City Council, Drugs, homelessness, Mayor Harrell, Taxes

Council Debates Harm Reduction, RV Storage and Jumpstart Tax as Annual Budget Deliberations Begin
Mayor Bruce Harrell’s proposed budget turns an estimated $212 million funding shortfall in 2026 into a $247 million shortfall, according to a city council staff analysis.

By Erica C. Barnett

Seattle City Councilmember Sara Nelson raised objections to funding several small harm-reduction programs using funds from the state’s settlements with opioid makers and distributors on Thursday, saying that the funds might better be spent on “treatment” rather than drug user health programs at the Hepatitis Education Project (HEP), Evergreen Treatment Services, and the People’s Harm Reduction Alliance.

These programs, which total less than $500,000, were originally funded using money the council set aside for a safe consumption site; in the face of strong political opposition to that idea, including from former mayor Jenny Durkan, the city worked with advocates to come up with alternatives that would still fulfill the original mission of harm reduction and health care without requiring a physical site.

Nelson, who has advocated for the city to fund traditional, abstinence-based inpatient treatment, said she wanted to know “what is the harm that is being reduced by the use of this money, and how do we measure the the performance of that investment? Because I know people know that I prefer that our scarce dollars should be used for treatment.” Although the three groups received funding from King County through a competitive Request for Proposals process, Nelson said they should go through another one, since the funding source is new.

According to City Attorney Ann Davison’s office, any lot for storing RVs that were previously used as residences has to be directly adjacent to a noncongregate shelter site—a requirement that has had the effect of virtually prohibiting such a lot. Davison said RVs could be allowed in this situation for up to 90 days, with extensions on a “case-by-case basis if the resident is working in good faith towards permanent housing”—a significantly more paternalistic approach than the previously approved proposal.

Both council president Debora Juarez and Councilmember Lisa Herbold seemed exasperated by Nelson’s objections. Juarez said it was already the city’s policy to fund both conventional treatment and harm reduction, while Herbold noted that the King County Board of Health, which includes Herbold and Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda, just unanimously approved a resolution supporting harm reduction as one use for the opioid settlement funds.

The council, Herbold pointed out, just approved spending $5 million in block grant funds for a new low-barrier opioid treatment facility, along with $2 million for a post-overdose recovery site, on Tuesday.

Another odd detail that emerged on Tuesday: Although the city allocated $1 million a year last year for people who had been living in RVs to store their vehicles for up to a year while they transitioned to living in shelter or permanent housing, the money has not been spent. The reason? According to City Attorney Ann Davison’s office, any lot for storing RVs that were previously used as residences has to be directly adjacent to a noncongregate shelter site—a requirement that has had the effect of virtually prohibiting such a lot.

The reason for allowing people to hang on to their old vehicles, at least for a while, while they transition into shelter is obvious. Many people are reluctant to move from the relative safety and privacy of their own RV into a shelter bed or tiny house, and don’t go into shelter as a result. If people can keep their RVs as a backup option, they’re much more likely to say yes to offers of shelter.

In a memo, an advisor to the city’s Human Services Department told the KCRHA that Davison’s office had determined that RV storage is “not identified as a permitted princip[al] use in the Seattle Land Use Code and is prohibited” everywhere in the city. RVs, the city attorney’s office said, could be allowed as an “accessory use” to a tiny house village for up to 90 days, but only if each resident who owned an RV started meeting with a case manager within 90 days to move toward permanent housing; extensions allowing people to store their vehicles longer “could be granted on a case-by-case basis if the resident is working in good faith towards permanent housing.”

This significantly more paternalistic version of the original proposal will require a provider willing and able to meet the city’s new conditions and restrictions. KCRHA put out an initial “letter of intent” seeking providers that are interested in opening an RV storage lot and a tiny house village next to each other on Wednesday.

On Thursday, Councilmember Lisa Herbold called the city attorney’s interpretation a “pretty significant misunderstanding” of the reason people want to store their RVs while they stay in a shelter. “The idea is is that this is a lot—much like a tow lot—where people voluntarily allow their vehicles to be towed into a fenced-in area,” Herbold said. “There are tow lots all over the city and they don’t all have to be next to housing for formerly homeless people.”

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The council is just starting its annual budget deliberation process. At a high level, the council will be debating how best to prepare for a “structural” general-fund budget deficit that’s now estimated at $212 million in 2025, an improvement from earlier predictions. Harrell’s budget plan would increase that structural deficit by adding $51 million in new expenditures, of which almost $28 million are ongoing annual costs.

Although the general fund is actually projected to do better in 2024 than anticipated, a lot of one-time funds that created new programs during COVID are set to expire, and the new council, which will likely have at least five new members, will have to come up with new revenues and, most likely, cuts.

Given that reality, it’s likely the council will scrutinize Harrell’s decision to add 110 new city employees next year, most of them permanent positions that create ongoing new funding obligations for the city. Overall, Harrell’s 2024 budget adds $51 million to the 2024 budget the council and Mayor Bruce Harrell “endorsed” last year) and increases the estimated deficit in 2025 to $247 million. Of the 110 positions, 40 are funded through the general fund—the part of the budget that pays for most of the city’s operations—and another 16.5 come from Jumpstart.

Jumpstart revenues are now expected to come in about $21 million below previous predictions; the tax is based on payroll expenses for the highest-paid employees at the city’s very largest companies, which makes it susceptible to swings when big tech companies cut jobs or move offices elsewhere.

The mayor’s proposal would extend an exemption from the tax for highly paid employees of nonprofit hospitals who make between $150,000 and $400,000. If this exemption was allowed to expire as scheduled, the city would take in an additional $5 million. Most of the private hospitals in Washington state are nonprofits and are exempt from many other taxes.

Harrell’s budget transfers $27 million from the Jumpstart tax fund to the general fund, an ongoing practice that the council has approved every year for the past several years to keep COVID-era programs going. Much of that includes new spending beyond what the council approved last year in the “endorsed” 2024 budget.

For example, the mayor’s budget would use revenues from the Jumpstart tax—which are supposed to be dedicated to affordable housing, small businesses, equitable development, and Green New Deal investments—to pay for higher human service worker pay, relocation costs for a tiny house village that needs to move off Sound Transit property; and subsidies for child care workers.

Nelson noted that she was the only councilmember to vote against raising human service workers’ pay, because she thinks the goal of eventually raising human service workers’ wages by 37 percent—the increase a University of Washington study concluded they would need to get to parity with similarly skilled workers—is unrealistic.

“The taxpayers are paying for a lot,” she said, citing several voter-approved human services levies.

“Regardless of what jurisdiction, it is—city, county, state, federal—it’s all taxpayer money,” Councilmember Lisa Herbold responded, and noted that other local jurisdictions, like King County, are also contributing to higher wages for human services workers, who often make so little that they qualify for social service programs themselves.

Harrell’s budget does not continue funding for a one-time 4 percent pay increase, plus an ongoing 3.6 percent increase, for homeless service workers, which the city had hoped the KCRHA would figure out a way to fund long term. Paying for these pay increases would cost the city an additional $1.9 million a year.

Councilmember Alex Pedersen, who represents the University District, suggested that it would potentially harm the people living at the tiny house village to “quibbl[e] about the pots of money”—a position that runs counter to his frequent calls for audits and “accountability” for programs he believes may be wasting money.

The mayor’s proposal also includes $1 million a year in new funding to evaluate the effectiveness of the Jumpstart tax, which would include two new permanent employees and unspecified additional expenses. It would also extend an exemption from the tax for highly paid employees of nonprofit hospitals who make between $150,000 and $400,000. If this exemption was allowed to expire as scheduled, the city would take in an additional $5 million. Most of the private hospitals in Washington state, including Virginia Mason, Providence/Swedish, and Pacific Medical Centers, are organized as nonprofits and are exempt from many other taxes.

Given how often the council has had to agree to exemptions from the spending plan since Jumpstart went into effect in 2021, a council staff memo asks semi-rhetorically, “is it time to consider expanding the areas of spending the JS Fund can be used for on a permanent basis?” Jumpstart architect Teresa Mosqueda may object to changing the spending plan, as she has in the past, but she’s likely to be replaced by a new, appointed council member next year, assuming she wins election to the King County Council.

City Council, Drugs, Elections, homelessness

Burien Mayor Sees No Issue With Distribution of Homeless People’s Private Info, Council Member Blames Her Colleague for Fentanyl Deaths

1. During a debate focusing on homelessness sponsored Wednesday night, Burien Mayor Sofia Aragon, who is running for King County Council District 8, responded to PubliCola’s report that the director of a group called The More We Love that offers private encampment sweeps had shared personal and medical information about vulnerable homeless residents of the city with police, city officials, and a private business owner.

