Category: Drugs

Drugs, homelessness, Mayor Wilson, neighborhoods, public safety

KCRHA Spins the News that Homelessness Is Growing
Nearly half of all homeless families are unsheltered, according to the latest count.

We discuss the latest estimate of the region’s homeless population and the latest “new approach” to drug use and crime in Little Saigon on this week’s Seattle Nice.

By Erica C. Barnett

After releasing a high-level summary of the latest “point in time count” report on King County’s homeless population last week, the King County Regional Homelessness Authority tried to put a positive spin on the results at a meeting of the agency’s governing board last week. The new numbers showed a 9 percent increase in overall homelessness—from an estimated 16,868 to 18,365—between 2024 and 2026.

On this week’s episode of Seattle Nice, we dug into all these numbers—and the KCRHA’s take on what they mean.

At a presentation to the governing board on Friday, the KCRHA’s associate director for strategy, William Towey, said “one of the key takeaways from the Point In Time count is that the system is doing amazing work. It’s moving a lot of people through, we’re housing a lot of people, a lot of people are coming in and successfully exiting, but the inflow just continues to grow.”

Every year, according to KCRHA, about 17,000 people stop using homeless services (a widely used proxy for no longer being homeless), while about 18,000 enter or re-enter the system. As long as the rate of people entering the system exceeds the number of people exiting, overall homelessness will continue to grow.

The KCRHA has focused heavily on the fact that although both sheltered and unsheltered homelessness continue to increase, the rate of increase in overall homelessness has declined—from 21 percent between 2022 and 2024 to 9 percent over the last two years. At the governing board meeting, Towey argued that the “declination in the rate of increase” represented a specific number of people who would be homeless but are not. “That translates to over 2,500 individuals or households who aren’t homeless because of that decrease in the rate of increase,” Towey said.

Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson pointed to a troubling aspect of the numbers Towey didn’t mention, but which we highlighted in our coverage of the count last week—unsheltered homelessness, which is both more visible and more dangerous for people living outdoors than living in shelter, has spiked by 21 percent even as sheltered homelessness has grown more slowly. That’s more than 2,000 additional people living unsheltered compared to the count released in 2024.

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“I’m very, very concerned by the really significant increase in the rate of unsheltered homelessness,” Wilson said. “We were already a national outlier in having over 50 percent of our homeless population unsheltered, and now when it’s up to over two thirds, that’s pretty shocking.”

Towey attributed the increase to the closure of 689 shelter beds, including an unspecified number of family shelter beds, which Towey called the “primary driver” of the shelter losses. Family homelessness, according to the report, has declined slightly over the past two years, but the percentage of  families who are unsheltered increased almost 40 percent, to nearly half of all households with minor children. In the 2024 count, about 35 percent of people living in family households were unsheltered.

Also on this week’s show, we discussed the latest  “new approach” to address the crowded drug and stolen goods market around 12th and Jackson in Little Saigon, which consists of expanding the hours service providers are on site, directing existing LEAD diversion services to the area, and, as ever, flooding the zone with cops, who are supposed to send some people to LEAD instead of arresting them.

Personally, I’m tired of hearing elected officials (and certain podcast cohosts) argue that hot spot policing, plus a nominal new investment in services, will improve conditions this time despite the many previous times the same basic approach has failed. Sandeep thinks there’s something truly new this time. I’m far less optimistic.

Drugs, human services, King County, Uncategorized

County’s Midyear Budget Sparks Controversy Over Harm Reduction, Human Service Contracts, and Lobbyists

1. After PubliCola reported on a King County Council supplemental budget amendment that would have prohibited spending county funds on safer smoking supplies for drug users, the proposal’s sponsor, Councilmember Rod Dembowski, decided to withdraw the amendment and replace it with one that simply requests more information on the program. It was a significant victory for harm reduction proponents, who pointed to data showing that the program provided access to services, including treatment, to tens of thousands of drug users last year.

