Mayor Bruce Harrell gathered supporters in Westlake Plaza Wednesday morning to announce his latest downtown activation plan, officially titled “Downtown Is You.” But the press event was initially sidelined by a group of anti-sweeps protesters holding signs and chanting, “stop the sweeps” and other slogans from a few feet away. After halting his prepared remarks, Harrell hopped down from the stage and attempted to get the protesters to be quiet, but gave up and returned to the stage after several responded that they didn’t trust his offer to talk to them in a different venue.
“Westlake Center is a center for civic engagement,” he told the audience. “Unfortunately, that’s not civic engagement—that’s just yelling.”
“These [unsheltered] folks you see down here, they’re not strangers to me. I grew up on these streets,” Harrell continued. Gesturing toward the group of young activists, he added: “How dare anyone say I’m going to sweep anybody. I don’t see anyone over there I grew up with.”
Under Harrell, the city has dramatically increased the speed and frequency of encampment removals.
The seven-point downtown plan Harrell announced Wednesday does not directly address encampments. However, it does envision a downtown occupied by shoppers, sports fans, and residents of new high-rise apartment towers along a section of Third Avenue between Stewart and Union Streets, where drug users and unsheltered people frequently congregate. The proposed upzone includes the block that includes a McDonald’s and a check cashing outlet as well as the block anchored by Ross Dress for Less.
At a press briefing on Tuesday, mayoral advisor (and soon-to-be deputy mayor) Tim Burgess said “several” developments in the area were “ready to go” once a proposed upzone goes through. The proposal would increase the maximum height for new buildings from 170 feet to 440 (460 if new developments include child care or education facilities) on about five blocks that are adjacent to a area where 450-foot-high buildings are already allowed. The city’s land use database does not include any active permits for these blocks.
On Tuesday, Burgess said the proposed rezone reflects “a recognition that we need to make some dramatic changes in order to shift what’s been several decades now of problematic street uses and disorder.”
Police almost outnumbered protesters during a demonstration at Mayor Bruce Harrell’s announcement of his downtown activation strategy.
Harrell’s plan also includes legislation to allow a broader mix of uses on the ground floor of buildings (apartments or conference spaces instead of retail, for example) and throughout buildings themselves, in the form of “vertical residential neighborhoods within buildings” that allow residents to access everything they need, from child care to retail stores to pickleball courts, inside their buildings.
The idea is a nod to the fact that—Harrell’s back-to-work order and admonishments notwithstanding—many people have continued to work at least partly from home, leaving significant vacancies in downtown office buildings. “I don’t think this is a philosophical shift away from retail” serving downtown office workers, McIntyre said Tuesday. “It’s embracing some flexibility and some new ideas and wanting to encourage a different mix on the ground floor area as the as the city continues to change.”
Another piece of legislation would make a half-block of Pike Street between First and Second Avenues pedestrian-only, connecting Pike Place Market Market to—well, one half-block of downtown directly adjacent to, but not part of, the market. (Asked whether the mayor would consider prohibiting car traffic in Pike Place Market—where pedestrians compete for space on the historic brick streets with exhaust-spewing cars—Office of Economic Development director Markham McIntyre said the city was still “talking to Pike Place Market … to figure out what what that might look like,” but had no immediate plans to get rid of cars in the Market, a change pedestrian advocates have been demanding for decades.
Beyond those concrete legislative proposals, the plan consists mostly of expanded pilot projects (doubling the number of businesses participating in Seattle Restored, a pop-up project that fills empty storefronts), initiatives that are already underway (reopening City Hall Park, “more murals” downtown), and ideas that are still very much in the whiteboard stages. It also incorporates many aspirational ideas that would require significant additional funding, such as completing the downtown streetcar, putting a lid over I-5, and creating a new “arts district” from South Lake Union to Pioneer Square.
Mayor Bruce Harrell briefly spoke to protesters before returning to his press event.
And, of course, it assumes a heavier police presence downtown—a mostly unspoken, but bedrock, element of the proposal. “Make Downtown Safe and Welcoming” is actually number one on the plan’s list of seven priorities, starting with arrests of people “distributing and selling illegal drugs” (and, presumably, using them—Harrell mentioned that a bill criminalizing drug possession and public use will likely pass in July). The safety plan also includes a number of initiatives to address addiction that Harrell announced in April, along with a plan to help private property owners remove graffiti—a particular burr under Harrell’s saddle.
Earlier this month, a federal judge issued an injunction barring the police from arresting people for tagging or graffiti, finding that Seattle’s broadly worded law “likely…violates the First and Fourteenth Amendments by being both vague and overbroad.” On Wednesday, I asked Harrell—who had just expounded on the difference, as he sees it, between “art” and “graffiti” (“One word: It’s unwanted”)—what he would do if the judge overturned the law.
“We have to have the ability to arrest people for unwanted graffiti, so if there’s precise language in the law that is unconstitutional, that is vague, that’s ambiguous, we have to fix it,” Harrell said. “If we lose the lawsuit, we go back to the drawing board and figure out what the deficiencies are in the law, and we fix it or remedy it.”
“This graffiti stuff just drives me nuts,” Harrell added.
Last week, the King County Regional Homelessness Authority gathered the members of its Continuum of Care (CoC) membership to vote on new members and a new charter for the Continuum of Care Board, a volunteer committee that, among other duties, oversees the KCRHA’s annual application for tens of millions of dollars in federal funding.
The online-only “convening,” whose public portion lasted less than 30 minutes, came on the heels of an explosive meeting earlier this year at which one of the CoC Board’s co-chairs, Shanéé Colston, yelled at another member, Kristina Sawyckyj, who objected to the appointment of a sex offender to the board. Sawyckyj, who said the nominee had also touched her inappropriately, went silent and left the meeting after Colston and another board member told her that her comments were out of order.
“We have no right to out anyone in this space,” Colston said. “I’m telling you that you cannot talk like that in this meeting. I will not have that here! If anyone wants to talk like that you will be muted and removed from this meeting.”
“This is about equity. And everyone—everyone— deserves housing. I don’t care if they’re a sex offender!” Colston continued. “This is an inclusive space, and we are equitable to all.” Another board member, Kristi Hamilton, defended the nominee and told Sawyckyj she should go to the police if she had a crime to report but that it wasn’t appropriate for her to raise those concerns in a public board meeting.
Colston told PubliCola she received death threats from around the world after the story about her comments went viral. She said she regrets “falling into the trap, and… that I was not prepared and I responded in reaction to [Sawyckyj’s comments] and not in thought.”