The real issue, Aragon said, was that someone in the city had “leaked” the information to me, not that the person who shared the information, The More We Love director Kristine Moreland, had done so without apparent concern for the privacy of the more than 80 people included in the detailed spreadsheet she created.

“I know that there was some information shared, and I don’t know how that got to the reporter, but I know that you know, things that we share within the city will often leak out,” Aragon said. “I don’t know how that occurred, we definitely would be we would be serious about the protection of health information because in [the nonprofit] industry, that is certainly something important.”

Aragon said it was understandable that Moreland sent her spreadsheet of personal information to the private business owner, Jeff Rakow of Snowball Investment, because he contracted with Moreland’s group to remove an encampment outside a Grocery Outlet property that he owns.

As I reported, I received the information through a routine public disclosure request; Moreland attached the spreadsheet to an email she sent to a city council member, two police officials, and a real estate investor who paid Moreland’s group to remove an encampment on his property. It’s unknown whether, or how widely, Moreland distributed her spreadsheet outside the city of Burien, since only public officials are subject to public disclosure requests.

When debate moderator Scott Greenstone from KNKX noted that I got the information through a records request, Aragon breezed past the clarification, saying it was understandable that Moreland sent her spreadsheet of personal information to the private business owner, Jeff Rakow of Snowball Investment, because he contracted with Moreland’s group to remove an encampment outside a Grocery Outlet property that he owns.

“And what he did, because he did see some success, is he shared that with the city, but that doesn’t excuse leaking out of private information from those who are homeless, and that’s something that needs to be addressed,” Aragon said.

As a side note: Unlike Moreland, I did not publish or distribute any of the private information contained in Moreland’s spreadsheet, because that would be an additional violation of the privacy of the people whose information she distributed.

For context, credible nonprofit homeless service providers do not, as a rule, share their clients’ private information outside their organizations without explicit informed consent, because to do so would violate people’s privacy, damage trust, and potentially break federal laws protecting people’s medical information.

2.In a TV ad for District 7 city council candidate Bob Kettle, Seattle City Council member Sara Nelson accused her colleague, District 7 incumbent Councilmember Andrew Lewis, of being responsible for the deaths of countless people from drug overdoses during the two and a half months when the city did not have a law empowering the city attorney to prosecute people who use drugs in public. Lewis cast the deciding vote against the bill in June, then voted with the majority of the council in favor ot a substantively similar bill in September.

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“Andrew Lewis’ decision to block my drug bill cost the lives of too many people from fentanyl overdose. I trust Bob Kettle to do the right thing,” Nelson said in the ad.

Nelson sponsored the initial version of the bill, which said nothing about treatment, diversion, or overdose prevention, and opposed many of the new provisions in the updated bill that support diversion and crisis intervention training. Lisa Herbold and Lewis sponsored the version that passed, which included language indicating that police should divert people to treatment or other diversion programs instead of jail. Public drug use and simple possession are already illegal across the state, thanks to a law passed in May that made both a gross misdemeanor.

“When you have nothing substantive to say, I guess the only thing to do is resort to Republican-style attack ads,” Lewis said. “I will continue my campaign of bringing people together to achieve real results for the people of District 7.”

City Council, Elections

PubliCola Questions: City Council Member Tammy Morales, District 2

By Erica C. Barnett

The 2023 election will dramatically reshape the Seattle City Council. Four council members are not seeking reelection, while a fifth, Teresa Mosqueda, is running for King County Council and will be replaced by an appointee if she wins. Even if all three of the incumbents who are running win reelection, the council will probably have at least five new members next year—a new majority of freshmen on a council whose most experienced members will, at most, be entering their second terms. If all eight seats turn over, it would make Sara Nelson, an at-large council member who started her first term last year, the most senior member of the council.

Debates over issues and ideology are understandably front and center in campaigns. But with eight of nine council seats up for grabs, I want to focus for a moment on an often overlooked question that impacts how the city council makes decisions and functions on a daily basis:  Can these people work together? Among the current council, the answer is frequently no. At best, there’s a sense that council members aren’t talking to each other outside public meetings, which are still largely virtual. At worst, the hostility bursts out into the open—as it has during this election, when one council member, Sara Nelson, is actively campaigning against three of her incumbent colleagues.

In this setting, five—and up to eight—new council members could provide a needed reset and eliminate some of the bad blood that has built up over the past several years.

Less optimistically, an inexperienced council could leave Mayor Bruce Harrell’s exercise of executive power unchecked, allowing the mayor to push through any number of priorities that the current council has shot down—like raiding the JumpStart payroll tax, which is supposed to be spend on housing and equitable development, to pay for general city obligations.

The next council will have to get up to speed fast, because they’ll soon face challenges that are only growing in scope—from homelessness, gun violence, and addiction to a looming $250 million budget deficit that will require tough decisions and could mean significant service cuts.

To get a better sense of how council incumbents, challengers, and first-time candidates would tackle these challenges, PubliCola spoke with 10 of the 14 council candidates, representing every council district.

Two candidates—Rob Saka in District 1 and Tanya Woo in District 2—ignored our emailed requests to sit down for an interview and did not follow up after I asked again in person. One candidate, District 3’s Joy Hollingsworth, set up an interview but then canceled, and did not respond to my request to reschedule. Maritza Rivera, running in District 4, would not sit down for an interview but did provide emailed responses to written questions. And Cathy Moore, in District 5, declined my request in an email.

The number of candidates who declined, canceled, or ignored our requests for an interview is unusual. While PubliCola isn’t shy about expressing our views on issues, that has rarely been an impediment to dialogue in the past. These candidates’ refusal to sit down for an in-depth conversation about the issues they will have to address if elected could bode poorly for transparency on the new council; in our experience, candidates who refuse to talk to members of the press they perceive as critical rarely become more tolerant of tough questions under the pressure of public office.

I’ll be rolling out interviews with the council candidates in every race over the next two weeks. I hope readers will learn more about the candidates from these in-depth conversations and use them to inform your vote. Ballots go out on October 18.

Today’s interview is with District 2 Councilmember Tammy Morales, who represents Southeast Seattle and is running for reelection in District 2.

PubliCola [ECB]: Some of your colleagues have disavowed their support for reducing the police budget by 50 percent. Do you still think the council did the right thing in drawing this line in the sand in 2020, and what does the backlash say about where we are as a city?

Tammy Morales [TM]: I think the thing [to know] about all of that is that nobody [on the council] is talking about that anymore. The important thing for us to do now is to talk about accountability. Because when officers demonstrate contempt for the public, when they’re harassing neighbors, when they’re laughing at the death of a young woman, a death that was caused by one of their own, that’s public safety, too. That’s a safety issue for all of us. And I think we need to really start to have a conversation about this department that takes 47 percent of our general fud—what is the return on investment for us?

My hope is that we can have those conversations about the culture of the department, which is clearly very toxic, as demonstrated by the fact that the majority of members elected two very toxic leaders of their union. And we need to figure this out, because people are frustrated and angry, and rightfully so.

“Pushing a narrative of fear, and [portraying the city as] a dystopian situation is not helpful. And I don’t think just listing off all the challenges that the city has, as so many candidates are doing right now, is helpful either. We need serious solutions, we need to be able to pay for them, and we need to be able to provide our neighbors with the things that they need in order to thrive.”

ECB: You seem pretty pessimistic. Do you think that SPD can be reformed?

TM: Here’s the challenge that we face as a city: We have boxed ourselves into a corner. We allowed the guild to bargain, and to assume that they can continue to bargain, around accountability. I think we are going to have to have a conversation in the legislature about this as we’re trying to move the dial there. But as we’re moving toward the next contract, questions about arbitration, questions about allowing disciplinary decisions to be overturned—these are things that really need to be front and center, and we really need to get back to the accountability measures that we had in the 2017 accountability legislation.

I’m not part of those conversations anymore. I’m not on the [Labor Relations Policy Committee]. Even if it was, I couldn’t talk about it. But I will say that I don’t know how we change the culture. That has to come from the top. That has to come from expectations from the mayor, expectations from the chief. Loudly and clearly calling out when shit happens instead of excuses. I don’t see that happening right now. And so what we are left with as a council is the contract negotiation, and how and whether we support whatever that looks like.

ECB: The new council is going to consist largely or mostly of new members, and if you’re reelected, you’ll be a veteran by virtue of being in your second term. Are you worried that having so many newcomers getting up to speed at once will diminish the council’s ability to serve as a check on the mayor, especially when there are disagreements?

TM: I am actually not worried about that. Well, I guess it depends on the outcome. I do think that there are candidates who are coming in with some pretty clear visions for what they want to see in terms of how the city grows and changes, how we make sure that our communities are vibrant, strong, and healthy, and what that means for the way we hold ourselves accountable as a city and fund the things that need to happen in the city. So, again depending on the outcome, we could be moving in a really positive direction. I do think it is important to pay attention to the tone that’s being set.

