Tent City 4, the authorized encampment whose long-planned move within Lake City was hampered at the last minute by objections from City Councilmember Cathy Moore, can stay for six months. Although Moore and Mayor Bruce Harrell expressed surprise that Tent City 4 planned to stay in Lake City, emails show their offices were working to make the move happen as far back as February.
PubliCola co-founder Josh Feit was our guest on this week’s podcast, where we discussed the King County assessor’s latest attacks on the woman he’s accused of stalking, Cathy Moore’s losing battles against a growing urbanist movement, and the historical context for Bruce Harrell’s latest efforts to crack down on nightlife in the guise of protecting public safety.
In this PubliCola exclusive, we reported on an outside investigation that found it likely that Seattle Fire Department employees, including senior officials, bought and sold blank CDC vaccine cards and fraudulently presented them as proof they had been vaccinated against COVID-19 in order to get around the city’s vaccine mandate. One high-ranking fire official involved in the alleged vaccine card trade referred to himself as “the Harriet Tubman of SFD,” a reference to the Underground Railroad.
The city council tapped the brakes on Cathy Moore’s fast-tracked legislation to ban property management companies from using algorithmic tools like RealPage to set rent prices, pushing a vote on the bill back one week. Moore, who is leaving the council on July 7, objected to the brief delay, saying there had already been plenty of process—an ironic position for someone who has consistently called for more public input into legislation that would allow more housing in Seattle.
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In a bizarre, emoji-filled email rant, City Councilmember Rob Saka accused people who opposed his efforts to remove a road divider that prevented illegal left turns into the preschool his kids attended of being racist, pro-“defund the police” car haters and “White Saviors” who don’t even live in his district and only pretend to support immigrants and refugees, just like Trump does … among many other spaghetti-at-the-wall complaints.
King County Councilmember Reagan Dunn, who was absent from last week’s 8-0 vote demanding the resignation of Assessor Wilson, made a point this week of saying he thinks Wilson should resign. On Facebook, Wilson weaponized a photo of himself and the woman who has a restraining order against him, noting that she is smiling and does not look scared of him in the picture.
Also: The Seattle/King County Coalition on Homelessness has appealed a ruling upholding the city of Burien’s complete ban on sleeping outdoors.
A story from local station KNKX, distributed nationally by NPR, contrasted two housing projects in Seattle—one that saved existing trees, and one that removed them. What the reporter failed to mention was that their example of a bad, treeless project is an affordable-housing development by Habitat for Humanity—and that Habitat is planting 26 new trees to replace the 10 that are being removed to build 22 new affordable homes, more than doubling the number of trees on site.
The King County Homelessness Authority presented potential budget cuts that could reduce homeless services this week, along with a warning that without another $4.7 million to pay for administrative expenses, the agency may have to cut 22 jobs—about a fifth of its staff.
An independent investigation found it probable that Seattle Fire Department officials obtained blank vaccine cards and used them to falsely claim they were compliant with the city’s COVID vaccine requirement, PubliCola has learned.
The city launched the investigation after a fire lieutenant, Lance Fisher, told Seattle Fire Chief Harold Scoggins that people in the department were buying and selling fake vaccine cards. Fisher relayed this information during his own disciplinary hearing; he was one of many SFD employees who refused to get vaccinated during the pandemic.
According to the investigation—provided by Rose Terse, who frequently posts documents obtained through records requests on Muckrock—”a now former (retired) SFD employee contacted Lieutenant Fisher and offered him a CDC-issued COVID-19 vaccination record card that Lieutenant Fisher ‘could fill out’ and submit to the City as fraudulent proof that he had complied with the vaccination mandate.” Fisher told investigators the cards came from a former COVID vaccination site that SFD shut down without safeguarding the blank vaccine cards, allowing a firefighter to grab the blank cards and sell them.
Later, Fisher said, he learned that there were blank vaccination cards at many fire stations, and “people could just take them.”
Fisher told investigators he “declined that offer” to get a fake vaccine card and told Scoggins, “It’s known that people are submitting fake vax cards. What are you doing to verify the authenticity?”