PubliCola reported on the meeting in May. Over the next few weeks, our story was picked up (and distorted) by right-wing media worldwide, spreading from local FOX affiliates to the New York Post to the Daily Mail. A Change.org petition, which falsely stated that the board approved the sex offender’s nomination—in reality, he withdrew his application—called for Colston’s removal “from all leadership positions” at the authority. Many of the articles about the incident used racist language to portray Colston as a stereotypical angry Black woman lashing out at a meek white colleague (described by the Daily Mail as a “wheelchair-bound mother”) on behalf of a “child rapist.”
Colston told PubliCola she received death threats from around the world after the story about her comments went viral. She said she regrets “falling into the trap, and… that I was not prepared and I responded in reaction to [Sawyckyj’s comments] and not in thought.”
At the height of the uproar, KCHRA chief program officer Peter Lynn sent Colston a letter demanding she resign, which she refused to do. Last week’s election accomplished the same result by prematurely terminating Colston’s three-year term.
According to Colston, she and other board members were not aware that Crowfoot was a sex offender “until it was announced (by Sawyckyj) that day,” and said that the committee that reviewed board applications before bringing them to the full board rejected several applicants because of their past behavior—including drinking on the job and using housing vouchers “to manipulate women,” according to Colston.
“I asked for her to be muted on her mic as it’s not the responsibility of a victim to have to be vulnerable and publicly announce their trauma to the world,” Colston said, “and it was breaking the rules” of the board. “I don’t agree he or others should have a seat of power on this CoC Board,” she continued, “but the voices of their experience with being homeless have to be heard, listened to, and some form of plan implemented to end homelessness [for them] as well.
“I don’t agree [the sex offender] or others should have a seat of power on this CoC Board, but the voices of their experience with being homeless have to be heard, listened to, and some form of plan implemented to end homelessness [for them] as well.
When she said that everyone, including sex offenders, deserve to be housed, Colston said she was identifying a well-known problem—sex offenders, as well as convicted arsonists, are systematically denied access to shelter and affordable housing, forcing many into unsheltered homelessness.
“When I stated that I was glad that he was there, it means that arsonists and sex offenders are a very vulnerable population” Colston said. “If KCRHA is really centering the Theory of Change and listening to those with lived experience to end homelessness for all, as radical as it may be, those populations of vulnerable individuals are included in housing all people.”
During Friday’s meeting, interim KCRHA CEO Helen Howell read a statement apologizing for “any distress or discomfort caused by the incident” at the CoC Board meeting, “and we want to assure you that we take this matter seriously [and] are actively working to prevent such incidents from occurring in the future.”
In addition to replacing Colston and electing eight new board members, Continuum of Care members voted Friday to adopt a new charter for the board that relegates “lived experience” to just one of many qualifications for board seats and significantly reduces the board’s authority.
Unionized staff at the King County Regional Homelessness Authority say the homelessness authority has failed to come to the bargaining table to negotiate their first contract, canceling five out of eight scheduled bargaining sessions and refusing to discuss proposals for increased wages amid a “toxic work environment” that has driven at least 17 people to leave the agency, which recently surpassed 100 employees, since 2021.
According to a letter to the KCRHA’s governing and implementation board members from the Professional and Technical Employees Local 17 (PROTEC17), the workers—who unionized almost exactly a year ago—provided a draft contract to the agency earlier this year, but the union’s “calls for support and offers to negotiate at the bargaining table have largely gone unmet.” In March, the union filed an Unfair Labor Practice with the state Public Employee Relations Commission for refusal to bargain; four of the five cancellations occurred after that filing.
“Although we are heartened by KCRHA’s response to our proposals at the June 15th bargaining session, this negotiation lacked any response or timeline for addressing our economic proposals, the letter to the agency’s governing and implementation boards says.
The union sent a similar letter to interim director Helen Howell this morning.
According to a source familiar with the negotiations, the KCRHA did not want to discuss cost of living adjustments, wage classifications, or other economic issues, and suggested that the agency has little control over what it can pay employees because its funding comes from outside sources—chiefly the city of Seattle and King County.
“If not addressed soon, this could develop into an additional failure to negotiate. This lack of interaction with our union not only undermines the rights and well-being of the staff but also erodes trust within the organization,” the letter continues.
Earlier this year, the KCRHA reportedly gave staffers a 3 percent cost of living adjustment, without notifying the union or negotiating the increase, which is below the rate of inflation.
The KCRHA has not responded to a list of questions PubliCola sent on Wednesday morning, including a request for confirmation of the 3 percent COLA. We will update this post if they respond.
“It is disheartening to witness the immense potential of the KCRHA that brought staff to the organization being squandered due to ineffective leadership.”
The union also raised questions about the safety of the KCRHA’s system advocates—outreach workers with lived experience of homelessness—who go into encampments and other potentially dangerous situations to identify and follow up with clients in downtown Seattle. The system advocates were the brainchild of former agency CEO Marc Dones, and are funded through a public-private partnership with local companies and private philanthropic groups.
According to the letter, KCRHA leadership “targeted and retaliated against” one of the co-directors of the systems advocates, “for raising still unresolved safety concerns for our Systems Advocate workforce.” Earlier this year, after that co-director was terminated, organizers posted an online petition demanding safer working conditions for system advocates, including safety equipment and information about hazards that may be present at encampments.
As we’ve reported, the KCRHA has had trouble hiring for a number of vacant positions, including grants and contract staffers who verify contracts and make sure hundreds of agencies who receive funding through the KCRHA get paid.
“Projects and initiatives are delayed across the organization, including Partnership for Zero and contracting (which have been directly impacted by employee turnover),” the letter to the two boards says. “It is disheartening to witness the immense potential of the KCRHA that brought staff to the organization being squandered due to ineffective leadership.”
On Friday, the King County Regional Homelessness Authority will convene an unusual meeting to determine the future of a previously obscure body, the Continuum of Care Board, that made headlines earlier this year when its co-chair, Shanéé Colston, shouted down another board member who objected to the appointment of a registered sex offender to the board. That board member, who also described her own traumatic experience with the nominee, left the meeting after Colston and another board member told her she had no right to object.
The meeting includes a vote on a new charter for the organization as a whole, followed by a vote for new board members, including a replacement for Colston, who has not completed her three-year term.
In a statement on Wednesday, interim KCRHA CEO Helen Howell—said she hoped that “with new leadership in place, the CoC Board can refocus its energies on the upcoming application for over $50 million in federal funding to reduce and prevent homelessness across King County.”
