Category: human services

homelessness, human services, Mayor Harrell

Seattle Still Emphasizing “Shelter Referrals” As a Sign of Progress on Homelessness, Says Other Cities Must Pitch In
Arrow goes up: Seattle touts metrics that advocates, service providers, and a two-year-old auditor’s report have said are deeply flawed.

By Erica C. Barnett

Seattle Deputy Mayor Tiffany Washington told reporters last week that the city has made impressive progress on removing encampments and referring their displaced residents into shelter, and that new, data-driven criteria for prioritizing encampments now prevents “the loudest voices” from dictating which encampments get removed.

Although incomplete identification data means that any numbers are likely an undercount, Washington said, “we’re happy to say that shelter referrals are up” 20 percent over last year, and shelter enrollments are also on the upswing. “I’m encouraged by the progress we’ve made over the last few years,” she said.

Harrell cited similar numbers in his State of the City speech on Tuesday, crediting a new “state-of-the-art system that informs a data driven, objective and equitable approach to resolving to resolving encampments” for the increase.

In reality, the main component of the city’s “state-of-the-art system” is a frequently updated database of encampments (which replaced an earlier spreadsheet-based system), combined with a prioritization matrix that helps inform which encampments the city removes. That matrix is essentially the same as the one Harrell’s office created back in January 2022, when he first took office.

For years, homeless service providers, advocates, and elected officials have asked the city to stop touting shelter referrals, since that number only refers to the number of people who were told that a specific bed was available, not how many actually slept in a shelter bed for even one night—much less accessed meaningful services or ended up in housing.

The deputy mayor said getting other parts of the region to allow new shelters or housing will be “a challenge. If you were them, and you saw what we were dealing with, would you want a shelter in your city?”

Enrollments—in which a person living in a swept encampment shows up at a shelter for at least one night—totaled 970, up from 746, across all encampment removals last year. While enrollments are a slightly better measure of success than referrals, staying in a shelter for a night or more—perhaps because it’s cold outside—is not a measure of success or progress toward housing.

Because the amount of available shelter space is a fraction of the thousands of people sleeping in tents, vehicles, and doorways every night, the fact that several hundred people a year are “accepting” the city’s shelter offers, and even “enrolling” in shelter, is less an impressive achievement than an indictment of the city’s perennial lack of shelter and housing. Asked about the possibility of siting more shelter and parking for people living in their vehicles, Washington said it was time for other communities besides Seattle to step up.

“I may get in trouble for this, but I think Seattle’s exasperated,” Washington said. “What happens when we go to site anything? The neighbors are like … ‘No, put it somewhere else.’ …Homelessness doesn’t just reside in Seattle, it’s a regional problem. And Seattle needs to not hold the majority of all shelters.” But, Washington added, getting other parts of the region to allow new shelters or housing will be “a challenge. If you were them, and you saw what we were dealing with, would you want a shelter in your city?”

PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you.
CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.

Support PubliCola

The Harrell administration has made a lot of adopting a “data-driven approach” to homelessness, suggesting that this distinguished them from the Durkan Administration. Last week, when I asked Washington when the city stopped using complaints as their primary basis for encampment removals, mayoral spokesman Jamie Housen jumped in and responded, “When Mayor Harrell took office”—that is, after Mayor Jenny Durkan left.

Washington, however, is a holdover from the Durkan administration, where she held several roles overseeing the city’s homelessness response including as the deputy mayor overseeing homelessness—her current role. As the head of the city’s homelessness division under Durkan, Washington vigorously defended the city’s strategy for prioritizing and removing encampments. In 2019, when the Durkan administration was forced to acknowledge they had no idea how many unsheltered people were actually ending up in housing, Washington said the exact number didn’t really matter, because “no matter how you look at it, it’s getting better.”

The city’s homelessness data still doesn’t include that information. Nor does the Harrell Administration’s “state-of-the-art” encampment dashboard appear to include most of the information a report from the City Auditor’s office said the city should provide about homelessness back in 2022, at the beginning of Harrell’s term.

That audit recommended the city create a “data dashboard” that would show whether and how the city’s encampment removal were performing based on a wide array of measures, including health and safety outcomes for people living unsheltered (like deaths from hypothermia, overdose deaths among unsheltered people, and the spread of infectious diseases) as well as other measures beyond shelter referral rates, such as outreach workers’ ability to maintain engagement with their clients after a sweep, access to mental health care and addiction treatment, and the availability of public restrooms with running water.

The city’s public-facing dashboard includes data points related to shelter referrals and public safety (such as shots fired and reported encampment fires), and a “snapshot” map, updated four times a year, showing encampments the city has removed.

During his State of the City speech, Mayor Harrell noted that “there have been bumps in the road” since the city and county created the KCRHA in 2020. “So this year, we will drive needed changes to improve oversight and accountability and foster stronger regional collaboration and solutions,” he said.