“According to Lieutenant Fisher, Chief Scoggins’ response was that ‘it wasn’t his problem,'” the investigator concluded.
Much of the investigator’s evidence consisted of Signal messages sent to and from Deputy Chief Tom Walsh on his city-issued phone, “suggest[ing] that a system and/or network existed through which SFD employees obtained COVID-19 vaccination cards, which they submitted to the City.”
“Facts found throughout the course of my investigation suggest that one or more SFD employees may have obtained CDC-issued COVID-19 vaccination record cards; filled the cards out with false information to reflect that they had been vaccinated for COVID-19; submitted the cards to the City as proof of their compliance with the COVID-19 vaccination mandate; and were deemed to have satisfied the City’s COVID-19 vaccination mandate based on their submission of the CDC-issued COVID-19 vaccination record cards containing falsified information,” the independent investigator, Jennifer Parda-Aldrich, wrote.
“My investigation, however, did not reveal sufficient evidence from which I was able to make any conclusive findings, based on preponderance of the evidence, of the existence of any such practice or of the identity of any SFD employee(s) who submitted a COVID- 19 vaccination record card containing false information to reflect that they had been vaccinated for COVID-19 in satisfaction of the City’s vaccination mandate.”
PubliCola readers may recognize Walsh’s name. He was the deputy fire chief who, along with longtime firefighter Paul Patterson, sent emails to Scoggins in which he pretended to be a “proud Latino” South Park resident who was deeply offended by the term “brownout.” The goal of the prank emails was to get the fire department to stop using the term to describe power outages in order to prove that the department was excessively “woke.”
Walsh and Patterson worked closely with right-wing talk show host Jason Rantz, who wrote about the hoax repeatedly and seemed to find it hilarious; they later collaborated with local right-wing activist Ari Hoffman to accuse Scoggins of breaking the law when he loaned stretchers to volunteer medics trying to get injured people out of the so-called Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone in 2020.
Although the Seattle Police Department got the lion’s share of attention, positive and negative, for fighting against the city’s vaccine requirements, the Seattle Fire Department was also a hotbed of anti-vax sentiment.
Messages between Walsh and other fire department employees, including Patterson, along with a city IT staffer named Dan Whipple, include multiple references to people buying “art,” using Patterson as the go-between, for themselves and other fire department officials, including Walsh’s son, firefighter Devon Walsh.
For example, in this Signal exchange from December 2021, Patterson and Walsh discussed whether it would be better for Walsh and his son to wait a few days after his daughters and wife got their “art” so it won’t look “ridiculous”:
Just cause you get the piece sooner then later doesn’t mean you have to put it on display until you are ready
Walsh: Fair point. If I did return to the art show circuit, it would save me some sick time as well.
Paul Patterson. The Harriet Tubman of the SFD.
* * *
Walsh: Did a guy from 2’s named Seto or Setu or something like that get a piece of art from you?
Patterson:One thing about my art dealings is that it is totally Anonymous
Walsh:Well I am asking out of curiosity. What you should wonder is why I’m asking. I couldn’t pick this guy out of the police lineup, but I know that somebody’s done some artwork for him. If it’s you, you should tell him to keep his fucking mouth shut.
If you weren’t the artiest, just let me know that and I’ll tell him to keep his mouth shut. All we need is an audit.
Patterson:Wasn’t me, and I appreciate you looking out Yes I would have a sit down with him. It’s important for people to know it can be down but in a very discreet way.
Walsh:My 20-year-old daughter came in the house and told me he had some art done. Now, the exact mechanism by which she found out is unimportant—He just needs to know that what happens in a fight club stays and fight club.
Had it been Hasting’s daughter, this is a different story.
Walsh referred to himself as Harriett Tubman in a Signal exchange with Whipple that same month, saying he had found “a path to get that one piece of paper that I need” in order to fulfill “my missing requirements to work at SFD.”