ECB: Can you talk a little more about what you mean by tone?

TM: We’re a growing city, and we did not keep pace with the infrastructure or the services that we need to deal with the structural problems that we have. And then on top of that, we have a social service crisis brought on in part by the pandemic. So there’s absolutely a lot of work to do. But pushing a narrative of fear, and [portraying the city as] a dystopian situation is not helpful. And I don’t think just listing off all the challenges that the city has, as so many candidates are doing right now, is helpful either. We need serious solutions, we need to be able to pay for them, and we need to be able to provide our neighbors with the things that they need in order to thrive.

ECB: The council is in the middle of its annual budget process. What are your priorities for new investments, and how are you going to pay for them beyond this year, given that the city faces a looming budget deficit of $250 million a year starting in 2024?

TM: It’s going to be hard. There’s no doubt about that. We’re a growing city with growing needs. We were able to fund a lot of those needs with one-time federal money that we got during COVID. But that money is gone, and the needs still exist, and they are growing. So we’re going to have to talk about raising more revenue. I was one of three council members in last year’s budget who voted to increase the progressive payroll expense tax. And I think that needs to be on the table. I think the capital gains tax needs to be on the table. I don’t quite know how the executive pay disparity tax would work. But that I know, that was also a recommendation, and I think it’s something worth investigating more.

And I think we’re going to have to partner with the county, with the state, with the feds, to try to fill some of these other holes that we have, if we’re really going to get serious about meeting the needs of the folks who are most vulnerable in our community. And, you know, I can certainly think of one place that we could trim a little bit, but that conversation is fraught, and I don’t know that it would be terribly productive.

ECB: You don’t think that talking about cutting the police budget at this point is going to be productive?

TM: What I will say is that I certainly don’t think we should be adding funding there. And I know there is more money added to the department [in Harrell’s proposed 2024 budget] from salary savings, from some other places, for some additional one-time funding [for things like Shotspotter and surveillance cameras]. I don’t think we need to be adding anything new that isn’t going to be sustainably funded.

“As a city, we have a responsibility to protect the safety of our community members, and that includes [drug users’] health and safety. That includes people who are experiencing homelessness and substance use disorder. So in my mind, this bill does not protect them. It doesn’t provide treatment, it doesn’t provide services, and in fact, basically defines the threat of harm as public drug use.”

ECB: What about Jumpstart? Every year, Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda is a fierce advocate for preserving the Jumpstart spending plan instead of raiding that funding source for other purposes. If she’s elected to the county council, which seems likely, are you concerned about preserving that stable source of funding for housing and equitable developmemt?

TM: I want to have that conversation in the context of whether or not we will be able to increase [the Jumpstart payroll tax]. And I don’t know yet. There are some really important programs that Jumpstart is funding—some really important goals that we have for the city around affordability and housing. And it was really important to me to get the Equitable Development Initiative included in that package. And I fought to make sure that we had at least that 9 percent setaside because EDI needs a permanent funding source. And so the way that was set up was really, in my mind, a value statement—wanting to dedicate resources to the things that we say are important, and not letting it get sort of swept up in the general fund.

That said, you know, it has been an important way to fill some of the [budget] hole, and now that that hole is bigger. I don’t want all of the payroll expense tax to go into that gap. But we may need to at least extend the percentage that has been going [to the general fund]. And if we’re able to increase the tax, then that is another way to try to fill some of that hole.

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ECB: What are some of your priorities for reducing gun violence in southeast Seattle, and why do you think the rate of gun violence has continued to rise, both in your district and throughout Seattle?

TM: What I have what I have said my entire term, and even before my term, is that what we really need to be doing is investing in neighborhoods that are underresourced, and investing in things that can change the community conditions that lead to violence in the first place. And part of the problem is we just don’t have a social safety net in this country. So we need to invest in our neighborhoods so that people have housing they can afford, and food security, and access to medical care, and high quality education and job opportunities, and after school programs, and mentoring, and all of those things. We need all of that.

And in addition to that very upstream answer, we need to be scaling up the kinds of programs that provide street activation and diversion programs and violence interruption programs—all of those things that can help activate the streets, that can identify the people who are involved in some of this activity, and either divert them after arrest or try to engage them before they’re arrested so that they get onto a different path. I think identifying the people who are at risk is important, and there are a lot of programs that do that kind of work.

And then trying to mitigate that risk, and making sure that we are providing groups like, you know, Southeast Safety Net and Choose 180—those groups that work on a pathway out of violence are also important. And then I think there is a role for the police to play after the fact in some of this— responding to violent calls, investigating incidents of drug trafficking, or sex trafficking, or any of the other things that that are really harming people.

ECB: You voted against the new drug criminalization bill, which put you in the minority on the council, and I wanted to just give you a brief opportunity to explain why and what you would like to see happen now.

TM:  For me, the issue remains that this bill was really about giving the city attorney the ability to prosecute [drug users], more than more than anything else. And I still believe that if our goal is to help people who are suffering from addiction, then we need to be taking a public health approach to solving that problem. And what public health professionals are saying is that we need to expand treatment options. We need to expand harm reduction options. We need to make sure folks can access the medications that they need that could help them with withdrawing from these drugs that they’re on.

I think something like 1,000 opioid-related deaths have happened in the last year. As a city, we have a responsibility to protect the safety of our community members, and that includes [drug users’] health and safety. That includes people who are experiencing homelessness and substance use disorder. So in my mind, this bill does not protect them. It doesn’t provide treatment, it doesn’t provide services, and in fact, basically defines the threat of harm as public drug use.

“The folks in the south end don’t consider [Link light rail] done yet, and won’t consider it done until you make the safety investments that you should have made in the first place. Because it’s great that you’ve learned all kinds of lessons, and you’re doing things differently, or plan to do things differently, up in Ballard or wherever else you’re going. But you learned those lessons at the expense of the folks in the Rainier Valley.”

ECB: You came out in favor of the new “North and South of Chinatown/International District” light rail option, which would eliminate stations in Midtown and the heart of the CID. There are a lot of people in the district who have advocated for a Fourth Avenue option that would provide the CID with a connection to the rest of the system, including the airport, in the future. Can you explain why you decided to support these new locations?

TM: There’s a real fear that if we move with the Fourth Avenue option, local businesses will be disrupted, local businesses will lose customers, and they will shut down. I think there’s something like 20 businesses around there. And the CID is changing rapidly already. There’s a lot of national chains coming in that I think are really changing the character of the neighborhood. And so the initial conversations were really like, how do we make sure that we’re preserving these businesses? And so the conversation started about the other two locations that [some neighborhood] advocates were proposing. This is a community, as we’ve all heard over and over again, that has regularly borne the brunt of these transit projects with very little engagement or seeming understanding from the agencies themselves about the impact they’re having. And they’re fed up, understandably.

So that’s where the conversation started. I will say that I realize the plans weren’t fully developed as we were having those conversations. And now that Sound Transit has identified that as the preferred alternative, and is beginning the process of diving deeper into what these are, I do want to see what it’s going to look like. And I think that regardless of what ends up happening, Sound Transit really needs to step up their community engagement there, and they need to be very clear about what mitigation measures and what community benefits they will commit to.

ECB: In Southeast Seattle, Sound Transit’s at-grade light rail trains continue to collide with vehicles along MLK Way SE on a routine basis, and a number of pedestrians have been struck and killed by trains. How are you working with Sound Transit to make the light rail crossings in Southeast Seattle safer for residents of those neighborhoods?

TM: I have quarterly meetings with Sound Transit about MLK, in particular. And there’s been some movement on [the Seattle Department of Transportation’s] side to add leading pedestrian intervals, different kinds of signal timing, and more lighting around the stations themselves. On Sound Transit’s side, there is beginning to be a conversation about what it would take to add [railroad] arms to the pedestrian pathway so that they can’t cross into the track. There’s all kinds of design and engineering reasons why they say that is problematic. But I think there’s finally a willingness to really have that conversation.

And as I say every time we talk, the folks in the south end don’t consider this project done yet, and won’t consider it done until you make the safety investments that you should have made in the first place. Because it’s great that you’ve learned all kinds of lessons, and you’re doing things differently, or plan to do things differently, up in Ballard or wherever else you’re going. But you learned those lessons at the expense of the folks in the Rainier Valley. And that needs to be addressed.

 

City Council, Elections

PubliCola Questions: City Council Candidate Maren Costa, District 1

By Erica C. Barnett

The 2023 election will dramatically reshape the Seattle City Council. Four council members are not seeking reelection, while a fifth, Teresa Mosqueda, is running for King County Council and will be replaced by an appointee if she wins. Even if all three of the incumbents who are running win reelection, the council will probably have at least five new members next year—a new majority of freshmen on a council whose most experienced members will, at most, be entering their second terms. If all eight seats turn over, it would make Sara Nelson, an at-large council member who started her first term last year, the most senior member of the council.

