By Erica C. Barnett

Burien city manager Adolfo Bailon offered a novel explanation last night for why he failed to inform the full city council about a November 27 deadline for using $1 million in shelter funding from the county: He had, contrary to his previous claim, opened and responded to the email from Deputy County Executive Shannon Braddock, but he had “left it [marked] unopened to deal with the following week.”

The email then got buried, Bailon said, underneath a pile of messages about a sanctioned encampment at a church proposed by a nonprofit headed by Councilmember Cydney Moore, and he was unable to get back around to it until the next Friday, November 3, when he finally told the rest of the council. The encampment proposal “monopolized our time and led to a number of different things occurring” last week, Bailon said.

Aragon confirmed during the meeting that she was also aware of the deadline last week and had discussed it with Bailon during their agenda-setting meeting on Wednesday. It’s unclear which other council members besides Aragon, if any, also knew about the deadline before Bailon informed the full council in an email on November 3.

Since March, the Burien council has been debating how to respond to a group of several dozen unsheltered people who the city initially swept from a site next to City Hall and the downtown Burien library and who have since been swept from place to place. King County offered the city $1 million and 35 Pallet shelters, which can each hold two people, back in June, suggesting that the shelters go on a piece of city-owned land that currently serves as excess inventory storage for a local Toyota dealer; under the deal, the county would provide space in its own garage for the cars. In July, the council’s four-member majority voted to reject that offer, and in September, the council enacted a nighttime “camping” ban.

As we reported on Monday, Bailon initially said that he had not seen or responded to the time-sensitive email until a full week after it landed in his inbox, a claim PubliCola revealed as false after obtaining Bailon’s response to Braddock from King County, sent shortly after he received the letter informing him of the new deadline.

“I am sorry to share with you that the email from Shannon Braddock went unopened and became lost until today due to the more than 150 email messages that I have received since Sunday regarding the proposed encampment at Oasis Church,” Bailon wrote in an email to the full council and the city attorney. “I have since reviewed all unopened email messages.”

Moore challenged Bailon on his changing story, noting that by withholding the information from certain council members, Bailon deprived the council of a full week—out of four until the deadline—to secure a location for the shelter King County has been offering to fund since June. “I would like to know why the misinformation was given to council that the letter wasn’t read or open until Friday,” Moore said. However, she was interrupted repeatedly by Bailon and Aragon, who said Moore was stirring up irrelevant “drama” and creating a “distraction” from important issues.

Bailon said Moore’s claim that he had withheld information from certain councilmembers was “tantamount to slander,” and the council almost went into a closed executive session on the grounds that Moore was threatening legal action against the city.

Instead, the council meeting continued until a public commenter who opposes the encampment ban, Jennifer Fichamba, suggested Bailon should resign and return to California, where he lived before taking the job in Burien, because he lacked “compassion” for homeless residents and had “not done due diligence to understand what our community is about.”

This led Councilmember Kevin Schilling to suggest Fichamba, an outspoken advocate for immigrant rights, was racist for saying “our Hispanic city manager [should] go back to California” and demanding that she apologize. “I am ashamed at what I just heard!” Schilling yelled. As the room erupted, Aragon shut down the meeting, clearing the chambers for 10 minutes before returning with a warning that the council could end the meeting and reconvene in private if people didn’t behave.

This wasn’t the first time in recent weeks that members of the pro-sweeps council majority had accused someone on the other side of the issue of being racist. Earlier this year, Councilmember Hugo Garcia, one of three council members who have voted against efforts to crack down on Burien’s unsheltered residents, expressed his opposition to a potential new encampment site in Boulevard Park. The fact that the council majority wanted to move people from a wealthy, white neighborhood into a poor, Black and brown one “reeks of white supremacy,” Garcia said. Both Schilling and Councilmember Stephanie Mora expressed shock at Garcia’s comment, and Mora called for Garcia to be censured for his “very racist remark.”

The city council has two more council meetings scheduled before the county’s deadline, including one on November 27. The $1 million is time-limited federal money; if Burien doesn’t come up with a plan by the deadline, the county will make it available to other jurisdictions through a standard bidding process.