“If you had a friend who is counterfeiting $20 bills, that would be good,” Walsh wrote. “But if it was actually counterfeiting them at the US mint,…Well that would just be money at that point. Those bills would have real life serial numbers, and probably be appropriately placed in whatever database they put $20 bills in.”
Whipple later told investigators he thought he and Walsh were talking about a “joke” that “we were going to have to pay people to get us out of the state or country” because of the vaccine mandate. “I didn’t understand him to be referring to fake vax cards.”
Parda-Aldrich also looked into the possibility that Walsh and Deputy Chief Chris Lombard, who was then heading up the Community Safety and Communications Center had conspired with Walsh to produce evidence that the city was refusing to grant religious exemptions to the vaccine mandate, which could help bolster the claims of a group of former firefighters who sued the department over the requirement. The CSCC was the predecessor to today’s CARE Department, a civilian department that dispatches 911 calls.
In October 2021, after a meeting in which he told then-mayor Jenny Durkan’s policy advisor, Adrienne Thompson, that the CSCC was going to lose 10 percent of its staff if they had to comply with the vaccine mandate, Lombard wrote an email to himself and his own human-resources manager to establish for the record that the mayor’s office refused to provide accommodations for CSCC staff who refused to get the vaccine on religious grounds.
Signal messages between Walsh and Patterson, along with Signal messages between Walsh and fire lieutenant Chris Carter, show that the men believed Lombard was getting the mayor’s position in writing to help the plaintiffs in two lawsuits filed by firefighters who were fired for refusing to comply with the vaccine mandate. (In one exchange, Walsh referred to Lombard as “the kind of person who hides Jews under [the] floorboard.”)
Parda-Aldrich wrote that she was unable to substantiate the claim that Lombard wrote the email with the intent of establishing a written record that would help the suing firefighters. However, she did conclude he had improperly disclosed confidential personnel information—the identities of firefighters who asked for exemptions from the vaccination requirement—to Walsh.
Neither Walsh nor Patterson responded to requests for an interview; both have retired from the department. Lombard did not respond to a request for an interview.
A spokesperson for the fire department, Kim Schmanke, said no one at SFD has faced disciplinary action for falsifying vaccine cards, and said she does not know how firefighters might have gotten the cards, if they did so.
“SFD has no conclusive facts showing that employees falsified their vaccine cards and cannot take personnel actions without factual findings,” Schmanke said. “Although the April 2025 investigative report facts that ‘suggest’ SFD employees submitted authentic COVID-19 vaccination cards with falsified information to comply with the City’s vaccine mandate, the investigation was ‘unable to make any conclusive findings, based on a preponderance of the evidence, as to the existence of any such practice or the specific identity of any employee(s) who submitted a COVID-19 vaccination record card with falsified information.'”
Devon Walsh, Dan Whipple, Chris Lombard, and Lance Fisher all remain employed at the city.
The fire department considers the matter closed, Schmanke said. “However, if any new information comes to light, the department will take appropriate follow-up action.”
After police cracked down on people hanging out and using drugs at the corner of 12th and Jackson, they moved a block away. Photo: Andrew Engelson
Editor’s note: This post has been updated to include additional quotes from Lisa Daugaard, the director of Purpose Dignity Action, which runs the city’s largest diversion program, LEAD.
By Andrew Engelson
In the six months since Seattle enacted a controversial law making public drug use and possession a gross misdemeanor, City Attorney Ann Davison’s office has filed charges against 17 people for violations of the law, which criminalizes the use or possession of drugs other than cannabis. That’s a tiny percentage of about 300 arrests police have made since the new law went into effect in October.
And while advocates for diversion—a strategythat involves enrolling people in services in lieu of charges—say the low charging rate is a good thing, the city’s main diversion program is perpetually underfunded and has had to shift strategies to take on so many new clients from arrests.
SPD has been arresting hundreds of people under the new law, though the number of monthly arrests has recently been on a steady decline.According to Seattle Police Department data, arrests spiked during a highly-publicized series of stings in October and peaked in January. The number of monthly misdemeanor drug arrests has dropped significantly since then, with just 20 arrests in March and six in the first 11 days of April.