The supplemental budget, usually a low-key affair, sparked a number of controversies  this time around.

During a work session before this week’s county council meeting, Dembowski said that in response to “feedback,” his amendment would “modify that language away from a strict cutoff to asking for some more information about the program. You know, how many supplies are being distributed? What is the cost? Who are they going to? What studies are out there? What assessments are out there? Give us some more information, and come back in a few months to let us know about the program.”

As we reported last week, the county spends a small amount—about $14,000 so far this year—on safe smoking supplies, plus some staff time for county employees who distribute pipes and foil at the county’s syringe exchange and to nonprofit groups that run their own syringe exchange programs.

Those programs had fallen largely into disuse as most drug users switched from injecting to smoking; the result was a sharp reduction in the number of people who accessed other county services that are a primary function of the program, such as case management, basic health care and STI testing, and referrals to treatment. Opponents of harm reduction have caricatured and demonized safer smoking programs in the Trump era, claiming that they “enable” drug users and encourage drug use.

2. The supplemental budget, adopted yesterday, also included a modified version of an amendment Dembowski proposed earlier this month that will add another layer of process to every new Best Starts for Kids contract. (Best Starts has been under fire for months after an audit and followup investigation found potential misuse of funds, and possible outright fraud, by some “high-risk” organizations that received contracts during and after the pandemic.)

The amendment adopted Tuesday will require the county’s Department of Community and Human Services to send a “notification letter” to the county council certifying that every new contractor has met a series of requirements— guaranteeing, for instance, that each individual contractor has sound financial systems and “qualified personnel” to administer the contract. Previously, the amendment would have also required such a letter for every contract amendment, which opponents said would have turned routine changes into lengthy administrative nightmares.

The amendment, like Dembowski’s original proposal, also requires contractors to attest that neither they, nor any person in a position to administer contracts, has ever lost a county contract because of misconduct or misuse of funds. But it provides a new out that wasn’t included in the original proposal: If the contractor has taken “all reasonable steps” to recover misused funds and can show that “adequate corrective action has been implemented,” the county can still contract with them.

Dembowski characterized every element of the amendment as “not unusual” or something that “shouldn’t be a challenge.” But critics of his amendment argued in public comment that it still creates more process without providing meaningful oversight, since the council is made up of elected officials, not contracting or financial experts.

Dembowski’s amendment doesn’t include a minimum contract size or explain how small organizations that may be new to government contracting are supposed to prove they already have financial controls and systems in place that will meet the new requirements.

3. Also Tuesday, the county council voted to retain the county’s current federal lobbying firm, Washington2 Advocates, for at least a year while also paying a new lobbying firm, Manatt, Phelps, & Phillips. The contract with Washington2 will be with the legislative branch, while the contract with Manatt will be with the county executive.

Tensions flared over the contract decision after King County Executive Girmay Zahilay hired Manatt through a request for proposals process without telling the council what they were doing, effectively canceling out a one-year option to retain Washington2 Advocates, run by longtime county lobbyist (and personal friend of some councilmembers) Jeff Bjornstad.

During Dow Constantine’s time as executive, the council and executive jointly approved the lobbying contract. So it was a surprise to some on the council when they learned that Zahilay had run a new bidding process and picked a new contractor. (After we published this post, the executive’s office reached out to let us know that the council’s government relations staff was aware of the RFP. “We communicated to all Councilmembers our desire to coordinate with them on this RFP before it went live in April,” the spokesperson said.)

“The renewal came up sort of abruptly—we weren’t notified until there was already an RFP put out by the executive branch to search for another contractor,” Councilmember Claudia Balducci told PubliCola Tuesday. “For a very long time, we hired a lobbyist and worked together across the branches very closely … so this was a little jarring.” It “didn’t help,” Balducci continued, that Zahilay “deleted the council from the RFP” itself, effectively cutting them out of the lobbying contract altogether. “We were told that wasn’t the intent, but this all happened very quickly.”

