1. A coalition of city employee unions, including the two largest unions representing Seattle police officers, issued a letter to the interim head of Seattle’s Labor Relations unit on Monday demanding to bargain the effects of the city’s newly announced requirement that all employees receive the COVID-19 vaccine before October 18, 2021.

In the letter, Coalition of City Unions co-chair Shaun Van Eyk wrote that the vaccine mandate—which would give the city grounds to fire employees who refuse the vaccine without an exemption, and which could open the door for phasing out remote work—will have a “direct impact on working conditions.”

In an email to PubliCola on Monday, Van Eyk clarified that while his coalition generally believes that the mandate is legal, any decision that affects working conditions requires the city to come to the bargaining table to negotiate how the city implements the new rule. The areas for debate, he said, could include accommodations for employees who obtain a religious or medical exemption from the mandate, as well as additional protections for employees who have already received the vaccine, such as personal protective equipment or HVAC improvements to ease the transition back to in-person work, for instance.

In a separate letter published on the Seattle Police Officers Guild (SPOG) blog on Monday, union President Mike Solan also called for the city to come to the bargaining table to discuss the new mandate, adding that Mayor Jenny Durkan’s office did not consult with SPOG before issuing the mandate.

So far, SPD has been unable to track its employees’ vaccination status because of privacy rules; officers became eligible for vaccination in mid-March. In his letter, Solan claimed that more than half of his union’s members are vaccinated, though he suggested that mandating vaccination could prompt officers who have resisted the shot to leave the department in protest. “SPOG is concerned for the safety and wellbeing of all of our members including those with personal vaccination beliefs,” he wrote. “Can Seattle now endure more losses of police officers due to Mayor Durkan’s vaccination order?”

PubliCola has reached out to the King County Police Officers Guild, which represents most of the sworn employees in the King County Sheriff’s Office, for their response to the county’s parallel mandate.

2. An email obtained through a public disclosure request confirms that Mayor Durkan’s former homelessness advisor, Tess Colby (now deputy director of the Human Services Department’s homelessness division), asked HSD to require outreach providers that contract with the city to collect information about where every client they work with first became homeless, and to withhold contractors’ funding if they refuse to do so.

In the email to HSD staff, dated January 11, Colby wrote that for “ALL contracts the Mayor wants data collected on prior place of stable housing. This is a question in [the Homeless Management Information System, a database used by the city and county] (although not mandatory) that has a lot of null responses. She wants it replied to by everyone enrolled in HMIS. A way to ensure this happens is through a minimum data quality standard, below which invoices are held until the provider brings the data quality up. There may be other ways. The Mayor will want to see this in each contract prior to execution.”

The order was never implemented, in part because of objections from service providers, who reportedly said collecting this information from every client would be invasive and unnecessary. Durkan, as we’ve reported, has taken to citing an older statistic suggesting that 40 percent of people who are homeless in Seattle became homeless somewhere else, suggesting that Seattle is a “magnet” because of its homeless services.

Durkan spokeswoman Kamaria Hightower confirmed that the city never made the data collection a requirement contractors would have to meet in order to get paid. “Collecting basic data shows the regional nature of homelessness and the degree to which, due to lack of local shelter or services, people are forced to leave their communities and social support systems to seek services elsewhere,” Hightower said. “For example, we know that the City is currently supporting hundreds of individuals who were last stably housed in Kent, Renton, Auburn and Federal Way.”