By Erica C. Barnett

A King County Council committee rejected a last-minute proposal by King County Councilmember Rod Dembowski to cut $6 million from a five-year plan to improve human service workers’ wages on Wednesday, voting to reject an amendment passed by the countywide Regional Policy Committee (RPC) this past Monday.

Dembowski’s amendment, which went out to RPC members the Friday after Thanksgiving, would amend the spending plan for the voter-approved Veterans, Seniors, and Human Services Levy to reduce funding for human service worker raises by $1 million a year, or between 9 and 12 percent every year the levy is in effect, with the money going to unspecified future capital grants to improve food access

The RPC, which is in charge of approving the levy spending plan before it goes on to the county council, passed Dembowski’s proposal with minimal discussion on Monday. (The amendments didn’t go out to RPC members until the day after Thanksgiving, and the discussion lasted less than five minutes). “We’ve really got a rising need in this county for folks who are hungry,” Dembowski said Monday. While he would have preferred to pass a more generous levy in the first place, Dembowski added, $6 million “didn’t seem to me to have a tremendously adverse impact in the scale of things.”

King County Councilmember Claudia Balducci, one of two county council representatives on the RPC, disagreed, telling PubliCola that Dembowski’s amendment “fundamentally changed the proposal by taking 10 percent out of a program that was fundamental to the levy.” Dembowski, she added, “didn’t do any outreach to me” before putting his amendment forward.

Dembowski did not return a call or text messages seeking comment.

Human services providers seemed blindsided by the amendment, which only Seattle City Councilmember Lisa Herbold and King County Councilmember Claudia Balducci opposed at Monday’s meeting. “It was extremely disappointing to see this unfold in a process with effectively no notice, engagement, or opportunity to comment before the Regional Policy Committee took action during a special meeting,” Seattle/King County Coalition on Homelessness director Alison Eisinger said.

But by Wednesday, when a county council committee took up Dembowski’s amendment, providers had mobilized, urging the council not to pit food security against human service providers’ wages. Councilmember Girmay Zahilay said that in the last two days, he had “heard from so many organizations that I work with regularly that they didn’t have an opportunity to make their voice heard on on those changes…. [and] are terrified that depriving them of the needed resources at this time would really jam up their services.”

“I am sympathetic to Councilmember Dembowski’s desire to add more funds to the food strategy,” Herbold told PubliCola after the vote on Wednesday. “We know that food banks everywhere are seeing huge increases in clients. … I’m sympathetic to the intent, but not to the impact.”

The levy funding, on its own, isn’t enough to give human service workers a living wags—a fact Dembowski used to argue for repurposing the funds, noting that by his math, $1 million a year across 10,000 human service workers works out to only “about two bucks a week.” But the money, combined with similar increases adopted as part of the city of Seattle’s 2024 budget and in the county’s Crisis Centers Levy, would help keep these workers from falling further behind.

For years, nonprofits in King County have struggled to recruit and retain workers because they can’t afford to pay them living wages, much less competitive salaries. A study conducted by University of Washington researchers in 2022 and released earlier this year found that people who left jobs in human services for jobs in other fields saw their wages increase 7 percent relative to what they would have received if they had stayed in their human services jobs. The 7 percent figure accounts for factors like workers moving into higher job classifications and working more hours, according to the researchers.

Eisinger, from the Coalition on Homelessness, said she was “grateful” to the county council for restoring the funding for human service worker wages. “I hope every elected official in King County understands that achieving our shared goals for the Levy requires a strong human services workforce,” she said.

On Wednesday, Dembowski urged his county council colleagues to support his proposal, arguing that it was too late in the process to start second-guessing amendments now. “It would sadden me if we were to zero this out,” Dembowski said, “and I’m very worried about a whole back and forth at the year-end.” This argument might hold more water if Dembowski himself hadn’t initiated the back and forth with his last-minute amendment moving funds from provider pay into a vaguely defined capital fund, which the council will now have to “zero out” to return things to the way they were.

Had Dembowski made a proposal much earlier in the spending plan discussions about “specific needs at specific food banks, that could have been compelling, but it was at the last minute and the end of the process,” Balducci noted. The RPC will now have to hold a special meeting to reconsider the plan, as amended, and the county council will have to approve it before December 14, when the council starts its winter recess.