By Erica C. Barnett

In an unusual move, King County Sheriff Patti Cole-Tindall announced Monday that her office is suing the city of Burien over its total ban on living unsheltered in the city, calling the law a violation of the rights affirmed in a consequential 2019 case, Martin v. Boise, which prevents cities in the Wastern US from banning homeless people from public spaces unless adequate shelter is available.

Last Friday, the sheriff’s office informed the city that they would not be arresting people for violating the new homelessness ban. Since then, city manager Adolfo Bailon has directed the city to stop paying the sheriff’s office millions of dollars the city is obligated to pay under a contract with the sheriff’s office, which serves as Burien’s police force. In his previous position, Bailon was city manager of a small town in Vermont whose entire police force “drifted away” during the year he was there, leading the town to disband the force.

Cole-Tindall acknowledged that there have been “some challenges with the city, and specifically the city manager.”

“We have an obligation to avoid engaging in conduct that has been addressed in federal litigation and found to be unconstitutional,” Cole-Tindall said Monday. “As law enforcement officers, we must uphold the state [constitution] and the Constitution of the United States of America, and if there is a law that is not constitutional, I cannot in good conscience have my people enforce that.”

Burien’s new law expands on an earlier sleeping ban, prohibiting people from “living” on all nonresidential public land at all hours of the day or night; previously, people were allowed to sleep outdoors on some sidewalks. The law pays lip service to Martin by saying that the police can’t arrest people for being homeless if shelter is available, but the city has interpreted this requirement to include shelter in Seattle or Bellevue, neither of which is accessible to Burien.

The new law also creates 500-foot “buffers” around all schools, parks, day cares, and libraries, effectively banning homeless people from around 80 percent of the city, and gives City Manager Adolfo Bailon absolute power to expand these “buffers” at any time to include any other land in the city for any reason.

Burien has posted no signs identifying the exclusion zones, nor has it ever directly designated or posted notices identifying areas where the homeless are permitted to engage in “living space” activities,” which include not just sleeping but possessing items that “indicate” camping, like tents, tarps, and survival gear such as blankets.

“The city manager seems to have unfettered discretion in drawing a line at any point and in any way which he deems appropriate, without any real public comment or notice or opportunity to be heard,” Senior Deputy King County Prosecutor Erin Overbey said Monday.

In response to Cole-Tindall’s directive to deputies not to enforce the new ordinance, Bailon “reacted strongly,” according to the lawsuit, and directed the city to stop paying the county for its police services, which, according to the lawsuit, the city has done.

Last Thursday, one day before the sheriff’s office told the city it would not enforce the new law, Bailon sent a letter to Evergreen Treatment Services announcing that the city was terminating its brand-new outreach contract with ETS’ outreach arm, REACH, because “businesses within the Downtown core … have reported to the city a lack of outreach from the Neighborhood Outreach Coordinator.”

Representatives for REACH did not return calls for comment Monday.

In his letter to ETS, Bailon also accused a nonprofit set up  last year to run a temporary tent city at a Burien church of “creat[ing]” an encampment in downtown Burien—suggesting that the group, run by former city council member Cydney Moore, is tactically deploying homeless people to areas where they will be visible and inconvenient. The encampment, notably, is the same site where City Councilmember Linda Akey was recently caught on tape verbally attacking a group of unsheltered people sleeping on the sidewalk near her luxury condo. That video, which was first reported by PubliCola, made international news last month.

Burien has been pushing unsheltered people around the city since last March, when the city swept an encampment in front of the City Hall. As the county’s lawsuit notes, “Burien’s actions on homelessness succeeded only in shuffling unhoused people from City Hall to the dog park lot”—a piece of public land the city leased the land to a private animal shelter in order to evict the homeless people living there—to the triangle encampment [on Ambaum Way] to the church and then back again to City Hall, while never offering them any authorized camping location.”

REACH worked with the sheriff’s office to offer services and shelter to encampment residents when sheriff’s deputies enforced an earlier, less-expansive version of the outdoor sleeping ban; according to Cole-Tindall, no one was ever arrested under that version of the law. “REACH has been a real benefit to the sheriff’s office,” Cole-Tindall said. “They’ve been collaborating with us for many, many months. So the loss of that resource will adversely impact the work of the sheriff’s deputies.”

The future of Martin v. Boise is an open question, as the US Supreme Court gears up to hear arguments in a case that will decide whether cities have to ensure adequate shelter before removing or arresting people next month. Meanwhile, another lawsuit is moving forward that’s based on the Washington State Constitution’s prohibition on “cruel punishment”; that lawsuit will not be affected if the US Supreme Court overturns or alters the lower court’s findings in Martin.