The KCHRA’s leaders, Howell continued, “encourage the voting membership to consider the importance of electing a Board that will lead with empathy, build consensus, and focus first and foremost on our shared goal of bringing more people inside.” The statement was co-signed by the three chairs of the KCRHA’s governing board, Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell, King County Executive Dow Constantine, and Renton City Councilmember representative Ed Prince.
For the past few weeks, the KCRHA has been encouraging people and organizations with a stake in the region’s homelessness system to sign up as members of the stakeholder group that oversees the region’s Continuum of Care (CoC), the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s term for an agency, like the KCRHA, that oversees and coordinates homelessness services in an area.
On Friday, this stakeholder group—now, thanks in part to the KCRHA’s recruitment efforts, about 150 strong—is scheduled to vote on a new charter for the Continuum of Care as a whole, as well as new members of the CoC board. The new charter, if it’s adopted, will empower the entire CoC membership, rather than the board itself, to determine who sits on the board—a significant change that would make board members uniquely accountable to a large group of unelected stakeholders.
After the charter vote, the CoC is scheduled to vote on 13 candidates for board seats, including five current members and eight new nominees. Colston is not running for reelection to the board. KCRHA spokesman Anne Martens said members of the board itself, including two co-chairs, requested the change. “This process is a best practice to keep the board accountable to the community,” Martens said.
The KCRHA—whose first director, Marc Dones, recently resigned—is in a period of retrenchment. Under Dones, the KCRHA committed to empower people with direct experience of homelessness as key decision makers at the authority—sometimes at the expense of more conventional qualifications, like work experience and technical expertise. Now, after a chaotic first two years, the agency is starting to walk some of those commitments back.
The Continuum of Care board has a complex mix of responsibilities: It reviews and approves the KCRHA’s applications for federal funding, oversees performance metrics for homeless service providers, and creates a prioritization tool to judge funding applications, among other duties.
After PubliCola broke the story, right-wing media grabbed it and took it in a predictable direction, demonizing Colston—a volunteer board member with extensive personal experience of homelessness—as an out-of-control “official” for the KCRHA and demanding her resignation.
However, the board is probably now best known for the meeting in which Colston shouted down another board member who objected to the appointment of a man who has been convicted of multiple sex offenses involving teenage girls and who, according to the board member, had also touched her inappropriately. After the incident, KCRHA chief program officer Peter Lynn asked Colston to resign, saying her actions had created a “hostile environment for KCRHA staff and committee members.” The board has not held a public meeting since May.
Although the nominee, Raven Crowfoot (also known as Thomas Whitaker), later withdrew his application, the fallout from the incident was immense. After PubliCola broke the story, right-wing media grabbed it and took it in a predictable direction, demonizing Colston—a volunteer board member with extensive personal experience of homelessness—as an out-of-control “official” at the KCRHA and demanding her resignation. Colston, who did not respond to a request for comment, did not step down. But she is not running for reelection to the board, which means that if the vote goes forward on Friday, she will be replaced before the end of her term.
According Martens, new CoC board members (and current members who choose to attend) “will receive an in-depth onboarding,” including “training on the Open Public Meetings Act, CoC roles and responsibilities, trauma-informed practices, LGBTQIA2S+ equity, professional development for people with lived experience, and board roles and responsibilities among other items.”
The proposed new charter also removes all references to the Lived Experience Coalition, an advocacy group that was empowered, under Dones, to directly appoint members to the agency’s implementation board and weigh in on agency policies and priorities. The new charter even deletes a reference to the LEC’s role in creating the agency’s theory of change, instead crediting the community and the National Innovation Service, the firm where Dones developed the framework for the KCRHA as a consultant.
As we reported last week, the KCRHA recently terminated an agreement that gave the LEC the authority to staff the KCRHA’s ombudsperson office, and has been systematically removing references to the organization from job descriptions, the KCRHA’s Five-Year Plan, and other agency documents. The KCRHA has been distancing itself from the LEC for a while, but a major breaking point came when the LEC and its fiscal agent, Building Changes, ran out of money to operate several hotel-based shelters it was operating with federal funds earlier this year.
It’s unclear who, specifically, drafted the new version of the charter, which is dated “June 2023.” Martens said it was developed “with input from current Board members and KCRHA staff, with guidance from HUD [Technical Assistance] and KCRHA counsel.” An earlier, much different version of the charter, which had been on the KCRHA’s website since at least the beginning of May, was posted ” in error before counsel had a chance to review,” according to Martens.
The KCRHA’s “Meet the Continuum of Care Board” web page no longer displays the names of the board (available here); instead, it reads, “CoC Board Members are being voted on at the June 23rd, 2023 CoC Member Convening. Results of the vote will be posted here June 26th, 2023.” A list of candidates is available on the KCRHA’s website.
1. The King County Regional Homelessness Authority appears to be distancing itself from the Lived Experience Coalition—a statewide group of advocates who have direct experience with homelessness—in the wake of former CEO Marc Dones’ resignation, which became effective last week.
Last week, some members of the KCRHA’s implementation board raised questions about a new charter for the agency’s ombuds office—a semi-autonomous office that responds to questions and complaints from people who receive homelessness services, service providers, and KCRHA staff—that ices out the LEC, which previously played a key role in running the office and selecting its staff.
The agency’s chief ombudsperson, Katara Jordan, told the board that the KCRHA had terminated its year-old memorandum of agreement with the LEC’s fiscal sponsor, Building Changes (which functioned as a pass-through agency for the LEC’s money.) That agreement established a “joint ombuds office” for the agency, with half its staff employed by the LEC and half by the homelessness authority. The agreement gave the LEC the power to directly appoint the KCRHA’s chief ombudsperson and choose two of that person’s four paid staffers.
“For various reasons, the structure did not work,” Jordan said.
Under former KCRHA CEO Marc Dones, the LEC became the primary voice for people experiencing homelessness in the region, with the authority to appoint members to the KCRHA’s governing and implementation boards, co-develop the agency’s mission and founding documents, issue politically charged statements on the KCRHA’s website, and receive government contracts to run hotel-based shelters.
In recent months, however, the KCRHA and Dones began distancing themselves from the LEC, a situation that came to a head this spring when the LEC ran out of money to pay for the shelters it was operating around King County. The crisis led to a frenzy of finger-pointing and badly damaged the relationship between the KCRHA and the LEC.
The LEC remains an official partner in the public-private Partnership for Zero, which is behind schedule on its plan to eliminate unsheltered homelessness in downtown Seattle.