City Council President Sara Nelson and City Attorney Ann Davison touted the new law as a way to reduce public use of fentanyl and meth. But so far, it doesn’t seem to have made more than superficial changes to the level of drug use in two of the most visible hot spots in the city: Third Avenue downtown, and 12th and Jackson in the International District. According to SPD data, about two-thirds of arrests under the law were in SPD beats that encompass those two areas of the city.
Of the 17 people the city attorney’s office has charged, about half failed to appear for court hearings–a strong indicator that they were living without shelter. People who are homeless or struggle with mental illness often have trouble making court appearances, and this can result in a reinforcing cycle of interaction with the criminal justice system and lack of shelter.
Davison’s office has motioned to remove municipal judge Pooja Vaddadi from hearing eight of the 17 drug cases. Since March, Davison has directed city attorneys to challenge judge Vaddadi from hearing any criminal cases, charging that the judge, a former public defender, has a “regular pattern of biased rulings.”
Seattle Municipal Court Judge Damon Shadid told PubliCola he’s seen about a dozen cases in his court related to the new drug law. “Anecdotally, from my own courtroom, I can tell you that I have a zero percent appearance rate so far for people charged under the new drug statute,” he said.
According to municipal court records, the average time between an arrest under the new drug law and when the city attorney files charges is about 70 days; more than half of the people charged under the new law waited 90 days or more for Davison’s office to file charges. This is in sharp contrast to Davison’s promise, in 2022, to decide whether to file charges in all criminal cases within five business days after her office receives a referral from the police department.
“If charges aren’t filed right away, then it is very difficult to find a homeless person and get them to come to court,” Shadid said. “My suspicion is that the vast majority of people charged with [possession or public use] are homeless and that’s why we’re seeing such a low appearance rate in court.”
In about half the arrests under the new drug law, police referred drug users to the LEAD diversion program, which connects people with case management, harm reduction, and other services.
Lisa Daugaard, the director of Purpose Dignity Action, which runs LEAD, says she welcomes the emphasis on diversion. “It’s completely appropriate for the city attorney to defer filing while LEAD case managers are working with people to complete diversion intake, and that’s what the ordinance calls for,” Daugaard said. “No one should criticize prosecutors for actively encouraging pre-filing diversion efforts, when those are demonstrated to be the most effective response to severe substance use disorder.”
However, taking on post-arrest referrals has required LEAD to stop taking referrals from other sources—effectively shifting its referral strategy away from community-based referrals, which don’t require an arrest, to post-arrest referrals for people caught violating the new law. Although LEAD has received more funding from state and federal sources in the meantime, that funding is not related to the new law and the city itself did not increase LEAD funding as part of its shift to arrest-based diversion. Over the past several years, LEAD (which used to stand for Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion) has moved toward community referrals, which don’t require people to choose diversion while in handcuffs.
The increase in SPD interactions put a strain on LEAD’s limited resources. To address this, during the recent legislative session, the supplemental budget included a $2.5 million boost to Seattle and King county’s LEAD program, in budget line items sponsored by Rep. Darya Farivar and Sen. Rebecca Saldaña. Combined with another $3.5 million in one-time funds, that’s enough to enable LEAD to do some community referrals, in addition to referrals resulting from arrests, this year. However, Daugaard said, the PDA is “reluctant to overextend on community referrals until there is a more sustainable plan for scaling beyond this year.”
“We are one of numerous community-based case management providers,” Daugaard said. “So it’s a collective response but it needs to have a stable, sustained funding stream. It’s an approach that almost everyone knows is the right approach. But you can’t go year to year, constantly on the verge of cutting it off.”
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Tim Robinson, a spokesman for the city attorney’s office, said the time it takes to review a case and file charges “is dependent on many factors, one of which is waiting for toxicology lab results.” The State Patrol’s toxicology lab has been plagued with delays (usually associated with DUI cases) but opened a new center last year to address the backlog.