Debates over issues and ideology are understandably front and center in campaigns. But with eight of nine council seats up for grabs, I want to focus for a moment on an often overlooked question that impacts how the city council makes decisions and functions on a daily basis:  Can these people work together? Among the current council, the answer is frequently no. At best, there’s a sense that council members aren’t talking to each other outside public meetings, which are still largely virtual. At worst, the hostility bursts out into the open—as it has during this election, when one council member, Sara Nelson, is actively campaigning against three of her incumbent colleagues.

In this setting, five—and up to eight—new council members could provide a needed reset and eliminate some of the bad blood that has built up over the past several years.

Less optimistically, an inexperienced council could leave Mayor Bruce Harrell’s exercise of executive power unchecked, allowing the mayor to push through any number of priorities that the current council has shot down—like raiding the JumpStart payroll tax, which is supposed to be spend on housing and equitable development, to pay for general city obligations.

The next council will have to get up to speed fast, because they’ll soon face challenges that are only growing in scope—from homelessness, gun violence, and addiction to a looming $250 million budget deficit that will require tough decisions and could mean significant service cuts.

To get a better sense of how council incumbents, challengers, and first-time candidates would tackle these challenges, PubliCola spoke with 10 of the 14 council candidates, representing every council district.

Two candidates—Rob Saka in District 1 and Tanya Woo in District 2—ignored our emailed requests to sit down for an interview and did not follow up after I asked again in person. One candidate, District 3’s Joy Hollingsworth, set up an interview but then canceled, and did not respond to my request to reschedule. Maritza Rivera, running in District 4, would not sit down for an interview but did provide emailed responses to written questions. And Cathy Moore, in District 5, declined my request in an email.

The number of candidates who declined, canceled, or ignored our requests for an interview is unusual. While PubliCola isn’t shy about expressing our views on issues, that has rarely been an impediment to dialogue in the past. These candidates’ refusal to sit down for an in-depth conversation about the issues they will have to address if elected could bode poorly for transparency on the new council; in our experience, candidates who refuse to talk to members of the press they perceive as critical rarely become more tolerant of tough questions under the pressure of public office.

I’ll be rolling out interviews with the council candidates in every race over the next two weeks. I hope readers will learn more about the candidates from these in-depth conversations and use them to inform your vote. Ballots go out on October 18.

First up: Maren Costa, a former Amazon employee who founded Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, where her organizing helped lead to Amazon’s “climate pledge” to reduce the company’s net emissions to zero by 2040. In 2020, she was fired after circulating a petition on behalf of warehouse workers organizing for better workplace conditions. Her opponent, Rob Saka, is supported by Mayor Bruce Harrell.

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

PubliCola [ECB]: Seattle Police Department officers have repeatedly been caught mocking or belittling the deaths of people killed by police—most recently SPOG vice president Daniel Auderer, who was caught on tape joking with SPOG president Mike Solan about the killing of Jaahnavi Kandula by a third officer. These are police leaders, and they shape the culture at the department. Do you think SPD can be reformed, and if so, how?

Maren Costa [MC]: Reform is really hard. A lot of the things that happen in a fight or flight decision—which is where we see, oftentimes, the worst examples of police brutality and overpolicing—those come from the brain stem. In big tech, we deal with implicit bias all the time. We know that there’s implicit bias—it’s just everywhere, and it hard to train out of people. So when you’re dealing with somebody who has a gun, and they’re in an adrenaline situation, it’s just going to be hard for people not to resort to that lower brain and not to go to their fear-based reactions.

I am a proponent of minimizing armed response where it’s not needed—so, standing up that third department that we’ve all been waiting for, whether we call it CARE or civilian response or dual dispatch. I think the community will be safer if we don’t send an armed officer when we don’t need an armed officer.

And then we need to hold people accountable when we see that kind of behavior. Culture comes from the top.

“I do think that treatment for some people might need to be mandatory— enough to give someone a chance to be off drugs, to help them get onto methadone, or whatever will help ease them back to a non-drug[-using] stage.”

ECB: You told me before the primary that you opposed local legislation giving the city attorney the ability to prosecute people for using drugs in public or for simple possession. Now that the law has passed, what policies will you advocate to promote diversion and minimize harm?

MC: I think the evidence shows that treatment works better than incarceration for substance use disorder. So but we need to fund that. But this bill that passed, unfortunately, seemed performative. If you’re someone who wants to incarcerate someone for substance use disorder, I’m sorry, that won’t happen. Because we don’t have time, courts are backed up, the jails are full. If you’re someone that wants to treat substance use disorder, sorry, that won’t happen [either]. Because we don’t have the beds, we don’t have the programs, we don’t have the resources and the diversion set up to deal with it.

ECB: What do you think effective treatment looks like?

MC: Fentanyl is such a beast. And, you know, somebody said, ‘There’s no such thing as a long-term fentanyl user,’ which is so tragic. We know that getting out of addiction can often take multiple tries. And sometimes you just don’t get those chances with fentanyl. So I think it’s just going to be different for every person. You know, ‘is this your eighth time in [treatment]? Have we seen you before? What are you struggling with?’

I think when people talk about, ‘incarceration works,’ they’ll have these anecdotal stories of somebody saying, ‘I sobered up in jail and it saved my life.’ And you can have the same anecdotal stories of people saying ‘I sobered up in the hospital’ because they had some kind of an injury that put them in the hospital where they couldn’t leave [and had to stop using drugs]. So I don’t think it has to be jail. But I do think that treatment for some people might need to be mandatory— enough to give someone a chance to be off drugs, to help them get onto methadone, or whatever will help ease them back to a non-drug[-using] stage.

ECB: How do you feel about your ability to work with City Attorney Ann Davison’s office on less punitive alternatives to prosecution for drug users arrested under the new law?

MC: Oh, great. We agree on the outcomes. We want people to not hurt other people and not hurt themselves. [We want them to] not be doing drugs on openly on the streets. We want to house people. Most of us still want to be compassionate. But we also don’t want to accept harmful behavior. And the devil then is in the details. How do we do all of those things? And then also, how do we pay for them?

ECB: How do we pay for them? Inpatient treatment can be very expensive, to name one example.

MC: We  obviously want to make sure we’re spending every dollar that we have as best as we can. At Amazon, there was a leadership principle called frugality: Every dollar not spent on the customer is a dollar wasted. That was drilled into us. So we should make sure we’re spending the money we have as efficiently as we can. This might have to come from the mayor, but I would love to say to all the departments, ‘Filter up 10 ways that your department can save money.’

And it can be anonymous, because there might be people in a department who are like, ‘We have this meeting every week where there’s 10 people sitting around making $300 an hour and nothing comes out of that meeting.’ Or, ‘we’re paying this one nonprofit to do this work, and they have never produced results.’ Or whatever it is—you know, bubble it up. And let’s go after those things and try to save as much money as we can and do that quickly, because we’re going to need to do everything we can.

And then we need to raise progressive revenue, because we have an upside-down tax code where the poorest among us pay the highest percentage of their wages. We have a ton of money in the city. And we have a hard time getting the people who have that money to pay their fair share. So we have to make sure that we’re getting everybody to pay their fair share, and then we’ll have more money to solve our big problems. And that’s where I can’t get my opponent to commit, because the Trump donors that are funding his [independent expenditure] campaign don’t want to hear him say he’s going to raise taxes on big business.

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ECB: The King County Regional Homelessness Authority, which is mostly funded by the city, has struggled to find its footing in its first two years and has suffered a number of high-profile setbacks, including the termination of its program to end homelessness downtown and the departure of its founding CEO. Do you think homelessness requires a regional approach, and if so, what can be done to turn the KCRHA around?

MC: I’m not ready to abandon it. But we have to make sure that we’re monitoring it and auditing it to make sure it’s meeting the goals, and if it’s not meeting the goals, fix it or kill it. And I think we’re at the fixing stage. I have hopes for it. I think the regional intent is good. When it comes to [deciding], where are we going to put all the tiny home villages or safe [parking] lots that we want to build, everyone in the region has to pony up. You know, ‘Give me three places where you will be willing to put [shelter] in your neighborhood’ and share the load appropriately. I think it’ll make us more efficient and more able to actually meet the needs of our own homeless population, which is growing every day.

I met with [a policy staffer for KCRHA] recently, and he gave me a lot of hope for the organization. He said that when they are actually going into encampments armed with what they need to solve the problem, they’re having a 90% success rate of bringing people inside. And that’s what I love to hear. Because that’s what we need to do. And you need to tailor that offer. Before, we were offering congregate shelters and nobody wants to go. When we can go in and really help people get situated into something that works for them, we’re getting 90%.