“The KCRHA ombuds is not beholden to what a particular organization demands, or wants, and may not always be in complete alignment with a particular organization, especially if it is not in the best interest of the public good, or people we serve experiencing homelessness.” —KCRHA Chief Ombudsperson Katara Jordan
During last week’s meeting, several board members questioned the agency’s decision to formally break ties with the group. “Why are we pushing the LEC out?” board member Ben Maritz asked. Jordan responded that while the voice of people with lived experience of homelessness is important, the LEC is not the only group in the region that represents that perspective.
“There needs to be boundaries and an understanding that the KCRHA ombuds is not beholden to what a particular organization demands, or wants, and may not always be in complete alignment with a particular organization, especially if it is not in the best interest of the public good, or people we serve experiencing homelessness,” Jordan said.
Recently, the KCRHA advertised for two vacant ombudsperson positions. Compared to the old job description for this role, the new posting eliminates multiple references to the Lived Experience Coalition and include more specific job qualifications related to past work experience, rather than life experience and unusual qualifications like “comfortable with ambiguity.”
2. In an email to human-service providers earlier this month, interim KCRHA director Helen Howell said the agency no longer plans to re-procure all of the contracts that make up the region’s nonprofit homelessness system this year, and now plans to start that process—a huge undertaking—in 2024.
As director, Dones frequently emphasized the need to swiftly revamp the entire homelessness system using new metrics and goals. However, after the agency fell months behind on paying its existing contractors for the second year, human-service providers demanded that the KCRHA focus on basics like getting checks out the door before recreating the entire system from scratch.
“Based on feedback we received from contracted providers and other stakeholders, KCRHA has decided to postpone the majority of the System Re-Procurement process until 2024,” Howell wrote. “We want to ensure that KCRHA has the organizational capacity necessary to achieve a successful equity-based re-procurement of homelessness services contracts.”
In a presentation on the decision to hold off on redesigning the system, the KCRHA noted that it has had trouble finding people to fill its finance and contracting positions because “staff in these fields are in incredibly high demand,” making it “difficult to recruit qualified staff for these positions.” According to the presentation, the KCRHA has four vacant grants and finance positions.
At the risk of rehashing ancient (well, two-year-old) history: When the KCRHA was first taking over grants and contracts work from the city of Seattle’s Human Services Department, the union that represented the people doing these jobs sought a succession agreement that would have given them the right to keep doing their existing jobs—managing the exact same grants and contracts— at the KCRHA. However, Dones objected to this idea, saying they wanted to hire an entirely new team, and that anyone at the city who wanted to keep doing their current work would need to apply for open positions.
Source: City attorney’s office 2022 4th-quarter report
By Erica C. Barnett
Before casting the deciding vote to reject a bill that would have given City Attorney Ann Davison new power to prosecute people for using or possessing drugs, Councilmember Andrew Lewis said he was swayed to vote no by Davison’s unilateral decision to stop sending cases to community court, a therapeutic court that allows people accused of specific low-level misdemeanors to access services and life-skills classes in lieu of prosecution.
Davison’s office has argued that community court and its onetime presiding judge, Damon Shadid, have been too lenient on low-level defendants, allowing people to elude charges by attending a single online life-skills class. Some service providers have actually echoed this complaint, arguing that the court does too little to get people into meaningful services like addiction treatment and job assistance programs.
Proponents of community court, including Shadid and the King County Department of Public Defense (DPD), say community court graduates were less likely to reoffend (one measure of success) than people who go through mainstream court, and that the court offered a vital alternative to prosecution and incarceration, which clog up court dockets and put more pressure on the understaffed downtown jail.
“Community Court was a collaborative effort to reduce the harm of the system and instead connect people charged with nonviolent misdemeanor offenses to services,” DPD director Anita Khandelwal said after Davison announced her decision. “Nonetheless, the Seattle City Attorney … seeks to push push people deeper into a criminal legal carceral system that is expensive, deadly, and deeply racially disproportionate.”
Lewis, a former assistant city attorney, has said he will vote for a future version of Davison’s legislation if and when the city comes up with an alternative, or “successor,” to community court that includes access to services like addiction treatment for people who participate. So far, Lewis—who’s up for reelection this year—has outlined no specific plan, timeline, or proposal for what the new court would look like and who would be eligible.
In this context, the debate over Seattle’s now-defunct community court is still highly relevant. If the whole concept is doomed to failure, as Davison has suggested, the solution might be some combination of expanded pre-trial diversion programs and prosecution, which Davison’s office maintains the Seattle Municipal Court is better equipped to handle now that one judge (Shadid) has been “freed up” to hear mainstream cases. If it was a success, as DPD maintains, a new court might look more like community court 4.0, perhaps with more requirements—Davison’s office bristled at Shadid’s elimination of a community-service mandate—and a more punitive prosecute-and-jail track for people who fail to engage after signing up for the program.
The City Attorney’s Perspective
In her letter to the city council announcing the city’s withdrawal from community court, the city attorney’s criminal division chief, Natalie Walton-Anderson, said community court had an extremely low completion rate, with just a 22 percent “graduation” rate among defendants referred to the court. This, the city attorney’s office argued, has led over time to “a huge volume of unresolved and unaccounted for cases”—growing from a handful in August 2020, when the court was launched, to more than 1,500 as of last September.
“Prosecutors, judges and defense sitting in empty courtrooms is extremely costly, not just in staff time but in opportunity cost,” a spokeswoman for the city attorney said. “There are many more effective uses of this staff time. It also imposes a public cost—if there is no effective response to repeat criminal activity then the public pays through reduced safety and increased victimization.”
This backlog, Walton-Anderson argued, is the result of people failing to engage in court by showing up for hearings or complying with court requirements, even though “most participants only had to participate in an assessment with a pre-trial service counselor and attend a 90-minute life skills class.”
“Prosecutors, judges and defense sitting in empty courtrooms is extremely costly, not just in staff time but in opportunity cost,” a spokeswoman for Davison, Marina Yudodik, told PubliCola. “There are many more effective uses of this staff time. It also imposes a public cost—if there is no effective response to repeat criminal activity then the public pays through reduced safety and increased victimization.”
Community court—which excludes anyone accused of serious misdemeanors, such as stalking, harassment, and motor vehicle offenses—has three tiers for engagement, ranging from a 14-day program that includes the online life-skills class and information about available services to a 45-day program that includes mandatory engagement in services assigned by the court. According to Seattle Municipal Court data, Tier 1 defendants—the lowest level of engagement—account for fewer than half of those who enter community court, and there are about the same number of Tier 3 defendants as Tier 1.
