By Erica C. Barnett
The city council’s land use committee approved the final piece of Mayor Katie Wilson’s shelter expansion proposal today, increasing the maximum size of tiny house village-style shelters throughout the city. The bill will allow villages, or “transitional encampments,” with up to 150 people (up from from 100), subject to restrictions that include minimum case management and overnight staffing, good neighbor agreements, and written public safety plans. The bill, which still has to be adopted by the full council, is the final piece of legislation the Wilson administration requested as part of a plan to add 1,000 shelter beds this year.
The shelter vote was clouded by a growing tension between the council and mayor’s office that exploded into the open over the past week.
On Tuesday, less than 24 hours before today’s scheduled vote, the mayor’s council liaison called land use committee chair Eddie Lin to ask him to pull the legislation from today’s agenda because the mayor’s office had problems with some of the changes the council has proposed. Lin said no.
This demand from the mayor’s office was a highly unusual breach of the legislative process in itself. Later in the day, Wilson’s senior advisor on housing and homelessness, Jon Grant, along with at least two other mayoral staffers—Kate Brunette Kreuzer and Nicole Vallestero-Soper—met with council members one on one and continued demanding last-minute changes to the amendments.
The meeting turned into a heated late-afternoon conflict that several sources described as a serious and significant breaking point in the relationship between the mayor and council. Several sources characterized Wilson’s staffers as “disrespectful” and expressed surprise that Wilson’s office seemed to believe they could order the council around.
Before Wednesday’s vote, council members thanked each other for their professionalism, speed, and transparency before moving the bill forward Wednesday, and Council. President Joy Hollingsworth alluded to a “lack of communication” about the amendments; only Lin thanked the mayor’s office.
Wilson herself, several people we spoke to emphasized, has always been polite and thoughtful in their interactions. But the mayor herself has rarely been around, according to council sources, sending staffers down to discuss legislation with council members and staff instead.
In response to questions, Wilson’s spokesperson, Sage Wilson, said the mayor’s office will “take our share of responsibility for that [communication] gap,” adding, “we did ask if the committee chair was open to providing more time to continue discussions so we could get to a good place together.”
Council members have raised concerns about the increasingly fractured relationship with Wilson’s office before; in fact, just last Friday, Council President Joy Hollingsworth met with mayoral staff to express how important it is that they communicate with the council throughout the legislative process. At a council media availability on Monday, before the mayor’s office asked Lin to pull the shelter bill, Hollingsworth said, “I know it’s a big learning curve, but it would just help us … that we’re talking before legislation is being transmitted” in order to avoid “surprises.”
It’s worth a brief digression here about how the city’s legislative process works. Legislation can come from the council itself, or the mayor can “send down” legislation by identifying a sponsor who will carry their bill through the council process and having them introduce it—a step Wilson skipped with her make-or-break shelter legislation. Then the mayor typically works with council allies to shepherd a proposal to the finish line, communicating closely with the sponsor and discussing any concerns as soon as they arise. Legislation is a give-and-take process between coequal branches of government, and mayors typically accept non-fatal amendments as part of the deal.
Instead of raising concerns with the bill and amendment sponsors when they proposed the amendments last week, the mayor’s office waited until the day before the vote to raise specific objections. (There would ordinarily be more time between introduction and a final vote, but the mayor’s office asked for an expedited timeline, designating the legislation as an “emergency” bill.)
Wilson, the mayor’s spokesman, said the mayor “raised concerns since amendments were initially released about the implications of putting policy related to shelter operations into the land use code. … We had good conversations with Councilmembers about how to address those concerns and thought we had come to an understanding, but there seems to have a miscommunication, because the language released Tuesday morning was not in line with what we had expected.”
The amendments Wilson’s office objected to weren’t the ones you might expect. Maritza Rivera’s proposals to create shelter-free “buffer” zones around schools, child care centers, and parks and require uniformed security outside every shelter did not move forward (she could reintroduce it at full council, but it lacks the votes to pass). Neither did language—apparently inadvertent—that would have made shelter providers responsible for unsanctioned encampments and public safety issues in the area around shelter sites.
Instead, the purportedly problematic amendments came largely from Wilson’s own progressive council allies. Alexis Mercedes Rinck, for example, added amendments that would set a nonbinding “goal” of minimum case management staffing and require staffing at night, and bill sponsor Dionne Foster added an amendment, on behalf of Debora Juarez, to require shelters to adopt public safety plans.
Another amendment, from Hollingsworth, stipulates that the new shelters must adopt good neighbor agreements, something many shelter providers already do. (Hollingsworth changed the amendment on Wednesday to remove many requirements she said shelter providers identified as problematic.) And Dan Strauss proposed a new version of an amendment that would require shelter providers to divide larger shelters into distinct, separate “neighborhoods” with controlled access, after Low Income Housing Institute director Sharon Lee emailed the council Monday with about the original, more rigid proposal.
LIHI provides most of the city’s tiny house villages and will likely be one of the biggest beneficiaries of funding to provide the new micromodular shelters. Grant, Wilson’s senior advisor on housing and homelessness, was most recently a longtime staffer at LIHI and frequently testified at council meetings on their behalf.
The shelter bill, a marquee proposal meant to fulfill Wilson’s biggest campaign promise, could represent a turning point in Wilson’s relationship with the council members whose support she will need to move her ambitious agenda forward. Just not in the way she probably hoped.