Category: headliner

Morning Crank Part 2: Homelessness Division Loses Another Key Player; Burgess Can’t Quit the Council

1. As I mentioned on Twitter last week, Navigation Team outreach leader Jackie St. Louis announced his resignation last month and his last day was last Friday. St. Louis did not return my calls asking about his decision to leave the city back in June, but he had recently been reassigned to a new position as “manager of unsheltered crisis response” in the Homelessness Strategy and Outreach division—a reassignment that could be interpreted as a demotion. Tiffany Washington, the erstwhile director of the homelessness division, also quit recently to become deputy director of the city’s Department of Education and Early Learning.

“So, this is where this part of my story ends. Not how I would have intended it to. Not how I would have envisioned it, but I accept that this is the way that it is supposed to be. Because a good name is worth more than any earthly reward, and integrity should never be entrusted to those who it is a stranger to.” – Former Navigation Team leader Jackie St. Louis, whose last day was last Friday

St. Louis told homeless service providers about his departure in a brief email. It read: “I wanted to take the time to thank you for your partnership over the years under what have been trying circumstances. I also want to wish you well and offer well wishes as you forge ahead with your respective missions. Though differing, they all help to try and create a better community for all those who call it home. Today will be my last day at the city.”

His departure letter to colleagues was significantly more dramatic. “To live is to wage war: war with the external forces that threaten our existence but even more so the war we wage with our own selves,” it began. “They tell us that history is told from the perspective of those who survive to recount that which has transpired. I challenge that assertion, because amongst us live and toil those who bear the scars of battles long since waged.

“It is not those who survive who tell those stories as much as it is those who still retain the desire of sharing the morbid details of things which they have most likely experienced as an observer. …

“The jury is still out on whether my ‘work’ here resulted in any significant impact for those whom it was intended. Yet, I am certain of the fact that I have been deeply impacted by your word and deeds. They have moved me toward being a better, more humble, more courageous, and resilient version of myself. …

“So, this is where this part of my story ends. Not how I would have intended it to. Not how I would have envisioned it, but I accept that this is the way that it is supposed to be. Because a good name is worth more than any earthly reward, and integrity should never be entrusted to those who it is a stranger to.”

St. Louis concluded by thanking a long list of colleagues. They did not, notably, include either Washington or Johnson.

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2. The Navigation Team also came up in a recent mailer from former mayor Tim Burgess’ PAC targeting city council incumbent (and Burgess’ former colleague) Lisa Herbold, who is running for reelection. In the mailer, Burgess’ group, People for Seattle, accuses Herbold of “vot[ing] to cut funding for the Navigation Teams tasked with reducing homeless camps.” This is inaccurate—as I reported at the time, although Herbold joined other council members in seeking a smaller permanent increase in the size of the team than Durkan initially requested, they ultimately gave the mayor everything she wanted, finding funds to marginally increase human service provider pay while preserve the increase in funding Durkan requested.

Burgess, who retired in 2017, has remained unusually active for a former elected official. Burgess’ PAC, which has raised more than a quarter-million dollars, has also sent out mailers accusing Kshama Sawant challenger Zach DeWolf of offering “more of the same” in an effort to boost Seattle Metro Chamber of Commerce-endorsed candidate Egan Orion through the primary. This week, Burgess also sent an email to council members admonishing them directly for defying Durkan with their vote to create a dedicated fund for the soda tax, providing the language of the original bill establishing the soda tax, and suggesting four things the council “could have” done instead of creating the dedicated fund.

Burgess’ attempts to influence not only council votes, but the makeup of the council itself, have prompted some on the council to joke that he should probably just run for council again.

Morning Crank Part 1: City Acknowledges Navigation Team Rarely Provides Services or Outreach

1. Seattle Human Services Department director Jason Johnson acknowledged that the city’s Navigation Team is now dedicated primarily to removing tents and people from public spaces, rather than providing outreach and services, at a meeting of the city council’s special committee on homelessness on Monday.