But even among people who do engage with services, Davison’s office argues, the majority only access items to help with their immediate needs, rather than ongoing services like drug treatment or job training. According to community court records, in the court’s first 16 months, 31 participants accessed drug treatment, including medication-assisted treatment with suboxone—less than a third of the number referred to treatment services. In contrast, 214 people received bus tickets, 132 got clothing, and 166 accepted food bags.
In addition, the city attorney’s office argues, community court has is open to people who are accused of “significant criminal acts,” and does not screen out people with “serious criminal histories,” including in other states. In her letter, Walton-Anderson gives several examples of cases that her office believes are “inappropriate” for community court, either because they’ve committed more serious crimes in the past or because their specific cases are more serious than their charges indicate.
The letter provides four examples of “inappropriate cases and individuals” that ended up in community court, including one man who had several felony cases pending in King County Superior Court who went on to carjack a vehicle with a child inside; one man who was charged with multiple felonies while in community court but still graduated; and another man who committed multiple misdemeanors and felonies while his cases were pending in community court.
In her letter, Walton-Anderson said the office plans “to dismiss a significant number of cases that were filed prior to January 1, 2022” to clear out the community court docket, and the city attorney’s office has said it plans to send more cases into pre-trial diversion, where appropriate, while routing other cases to mainstream municipal court. In a statement about her decision to stop sending cases to community court, Davison noted that people who participate in pre-filing diversion are less likely to reoffend than those referred to community court.
The city’s existing pre-filing diversion programs are aimed at people under 25, not the older adults who commit a large and growing number of drug-related crimes. Other programs, such as the longstanding program now called Let Everyone Advance with Dignity (LEAD), serve older adults, including those with significant behavioral health challenges and extensive criminal justice involvement, but LEAD is a pre-booking program separate from the pre-filing programs Walton-Anderson referred to in her letter.
Recently, the CAO did sign new pre-filing diversion contracts with several nonprofit groups, including the Urban League, the LGBTQ+ Center (formerly Gay City), and Unified Outreach, an arts program for at-risk youth that is expanding to serve adults. The city council provided $750,000 for expanding diversion to people 25 and older in 2021, but—after a protracted battle with Davison in 2021—moved the funding from the city attorney’s office to the Human Services Department, which spent more than a year analyzing potential diversion strategies. During this time, the funding sat unspent for “many months,” Davison spokeswoman Yudodik said.
These programs, once they’re up and running, will still be aimed at people who are fairly high-functioning—excluding, for example, those who are in active fentanyl addiction and need more services than a light-touch diversion program can provide.
Source: City attorney’s office letter, May 26, 2023
The Public Defenders’ Perspective
Community court has many defenders, including the attorneys who represent clients accused of low-level misdemeanor crimes.
DPD director Khandelwal recently told PubliCola that “if the CAO opts for traditional prosecution, we expect we’ll see more dismissals. This means that more people will churn through a costly and ineffective system and will be harmed and destabilized in the process.” Data from the city attorney shows that in 2022, municipal court judges dismissed nearly 800 cases out of 5,700 filed by the city attorney’s office.
Advocates for community court have also argued that criminalizing low-level crimes, and jailing people who would have been eligible for community court, will only destabilize defendants with major challenges that contribute to their criminal activity, such as mental illness, addiction, and homelessness.
“We have been able to hook people up with housing, with inpatient treatment, with mental health services, with Apple Care [Medicaid] insurance, right there at the court,” Shadid told PubliCola last year. “I just think this way is proven to have more positive effects for our community than putting people in jail, destabilizing them, making them lose their services, and then releasing them back into the community with less connections to services than they had when they entered.”
In her letter, Walton-Anderson provided several examples intended to demonstrate that community court doesn’t work, and that eliminating the court would give the city attorney the ability to prosecute people who cause harm. However, it’s debatable whether the cases she picked as examples would have gone differently if community court did not exist.
For example, the letter describes Ryan, who was accused of theft and property damage. After opting in to community court, he committed a felony by attempting to steal a car that had a child inside. However, both of Ryan’s charges stemmed from arrests in 2021 for which he was booked and quickly released, long before he opted in to community court last year. Both of those cases were dismissed for lack of proof. Ryan has been in jail on the felony charge since last May in lieu of $350,000 bail.
It would be one thing if this was unique to community court, but failure to appear is extremely common across all parts of the municipal court system. Scott Lindsay, now Davison’s deputy city attorney and a vocal opponent of community court, estimated in a 2019 report for the Downtown Seattle Association that around 65 percent of people failed to appear at their initial court hearing.
In another case, William racked up a large number of shoplifting misdemeanors before his 2020 referral to community court. The jail repeatedly released him directly into residential treatment for his substance use disorder, but he left each time before finishing. The reason William’s cases were dismissed, though, was a separate plea deal with the King County prosecutor on a felony case, not his failure to participate in community court or treatment. Additionally, William is on the “high utilizers” list Davison categorically excluded from community court more than a year ago, and has been ineligible for community court since then.
Walton-Anderson’s letter also cites David, a man who was arrested repeatedly for stealing from a store in North Seattle and “graduated” from community court in 2022, “having completed only the 90 minute life skills class to resolve all [nine] cases” from 2020. In fact, according to court records, David had been in a one-year residential treatment program for almost two months and “making great progress,” according to his probation officer, when he graduated from community court—precisely the kind of outcome the city attorney’s office has said it hopes to see. By the time David reoffended last August, he was already ineligible for community court because he, like William, was on Davison’s high-utilizers list.
Advocates for community court also dispute some of the statistics the city attorney uses to claim the court wasn’t working. For example, the office has frequently noted that community court has a low completion level—about 78 percent of people who opt in to the court don’t complete it. However, as Judge Shadid has pointed out, the low “graduation” rate stems from the fact that a high percentage of community court participants fail to appear at initial hearings, often because they are homeless.
It would be one thing if this was unique to community court, but failure to appear is extremely common across all parts of the municipal court system. Scott Lindsay, now Davison’s deputy city attorney and a vocal opponent of community court, estimated in a 2019 report for the Downtown Seattle Association that around 65 percent of people failed to appear at their initial court hearings. The subtitle for the report, which preceded the most recent iteration of community court, was “Declines, Delays, And Dismissals – Why Most Seattle Misdemeanor Cases Never Get Resolved And The Impacts On Public Safety.”
The city attorney’s office has pointed to higher recidivism rates among people who opt in to community court compared to pre-trial diversion programs that have more requirements, like the LGBTQ+ Center’s online Access to Change program for young adults accused of certain domestic violence crimes. However, people who get referred into pretrial diversion are a specific subset of defendants who the city attorney’s office believes are likely to succeed in diversion programs that offer a “light touch”—young people with minimal prior criminal involvement who generally do not face the same challenges as older community court defendants, like chronic homelessness, fentanyl addiction, and severe mental illness. They just aren’t the same group of people.