Robinson said the city attorney’s office has a backlog of about 800 cases for all criminal cases awaiting a decision to file, including drug use, theft, DUI, domestic violence, and other misdemeanors. He said the city attorney’s office is currently reviewing whether to charge in 81 cases and 14 cases are awaiting toxicology reports.
In the 17 cases the city attorney has charged, arrest reports show that they almost universally involve suspected fentanyl or meth use, and include descriptions such as one in an officer’s report that mentions “lighters, foil, and pipes, tubular objects that they were holding near the foil.”
Currently, no one arrested under the drug law is being booked into jail. King County’s Department of Adult and Juvenile Detention still has in place a pandemic-era moratorium on booking most people accused of non-violent misdemeanors. Robinson said that while those arrested aren’t able to be booked, “They may be booked into jail if they have also committed a companion crime (e.g. burglary while possessing drugs, etc.).”
Tent removal in progress on a recent morning at Third and James in downtown Seattle.
By Erica C. Barnett
A report commissioned by the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, but never publicly released, highlights some of the challenges the regional agency will face as it attempts to use federal Medicaid funding to pay for Partnership for Zero, a marquee program that aims to eliminate homelessness in downtown Seattle by connecting people directly with housing.
The report, from the nonprofit Corporation for Supportive Housing, also lays out a potential road map for navigating the Medicaid reimbursement process, which is so byzantine that many King County providers have avoided using the program.
Currently, homeless service providers can seek funding through a Medicaid-based program called Foundational Community Supports, which provides benefits and services for people experiencing homelessness who are eligible for Medicaid and have chronic health conditions. The program, which has been around since 2018, treats homelessness as a health care issue and housing as a form of health care—a meaningful step that many advocates have applauded.
“FCS is a really unique revenue source, because it’s not a short-term grant or contract—it really is based on a person’s health and will stay with them as long as they need these services,” said Debbie Thiele, CSH’s western managing director. “It’s been a major breakthrough to have the health care system seeing supportive housing services as a part of health.”
But establishing clients’ eligibility for the program and securing payment for ongoing services has been a daunting and sometimes money-losing challenge for service providers, who often have to hire specialized administrative staff and train case managers to meticulously document encounters with clients. In conversations with PubliCola earlier this year, providers explained how challenging it can be to translate notes by front-line case managers into billable Medicaid hours; a case worker who isn’t fully trained and dogged in their efforts to enroll clients and “constantly generate [billable] service contacts” can cost an agency significantly more than they bring in, one provider said.
Back in April, Dones said the KCRHA was about to start billing some services to Medicaid in a series of experimental “dry runs” that will “give us ample time to correct anything that is going wrong” before transitioning Partnership for Zero into a mostly Medicaid-funded program next year. Those dry runs haven’t happened, and the reasons for the delay remain somewhat opaque.
“Once providers are up and running with Medicaid FCS, it is projected to cover gaps with increase revenue, but to get to that point, providers report their start-up costs to be far more than they can afford, in some cases in the hundreds of thousands of dollars,” the report says.
Thiele says one solution would be funding to help organizations, particularly smaller and BIPOC-led groups, set up the billing and other infrastructure they need. “If you want the nonprofit sector, which is reliant on grants and contracts and doing this incredibly challenging work in community, to make a major internal change to the way they operate, then they need investment in order to do that,” Thiele said. “With staff turnover being what it is right now, it’s a big risk for nonprofits to do new things,” she added.
The CSH report breaks down some of the primary issues that prevent homeless service providers from getting the most out of Medicaid funds, including administrative hurdles that force staff to work extra hours manually inputting data and doing duplicative work; denials and disenrollments for reasons that can feel capricious, such as minor technical errors; and difficulty knowing what services FCS will consider “supplemental” or new, as opposed to “supplanting” funding for services that already exists.
Many of the issues that exist at nonprofits are also relevant for KCRHA, which will have to train its system advocates—case managers with personal experience of homelessness who navigate Partnership for Zero clients into services and housing—to do all the things nonprofit service providers have identified as major challenges.