Zahilay’s office disputes this, saying the council is still “a receiver of the consultant’s services” and saying the contract has always been just with the executive branch.

Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda told PubliCola that the fact that Bjornstad didn’t apply in the executive’s competitive process was “a sign that he wasn’t interested in competing.” Mosqueda argued that the executive had the right to issue a lobbying contract, arguing at a Monday council pre-briefing that the decision “should not be about individual relationships that people have had with a contractor over X number of years. …  This is about how the county can best be represented in these immense times.”

Doubling up on lobbyists for a year will cost the county about $200,000.

Asked about the dustup with the council, a spokesperson for Zahilay said, “we are rebidding and refreshing all federal and state lobbyist contracts. As a new administration, we believe this is good practice.”

Drugs, education, homelessness, human services, King County, LGBTQ+

This Week on PubliCola: June 20, 2026
KCRHA associate director William Towey

KCRHA says the county and city owe it $8 million, county councilmember plans to eliminate successful harm reduction program, and much more.

By Erica C. Barnett

Monday, June 15

Regional Homelessness Agency Says King County and Seattle Owe It $8 Million

In a comment that came as a surprise to many on the county council, King County Regional Homelessness Authority associate director William Towey said the city and county owe the KCRHA $8 million—the same $8 million an audit found the agency couldn’t account for and that may need to be “written off.” KCRHA CEO Kelly Kinnison couldn’t be at the meeting because she was on vacation.

Tuesday, June 16

County Human Services Director Calls Councilmember’s Contract Approval Proposal an “Overstep”

King County Councilmember Rod Dembowski has proposed a budget amendment that would require the county’s Department of Community and Human Services (DCHS) to submit a letter for county council review every time they execute or make any amendment to a contract in the Best Starts for Kids program, which was subject to an audit that found potential fraud and abuse in a subset of “high-risk” contracts. DCHS director Susan McLaughlin said the idea was a vast “overreach” that would not improve oversight.

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Wednesday, June 17

County Councilmember Dembowski Wants to Defund Successful Harm Reduction Program

In a separate amendment, Dembowski has proposed eliminating all funding for a county program that distributes safer smoking supplies to drug users. Opponents of harm reduction have targeted the program, which the county credits with more than quadrupling the number of people who come in to clinics where they can (and do) access other services, including case management, STI testing, and treatment.

Thursday, June 18

Right-Wing Activist Accused of Assaulting Security Guard While Trying to Force His Way Into Pro-LGBTQ Event

Jonathan Choe, a former KOMO reporter who now works for the Discovery Institute and Turning Point USA, showed up to the campaign kickoff for No Hate in WA State and tried to force his way inside, allegedly hitting a security guard in the back of the head, according to a police report. The campaign is working to combat two anti-LGBTQ+ statewide initiatives, including one that would ban trans kids from playing sports.

Friday, June 19

Here’s What Being a “Child Care Candidate” Actually Means

In an op-ed directed at all the candidates who say they support universal child care, SEIU 925 political and legislative director Erin Haick lays out a road map for what that means in practice—standing firm against additional cuts, paying child care workers like the professional educators they are, and right-sizing subsidies so they actually make it possible for people to pay for child care.

Also this week:

  • On Seattle Nice, we interviewed DCHS director Susan McLaughlin about how DCHS is addressing the findings of a damning audit that found potential waste and abuse in programs aimed at helping youth, among other topics—like the future of the King County Regional Homelessness Authority.
  • I went on KUOW’s Week In Review this week, where KUOW reporter Scott Greenstone, Republican former city attorney Ann Davison, host Bill Radke and I discussed the news of the week, including a report from a downtown business group that says downtown is struggling and it’s all the fault of taxes on big business (spoiler: It isn’t.)
  • ICYMI, I was also on Crystal Fincher’s Hacks and Wonks podcast last week, where we talked about the city’s data center moratorium, the latest light rail ridership numbers, ongoing challenges the CARE Team of unarmed first responders face, mostly from the Seattle Police Department, and more.