Community court is gone, for now, and its replacement is now in the city’s hands. Both Lewis and Davison have expressed support for expanded use of pre-trial diversion programs for the higher-functioning people who qualify, and continuing or expanding LEAD, an evidence-based program that provides case management and services to people with high levels of criminal legal involvement.
Even with those programs, both Davison’s office and the municipal court will likely be inundated with new low-level cases, which could lead to larger backlogs and more dismissals. Currently, according to records compiled by municipal court staffers, the court has almost 2,400 cases from 2022 that are still pending, along with nearly 2,000 so far in 2023. Adding cases that would have gone to community court to this pile would only increase the backlog. In 2019, for example, nearly 3,000 cases were filed that would have been eligible for community court, if community court had existed at the time.
Last year, Davison’s office declined fewer than 60 cases using pre-filing diversion programs—a small fraction of the number that will need to be diverted into programs that have limited capacity in order to avoid an even greater backlog. The city—and Lewis in particular—will have to be creative and determined if it wants to avoid the very situation Davison decried during her election campaign.
1. As of last week, the Seattle City Council seemed likely to vote at least 5-4 in favor of legislation, proposed by City Attorney Ann Davison and sponsored by Councilmembers Sara Nelson and Alex Pedersen, to criminalize simple drug possession and public use at the city level. The state legislature, responding to a state supreme court decision overturning the state’s previous felony law, made drug use and possession a gross misdemeanor earlier this year; the local proposal would incorporate parts of that law into the city’s municipal code.
However, after Davison abruptly withdrew the city from Seattle’s community court—a therapeutic court that accepts people accused of most misdemeanors without requiring them to plead guilty of a crime—council members who were leaning toward a “yes” vote have reportedly been reconsidering their positions. If Councilmembers Teresa Mosqueda, Tammy Morales, Kshama Sawant, and Lisa Herbold all vote “no,” all it will take is one more council member—either Andrew Lewis or Dan Strauss, both up for reelection this year—to doom the bill.
Lewis declined to comment on Monday, and Strauss did not respond to a text message last week. However, Strauss proposed an amendment on Monday that would add a “whereas” clause the bill pointing out that the state law mentions diversion, treatment, and services as alternatives to booking and prosecution, suggesting that he may believe the new law meaningfully encourages these alternatives.
If Strauss supports the bill, the decision would come down to Lewis. Although Lewis told the Seattle Times he supports prosecuting people for public drug use, that was before Davison withdrew the city from community court. In light of that decision, Lewis may want to avoid handing more authority to a separately elected official who has demonstrated she will act unilaterally to penalize low-level crimes. During Monday’s council briefing, Lewis criticized Davison’s decision, saying it was “concerning that the decision to pull out and disrupt that program has been made without a well-thought–out plan on what replaces it.”
The criminalization bill skipped past the usual committee hearing, so tomorrow’s 2 pm full council meeting will be the first time the council discusses the legislation publicly, and the first and last opportunity for the public to address the council directly before the vote.
2. Former King County Regional Homelessness Authority CEO Marc Dones, who announced their resignation last month, will reportedly receive a public contract to work on an unspecified project for the agency for up to three months after their last day on June 16. Sources close to Dones and the agency were tight-lipped about the details, but the deal is said to be a kind of payment in lieu of severance because Dones decided to resign rather than forcing the agency to fire them, which was starting to look more and more likely in the weeks leading up to Dones’ resignation.
Dones has been a divisive figure, winning praise for their big-picture vision and efforts to include people with direct experience in decisions that impact them directly, along with criticism for neglecting ground-level details, like building relationships with existing service providers and paying contractors on time.
It’s unclear exactly where the money for Dones’ potential contract would come from, and whether it would require them to be physically present at KCRHA headquarters at the same time that an interim director, Helen Howell, is working to establish a new course for the agency. A representative for King County declined to comment on the details of the potential contract, and a representative for Harrell did not respond to an email, a phone call, or a text message seeking comment.
After a heated public meeting Tuesday night, the Burien City Council declined to take any action on a longstanding encampment on city-owned property, effectively allowing a private business that has leased the property to remove several dozen people who have been living on the site since the city forced them to move from a strip of land next to City Hall in April.
As we’ve reported, the city of Burien evicted encampment residents from an area next to the building that houses both Burien City Hall and the local King County Library branch in April. After encampment residents moved (legally) to a city-owned lot nearby, the city decided to lease the property for $183 a month to a nonprofit animal shelter run by the director of Discover Burien, a local business group, which says it plans to open a dog park at the site.
Over the course of the two-hour meeting, which was frequently interrupted by loud disruptions from an unruly crowd, the council discussed and rejected several potential resolutions, including a land swap that would involve accepting $1 million from King County and relocating encampment residents into pallet shelters on a city-owned parking lot site currently leased by a Toyota dealership, which would move the vehicles it is storing there property owned by King County Metro. The Downtown Emergency Service Center will open a new 95-unit permanent housing project in Burien later this year, with 30 percent of the units reserved for people living homeless in Burien, such as the current encampment residents.
“We don’t know where people will choose to go. Certain sidewalks are available. The city does not have camping bans on sidewalks throughout the city. However, there are regulations that govern ADA accessibility … that the sheriff’s office has addressed in the past.”—Burien City Manager Adolfo Bailon
As part of that deal, the encampment would move temporarily to a local Methodist Church that has agreed to host it until the city can work out a deal with the dealership, whose owner was out of town this week and apparently unaware of the discussion about his business.
King County floated this option during conversations with county officials, including Councilmembers Jimmy Matta and Hugo Garcia, last week. Councilmember Stephanie Mora called her colleagues “very unethical and not transparent” for talking to the county without letting the rest of the council know, leading Matta to note that as an elected official, he is allowed to meet with other government leaders.
Mora is a longtime encampment opponent who has unsuccessfully proposed a total ban on “camping” in Burien. During Tuesday’s meeting meeting, she claimed that homeless people draw drug dealers into cities the way children draw ice cream trucks to parks in summer; in April, she opposed placing a portable toilet near the encampment, saying that homeless people should relieve themselves in dog waste disposal bags.
Under a 2019 federal circuit court ruling called Martin v. Boise, governments can’t force homeless people to move from public property if there is no suitable shelter available. Burien has maintained that it isn’t violating Boise by leasing out the property and forcing people to move, because people can simply move their tents onto public sidewalks or other strips of land where they are technically allowed to be. (Burien bans people from sleeping in its parks, using a similar justification).