Earlier this year, KCRHA’s then-CEO Marc Dones told the agency’s implementation board that securing funds through FCS should be relatively simple, and expressed confidence that Partnership for Zero, which has fallen significantly behind schedule, would be at least 85 percent Medicaid-funded by next year. In fact, Dones called the agency’s 85 percent prediction “conservative,” adding that “if we are able to exceed that, then we will close the budget gap just on Medicaid reimbursement.” KCRHA baked this optimism into its 2024 budget, which assumes that Medicaid, through FCS, will provide about $5 million for Partnership for Zero, with KCRHA making up an estimated $900,000 gap.
Dones resigned earlier this year. The city of Seattle is currently paying them $250 an hour to come up with recommendations for using Medicaid funds “to maximize the region’s resources available to address homelessness”—a portfolio that seems quite similar to the the work CSH is doing for KCRHA.
Back in April, Dones said the KCRHA was about to start billing some services to Medicaid in a series of experimental “dry runs” that will “give us ample time to correct anything that is going wrong” before transitioning Partnership for Zero into a mostly Medicaid-funded program next year. Those dry runs haven’t happened, and the reasons for the delay remain somewhat opaque.
According to Thiele, CSH was supposed to move into Phase 2 of their “engagement” with KCRHA as soon as they finished the initial report earlier this year: The “dry run, and convenings across King County.” But, she said, “we’ve been waiting on our contract with them for some time. … They did recently give us a small contract to get started, but we were seeing this as probably a good 18 months of process work” before Medicaid billing can start in earnest. “It’s in motion, but I just can’t tell how far we’ll get with it.”
KCRHA spokeswoman Anne Martens said the agency is “on track for a ‘dry run’ this fall. … My guess is that there will be some kinks to work out, and we’ll have to adjust and evaluate as we go.” Later, Martens clarified that the “dry run… is still expected to happen before the end of the year. So we’re still in the process of setting up the system, policies, tech configurations, and trainings required to test how Medicaid billing would work in practice.”
Partnership for Zero is funded by corporate and philanthropic donors through the nonprofit We Are In, which is also paying for the contract between the KCRHA and Corporation for Supportive Housing.
Had Partnership for Zero achieved its original targets, every person living unsheltered in downtown Seattle would now be housed, and the KCRHA would be working to rapidly house each new person who arrived in the downtown area as part of the final, “hold steady” phase of the project. After this phase, KCRHA planned to expand the Partnership for Zero effort into other parts of Seattle and other regions of King County.
Since launching, the downtown effort has encountered many challenges, including a reluctance among private landlords to rent to people in the program. One issue that arose early on, according to a January 2023 memo from Dones to We Are In director Felicia Salcedo, is that landlords wanted assurances that formerly homeless tenants would be able to pay fair market rent after the first 12 months, when their Partnership for Zero rent subsidy runs out.
In February, We Are In announced another million dollars in funding for the program, but the future of the overall program remains unclear. We Are In declined to comment for this story.
DESC’s Morrison Hotel building on Third Avenue in downtown Seattle
By Erica C. Barnett
The Downtown Emergency Service Center, which operates shelters, housing, and mobile crisis response teams, will operate a new opiate overdose response center, serving up to 20 people a day, inside its Morrison Hotel building on Third Avenue in downtown Seattle. DESC director Daniel Malone says the new facility will share the second floor of the Morrison, which housed the agency’s congregate shelter prior to COVID, with an expansion of DESC’s existing outpatient behavioral health clinic and serve people looking for services and a place to physically recover immediately after an overdose.
Currently, if someone overdoses in Seattle and emergency medical services (EMS) responds, they generally face two options: Go to the hospital in an ambulance, or walk away. A post-overdose stabilization site would create a third option where people could rest, receive IV fluids or medication to get them through the early stages of withdrawal, and initiate treatment for opioid use disorder. Patients could also access DESC’s outpatient behavioral health clinic, which connects patients with psychiatric care, counseling, and case management.