ECB: It sounds like he was talking about CoLEAD, which does encampment work in state-owned rights-of-way in collaboration with the KCRHA. That’s an intensive, expensive model that is unlike how the city itself responds to most encampments, which is to give 72 hours’ notice and offer people whatever shelter is available. And that’s in a best-case scenario where the city doesn’t just call an encampment an obstruction and remove it without notice or a shelter offer.

MC: LEAD works. It’s also very expensive. So if there’s a way to do it cheaper, great. And we can look at that, too. But I mean, these things are just going to cost money. I think we’re all really tired of not solving the problem.

“These decisions we’re making right now are going to impact our city for hundreds of years. And so it’s very short-sighted to worry about years of [light rail] construction. The most important thing we can do is build something that people actually want to use and that meets their needs, because we need to get people out of their cars, and in order to do that, we have to make it more convenient.”

ECB: Sound Transit has recently proposed moving around several stations in downtown Seattle to reduce the impact of construction on businesses and residents. What are some of the tradeoffs you see coming down the road in West Seattle, and can you talk about how you see light rail transforming District 1, for good or bad?

MC: Well, there’s going to be disruptions. Somebody’s going to lose their house, somebody’s going to lose their business. I guess I would want to make sure that we’re fairly compensating businesses and renters and homeowners. My sister’s business was actually under eminent domain for a while. I met with the owner of a daycare center who will probably get displaced for the Delridge station,, and the amount of money that they’re being offered to compensate them is not anywhere near the amount of money they’re actually going to need to reestablish their business somewhere else.

These decisions we’re making right now are going to impact our city for hundreds of years. And so it’s very short-sighted to worry about years of construction. The most important thing we can do is build something that people actually want to use and that meets their needs, because we need to get people out of their cars, and in order to do that, we have to make it more convenient. It’s a long wait. Ten years from now. Where are self-driving vehicles going to be at [by then]?

ECB: Do you support putting self-driving vehicles on our streets?

MC: Yeah. Probably not yet, but like 10 years from now? Sure. Let [other cities] be the guinea pigs for a year or two. We tend to want to rush everything—like rushing AI. And we don’t really just slow down and take a minute to see how well it’s working. So I’m not opposed to it, when it’s safe.

ECB: What are some of your ideas to decarbonize the city, other than electric vehicles and maybe, eventually, self-driving cabs?

MC: Everything we do to bring cars off the road is great, and we can’t just electrify them all because it is still an inefficient way to move people around. Sometimes when I’m sitting on I-5, I like to think about if you could snap your fingers and have the cars go away, the way that like Cinderella’s carriage went away, and then you just had the number of people that were there. It would be empty. It would just be like, ‘Oh my God, we have this massive thing running through our city and it’s only moving this this many people. It’s so frustrating. So we need to get cars off the road.

We have building emissions performance standards coming up—that needs to have teeth and it needs to happen. I would love to find a way to tax carbon so that we’re making the right thing to do the actual cheaper thing to do

We’re currently not on track to meet our climate goals. As a city, as a state, as a nation, as a planet, nobody is on track to meet our climate goals. We are all just numbingly accepting this as business as usual. We can’t refreeze the ice caps, we can’t de-acidify the oceans, we can’t reverse the biodiversity loss. And I don’t believe in blaming the individual at all, because that’s not where we need to change. But we need to have people understanding what the tradeoffs are—we’re currently trading our convenience today for a livable future. We need to help people understand that and then demand better from our government.

Police

Police Guild Leader Defiant in Defense of Officer Who Joked About Death of 23-Year-Old, Saying Critics Should Feel “Shame”

By Erica C. Barnett

In an interview with an investigator from the Office of Police Accountability, Seattle Police Officers Guild director Mike Solan claimed that SPOG vice president Daniel Auderer was processing a “tragic event” with “sarcasm and humor” when he laughed and joked about the death of Jaahnavi Kandula, a 23-year-old student who had just been struck and killed by a speeding SPD officer, Kevin Dave, earlier that evening.

Solan then blasted Auderer’s critics, suggesting that OPA director Gino Betts had informed media about the video and accusing unnamed people of engaging in a witch hunt against the department.

“I would like the director to answer publicly… why this case is already out in the media,” Solan said.

“People [who] use this unfortunate audio captured on body-worn video, which was unintentional, to gain a political strategy against the union and against officer Auderer—I think does the family that lost their loved one a disservice and makes them be re-victimized. Anybody that supports that ideology and supports that tactic should feel shame.”

PubliCola obtained the interviews and related documents through a public disclosure request. We obtained the video, first, through the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office, which is conducting a criminal investigation into Dave’s actions, and subsequently from SPD, which posted the video on its own blog about a half hour after PubliCola became the first media outlet to post the video.

“[As] police officers, we deal with tragedy almost on a daily basis, and we’re human beings just like the next person,” Solan told the investigators. “We have to process these in a manner that allows us to go to that next tragic event. And humor and sarcasm is used for us as a coping mechanism.”

In his interview, Auderer did not express contrition for his comments, saying it was a “private conversation” that could just as easily have taken place “over a beer” or “on a street corner.” Given that he thought the conversation with his union director was private, he continued, “No, I did not violate that policy.”

In the video, Auderer can be heard laughing repeatedly for several seconds at a time, then joking about the value of Kandula’s life.

“I think she went up on the hood, hit the windshield, then when he hit the brakes, she flew off the car. But she is dead,” Auderer said, then laughed for several seconds before replying to something Solan said. “No, it’s a regular person. Yeah.”

“Yeah, just write a check,” Auderer continued. Then he laughed again for several seconds. “Yeah, $11,000. She was 26 anyway, she had limited value.” At this point, Auderer turned off his body camera and the recording stopped.

The video does not capture Solan’s part of the conversation, which both Solan and Auderer have described as “mocking” the lawyers who will ultimately decide how much the city has to pay Kandula’s family for her death.

In his own interview with an OPA investigator, Auderer said that when someone dies, “you can either laugh or cry. … You’re laughing over the absurdity of people suddenly being here one moment and not the next.”

In his interview, Auderer did not express contrition for his comments, saying it was a “private conversation” that could just as easily have taken place “over a beer” or “on a street corner.” Given that he thought the conversation with his union director was private, he continued, “No, I did not violate that policy.”

The video is from the night Kandula died—January 23, 2023. An SPD employee who eventually saw the tape filed a complaint on August 2. Six days later, Auderer wrote a letter to OPA director Gino Betts asking for a “rapid adjudication” of his case, a process in which OPA foregoes an investigation in cases involving “minor or moderate” SPD policy violations. Rapid adjudication requires an officer to admit they violated department policy. Auderer is accused of violating SPD’s policy requiring officers to behave professionally.

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Betts denied Auderer’s request for a speedy resolution seven minutes after he sent it, saying that “OPA does not consider this case a candidate for Rapid Adjudication.”

In his interview with OPA, Auderer said he asked for an expedited response to his case not because he believed he had violated SPD policy, but “in order to explain it if somebody started asking questions. That was more important to me than [the threat of] being disciplined.”

Solan fiercely defended Auderer in his interview with OPA, calling him a “pillar in this department” who had “served his community for decades, leading in arrests.” Auderer has been an SPD officer for about 14 years—not decades—and has been the subject of dozens of allegations of using excessive force, behaving unprofessionally, and other violations of SPD policy.

“I find it unconscionable that this rapid adjudication inquiry to the [OPA] director was not taken serious,” Solan said. “SPOG looks forward to the closure of this investigation to make sure all the facts are put out there for context, if we’re talking about policy, loss of human life, and transparency and the understanding that officers need to feel as if the accountability system has their best interests in mind.”

Solan told investigators his side of the conversation was not recorded, and has not given an explanation that includes the actual “humor[ous]” comment that made Auderer laugh, nor what he said to make Auderer respond, “No, she’s a regular person.” According to OPA, no complaint has been filed against Solan for taking part in the conversation.

Both the OPA investigation and King County’s criminal investigation into Dave are ongoing.

homelessness, human services

Burien Prepares to Hire Controversial Nonprofit that Distributed Unsheltered People’s Personal Information to Police and Private Business Owner
Burien City Manager Adolfo Bailon and City Attorney Garmon Newsom II

By Erica C. Barnett

The city of Burien is preparing to sign a contract with The More We Love, a group run by Kirkland mortgage broker Kristine Moreland with the help of Eastside sales executive Chris Wee, to help enforce its new ban on sleeping in public spaces. The group offers what it has described as private “sweeps” at a price of $515 for each unsheltered person removed from a site. “Discussions with The More We Love remain ongoing and a contract will be established once terms are reached by both parties,” Burien spokeswoman Emily Inlow-Hood said.