 

Addiction, Drugs, King County

County Councilmember Dembowski Wants to Defund Successful Harm Reduction Program
Source: ADAI, University of Washington

By Erica C. Barnett

Earlier this month, King County Council budget chair Rod Dembowski quietly slipped an amendment into a nearly 400-page supplemental budget proposal that would prohibit the county from spending any money buying or distributing safer smoking supplies, such as pipes and foil, to drug users.

The county’s public health department only runs one needle exchange, where drug users can also access services and treatment medication, but the county distributes supplies to nonprofits that provide similar services, making the potential impact far more significant than the small amount—around $14,000— the county has spent so far this year on pipes and smoking supplies.

King County Public Health (KCPH) estimates that staff distribute safer smoking supplies at the downtown needle exchange for 15 to 20 hours a week, “translating to an estimated $83,000 annually for staff time,” according to KCPH spokeswoman Sharon Bogan. “During these interactions, staff are also connecting individuals with tools to prevent overdose, offering connections to treatment, and addressing client needs,” Bogan said.

King County hands out some of these supplies at its own needle exchange, downtown, and also distributes them to other organizations, including the Hepatitis Education Project and the People’s Harm Reducation Alliance.

Dembowski did not respond to several requests for an interview.

Opponents of harm-reduction approaches, such needle exchanges and the distribution of overdose reversal drugs, argue that making drug use safer merely “enables” drug users to stay addicted. The Trump administration has aggressively rejected harm reduction in favor of punitive approaches, including in recent policy guidance for federal shelter and housing funds.

King County, however, has long embraced harm reduction, which reduces the spread of infectious diseases like HIV and attracts drug users who would not otherwise come in contact with health care and treatment providers. The downtown needle exchange, for example, provides treatment referrals and “warm hand-offs” to the Pathways treatment clinic located in the same location; refers people to detox and medication-assisted treatment; provides case management and connections to housing, food and shelter; and hands out the overdose reversal drug Narcan, among other services.

“Distributing pipes and foil allows Public Health to build trust among people who use drugs. By building this trust, we can reduce preventable deaths, interrupt the spread of infectious diseases, and serve as a bridge to treatment and recovery,” Public Health’s Bogan said. “Discontinuing pipe and foil distribution means that we will lose our connections to people in our community who use smoking supplies and do not inject and who rely on our services.”

Source: ADAI, University of Washington

Caleb Banta-Green, a research professor at the University of Washington’s Addictions, Drugs, & Alcohol Institute (ADAI). said he “was saddened and surprised to see King County do something that appears to be following in the footsteps of the federal government’s really ill-informed approach.” When politicians actually visit harm reduction programs in person, he said, they often change their minds, “because it’s not just giving things to people. It is health promoting and it is literally about engagement and helping people.”

A survey ADAI conducted last year found that in 2025, opiate and meth users overwhelmingly switched from injecting drugs to smoking them, a change (compared to ADAI’s 2015 survey) that corresponded with a dramatic reduction in people showing up at sites that provided clean needles.

In King County, the reduction in injection drug consumption led to a reduction from 25,000 annual visits, or “encounters,” with the public needle exchange program to a low of 12,000 in 2022. After the county began handing out pipes and foil, that number rebounded, from 20,000 in 2023 to 60,000 in 2025, according to the county’s public health department.

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“There has been a dramatic shift in a decade from heroin to fentanyl, and from injecting to smokin—that is how people are consuming substances, and if we want to keep providing public health services for people who consume substances, we have to be adapting to that,” Banta-Green said.

Smoking from dirty or broken pipes, or using cheap, thin foil as a smoking surface, both pose their own safety risks, such as facial wounds and burns—making it a good idea for drug users to replace pipes and only use thick, high-quality foil. But coming in for safer supplies has another benefit, ADAI’s research found: It keeps people from injecting drugs, which is much riskier and can lead to abscesses, infections, and collapsed veins.

