, and other services for veterans and seniors.  A staff analysis, first reported on by Crosscut, showed that a flat levy renewal will cut the amount of affordable housing the levy can build by half, and fund ongoing operations at 45 percent fewer units than the current levy.

In contrast, Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell recently proposed a renewal of the city’s affordable housing levy that would nearly triple the size of the levy, an increase that will only modestly expand the amount of housing the levy will build thanks primarily to the rising cost of construction,

Councilmember Rod Dembowski proposed several amendments that would raise the levy by varying levels—from .011 to .013 percent—but got no support.

In fact, the mayors of two suburban cities—Nancy Backus of Auburn and Angela Birney of Redmond—argued that renewing the levy at 10 cents per $1,000 actually represents an increase, because the current “effective rate” of the tax is just over 8 cents per $1,000. For context, it’s important to know that 10 cents per $1,000 was only the initial levy; it went down over the years as property taxes increased, because the county could raise the fixed amount of money the levy promised with a lower tax rate. Raising the initial level back to 10 cents per $1,000 will cost homeowners about 20 percent more, but that’s only because King County homeowners’ property wealth has skyrocketed over the past six years. If this levy passes, the effective rate will almost certainly decline as property values rise as well.

King County Councilmember Claudia Balducci voted for the 10-cent rate, but said she wanted to keep the tax level open for discussion when the county council’s budget committee meets to discuss the proposal later this month.

“I will support moving this out today with the rate as it is, but would like to set the expectation that we have a real discussion at the committee,” Balducci said . “I hope we don’t walk away from exploring this as deeply as it deserves.”