As we’ve reported, in 2020, the state Department of Financial Institutions found Moreland violated the state Consumer Lending Act by coordinating high-interest loans to unlicensed brokers, and levied tens of thousands of dollars in fines, most of which she has failed to pay. Last month, according to King County District Court records, Bank of America sued Moreland for failing to pay credit card bills totaling more than $33,000.

Meanwhile, court records indicate that a former Bellevue resident with the same name as Moreland’s business partner, Christopher C. Wee, pled guilty last month to two counts of misdemeanor assault stemming from a road-rage incident in which Wee shoved a 65-year-old man to the ground and broke his hip. In the plea deal, Wee agree to pay more than $33,000 in restitution and attend anger-management classes.

Wee did not respond to a phone call or an email sent to The More We Love seeking information about the road-rage incident. The information in court records, including a police report, is consistent with publicly available information about Wee’s age, most recent previous address, and physical description. Public records indicate that Wee currently lives in Kirkland. PubliCola was unable to find another Christopher C. Wee in Bellevue or Kirkland using public court, property, and licensing records, in publicly available residential databases, or on social media.

According to court documents, Wee repeatedly “brake-checked” a driver who had honked for him to go at a green light, followed him to a Bellevue Hilton parking lot, and attacked both the 65-year-old driver and his son, pushing or punching the son and shoving the father to the ground. In his victim statement, the older man said he had to undergo two hip surgeries after the attack and lost an estimated $42,500 in wages during the seven months he was unable to work, plus three months when he could only work part-time.

Moreland shared spreadsheets containing private medical and personal information about more than 80 of her unsheltered “clients” with a city council member, two police officials, and a real estate investor who paid Moreland’s group to remove an encampment on his property. This represents a stark departure from widely used best practices designed to protect the privacy of people who share information with homeless service providers.

These incidents, while they are not directly related to The More We Love’s activities in Burien, seem relevant as Burien decides whether to sign a contract with the group to provide outreach to vulnerable unsheltered people and remove the encampments where they are living.

In addition to these potential concerns, PubliCola has learned that Moreland shared a three-page spreadsheet containing private medical and personal information about more than 80 of her unsheltered “clients” with a city council member, two police officials, and a real estate investor who paid Moreland’s group to remove an encampment on his property. This represents a stark departure from widely used best practices designed to protect the privacy of people who share information with homeless service providers.

The spreadsheets, which PubliCola obtained through a records request, include people’s full names, birthdates, contact information, health insurance status, criminal histories, and information about their apparent physical and mental health conditions, such as pregnancy, addiction, and mental illness. They also include information about what services individuals have accessed, The More We Love’s assessment of their overall situation (typically: “Drugs”), and the specific places they plan to go after the encampment where they are living is removed.

Many of the notes include disparaging editorial comments about established local homelessness programs, such as Co-LEAD; the names and phone numbers of unsheltered people’s purported relatives; and comments like “READY TO GO [to detox].”

“DETOX Immediately. UPDATE 7/10 did not want detox today will keep trying. At moms house currently,” one note reads. “Reach/Lead havent provided any meaningful services that would change anything – Wants help in 2-3 months, close to Richard,” another says. REACH is an outreach provider and LEAD is a program that diverts people from the criminal legal system and has a limited quantity of hotel-based shelter for people throughout the King County region.

In two cases, Moreland (or another person filling out the spreadsheet) uses anti-trans language to describe transgender women, calling each woman a “male that identifies as female.”

According to the spreadsheet, the most common identified destination for these “intakes” is detox, a three-to-five-day program that does not include housing, shelter, or long-term treatment for addiction. Other destinations include Union Gospel Mission’s inpatient treatment, an explicitly Christian program that includes mandatory Bible study. Moreland is a longtime UGM volunteer.

The council has never discussed the details of the potential contract publicly, although it appears to have been the subject of a lengthy executive session that delayed the start of the council’s October 2 meeting by almost an hour.

Moreland shared the spreadsheet with Burien City Councilmember Stephanie Mora, Burien police chief Ted Boe, Burien police sergeant Henry McLauchlan, and Jeff Rakow of Snowball Investment, a real estate company that owns a Grocery Outlet property and paid The More We Love to remove an encampment nearby.

Homeless service nonprofits generally do not share people’s personal information with public officials, much less private property owners, without the informed consent of individual clients, and generally only do so under explicit information-sharing agreements that are meant to benefit their clients—for example, by letting police and prosecutors know they’re participating in a diversion program like LEAD, which works to reduce people’s involvement in the criminal justice system.

For example, LEAD and REACH, which have been working with encampment residents in Burien all year, authorize case managers “to share information on an as-needed basis with a specified group of partner organizations and entities,” according to Purpose Dignity Action co-director Lisa Daugaard, whose organization runs LEAD. “We have been able to reach agreements in which prosecutors and police aren’t blindsided or misled, and get good information illuminating the underlying causes behind challenging behaviors; and in turn, they agree to ensure that no one regrets sharing this kind of sensitive information,” Daugaard said.

It’s unclear if Moreland, who did not respond to a request for comment, received consent from any of the people on her lists to share their private information with officials or private individuals. A public records request did not turn up any communications about the spreadsheets beyond an email to the Burien officials and Rakow in which Moreland wrote, “As promised here is our updated spreadsheet including all intakes to date. Just in the last three days we have placed 7. Hoping two more go by end of the day. Thank you!”

It’s also unclear who else has received the spreadsheet or similar information from Moreland, since public disclosure requests only deal with public officials’ communications.

“Information-sharing between social workers and enforcement entities can happen constructively—but only with the clear permission of clients/participants, based on their trust in case managers and the hard-won reputation of the program on the street; and only in the context of very specific agreements about how that information can be used,” Daugaard. Without that framework, Daugaard continued, “very quickly, individuals feel burned that they shared sensitive information and it was in some way used to their detriment” and the system breaks down.

At least one Burien Police Department officer is currently under investigation for allegedly harassing or attacking people living unsheltered in the city. The Bellevue Police Department confirmed that they are conducting the investigation and denied our records request seeking more information because the investigation is still ongoing.

Burien spokeswoman Inlow-Hood said the the Burien Police Department, which is staffed by the King County Sheriff’s Office, “will enforce” the city’s new ban on “camping” outdoors between 7 pm and 6 am   A spokesman for King County Executive Dow Constantine was more equivocal, saying that no decision has been made about enforcement. It’s unclear whether, and to what extent, The More We Love might be involved or on site when the police department removes encampments.

At least one Burien Police Department officer is currently under investigation for allegedly harassing or attacking people living unsheltered in the city. The Bellevue Police Department confirmed that they are conducting the investigation and denied our records request seeking more information because the investigation is still ongoing.

The city council has asked for a briefing from staff on any potential contract with the More We Love, which just registered as a business in April, but city manager Adolfo Bailon can sign any contract under $50,000 without council approval and is reportedly preparing to do so.

“The City Council asked for an opportunity to discuss the contract and it will be brought to Council in a future meeting,” Inlow-Hood said.

The council has never discussed the details of the potential contract publicly, although it appears to have been the subject of a lengthy executive session that delayed the start of the council’s October 2 meeting by almost an hour.  City officials are legally prohibited from talking to any outside parties about executive sessions, and PubliCola did not speak to any council members about the subject of this executive session.

Under state law, cities can hold closed executive sessions to “review negotiations on the performance of publicly bid contracts when public knowledge regarding such consideration would cause a likelihood of increased costs.” We have asked Inlow-Hood to explain the justification for any executive sessions on The More We Love’s potential contract, since it is not up for bid.

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As PubliCola reported in August, Moreland failed to pay tens of thousands of dollars in fines she owes for violating the state Consumer Lending Act in 2020. According to the state, Moreland facilitated “short-term, high-cost loans” with an unlicensed lender for at least four home buyers, then immediately turned around and refinanced the loans through the company she worked for, pocketing the commission. According to Department of Financial Institutions records, Moreland has consistently failed to make payments on the loans, despite agreeing to multiple payment plans.

Moreland has repeatedly claimed that her group (previously called the MORELove Project and more explicitly affiliated with Union Gospel Mission) has been more successful than any established organization at housing and providing treatment for people living unsheltered in Burien. However,  case managers and individual volunteers who have worked with Burien’s homeless population for years dispute this, noting that the homeless population in Burien has not diminished and includes roughly the same group of people as it did when the city of Burien first removed several dozen people from an encampment next to City Hall and the downtown Burien library in March. There are no year-round nightly shelters in Burien.

Most of Moreland’s “housing” placements, local advocates and service providers Burien say, have consisted of short-term motel stays and rides to detox, including one man who had to take two buses back to Burien after the “housing” he was expecting turned out to be a detox center outside Olympia.