With its vote, the council also declined to consider other potential options to relocate the encampment temporarily, including other county-owned properties, or continue working on a resolution while allowing people to stay where they are. Councilmember Sarah Moore asked City Manager Adolfo Bailon to address the distinct likelihood that—as the council’s own agenda noted explicitly—people would simply move onto local sidewalks since the city has not found anywhere for them to go.
“We don’t know where people will choose to go,” Bailon said. “To your specific question, yes, it is possible. Certain sidewalks are available. The city does not have camping bans on sidewalks throughout the city. However, there are regulations that govern ADA accessibility … that the sheriff’s office has addressed in the past.”
The King County Sheriff’s Office provides Burien’s police department. Last month, King County Executive Dow Constantine’s attorney sent a letter to the city of Burien saying the sheriff’s office would not help remove the encampment, prompting the city to issue a statement saying it was King County’s responsibility, not the city’s, to address homelessness in the region. Burien officials opposed to the encampment have suggested repeatedly that homeless people are migrating from Seattle to Burien, but there is little evidence for this claim.
Earlier this week, the organization placed signs around the property ordering people to vacate by June 1; according to KIRO, most people had vacated the encampment by early this morning.
When the King County Regional Homelessness Authority’s founding CEO, Marc Dones, announced they were stepping down earlier this month (news PubliCola broke on Twitter from vacation), reactions among homeless service providers, advocates, and agency insiders ranged from sighs of relief to deep concern over what’s next for the beleaguered agency.
Over the past two years, since Dones was hired in March 2021, the KCRHA has struggled to find its footing through a series of pivots, funding battles with Seattle and King County, and internal and public debates over its mission.
Did Seattle and King County create a regional homelessness agency to solve homelessness as quickly as possible, or is the KCRHA merely a clearinghouse for homeless service contracts previously administered by Seattle and King County, its two primary funders? Should the KCRHA set regional policies and spending priorities and expect its member cities to fall in line, or should cities have freedom to establish their own strategies based on their own local politics and context? Is “housing first” a nonnegotiable goal, or is shelter, even basic shelter with mats on the floor, a critical part of the region’s approach to homelessness?
One thing is clear: With Dones out, there is a power vacuum at KCRHA that will be difficult to fill, in a very practical sense: Despite the usual talk of a “thorough national search,” it’s unlikely the agency will be overwhelmed with qualified applicants. Dones, readers may recall, was the second pick for the position, and ascended to the job after the KCRHA board’s first choice, Regina Cannon, turned it down in 2020. The position now comes pre-loaded with two years of baggage and more urgency than ever; a new CEO will need not just a big-picture vision for the region, but a plan to show swift progress on homelessness and get the authority back on track.
Prior to taking the CEO position, Dones was a homelessness consultant whose firm, the National Innovation Service, created the framework for the KCRHA. As the architect of the regional plan, Dones frequently fought efforts to alter it, battling with local leaders over funding priorities, questioning the expertise of longtime service providers, and expending scarce political capital on ambitious plans that didn’t always pan out—like an early proposal to make big investments in safe parking lots for the thousands of people living in their vehicles across King County.
Under Dones’ leadership, the KCRHA established a clear picture of the homelessness problem in King County, but the agency also fell behind schedule on many of its initial goals.
Dones’ supporters praised them as a visionary who emphasized the disproportionate impact of homelessness on people of color, particularly Black King County residents, foregrounded and empowered people with direct, “lived” experience of homelessness, and never shied away from telling the unvarnished truth about what it would take to truly end homelessness in the region. Critics said Dones elevated lived experience over practical expertise, engaged in unnecessary battles with potential allies like Mayor Bruce Harrell and homeless service providers, and focused on the 10,000-foot view while neglecting ground-level basics, like opening severe weather shelters and paying homeless services providers on time.
Under Dones’ leadership, the KCRHA established a clear picture of the homelessness problem in King County—tens of thousands of people are living unsheltered, in vehicles, and in emergency housing such as hotels and congregate shelters—and housing or even sheltering them all is a problem with a price tag of billions of dollars a year.
But the agency also fell behind schedule on many of its initial goals, including relatively short-term commitments like the plan, announced with great fanfare in February 2022, to end unsheltered homelessness in downtown Seattle in “as little as 12 months” through a public-private partnership with the corporate-backed nonprofit agency We Are In. Although efforts to respond to homelessness continue downtown—including escalated sweeps by the city of Seattle, combined with more thoughtful one-off projects like the Third Avenue Project—unsheltered homelessness remains a pervasive issue in the area.
The plan, known as Partnership for Zero, was for the KCRHA to use private donations to hire dozens of outreach workers with “lived experience,” who would serve as a single point of contact for people living unsheltered downtown, navigating them “longitudinally” and directly from street homelessness into permanent housing, much of it provided by private landlords motivated by a desire to help solve the homelessness crisis. The coordinating body for this partnership is a “housing command center” that meets daily to discuss clients’ individual cases, with the goal of moving them into permanent housing that works for them.
From inception, there were a number of issues with this approach, chief among them the fact that Seattle—unlike, say, New Orleans and Houston, two cities that have successfully moved people directly from the streets to housing—does not have an abundance of vacant apartments, much less housing low-income people can afford. (The Partnership for Zero plan assumes that, in many cases, people will begin paying full rent after a year or so of subsidy).
The plan also assumes that Medicaid will become the primary funding source for the partnership, an assumption many providers have called premature, given the difficulties existing agencies face securing Medicaid reimbursement even for services that are traditionally covered by the federal program.
By setting up a in-house outreach program that duplicated work the agency’s own nonprofit outreach contractors have been providing for years, the KCRHA also created an unequal system in which government employees receive substantially higher pay, and access to more housing resources, than existing outreach providers. This two-track system has understandably irked some nonprofit outreach agencies, who have protested that setting up a parallel system puts them at a disadvantage when it comes to helping clients and retaining qualified staff, who can earn far more money doing the same job for the KCRHA.
The agency’s initial five-year plan—widely, if somewhat unfairly, criticized for being a “$12 billion plan to end homelessness”—included a number of unforced errors, beyond its eye-popping price tag.
More importantly, the partnership hasn’t produced the results it promised, putting about 200 people so far on a “path” toward housing, according to the KCRHA—one reason agency leaders could sunset the program in the post-Dones era.