In an update on the work of the Navigation Team—recently expanded to include two new “system navigators” after the nonprofit that had been trying to connect homeless people living in encampments to services, REACH, said it would no longer participate in removals—Johnson told council members that “most” of the people the Navigation Team encounters when clearing out encampments “are complying, meaning they are moving themselves and their belongings out of the right-of-way and are not engaging in a services conversation with the system navigators.” The navigators were supposed to replace REACH outreach workers, who stopped participating in removals when it became clear that their presence was harming their ability to build trust with unsheltered people traumatized by frequent sweeps.

This is hardly surprising—under new policies implemented by Mayor Jenny Durkan, the Navigation Team now focuses overwhelmingly on removing “obstruction” encampments without providing any prior notice or outreach, which tends to engender hostility and mistrust—but it was an unusually blunt acknowledgement of the facts on the ground.

Deputy Mayor David Moseley added that the city has no problem with people living outdoors—they just aren’t allowed to have any possessions that would make it slightly safer for them to do so. “Our mantra has been, it’s perfectly fine for you to stay here, but your equipment that’s obstructing the public right-of-way can’t.” (He clarified that by “equipment” he meant things like “your tent that is obstructing a wheelchair.”) Tess Colby,  the mayor’s homelessness advisor, added that homeless people had been “taking over” dugouts, picnic areas, and P-Patches, and the Navigation Team’s goal is to “get the public spaces back for public use.” In other words, unsheltered people are allowed to exist in public spaces, but they can’t have any type of shelter from the elements—a  view that may comply with the recent 9th Circuit ruling that homeless people have a right to sleep, but is somewhat at odds with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

In any case, there aren’t enough places for people to go. Even leaving aside the fact that directing traumatized people to mats on the ground hardly qualifies as”outreach and services” most people living unsheltered require, the Human Services Department’s own numbers, which they also presented Monday, show that there are, on average,  only 17 beds of any kind available to the Navigation Team. Last month, the Navigation Team referred a total of 18 people to shelter, according to the city’s data.

2. NEW at 1pm Tuesday: On Tuesday, the city’s LGBTQ Commission sent a letter to Mayor Durkan and the council criticizing the recent increase in encampment removals, including the sharp increase in removals with no notice to residents. Citing reporting by this site, the commission wrote, “The current policy of encampment removals does nothing to solve the underlying issues that lead to homelessness, and instead this escalation seems to be a way to make it appear that the city is taking action versus gathering the political will to raise revenue to support real change.” Noting that LGBTQ+ and other marginalized people are more likely to become homeless, the letter continues, “Until there are adequate numbers of safe short-term beds available, there is a significant risk that folks whose tents are confiscated or destroyed in an encampment removal will have even less shelter from the elements than they had before.”

3. Also at Monday’s meeting, Johnson confirmed that the “see a tent, report a tent” posters that made the social-media rounds last weekend were not produced by the city, but added that the city does consider the Find It Fix It app an appropriate place to report people experiencing homelessness to the Navigation Team. “If there is someone you’re concerned with who is sleeping outdoors it is also a way to get that on the Navigation Team’s radar,” Johnson said. “It is through the Find It Fix It app that we can be alerted to someone who is in distress and may be in need of services.”

Council member Teresa Mosqueda asked Johnson to clarify that reporting tents is not the intended use of the app. “What is our response to people who have used the app in this inappropriate way?” she asked. “You can use the Find It Fix It app to report all sorts of inappropriate things,” Johnson responded.

As I reported last month, 20 percent of all illegal dumping reports made through the app are recategorized as illegal camping and referred to the Navigation Team.

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The C Is for Crank is a one-person operation, supported entirely—and I mean entirely— by generous contributions from readers like you. If you enjoy the breaking news, commentary, and deep dives on issues that matter to you, please support this work by donating a few bucks a month to keep this reader-supported site going. I can’t do this work without support from readers like you. Your $5, $10, and $20 monthly donations allow me to do this work as my full-time job, so please become a sustaining supporter now. If you don’t wish to become a monthly contributor, you can always make a one-time donation via PayPal, Venmo (Erica-Barnett-7) or by mailing your contribution to P.O. Box 14328, Seattle, WA 98104. Thank you for keeping The C Is for Crank going and growing. I’m truly grateful for your support.

