By Erica C. Barnett

As I’ve noted previously, with some frustration, the Seattle City Council—which includes six brand-new members and a council president with just two years’ experience—is still spending most of its public meeting time getting up to speed on various city departments and offices do.

This slow-moving crash course in Civics 101 is probably necessary, since most of the new council members have never worked in or around City Hall, but the endless PowerPoint parade does give the impression the council has nothing urgent on its plate, even as a $230 million budget shortfall looms.

One thing the new council has been doing plenty of is asking questions. Although many are rhetorical or more-a-comment-than-a-question (looking at you, Rob Saka), they still say a lot about what the council hopes to do whenever they get around to governing full-time. Here are a few examples, from who recent council briefings about housing, homelessness, and public safety.

Sara Nelson wants to know if the problem with police hiring is the exams.

Nelson, a former council aide and two-year council veteran, pressed the director of the city’s two Civil Service Commissions, Andrea Scheele, about the city’s contract with the National Testing Network, a company the city uses to test new recruits’ knowledge, skills, and aptitude for the job, suggesting that the city should consider picking another vendor that could move applicants through the hiring process faster. The Public Safety Civil Service Commission administers tests for applicants for SPD and Seattle Fire Department applicants.

The city “invested heavily” in helping to develop the NTN test, Scheele noted, after a judge put the city under federal oversight amid allegations of bias and excessive use of force in 2012. (The US Department of Justice terminated most of that consent decree last year).  “The exam was tailored to assess a candidate’s cognitive abilities, but also to evaluate candidates’ skills and abilities related to judgment, appropriate human interactions, and integrity and ethics,” Scheele said.

About a month and a half ago, Scheele added, Mayor Bruce Harrell asked the PSCSC to “consider either adding or switching to” a test from a company called Public Safety Testing. Currently, between 60 and 65 percent of applicants either drop out during the testing phase or fail the NTN test, Scheele said. According to the Seattle Times, 90 percent of applicants pass the PST test.

Cathy Moore wonders if the problem with police hiring is that civil servants have no “sense of urgency.”

During her presentation, Scheele noted that the PSCSC now provides a list of candidates who have passed the application test to SPD, but said it would take another full-time employee to accelerate that process to every two weeks or faster. Currently, the two civil service commissions have three staff.

“I just think we’re moving way too slowly, and basically what I see here is a bureaucracy that’s clunky,” Moore responded. “We need to go faster. There’s no reason that we should be waiting to [administer exams and] send [SPD] a list of eligible candidates every six to eight weeks.”

“I don’t get a sense of urgency, frankly, when I’m listening to your presentation. And that’s not acceptable,” Moore said.

Scheele said the reason the PSCSC would need another employee to speed up the testing process is because the commission would have to stop processing test scores in batches—a change that would speed things up from the applicants’ perspective, but would add a new inefficiency at the end of the process. Moore said Scheele’s answer was “not satisfactory,” and told her to come back to the council in 30 days with “concrete steps that you’ve taken, because this is just too slow.”

“You’re here to serve the city, the citizens of the city, and the citizens of the city deserve to have police officers put on the streets as quickly as possible. Obviously, they need to be qualified, and we need to go through this process,” Moore continued. “Although there’s some question about whether we actually do need to, but nonetheless, this is where we are. So we have to light a fire under our our civil servants’ feet, because you are here to serve the city of Seattle.”

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Sara Nelson wants to know if we could subsidize cops’ housing (and day care, and cars, and college, and child care…)

Police officers in Seattle make a starting salary of around $83,000 before overtime and hiring bonuses, but could Seattle do more?

Nelson and other council members think they could, starting with perks like housing subsidies, “take-home cars,” subsidized day care, medical benefits after retirement, and other goodies that aren’t available to other city employees.

Rob Saka, elected last year, siad the city should consider paying relocation assistance for police who move here from elsewhere; when he learned that the city already does this, Saka said, “that’s great—and then paired with an actual housing subsidy, I think that that will be the most impactful.” Los Angeles provides new recruits with a $12,000 annual housing subsidy for their first two years, but the subsidy is only for housing in the city; currently, most SPD officers live outside Seattle.

Rob Saka wants to know why Seattle prioritizes homeless people’s privacy.

Washington state law allows unsheltered people to opt out of putting their personal and medical information into the county’s tracking system for homeless services, the Homeless Management Information System (HMIS). A significant number of people choose to do so because of privacy concerns, since the information the county tracks includes detailed information about substance use, time spent in hospitals or jail, and information provided to case managers. This “opt out” option means that Seattle’s homelessness data is never perfect; shelter referrals, for instance, represent an undercount.

Saka, along with council newcomer Maritza Rivera, wanted to know if there was a way to get around these requirements in order to “run analytics capabilities and use services to help us make better informed decisions and monitor trends, get ahead of trends, [and] plan—better planning, better outcomes.”

Saka, a former attorney for Meta, said he was aware that “there are some some notable potential privacy and security challenges with collection of certain data. But just because that is the case, and just because … the same issue applies to various technologies, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t use them or adopt them. Let us have effective safeguards in place to to control for that. But we need strong data collection capabilities to help us make better data-informed decisions.”

Requiring people to opt in to HMIS in order to receive homeless services would require a change in state law, something Rivera suggested the the city should support in an upcoming legislative session.

Maritza Rivera wants to know why we let people say “no” to shelter.

Rivera also questioned why the city allows people to decide whether they want to go indoors based on what shelter is available—saying no, for example, if the only option is a mat on the floor in a mass shelter.

“We do need to prioritize getting people indoors, whether or not we’re able to—you know, the goal is their first choice, but if that’s not available, we nevertheless have to get folks indoors. … I feel it’s inhumane to leave people on the street regardless” of whether they get their choice of shelter, Rivera said.

Tanya Woo wants to know how the city can help police feel safer at encampment sweeps.

Woo, who lost her race against District 2 incumbent Tammy Morales before the council appointed her to a citywide seat in January, said she has seen plainclothes police officers show up at encampment removals in the past, but “most of the time they don’t attend these, because they’re afraid of interactions during protests or interactions with unhoused residents. So,” she asked, “is there is there a plan going forward and how to mitigate some of that during resolutions?” Woo heads up a volunteer night watch in the Chinatown/International District, and led a successful effort to prevent the expansion of a Salvation Army-run homeless shelter in SoDo.

Deputy Mayor Tiffany Washington, who was leading a presentation about the Unified Care Team (the city’s umbrella group for encampment response) said police do show up at every encampment removal, adding that “the issues are, 98 percent of the time, with the protesters and not the actual people that are unhoused at the site.”

Sara Nelson wants to know: Why do we even pay for homeless outreach, anyway?

Nelson, whose beer business was one of the first to place eco-blocks in the public right-of-way to keep people from parking their RVs there, singled out the outreach provider REACH in asking Washington what the city’s outreach contracts are for.

“When we talk about outreach, what is it really supposed to do? Because when I hear you say you said earlier, that we want our outreach providers to stay engaged week after week, and we hear that they meet people where they’re at to build trust—toward what end?” Nelson asked. “Because if they’re just if we’re just building trust so that they can stay in these dangerous situations, exactly what is the programmatic goal of our outreach investments?”

“What I know,” Nelson added, “is that when budget time comes around and the REACH coordinators come in, they yell, ‘Stop the sweeps! Stop the sweeps!’ and then they are making it easier to stay in these dangerous environments.”

Although Washington noted that outreach is “a critical part of the homelessness response system,” Nelson’s disparaging comments about REACH could be a preview of the city’s upcoming budget discussions, where spending on everything but police, fire, and 911 will be on the table for cuts.