By Erica C. Barnett

At the city council’s first meetings on Mayor Bruce Harrell’s proposed budget this week, Councilmember Maritza Rivera repeatedly suggested that she has not gotten sufficient information, since joining the council last year, about several programs the city funds that are designed to help people living unsheltered or in crisis. Rivera has opposed some of the

On Thursday morning, Rivera suggested it might be premature to expand the city’s CARE Department, which responds to 911 calls, and the related CARE Team, which responds to a limited subset of emergency calls alongside police and can take over those calls once police sign off. As we’ve reported, the CARE Team is set to sign a new agreement with SPD that will allow it to respond to calls without police in tow, and expand the types of calls team members, who are social workers, are allowed to respond to.

The city expanded CARE to 24 people last year, the maximum allowed under the agreement with SPD that expires at the end of this year. A proposed 0.1 cent sales tax would increase that number to 48, on the assumption that the new agreement will allow the expansion.

“I don’t know how well that expansion is going,” Rivera said. “I know there are issues underlying all of that. Nevertheless, we are not done with this full year and  the proposal in this budget is to go from 24 to 48… and I have not seen any information about the work that CARE is doing that warrants the expansion,” given that the 2025 budget year isn’t over yet.

Largely in response to council questions, CARE launched a detailed data dashboard, currently accessible only the city’s internal network (to which Rivera has access) earlier this year. CARE has also repeatedly presented data and results to the council and publicly answered their questions.

Rivera did not raise similar concerns about a lack of data when the council approved an expansion of live police cameras into several new neighborhoods earlier this month. The council started discussing that expansion in late July, just weeks after SPD turned on new surveillance cameras in three initial “pilot” neighborhoods. The pilot program added almost $6 million to the 2025-2026 budget along with 21 new positions at SPD; the new budget anticipates SPD will need to hire another nine people to staff the surveillance center, and cost around $500,000 on cameras alone. A majority of the council, including Rivera, green-lit the surveillance expansion without any data showing that the cameras helped SPD solve or stop crimes that would have gone unaddressed without the cameras.

Later in the day, Rivera said she also didn’t have enough information to know whether LEAD and CoLEAD, two programs run by the nonprofit Purpose Dignity Action, were worth the funding provided in the mayor’s budget, which includes about $15 million for LEAD pre-booking diversion and $5 million for the CoLEAD encampment resolution program. That money, Rivera observed, is enough to “fund an actual department,” like the Office of Arts and Culture.

“I just want to make sure I understand how well we’re doing with diversion services,” Rivera said. “I just don’t feel, since I got here last year, that I have that information that I can really speak to. How really are we helping people? I understand there’s a lot more people in the system. Ideally we’d be people should be going into recovery, and then we’re taking up new people. I don’t necessarily think that’s happening, but I don’t want to be unfair, so I just need more information.”

Andrew Myerberg, Harrell’s chief of staff, said the people LEAD and CoLEAD work with, who are often homeless and involved in the criminal legal system, don’t just “go into recovery” and cycle out; their complex needs can take years to address, and relapse is common. LEAD, founded in 2021, is an internationally renowned diversion model that has been implemented around the world, while CoLEAD has been widely praised as the most successful approach to addressing unsanctioned encampments by permanently housing people living in state-owned rights-of way.

Speaking more broadly, Rivera said she was not “supportive of Housing First”—programs based on the premise that housing is a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for long-term stability, health, and recovery—because “I don’t think it’s fair. … They’re not going to be able to stay housed if they don’t have the treatment services.” This reflects a misunderstanding that has become a talking point among the right across the country—that “housing first” means “housing only,” and that programs like LEAD simply dump people in empty houses and leave them there to rot.

On Friday, Rivera appeared eager to reignite her efforts last year to gut the city’s Equitable Development initiative, which helps fund community-based efforts by small, often first-time, developers to help their projects get off the ground. Last year, Rivera proposed legislation that would have frozen all new funding for the program and required the community groups it funded to spend down every penny they received from EDI by the end of the year or lose all their funding—a virtual impossibility for long-term capital projects that typically take five to seven years to complete.

Rivera’s proposal resulted in an outcry from communities that were slated to benefit from EDI projects (which are concentrated in Southeast Seattle) as well as panicked EDI recipients, who begged the council not to withdraw city funding for their projects. (Eventually, Rivera withdrew her amendment and replaced it with new reporting requirements for EDI projects.) Rivera suggested Friday that she still thinks EDI is completing projects too slowly, noting that 20 of 75 EDI projects that have received funding at some point in the last 10 years, through 2025, are finished.

“You know, ideology is great, but what is really great is when we [take] action and these projects actually open to help community,” Rivera said. “Just talking about it, that’s great, but we have to do it. And so this was my concern, as you know last year, is a lot of these projects are not not moving along fast enough where they’re actually going to benefit community, and that’s a concern.”

Rob Saka backed Rivera up, saying that while he didn’t “remember all the ins and outs and twists and turns of that… [I] remember there being a fair amount of confusion around the original purpose and goals of that underlying effort. And I also remember my colleague being unfairly attacked, in some cases based off of race, which, you know, check your privilege! White saviorism in the city of Seattle is particularly real.”

Saka did not give any examples of anyone making a racist argument against Rivera’s proposal to gut the Equitable Development Initiative, which is explicitly designed to benefit underserved communities of color. The original EDI initiative was sponsored by former councilmember Tammy Morales, who, like Rivera, is Latina.

PubliCola’s own coverage at the time showed that the overwhelming majority of those who asked the council to allow EDI projects to keep moving forward were people of color who worked on or whose communities directly benefited from these grassroots community projects.