Will Durkan’s High-Stakes Gamble With Soda Tax Revenues Pay Off?

On Monday, the city council is poised to pass legislation sponsored by council member Mike O’Brien that would require any unanticipated revenues from the sweetened beverage tax (SBT) to be spent on their intended purpose—increasing funding for healthy food programs in the low-income communities most impacted by the soda tax.

Mayor Jenny Durkan has portrayed the move as a “cut” to programs that have historically been funded through the city’s general fund, but which the mayor’s 2019 budget started funding with the new tax, allowing her to use the “excess” general fund money to pay for other things. After Durkan and her department heads contacted human services providers last week to let them know that their funding could be eliminated if they didn’t help defeat O’Brien’s legislation, dozens of organizations—and the city’s own soda tax advisory board—rebelled, sending emails to Durkan and the council denouncing the hardball move. UPDATE: As of Sunday night, the groups opposing Durkan’s position—and supporting the idea that soda tax revenues should be spent on new or expanded programs, not used to backfill funding for existing ones—included groups representing the city’s farmers markets, human service providers, advocates for equitable investment in South Seattle, the Sweetened Beverage Tax Community Advisory Board, and 27 food banks.

Council member Mike O’Brien proposed the legislation after Mayor Jenny Durkan balanced her budget last year by taking away $6 million in general-fund spending on healthy-food initiatives (like food banks, Fresh Bucks, and school-lunch-related programs) and replacing that money with soda tax revenues; Durkan’s budget switcheroo went against the intent of the soda tax by using soda tax revenues to fund the city’s existing healthy food programs rather than expanding them or creating new ones. Effectively, Durkan’s budgetary sleight-of-hand eliminated the race and social justice compromise embedded in the tax: Instead of reinvesting the tax in the hardest-hit communities, the new budget maintained those programs at existing levels. Put another way, a regressive tax with a race and social justice component became just a regressive tax. O’Brien’s legislation would prevent this from happening in the future, by stating that (as a council staff memo puts it) “no SBT revenues could be used to supplant (i.e. take the place of) General Fund (GF) monies or other funding sources.”

In a letter to human services providers urging them to testify against O’Brien’s legislation Monday, interim Human Services Department director Jason Johnson Johnson wrote, “Your contract is in jeopardy because of a recent Seattle Council legislative action.

Although O’Brien made clear a year ago that he planned to propose this legislation (giving the mayor’s office ample time to make their case against it), Durkan didn’t respond publicly until this week, when she sent out a blistering press release “denounc[ing]” and “condemn[ing]” the council for “a proposed plan … that would cut $6.3 million funding they had approved for critical programs that provide nutrition assistance, child care for struggling families, and nursing care for low-income pregnant women.” (Durkan’s public statement followed a letter her budget director, Ben Noble, sent to the council making many of the same points late last month.)

Durkan’s press release went on to enumerate some of the previously existing programs that the city, under her budget, began funding with soda-tax revenues instead of general fund dollars last year, including the Fresh Bucks food voucher program, food banks, child care assistance, and the Nurse Family Partnership. (The council approved the budget 8-1. Durkan’s letter cites this vote to suggest that the the council supported this specific aspect of the budget, which many of them did not).

Council members O’Brien, Lisa Herbold, Lorena Gonzalez, and Teresa Mosqueda responded with a letter of their own, arguing that the legislation merely codifies what the law already said—that new soda tax revenues should go toward new programs promoting healthy food, not be used to supplant general fund revenues used to fund existing programs. “Community advocates led the fight to ensure sweetened beverage tax revenue have a direct community benefit for the most impacted community by this regressive tax,” the council members wrote. “[T]he very programs the Mayor claims would be ‘cut’ should see increases in funding to expand those programs in the Mayor’s proposed 2020 Budget, assuming she does not chose to once again raid those funds for alternate priorities.”