Homeless service contracts typically include, at minimum, a detailed budget, performance standards, reporting requirements, and compliance with a number of minimum standards including minimum insurance and non-discrimination policies. It’s unclear which of these items will be in any future contract between Moreland’s group and Burien.

City Council, Drugs, homelessness, King County, Mayor Harrell, Police

Burien Makes “Camping” Ban Worse, Auderer Now on Red-Light Camera Duty, Harrell Order Subtly Improves New Drug Law

1. On Monday night, the Burien City Council expanded the number of hours per day in which being unsheltered will soon be illegal, changing the daily deadline for homeless people to be off the streets from 10 pm to 7 pm. The change, an amendment to the sleeping ban the council passed just one week earlier, bans people from “living on” public property between 7 in the evening and 6 in the morning.

During Monday’s meeting, Burien City Attorney Garmon Newsom II said the city decided to make the adjustment after learning that many shelters “begin making their decisions” about who to admit around 4:30 in the afternoon; by 10pm, most are closed and “it would be too late” to take people there. By starting the ban earlier in the evening, the city seems to believe it can plausibly say shelter was “available” and that people refused to accept it, making it legal for police to remove or arrest unsheltered people from the streets.

Signs of camping, according to the ordinance, include “bedding, cots, sleeping bags, tents or other temporary shelters, personal belongings storage, and cooking equipment use or storage.”

During the meeting, Newsom inaccurately claimed the new proposal actually increases “the amount of time they are able to camp” by allowing “camping” between 7 pm and 6 am; in fact, it does the opposite, making it illegal to be unsheltered in public spaces between those hours. Councilmember Cydney Moore, who opposed the underlying ordinance, tried to correct the record, prompting a brief back and forth with Newsom that Mayor Sofia Aragon cut off, saying Moore should limit her comments to “these technical changes.”

The council’s agenda also suggests proponents were confused about what the amendment does. According to the bill description, it “clarifies, consistent with the council’s previously stated intent, that there will be no camping outside of the hours stated in the ordinance. At this time, the proposed amendment would change the start time for camping from 10:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m.” In reality, it changes the start time when “camping” is illegal.

Before voting for the change, deputy mayor Kevin Schilling said the King County Sheriff’s office had signed off on the change. A spokesman for King County Executive Dow Constantine told PubliCola Tuesday that the county still has not made a decision about whether and how to enforce the law.

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2. Daniel Auderer, the Seattle Police Officers Guild vice president caught on body-worn video joking with guild president Mike Solan about the killing of 23-year-old student Jaahnavi Kandula by another police officer, Kevin Dave, has been reassigned to review red-light camera footage and sign traffic tickets, PubliCola has learned.

Only a handful of officers are assigned to red-light camera duty at a time. Often, these officers are near retirement or, like Auderer, have been removed from patrol duty because of a complaint or other problem with their performance.

Auderer’s comments came to light when the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office, which is considering criminal charges against Dave, released the video to PubliCola and a reporter for the Seattle Times in response to records requests.

The Community Police Commission has called on Police Chief Adrian Diaz to put Auderer on leave without pay until the OPA complaint is resolved.

The changes are subtle—so subtle PubliCola didn’t notice them when we wrote about the executive order last week. The order reinstates language saying officers “will” determine the level of threat and make reasonable efforts to divert people from arrest when possible, and restores language Nelson deleted saying that officers should not arrest a person “absent articulable facts and circumstances warranting such action.”

3. In his executive order order clarifying how SPD should implement a new law criminalizing public drug use last week, Mayor Bruce Harrell mostly restated the language in the underlying bill, which says police should try to divert people to social service programs that will help them address their drug use instead of resorting immediately to arrests. But the EO includes a couple of subtle tweaks that could undo changes Councilmember Sara Nelson inserted at the last minute to give officers extra discretion to make arrests.

The changes are subtle—so subtle PubliCola didn’t notice them when we wrote about the executive order last week. They’re about the words “will” and “may.” In her amendments, Nelson changed language stating that officers “will” determine whether a person poses a threat of harm to self or others, and language stating that officers “will make reasonable efforts to” use diversion rather than arrest to say that officers “may” do both things, making each decision completely discretionary.

Harrell’s executive order reinstates language saying officers “will” determine the level of threat and make reasonable efforts to divert people from arrest when possible, and restores language Nelson deleted saying that officers should not arrest a person “absent articulable facts and circumstances warranting such action.”

Mayoral spokesman Jamie Housen told PubliCola, “As was discussed extensively during Council debate, the legislative branch cannot direct the actions of executive branch employees through legislation. Mayor Harrell has made it clear that under this bill he wants officers to conduct a threat of harm assessment and that diversion is the preferred outcome rather than further criminal legal system engagement.”

Under the language Nelson added to the bill, there would be little recourse if officers decided, using their broad discretion, to arrest every person using drugs in public without determining if they posed a threat, and no legal reason for officers to try to get people into diversion programs instead of arresting them.  By changing both words back to “will”—in the implementing executive order, if not the legislation—Harrell strengthened the bill (which, we feel obligated to add, still does not require diversion or fund any new diversion programs).

homelessness, King County

Reports: Homelessness Authority Must Improve Accounting, Monitoring, and Transparency

By Erica C. Barnett

Two recent reviews of the King County Regional Homelessness Authority’s financial and other internal policies—a monitoring report by the King County Department of Community and Human Services and a financial audit by the State Auditor’s Office—found that the agency made a number of financial errors in its first year of operations. Among other errors, the KCRHA overstated its revenues, failed to inform grant recipients of the federal requirements attached to funding, and spent grant dollars in ways that were inconsistent with their intended purpose.

“The Authority did not have effective internal controls in place to ensure accurate and reliable financial reporting,” the state audit found.

State auditors also discovered that the KCRHA failed to list many of the federal requirements when awarding grants to 11 homeless service providers, which could put those providers at risk of being out of compliance with federal rules and potentially “spending the funds for unallowable purposes.”

Additionally, accounting errors led the agency to end last year with a negative balance—or overspend—of $17 million. Bill Reichert, the agency’s interim chief financial officer, told PubliCola the agency didn’t bill its funders, which are Seattle and King County, on time for some expenses, resulting in a temporary negative balance—something the county’s monitoring report noted as well, saying the KCRHA had failed to meet the county’s deadlines to submit invoices, which led to late payments.

“This was a startup. There was a lot of learning going on, and standing up processes, and things didn’t get reconciled as soon as they should have,” Reichert said. “It’s not likely to occur again, because we’ve taken a number of steps to shore up training in our systems and processes.”

KCRHA interim CEO Helen Howell said the agency “is committed to a full assessment of KCRHA, and these audits and reviews are an important step to help us improve. We are clarifying what needs to change to get this agency fully on track.”

In a separate, emailed statement, Reichert said the authority “is working hard to ensure we understand the current state of the agency’s financial operations, identifying any gaps in oversight, process and practice so we can implement a set of targeted solutions.”

The county report also highlighted the KCRHA’s consistent late payments to homeless service providers, who reported having to “float” their budgets for 2022 by depleting reserves, a challenge for smaller organizations without significant cushions to fall back on when the homelessness authority failed to pay them on time.

“KCRHA was not able to execute contracts in a timely manner,” the report noted. The agency had only signed about half of its 2023 contracts by the end of April, the monitors found, “which place[d the] burden on contracting agencies to shoulder the financial burden of operations without incoming revenue.”

In a statement to PubliCola, KCRHA interim CEO Helen Howell said the agency “is committed to a full assessment of KCRHA, and these audits and reviews are an important step to help us improve. … We are clarifying what needs to change to get this agency fully on track.” The agency, Howell continued, is “making progress, and we will continue to push ourselves to be better.” Howell became interim CEO after former CEO Marc Dones resigned in May; the agency is currently looking for a permanent CEO.

As we reported when the agency was first staffing up, many experienced grants and contracts specialists at Seattle’s Homeless Strategy and Investment division sought agreements with the KCRHA to transfer their existing jobs to the new agency, but Dones wanted to hire their own team, and told HSI staff they would have to re-apply for their jobs—which most declined to do. As a result, there was a significant loss of institutional knowledge about how to administer homelessness contracts at the new agency, contributing to an already steep learning curve for the new authority.

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In its response to the state audit, the authority wrote that it “has already taken significant steps to implement many of the necessary components in our contracting year for 2023. We have been actively involved in recruiting experienced personnel and providing on-job trainings to strengthen our contract and grant management and compliance monitoring.”

The county’s report also raised concerns about the KCRHA’s governing structure, monitoring practices, transparency, and communication with the nonprofit agencies that it pays to provide outreach, shelter, and other services.