Methadone—an opiate that effectively replaces more harmful drugs like heroin and fentanyl, allowing people to resume normal lives—remains one of the most highly regulated drugs in the nation; patients typically have to show up in a physical location to take a single dose at a specific time every day, although lawmakers temporarily loosened those restrictions during COVID. Buprenorphine, which works by partially occupying the brain’s opiate receptors, is more widely accessible, and a new injectable form of the drug, trademarked Sublocade, lasts a month.
“It’s extremely important to us to make sure that we won’t have that kind of chaotic and disruptive activity happening on the sidewalk in front of the building, and part of our plan is to really enhance our capacity to have a much stronger presence to help ensure that the environment is calm and conducive to people coming and going safely.”—DESC Director Daniel Malone
“Methadone introduces a set of additional regulatory complications that the other medicines don’t have, but methadone would be an important tool in the toolbox,” Malone said.
Between January and July of this year, according to data from the King County Department of Public Health, emergency medical services responded to 2,546 nonfatal overdoses in Seattle, out of 4,918 countywide. Both fatal and nonfatal overdoses have increased steadily over the past five years, as fentanyl—a powerful opioid first developed as a pain medication in the 1960s—has worked its way into the street drug supply.
Funding for the new facility would come from the city of Seattle, King County, private grants, and the University of Washington’s Addictions, Drug & Alcohol Institute (ADAI). In July, the King County Council approved spending $2 million in unspent CLFR (federal COVID) funds to help renovate the second floor of the Morrison to accommodate the expanded outpatient center and the opiate recovery site.
The city of Seattle is expected to provide another $2 million for construction, out of $7 million in unspent federal funding that Mayor Bruce Harrell announced as part of his plan to “invest $27 million toward facilities, treatments, and services to address the opioid crisis.” As we’ve reported, the $27 million is actually $7 million in unspent federal grants for capital projects, plus a little over $1 million a year from state settlements with opiate manufacturers and distributors. That million dollars could could help fund the day-to-day operations of the new overdose recovery site over the next two decades, but it won’t be enough to keep the new site open full-time, Malone said.
“If there’s not enough money to [operate] 24/7, then some version where it’s only open certain hours may have to be implemented,” Malone said. Overdoses happen at all hours, so having only a part-time facility “would seriously limit the ability of this facility to meet all the community’s needs over the course of the day.”
Harrell expressed support for a post-overdose recovery center back in April, when he signed an executive order expressing the city’s commitment to site and “explore funding for” a new facility “where EMS can bring people after non-fatal overdoses to recover, get stabilized on medications, and access resources.” However, his office would not comment on the plan to open the site on Third Avenue, and would not confirm that DESC was the intended recipient of the funds Harrell announced last month. “There is [a request for proposals], and no decisions have been made,” Harrell spokesman Jamie Housen said. “It is a competitive process, and we expect DESC will apply.”
King County just approved spending $2.2 million in unspent federal COVID relief dollars to help renovate the site, which used to house DESC’s congregate shelter, last month.
Map of Morrison Hotel and DESC’s current behavioral health drop-in center
The Morrison Hotel, which also includes 190 permanent supportive housing units, is located directly across from the King County Courthouse. The sidewalk around the building’s Third Avenue entrance is often occupied by people who are unhoused, have untreated behavioral health conditions, or are actively using and selling drugs, making the building a target of frequent complaints and a perennial subject for conservative local media such as KOMO News, which infamously blamed DESC for crime on Third Ave. in its followup to the agitprop film “Seattle Is Dying.”
In addition to funds for the overdose site itself, King County approved $200,000 for a “client engagement team” that will “manage client presence and prevent conflicts on Third Avenue in front of DESC’s renovated facility,” according to a King County Council memo.
“It’s extremely important to us to make sure that we won’t have that kind of chaotic and disruptive activity happening on the sidewalk in front of the building, and part of our plan is to really enhance our capacity to have a much stronger presence to help ensure that the environment is calm and conducive to people coming and going safely,” Malone said. The new staff will “be present not just inside, but in the immediate external sidewalk area… to connect with people who are out there and deal with anything that may be happening that is contributing to an undesirable environment.”