Support The C Is for Crank
Sorry to interrupt your reading, but THIS IS IMPORTANT. The C Is for Crank is a one-person operation, supported entirely—and I mean entirely— by generous contributions from readers like you. If you enjoy the breaking news, commentary, and deep dives on issues that matter to you, please support this work by donating a few bucks a month to keep this reader-supported site going. I can’t do this work without support from readers like you. Your $5, $10, and $20 monthly donations allow me to do this work as my full-time job, so please become a sustaining supporter now. If you don’t wish to become a monthly contributor, you can always make a one-time donation via PayPal, Venmo (Erica-Barnett-7) or by mailing your contribution to P.O. Box 14328, Seattle, WA 98104. Thank you for keeping The C Is for Crank going and growing. I’m truly grateful for your support.

Durkan’s lobbying efforts didn’t stop at the council; her deputy mayor, Mike Fong, directed interim Human Services Department Director Jason Johnson and Department of Education and Early Learning director Dwane Chappelle to send letters to the agencies whose operations were funded by the tax last year informing them “that they should commence contin[g]ency planning as soon as possible” and urging them to show up and testify against the proposal during the council’s public comment period on Monday. In his letter to providers, Johnson wrote, “Your contract is in jeopardy because of a recent Seattle Council legislative action.” (Bolds in original.)

Johnson’s letter continued:

Last November, the adopted and endorsed 2019-2020 Biennium Budget, passed by an 8-1 vote and signed by the Mayor, allocated Sweetened Beverage Tax revenues to support food and education related assistance programs. The law currently permits soda tax revenues to be used for food and nutrition programs, education and child-based programs, job retraining and placement programs for workers adversely impacted by the tax. Unfortunately, the Council has now changed its mind and would rather have this $6.3M in revenue support unspecified new programs next year while providing no funding to back-fill the cuts to currently funded programs.

This legislation is scheduled for the vote of Full Council at its Monday, July 22 meeting, which starts at 2:00 p.m. Councilmembers will take public testimony on the legislation before final action.

The effort appears to have backfired. Instead of agreeing to show up and lobby on the mayor’s behalf, the Seattle Human Services Coalition and Got Green, an organization that fights displacement and promotes economic opportunity and equitable investment in South Seattle, wrote letters of their own denouncing the mayor’s tactics. UPDATE: Four more organizations representing farmers’ markets, including the Pike Place Market Foundation and the Seattle Farmers Market Association, have signed a separate letter condemning the mayor for blaming any future budget cuts by her office—which writes the budget—on the council. To do so, the groups wrote, “assumes that we are uninformed of the City’s budget process and the funding sources used to support the totality of our programs.”

“If the mayor does not propose funding in the 2020 budget from a source other than [Sweetened Beverage Tax], as your Council Bill would direct, it would be the mayor who is proposing the cut, not Council.” —Letter from the Seattle Human Services Coalition about Durkan’s response to the council’s soda tax legislation

The Human Services Coalition, which represents nonprofit human services providers, wrote that they are “disappointed by the communications from HSD, DEEL, and the Mayor’s Office to our organizations. … Characterizing this legislation and its impact as ‘jeopardizing’ 2020 contracts to current, successful services is at best misleading.

“It is the Mayor’s role in our three-branch system to implement policies which City Council legislates, and so up to the mayor if she will propose cutting the services instead of identifying an alternate fund source from the $6 billion annual revenue that comes into the City of Seattle.  If the mayor does not propose funding in the 2020 budget from a source other than SBT, as your Council Bill would direct, it would be the mayor who is proposing the cut, not Council.”