One criticism of the KCRHA, under Dones’ leadership, is that Dones’ big-picture proposals have sometimes been at odds with political and practical realities. For example, the agency’s initial five-year plan—widely, if somewhat unfairly, criticized for being a “$12 billion plan to end homelessness”—included a number of unforced errors, beyond its eye-popping price tag.
Under the agreement that established the KCRHA, the five-year plan was supposed to set out practical goals for the first five years of agency operations, with the goal of reducing homelessness among specific population groups. Instead, the initial version of the plan laid out what it would cost, in theory, to eliminate unsheltered homelessness in five years. (The plan does not deal directly with housing, which is the responsibility of other agencies, like the city of Seattle’s Office of Housing.) The plan proposed spending billions of dollars a year on shelter, along with thousands of new “safe parking” spaces for people living in their vehicles—an utterly impractical proposal, given the region’s inability to site even one permanent safe lot in more than a decade of efforts to do so.
The initial five-year plan also called for reducing funding for tiny house villages, singling out this shelter type (along with the region’s tiny house village provider, the Low Income Housing Institute) as undesirable despite the fact that the city of Seattle, the KCRHA’s chief funder, prefers to fund tiny houses over almost every other form of shelter. Defending the proposal to cut funding for tiny houses while investing billions in other forms of shelter and parking lots for people to live in their cars, Dones said it was “just math,” pointing to a survey the agency conducted of about 180 homeless people that was used to determine the mix of services in the plan.
The proposal antagonized other existing shelter providers, too, by asserting that almost one in four shelter beds are vacant (and, by implication, useless). And it set off alarms among suburban city leaders because it called for the complete elimination of funding for congregate shelters—the only form of shelter that exists in many cities outside Seattle.
Ultimately, the agency adopted a rewritten plan that omitted most of the prescriptive language from the initial proposal, along with language criticizing the purported failures of the existing shelter system. While the original proposal included seven goals and dozens of sub-strategies, the plan adopted by the agency’s boards earlier this month focuses on “one goal”: Reducing unsheltered homelessness and preventing homeless people from dying. More than 30 pages lighter than the original proposal, the new five-year plan meets the bare minimum requirements of the KCRHA’s charter while allowing plenty of room for future leaders to pick their own priorities. Continue reading “With the Departure of Founding CEO Dones, What Comes Next for the Region’s Homelessness Agency?”→
An encampment on property owned by the city of Burien could be swept as soon as this week, after a nonprofit animal shelter run by the director of Discover Burien, a local business group, secured the right to lease the property from the city starting on June 1, and—according to Burien City Manager Adolfo Bailon—evict the people living there. The shelter, Burien CARES, has said it plans to “revert” the property, which had been an informal dog park, “back to its most recent use by the community as a dog recreation and relief area.”
The encampment was originally located next to City Hall and the downtown Burien branch of the King County Library system, but was booted earlier this year after the condo association that owns the property, whose sole members are the library and the city, voted to make the area around the building a “no-camping” zone. Encampments are also banned in all city parks, limiting where people can legally sleep to bits of city-owned property like the one Burien CARES now plans to lease.
“If the city had taken the responsibility and said, ‘here’s a spot for the people living at City Hall,’ and put up some boundaries, [the encampment] probably wouldn’t have grown,” said Nancy Kick, a Burien resident and activist who opposes sweeping the encampment. “This was all foreseeable; if you don’t create a solution, then the solution creates itself. It’s going to just be what it is and you can’t control it at all.”
Although local advocates and outreach groups have asked King County and the King County Regional Homelessness Authority to help secure housing or shelter for the dozens of people who will be forced to move their tents elsewhere in Burien if the sweep takes place, those efforts have been unsuccessful.
Earlier this month, KCRHA director Anne Martens told PubliCola agency staffers have been meeting with outreach, shelter, and advocacy groups, as well as the city of Burien, and “continue to work together to seek housing and shelter placements.” However, as of last week, those talks hadn’t resulted in a solution for the dozens of people who stand to be evicted from the site this week.
Last week, King County Executive Dow Constantine informed the city of Burien that the county sheriff’s department, which provides Burien’s police force, would not help Burien CARES or city officials remove encampment residents from the property.
“Although the City currently owns the City Lot, it has not identified housing alternatives for the persons who live there despite constitutional duties imposed on the City under federal law,” the letter, signed by Constantine’s general counsel, David Hackett, says. “Instead, the City is attempting to circumvent those duties by entering a lease with a private party, who will maintain and continue the use of the City Lot as a public dog park while attempting to use criminal trespass to force unhoused persons from the premises.”
Meanwhile, the Burien City City Council has scheduled a special meeting for Tuesday, May 30 to discuss—among other combatively worded agenda items—”the best response to the fact that Burien is one of the few, if not the only, jurisdiction other than Seattle to welcome a DESC facility, and yet King County refuses to help Burien help the unhoused” and “the value of the contract for King County Sheriff’s Office services since the Sheriff’s Office refuses to provide police services.”
Under a 2019 federal circuit court ruling called Martin v. Boise, governments can’t force people to move from public property if there is no suitable shelter available. Burien’s approach of leasing out its land and having its tenant evict encampment residents represents an attempt to “evade the holding in Martin,” Hackett wrote, because the land is still city property—and the city hasn’t offered the homeless people living there anywhere else to go.
Burien disagrees with this, arguing that the city doesn’t have an ordinance banning people from sleeping on city property in general, just parks, and that the city is “not asking for or seeking criminal penalties, fines, or even arrests” for the people it wants the sheriff’s department to assist in removing from its property.
Gallagher, a spokesman for Constantine, said the county has “continuously engaged with the City of Burien throughout the past few months to help the city identify a solution that meets the needs of our shared residents. Homelessness is a regional problem, and every jurisdiction plays a part in finding solutions. But that regional aspect doesn’t alleviate cities from the responsibility of serving their residents and taking action directly in their community.”
Last year the Burien City Council approved a new Downtown Emergency Service Center project that will provide 95 units of permanent supportive housing, with 30 percent of the units reserved for Burien residents. However, that building won’t come online until next year.
Meanwhile, the Burien City City Council has scheduled a special meeting for Tuesday, May 30 to discuss—among other combatively worded agenda items—”the best response to the fact that Burien is one of the few, if not the only, jurisdiction other than Seattle to welcome a DESC facility, and yet King County refuses to help Burien help the unhoused” and “the value of the contract for King County Sheriff’s Office services since the Sheriff’s Office refuses to provide police services.”
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Last week, some members of the KCRHA’s implementation board raised questions about a 
However, after Davison abruptly 
By Erica C. Barnett
