By Erica C. Barnett

Burien city officials escalated the drama over the city’s total ban on “living” outdoors last week after King County Sheriff Patti Cole-Tindall sued the city for what she called the city’s “unconstitutional” new law. As we reported last week, City Manager Adolfo Bailon immediately responded to the lawsuit by instructing employees to stop paying the sheriff’s office, which serves as Burien’s police department. (The move makes Burien, ironically, the first local city to actually defund its police.) Bailon also canceled the city’s recently signed homelessness outreach contract with REACH, leaving Burien without any professional homeless outreach services.

On Thursday, a man died in an encampment in downtown Burien; his body was discovered by outreach workers from REACH. Burien officials  immediately politicized the tragedy.

Speaking to the B-Town Blog, Burien Mayor Kevin Schilling lashed out at Cole-Tindall and a nonprofit run by a former city council member that ran a short-lived sanctuary encampment at a local church. Schilling said the man’s death, from an overdose, was a “direct result of the Sheriff’s Department and the County Executive suing us so they don’t have to enforce our common sense tent regulating measure, as well as not enforcing drug laws in the Downtown core. … I sure hope the Sheriff and County Executive staff taking their roles seriously, and stop wasting taxpayer time and money with their stunts that are leading to deaths.”

The new ban on “living” in public spaces includes appearing in public with any “indicia of camping,” including blankets, sleeping bags, and cooking equipment.”

The sheriff’s department has repeatedly told city officials that their priority is 911 calls and serious crimes, not the presence of homeless people in Burien. In a deposition last week, Burien Police Chief Ted Boe said his deputies spend most of their time responding to emergency calls, which “means we do not have capacity to provide continual management and oversight of conduct in encampments of unhoused persons that have been part of the community for the entire time I have worked with the City.”

Boe, who has been Burien’s police chief since 2018, said he had no issues getting people living unsheltered in Burien to “voluntarily move” when asked— until the city council hired Bailon in 2022.

Starting that year, Boe said, Bailon “put continual pressure on me to redeploy resources away from other public safety matters such as 911 calls and to address several non-criminal aspects of camping. I requested he provide support for addressing non-criminal behaviors to prevent police from being responsible for managing camp rules.”

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Boe also revealed that during a recent conversation with Bailon, the city manager told him he “would be demanding that I be removed as the City’s Chief” and replaced by someone who would be willing to accede to Bailon’s demands.

Another option the city is reportedly considering: Hiring their own police force, and ditching their contract with the county. This, however, would almost certainly be more expensive than the county contract. When the city looked into creating its own police force in 2011, a consultant concluded that it would cost between 12 and 35 percent more for the city to fund a similar level of service. Policing makes up about 45 per cent of Burien’s annual general-fund budget.

“I have grown to love this community and it is upsetting to have this assignment taken away for doing what I not only believe is right, but what I think our courts expect me to do as a police leader in Washington,” Boe said in his deposition.

At tonight’s Burien City Council meeting, the council will discuss a proposal to take away federal ARPA dollars that the council allocated to a day center for homeless Burien residents at Highline United Methodist Church last year. Opponents of providing shelter and services to homeless Burien residents have made similar arguments against providing them an indoor space to be (and access services) during the day, claiming that they will bring drugs and violence into the area.