“It is entirely in the Mayor’s power, and in fact, is her responsibility, to find an appropriate, more stable funding source for the programs where SBT revenues were used to supplant general fund dollars.”—Letter from local farmers’ market organizations

Separately, Got Green urged its members and supporters to show up Monday to support the legislation and prevent Durkan from “pull[ing] millions of dollars that the council and previous mayor had promised for Food and Early Childhood Education programs and dump[ing] it in the general fund (where it becomes impossible to track and she can spend it on whatever she prioritizes.”

The email calls Johnson’s letter to providers an “ultimatum that organizations will have funding reduced unless they show up at a council meeting on Monday to provide public testimony against the ordinance to protect Food Security and Early Education Dollars.”

“Efforts to portray this legislation and its impact as causing funding cuts to organizations in POC and low income communities is not only misleading, but intentionally deceptive,” Got Green’s letter continues. “As community-based organizations working tirelessly to serve vulnerable Seattle residents, most are allied and will refuse to take your bait in attempting to pit our organizations and our issues against each other in the name of scarce funding and funding cuts.”

The farmers’ markets’ letter notes that the soda tax is an unpredictable funding source (increasing when soda consumption is up and decreasing when it is down) that should be used for one-time programs, not to fund ongoing needs that would ordinarily be paid for by the more stable general fund. “In order for programs to establish themselves, show impact, and grow to meet the rising need for food security in the City of Seattle, reliable and consistent sources of funding for these critical programs are needed,” their letter says. “It is entirely in the Mayor’s power, and in fact, is her responsibility, to find an appropriate, more stable funding source for the programs where SBT revenues were used to supplant general fund dollars.”

The mayor’s office has confirmed that she plans to veto the legislation, which means it will eventually need the support of a veto-proof six-member majority to override her veto even if it passes with just five votes on Monday. If the council does decide to call the mayor’s bluff, it will mark a major shift in council-mayor relations: Although this council has frequently fought with Durkan over spending, they’ve typically gone along in the end—voting, for example, to kill the controversial “head tax,” which Durkan opposed, after passing it last year. Lately, council members (particularly Gonzalez, Mosqueda, and Herbold) have been pushing back on Durkan more forcefully—including last week, when the three called on the mayor to reopen police contract negotiations in light of a judge’s finding that the city is partially out of compliance with federally mandated reforms.

The council’s soda tax legislation passed out of committee unanimously, with five votes, on July 10. I’m calling around to council offices and will update this post if I find out more about how the remaining council members plan to vote.

Afternoon Crank: Showbox Landmarked, “Freelance Bill of Rights” Booster Uses Freelance Labor

1. The Seattle Landmarks Preservation Board voted unanimously last night to designate the downtown Showbox building a historical landmark, after dozens of speakers spoke in favor of the move using the usual combination of hyperbole (one speaker compared the two-story building on First Avenue to “the manger where Jesus was born), cheeseball sincerity (the crowd sang backup while singer Mark Taylor-Canfield went way over time with his “Save the Showbox” song), and insistence that the building, which has been heavily altered throughout its history, is an “irreplaceable” cathedral of music along the lines of the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville or Carnegie Hall.

Jack McCullough, the attorney for the Showbox building owners, argued during his presentation opposing the landmark nomination that the “history” that “Save the Showbox” proponents want to preserve took place in very recent history, during the late ’90s, rather than in the preceding 60 years, when the building was heavily altered and frequently shuttered. “If we were sitting here 20 years ago would we be having this conversation?” McCullough asked rhetorically. “The building had been a pastiche of other things for the past 60 years. … Really, what we’re talking about here is what has occurred in this reconstructed building in the last 20 years.”

The vote was a foregone conclusion—one board member, Russell Comey, showed up with a poem he’d written that began “Showbox forever” and bowed to the applauding audience after the vote—but the future of the Showbox building is not.

Although many of the (unanimously pro-landmarking) public commenters made a point to mention Duke Ellington’s stint there during the segregated 1940s (according to the Seattle Daily Times archives, Ellington played at several other clubs in town during that decade, including the Civic Ice Arena and the Palomar), many of the speakers also inadvertently proved McCullough’s point, by name-dropping bands that played there during the grunge era, like Soundgarden and Nirvana. “That thing you’re feeling is a combination of hopes and dreams, milestones and history,” one commenter told the landmark board. “It’s impossible to replicate these kinds of spaces.”