Judges and other courthouse officials have complained for years about safety issues around the courthouse, which also borders City Hall Park—a compact greenspace that recently reopened after a lengthy closure. King County Superior Court Judge Patrick Oishi, who has repeatedly raised alarms about the safety of jurors and courthouse staff, told PubliCola he hopes the opioid recovery center will have a positive impact on the street scene around the courthouse.
“Although it is difficult to predict what impact an opioid recovery center will have on the courthouse area, the Court commends Mayor Harrell, the City of Seattle, and King County for taking critical steps to address this significant public health crisis,” Oishi said. “It is our hope that responding to the opioid crisis will enhance public safety in the courthouse area.”
Last week, King County Councilmember Reagan Dunn proposed a resolution urging King County Executive Dow Constantine to “quickly re-hire” the 281 King County employees who lost their jobs because they refused to get the COVID vaccine. Speaking at a council meeting last Wednesday, Dunn said his resolution would help the county fill “a lot of employee vacancies, both in the sheriff’s department and the jail and other areas of the county.”
All of the fired employees were ruled ineligible for the county’s religious exemption, which allowed people to claim that the vaccine was against their religion. Under the county’s current rules, the fired employees have the right to be rehired to their previous jobs as long as they remain eligible and their job classification still exists.
County Councilmember Claudia Balducci noted that in nearly 40 minutes of self-pitying comments from former employees, “I didn’t hear one word about our commitment to the people we serve and keeping them safe.
Among other reasons, sheriff’s deputies claimed that they shouldn’t have to be vaccinated because the vaccine uses fibroblast cells that originated with fetal cells derived from two fetuses in the 1960s. “All of the available vaccines at the time [of the terminations] were created with aborted fetal tissue,” Enumclaw-based officer Jason Brunner declared, inaccurately. “Because I believe that all children are innocent and precious in the eyes of God. I couldn’t very well put that vaccine into my body when I am vehemently against the the abortion aspect. As such, I was persecuted, along with my brothers and sisters, for our sincerely held religious beliefs.”
As KING-5 reported in 2021, almost every Christian denomination, including the Catholic Church, allows vaccines, including the COVID-19 vaccine.
Because King County no longer has a vaccine mandate, the fired employees are eligible to re-apply for their former positions. Former sheriff’s deputies who spoke during public comment last week argued this process was insulting and “frightening” because they would have to go through a probationary period as new hires. They also demanded back pay for the time they have not been employed by the county. Of about 25 members of the King County Police Officer’s Guild who were terminated because of the mandate, only 12 have expressed an interest in returning, a county staffer confirmed during the meeting—4.7 percent of the 252 vacancies at the sheriff’s department.
Source: King County COVID data dashboard=
County Councilmember Claudia Balducci pointed out in a Twitter thread that the county’s labor unions are already in negotiations that will result in rehiring many employees who lost their jobs because they didn’t want to protect themselves and others against COVID-19. On Wednesday, Balducci noted that in nearly 40 minutes of self-pitying comments from former employees, “I didn’t hear one word about our commitment to the people we serve and keeping them safe. I heard only about the impact on the employees. We are here with a mission, and our mission is to serve the public.”
To Balducci’s point: The COVID vaccine saves lives and has prevented many cases of severe COVID. And COVID continues to kill even as government entities treat their own decisions to require vaccines like an ill-conceived, fear-driven folly.
About 85 percent of King County residents received an initial two-dose vaccine, but only a third are fully vaccinated. Those who aren’t fully vaccinated are far more likely to die or be hospitalized from COVID, according to the county’s COVID data dashboard. Since the date when King County implemented its vaccine mandate, more than 7,700 King County residents have been hospitalized for COVID, and more than 1,400 have died. Three-quarters of the people in both of these groups were not fully vaccinated against the disease. Since the end of the county’s vaccine mandate in February of this year, 91 people have died of COVID countywide; about three-quarters of that group were not fully vaccinated.