The KCRHA’s Continuum of Care board, which came under fire earlier this year after a board member shouted down a colleague’s objections to the proposed appointment of a repeat sex offender, often lacked a quorum and didn’t get enough information from KCRHA to make decisions or recommendations about complex decisions, like the agency’s annual federal funding requests, the report found.

As PubliCola reported, the KCRHA ran a bit of a coup on the CoC board earlier this year, recruiting new members to the stakeholder group that oversees the CoC and holding an unusual “convening” to adopt a new charter and a new slate of members for the board. (Ordinarily, CoC “convenings” are day-long events that include panels and discussion sessions; this year’s meeting was focused on these two votes.) The agency is supposed to hold two major meetings a year, but has failed to do so, according to the report.

The report also raises concerns about the KCRHA’s compliance with the state Open Public Meetings Act, noting that information about meetings often isn’t available in a timely or transparent fashion, and says the agency doesn’t have a consistent way of communicating with service providers or stakeholders about important decisions, like changes to Coordinated Entry—the system for accessing services, shelter, and housing. The KCRHA got rid of a committee that met quarterly, in public, to discuss Coordinated Entry, and “[a]s a result, subsequent changes to CE processes were made with little notice to, or input from, providers and other stakeholders.”

Although the report praises KCRHA for its “innovative” data collection strategies, including an annual count of the region’s homeless population that was based on state data and a separate qualitative survey of people experiencing homelessness, the monitors note that it remains “[u]nclear how KCRHA uses data/metrics to monitor evaluate program performance (other than for funding decisions) and to evaluate system performance.”

Last week, the KCRHA posted a response on its website to the state and county reports; a federal audit will also be released later this month.

Guest Contributor, Transportation

Could You Go a Week Without Driving?
Tanisha Sepúlveda (center) and other Empower Movement members at a walking/rolling event. Also pictured:Disability Rights Washington’s Anna Zivarts and former Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn. McGinn now serves as the executive director of the pedestrian advocacy organization America Walks, which is coordinating the Week Without Driving challenge.

By Tanisha Sepúlveda

What would you do if you didn’t have your car, and you had to go a Week Without Driving? How would you get to work, go to the doctor, bring home groceries, or visit friends and family? How much would this cost you—in time and in money? For nearly one-third of the US population, these questions are everyday experiences we must navigate.

As a power wheelchair user living in West Seattle, I rely on my wheelchair and public transit when getting to and from places. I am fortunate to live in a city with public transit, although accessing the transit is where it can become difficult. Many sidewalks don’t have curb cuts, or turn into dirt paths, or run into roads without notice. This forces me to backtrack or go onto the road. I have had people yell at me that it’s “not safe,” but they don’t understand if I get thrown off the sidewalk into traffic because there’s a tree root or an uneven piece of sidewalk, it is even less safe for me and oncoming traffic.

Many of our nation’s nondrivers are people of color, immigrants, people in poverty, and people with disabilities. This includes young people, people who have aged out of driving, had their license suspended, or cannot afford the financial burden of owning and operating a vehicle. We live in cities, suburbs, rural areas, and small towns. In all these places, there are gaps and barriers that make it difficult for us to get where we need to go. 

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Many other obstacles exist for those with and without disabilities when trying to access transit. A lack of light and shelter at a bus stop, or along the way, can be unsafe. The risks increase for those who are hard of hearing or low vision. Crosswalks that do not have physical and audible crossing signals to alert the people crossing pose a danger, especially in busy streets. Overgrown hedges from people’s properties blocking access to the sidewalk. Infrequent bus routes and lack of bus stops, especially outside of the city, can limit users from accessing opportunities for education, work, housing, and more. 

I would like to invite and encourage you, along with policymakers, public officials, and transportation leaders, to participate in the 2023 Week Without Driving challenge taking place October 2nd-8th. The challenge is simple: Participants can get around however they want but they cannot drive themselves. This applies to all activities—not just work commutes. 

This isn’t a disability simulation or a test of how easily you can find alternatives. It is far easier to give up your keys if you can afford to live in a walkable area well served by transit or can outsource your driving and delivery needs to other people. Also, having to drive during the challenge does not signify failure. The goal is to consider how someone without that option would have coped, and what choices they might have made. 

We need decision-makers to understand these barriers so they can understand how their decisions impact the public transportation system—and, ultimately, the quality of life for nearly one-third of our population. Participating in the Week Without Driving can be a life-changing event. It teaches participants what it’s like for people who have no choice but to navigate our inadequate transportation system daily. Every day, people with disabilities rely on walking, rolling, public transit, or asking or paying for rides. Understanding how these options work or don’t work for us is a matter of racial, economic, and disability justice.

Tanisha Sepúlveda is an architectural associate for BCRA, and a program coordinator for Empower Movement, a coalition of BIPOC and disabled mobility advocates supported by Disability Rights Washington and Front and Centered. As a power wheelchair user since 2010, Sepúlveda recognizes the lack of accessibility in the built environment and advocates for equitable access to transit and housing, with a focus on sidewalk repair and maintenance. 

Addiction, Drugs

Harrell Issues Order on New Drug Law, Clarifying “Harm to Others” Standard and Requiring Data Collection on Drug Users

By Erica C. Barnett

Mayor Bruce Harrell issued an executive order on Thursday providing direction to the Seattle Police Department as it develops policies to implement a recently passed law that makes public drug use, along with simple possession, a gross misdemeanor. The law also criminalizes simple drug possession and empowers the city attorney, Ann Davison, to prosecute drug cases. The new law does not apply to public use of alcohol or cannabis.

The order, which describes fentanyl use as a “health crisis,” says that “diversion and referral to services is the preferred response to public possession and use” in instances where police determine a drug user poses no potential harm to anyone else. But it also says that arrests may be appropriate when a drug user poses a “threat of harm to others,” then defines this potential “harm” broadly, to include any drug use that impacts “the ability of others to use shared public space.”

The drug law adopted last week defines “harm to others” in similarly expansive terms, asserting that “unchecked” drug use “in certain areas of the city” harms “businesses, transit riders, and people  traveling to school, work, retail stores, or trying to enjoy the City’s parks and other public places.”

SPD is expected to issue its own guidelines to officers who will be implementing the law within the next few days.

The executive order, echoing the Harrell Administration’s earlier effort to prosecute “disorderly conduct” near transit stops on Third Ave., specifically notes that locations where drug use presents an “inherent impact on public safety and security” may include any location “in or within close proximity to a transit stop, rail station, or other transportation structure or facility.”

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Harrell’s order is mostly suggestive rather than prescriptive. Officers who believe a person’s drug use inherently threatens those around them can decide, based on their training and “the totality of the circumstances,” to arrest a person or attempt to divert them to LEAD, the city’s primary diversion program. The number of arrests that officers will actually make is constrained by the booking capacity of the downtown jail, which is severely limited due to a shortage of guards.

The order also requires outreach providers that contract with the city to create a “by-name list” of every person “significantly affected by” the opioid crisis in downtown Seattle between the Denny Triangle and the stadiums south of the Chinatown/International District. (Since the new law and the rest of the executive order refers only to people using drugs in public, it’s safe to assume the list will exclude housed downtown residents who use addictive drugs indoors.)

Jamie Housen, a spokesman for the mayor’s office, said the city “is not planning to collect a list of names or individual clients, but instead to use an approach that creates a baseline estimate of those using drugs and in need of treatment and services, so that we can measure those needs, changes over time, and if progress is occurring.”

Alison Eisinger, director of the Seattle King County Coalition on Homelessness, said the order released on Thursday “inappropriately uses a By-Name List,” which is supposed to be “a tool used by people who are offering focused engagement and have appropriate resources to connect people with.”

Providers that serve unsheltered people often create “by-name lists” of people living in a discrete area, such as an encampment, in order to keep track of them as part of a specific project. Recently, the King County Regional Homelessness Authority acknowledged that its own effort to create a “by-name list” of every unhoused person downtown, as part of the Partnership for Zero effort that recently folded, was unproductive, because people can and do move around.

Data on drug users from providers, including the number of drug users they’re serving downtown and the kinds of issues those individuals are facing, “will help determine how many individuals the City is trying to assist and to provide a better understanding of the underlying issues and facts addressed by this [order].” After 12 months, according to the order, the city will “conduct a follow-up assessment” and compare the two sets of data “to gauge the effectiveness of the strategies” in the order.

Council members who switched their votes on the drug law, a version of which failed back in June after Andrew Lewis decided to vote against it, said they were convinced to vote “yes,” in part, by the mayor’s promise to propose an executive order that would emphasize diversion over arrest. Before Harrell issued the order out on Thursday, Lewis said he expected that it would “provide clarification” on how the city will implement the new law. We’ve reached out to Lewis for comment on the order.