At needle exchange sites that didn’t offer smoking supplies, participants were far more likely to have injected drugs (70 percent) than at sites that offered smoking supplies (35 percent), according to the survey. At those same sites, 83 percent of participants said they would “like to get free, clean pipes or foils to smoke opioids, cocaine, or meth,” and 75 percent of the people who injected drugs but were interested safer smoking supplies said they would “inject less often”  if smoking supplies were available.

“All of the evidence points to the same thing, which is when you make smoking supplies available, people will inject less, and if you take smoking supplies away, people will start injecting more,” Banta-Green said.

The county council is scheduled to vote on the full supplemental budget next Tuesday.

City Council, Drugs, Police

SPD Chief Questions Whether LEAD Diversion Program is “Meeting Expectations”
“Mark43 Recorded Diversion” refers to all completed referrals police made through arrests; LEAD also gets some referrals that don’t come from SPD.

Barnes allowed that LEAD was better than “no diversion at all,” while Councilmember Rivera said the city has already “thrown a lot” of money at the program.

By Erica C. Barnett

Police Chief Shon Barnes questioned the value of LEAD, the city’s main criminal justice diversion program, at a city council committee on Monday—saying the program could not, on its own, “deliver the level of order, safety and visible presence that residents, businesses and visitors believe should be indicative of a major US city.” For 15 years, LEAD has provided services as an alternative to arrest and incarceration; the model, which includes long-term case management, harm reduction, and connections to housing and treatment, has been replicated around the country and is considered a best practice for minimizing people’s involvement in the criminal legal system.

Since 2023, police have had the power to arrest and charge people with a gross misdemeanor for possessing or drugs or using them in public. That year, a new state law made drug use or possession a gross misdemeanor, rather than a felony, in response to a 2021 state supreme court decision called State v. Blake that overturned existing laws that classified possession and public use as felony crimes.

Between 2024 and 2025, according to a staff presentation during the council’s public safety committee on Tuesday,  LEAD diversions for people arrested for possession or public use declined almost 37 percent—from 173 to 109—while charges filed by police officers more than doubled and attempted jail bookings increased by 191 percent. (This number includes both jail bookings and people the jail declined to book because of medical and other issues). Misdemeanor drug use and possession cases made up just under half of all drug arrests.

This is not the outcome local leaders said they hoped for when they adopted the law in 2023. In an executive order that accompanied the new law, then-mayor Bruce Harrell directed SPD to adopt a policy that directed officers to divert drug users into LEAD or other programs whenever possible, rather than arresting them. That policy says, “When an arrest is warranted, sworn employees should prioritize diversion in lieu of booking.”

In general, the numbers show, police have continued to routinely arrest and book people using drugs in public rather than sending them to LEAD.

Both the new law and the executive order gave individual police officers the ultimate authority to decide whether to arrest someone or refer them to LEAD, based partly on whether they decide a person is posing a “threat of harm” to anyone in the public. (LEAD can also take referrals after an arrest).

The way SPD’s policy defines a threat of harm gives police a lot of discretion to decide whether they think someone is causing harm. But it specifies that any time a person is using drugs near a bus or rail stop, school, or park, a threat of “harm will be presumed.”

Seattle Police Chief Shon Barnes said the list was almost too expansive. “A very important policy decision will have to be made whether or not officers can [arrest] people using drugs” when they witness it, “and whether or not we can make that arrest without having to go through the checklist,” Barnes said.

Barnes and acting Assistant Chief Rob Brown told the committee that they respected LEAD and planned to continue diverting people to the program. In “many cases,” Barnes said, LEAD “is better than having what we’ve always done, which is no intervention at all. But it’s also important to be clear-eyed about what the program can and cannot accomplish and whether it’s meeting the expectations of the people who live, work and visit the city.”

 

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LEAD was started in Belltown in 2011 and has expanded in size and scope many times since, so it’s inaccurate to say that the city has “always” done “no intervention at all.” Barnes, previously police chief in Madison, Wisconsin, was appointed chief by Harrell last year.