The vote was a foregone conclusion—one board member, Russell Comey, showed up with a poem he’d written that began “Showbox forever” and bowed to the applauding audience after the vote—but the future of the Showbox building is not. As I reported  last month, the owners of the building (who originally planned to build apartments on the property, which the city recently rezoned for that explicit purpose) have terminated Showbox operator AEG Presents’  lease when it ends at the beginning of 2024,  and recently won a major victory in their lawsuit challenging legislation that put the Showbox building inside the Pike Place Market Historical District, severely restricting its future use. Landmarking places controls on the building, but not on its use; a landmarked building can still be torn down or used for a different purpose. To “Save the Showbox,” at this point, will likely require a group to raise tens of millions of dollars to purchase the land from its owner, who has valued the property at around $40 million. Historic Seattle, which has expressed an interest in buying the property, has not yet indicated how or whether it plans to raise that kind of money.

Support The C Is for Crank
Sorry to interrupt your reading, but THIS IS IMPORTANT. The C Is for Crank is a one-person operation, supported entirely—and I mean entirely— by generous contributions from readers like you. If you enjoy the breaking news, commentary, and deep dives on issues that matter to you, please support this work by donating a few bucks a month to keep this reader-supported site going. I can’t do this work without support from readers like you. Your $5, $10, and $20 monthly donations allow me to do this work as my full-time job, so please become a sustaining supporter now. If you don’t wish to become a monthly contributor, you can always make a one-time donation via PayPal, Venmo (Erica-Barnett-7) or by mailing your contribution to P.O. Box 14328, Seattle, WA 98104. Thank you for keeping The C Is for Crank going and growing. I’m truly grateful for your support.

2. Shaun Scott, a Democratic Socialists of America member running for city council in District 4 (Northeast Seattle), has proposed a “freelancers’ bill of rights” that would guarantee  new rights to independent contractors and gig workers, including a written employment contract, pay within 30 days, portable benefits, and a ban on non-compete clauses guaranteeing that they won’t work for a competitor within the same market. “Gig economy workers deserve the same rights as unionized employees and laborers in traditional fields,” Scott said in the announcement.  In addition to the issues that would be addressed by the “bill of rights,” freelancers also pay both employer and employee taxes, usually pay for health care out-of-pocket, and don’t have access to unemployment benefits or L&I compensation. (Full disclosure: As a freelancer, I know all of this from experience.)

It was somewhat surprising, then, to learn that instead of hiring his campaign staffers on a permanent basis and offering them all those benefits, Scott himself is using independent contractors for much of his campaign work. Scott says his staff are all paid “at least $16 an hour” and are currently “in the middle of unionizing, having just submitted their letter of recognition asking me to recognize their bargaining unit in affiliation with the Campaign Workers Guild.”

It was somewhat surprising, then, to learn that instead of hiring his campaign staffers on a permanent basis , Scott himself is using independent contractors for much of his campaign work. Scott says his staff are all paid “at least $16 an hour” and are currently “in the middle of unionizing, having just submitted their letter of recognition asking me to recognize their bargaining unit in affiliation with the Campaign Workers Guild.” (The election is on August 6.)

Scott says that all his campaign staffers are paid “at least $16 an hour,” that the two full-time campaign workers have vacation benefits, and that “everyone is eligible for transit and data reimbursements that will hopefully become even more robust after demands are presented and we agree on a contract.” Scott’s campaign finance reports only show one expenditure on transit (a $10 Sound Transit light-rail ticket), and none for data reimbursement or cell phone costs. They do include more than $2,200 spent on Lyft.

“Campaign work can be just as grueling and uncertain as freelance work in the arts, tech, and journalism,” Scott says. “If progressive campaigns can’t support their own workers, they will be in no position to truly advocate for the broader labor community.”