Brown, who was previously the commander of SPD’s South Precinct, said he was particularly interested in holding people accountable who engage in what he called “defiant” drug use—that is, drug use in highly visible places that make residents and customers “very uncomfortable.” These “defiant” users, Brown said, “feel like they’re entitled to consume. … I understand that [for] somebody who is an addict, that jail alone, by itself, is not necessarily going to help them get to moving beyond their addiction. But what I do want to see is behavior change for this type of defiant, open consumption.”

In a separate presentation, Purpose Dignity Action’s Lisa Daugaard, who launched LEAD in Belltown 15 years ago, said funding for the PDA-run program hit “a high-water mark” in 2022 and has been declining ever since, reducing LEAD’s capacity to take on new clients.

After a LEAD staffer described an analysis that showed people do better the longer people they stick with LEAD, Councilmember Maritza Rivera said she wasn’t convinced the program was doing enough to impact visible drug use and disorder. “I appreciate that it can take up to two years to get someone to accept services and get toward a path of recovery,” Rivera said, but businesses can’t wait that long to see improvements. “It taking two years to help someone get off of 12th and Jackson is not helping that small business be able to stay in business and stay open,” she said.

“I don’t mean any disrespect by this,” Rivera continued, “but everyone comes here and says, if we had more money, it would be different. … “You know, we have thrown a lot [of money at LEAD]—I mean, PDA gets $20 million from the city.”

“We’re in a budget deficit. So are there other things that we can do to address the problem? … Because I don’t know that we have more money that we can put into it.”

Last year, Rivera voted along with the rest of the council to increase the police department’s budget by $35 million, including millions for to expand SPD’s camera surveillance program into additional neighborhoods. That amount will grow this year even in he absence of new programs, as officers that received raises of 42 percent over the past five years get raises on top of their new higher salaries.

Drugs

New Drug Sensors Lead to Restroom Closures at Four Seattle Library Branches
Seattle’s Ballard branch library. Photo by Dennis Bratland, via Wikimedia Commons, CC-by-4.0 license.

By Erica C. Barnett

If you need to use the restrooms at the Lake City, Ballard, Capitol Hill, or International District libraries and find them closed, it may be thanks to new “air-quality sensors” that detect vapor from drugs that don’t set off regular smoke detectors, like fentanyl and meth, and alert staff to immediately close the restrooms down for at least 15 minutes or until the air quality improves to a minimum threshold level.

Library staff already have the authority to issue temporary or permanent bans for people who use drugs in the restrooms and other violations of the library’s code of conduct or the law.

According to Seattle Public Library spokeswoman Elisa Murray, SPL decided to start shutting down restrooms at certain branches in response to drug use as a way to protect patrons and staff.

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“Prior to implementing this technology, staff only became aware of unsafe conditions when fumes reached the service desks or when a patron comment prompted staff to enter the restrooms and detect smells, at which point they’re already risking exposure,” Murray said. “An alert allows the behavior to be interrupted as early as possible, and access to live data informs staff decisions about whether or not the restrooms should remain closed without exposing staff to harmful chemicals.”

King County has long advised that fentanyl “fumes” are generally harmless. “When someone smokes fentanyl, most of the drug has been filtered out by the user before there is secondhand smoke. It doesn’t just sort of float around,” Washington Poison Center medical director Scott Phillips said in a King County Public Health blog post in 2022. “There’s no real risk for the everyday person being exposed to secondhand opioid smoke.”

Despite this, Murray said library “staff have reported feeling sick from drug-related fumes, and we have had to close restrooms because of fumes related to drug activity. Air quality sensors help us maintain a safe and healthy environment for both staff and patrons.”

Murray said the library has received no complaints from patrons or staff about the restroom closures. Using or possessing drugs in public became a misdemeanor in 2023, and people accused of either offense can be banished from certain parts of the city even without a conviction.

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