Harrell has frequently been critical of the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, and recently nominated a friend and ally, Darrell Powell, as its interim CEO. (Prior to accepting the new position, Powell was the chief financial officer for several nonprofits, including the local YMCA and an agency, the Scholar Fund, at the center of a dispute with King County over alleged fiscal mismanagement.) He also asked the agency to come up with potential cuts to help the city close its $220 million budget deficit this year.

Those moves, and the increasingly high priority of the encampment-removing Unified Care Team, has led to speculation that the mayor may move to shut the agency down. During his speech on Tuesday, Harrell noted that “there have been bumps in the road” since the city and county created the KCRHA in 2020. “So this year, we will drive needed changes to improve oversight and accountability and foster stronger regional collaboration and solutions,” he said.

Last week, Washington said that the city wasn’t considering such a move, and wouldn’t unless “they fail, which we really hope they do not.” If that happens, she said, “we would have to have a discussion with all of the partners at the table and determine whether we revamp it, change it, restructure it, or completely pull out and everybody goes back to their corners.”

Want to get PubliCola delivered right to your inbox? Sign up to get daily posts!

homelessness, human services

Burien Assails Church For Hosting Homeless People Displaced by City Sweeps

By Erica C. Barnett

The Burien City Council capped off 2023 by holding an executive session last Monday to discuss “litigation or legal risks” associated with a new church-based encampment in the city, whose nighttime outdoor sleeping ban went into effect December 1. After the city swept a longstanding encampment where many of Burien’s unsheltered residents had been living, a number of people moved into a structured encampment at Oasis Home Church that has been operating since November 1.

Burien City Manager Adolfo Bailon, along with City Attorney Garmon Newsom II, has insisted that the encampment can’t operate without a temporary use permit would limit encampment operations to no more than 60 days in any calendar year.

“Oasis Home Church remains in violation of  the city’s zoning codes,” which do not allow encampments, Bailon said at last week’s council meeting. “Oasis Home Church continues to refuse to acknowledge the rights afforded to the city of Burien to protect public health and safety. … The city is not aware of how, if at all, public safety is being addressed at Oasis Home Church. We do not know of any protections in place to protect the people in the encampment and at the community at large.”

In a letter dated November 30—the day before Burien’s sweeping encampment ban went into effect—Burien assistant city attorney Ndiabou Diagana explained why the city believes it can restrict a church from hosting a homeless encampment, which is explicitly allowed under state law. Acknowledging that the state law supercedes city codes, Diagana argued that the city still has the right to require a temporary use permit because the law only prohibits cities from enforcing laws that pose a “substantial burden” on their free exercise of religion (emphasis in letter.)

One irony of the city’s decision to challenge the encampment so publicly is that many council members who voted for the sleeping ban have repeatedly said that religious and private charities, not the government, should bear the burden of helping homeless people in the city.

“Asking for a temporary use permit to know how, where, how long, and in what fashion the encampment will be run is reasonable, within Burien’s Washington State Constitution Article XI, Section 11 authority to protect health and safety, and not a substantial burden,” Diagana wrote. “Even Washington’s Religious Freedom provision prohibits practices inconsistent with peace and safety. The temporary use permit is a tool that municipalities use to ensure peace and safety.”

The thing supposedly threatening “peace and safety,” in this case, is an encampment intended to provide some sanctuary and safety for people who are homeless in a city that has effectively banned homelessness, which is precisely the type of situation that led to the law allowing churches to host encampments in the first place. One irony of the city’s decision to challenge the encampment so publicly is that many council members who voted for the sleeping ban have repeatedly said that religious and private charities, not the government, should bear the burden of helping homeless people in the city.

Oasis Home Church’s lead pastor, Mark Miller, did not respond to a request for an interview.

In its letter, the city also argued that the two-month limitation shouldn’t be a problem for the church, since the encampment’s supporters have already said it would be temporary. But this is being cute: If the church agreed to a 60-day limitation, it would have to shut the shelter down on December 30, just one month after Burien’s encampment ban went into effect.

Enjoying this article? PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you. Help keep PubliCola sustainable by CLICKING HERE to become a one-time or monthly contributor.

The city declined to respond to a list of questions from PubliCola; a spokeswoman said the city could not comment on legal matters. It’s unclear if the city plans to sue the church or the Burien Community Support Coalition, a nonprofit started by Councilmember Cydney Moore. Moore, who lost her reelection bid, was excluded from the executive session because, according to City Attorney Newsom, she would be a “party” to any future legal action.

Before joining most of the council in closed session, Newsom accused Moore of misrepresenting her connection to the encampment, charging that she “denied entry to a member of the press who was attempting to enter this site.” The “member of the press” Newsom was referring to was Jonathan Choe, a self-appointed provocateur and staffer for the right-wing Discovery Institute who takes iPhone videos of himself confronting homeless people and activists and posts them on X. Choe’s video of his encounter with Moore shows him attempting to enter the fenced encampment and Moore asking him to leave.

Laws against trespassing, along with basic ethical standards, generally prevent members of the press (and general public) from non-consensually entering privately operated shelters, sanctioned encampments, transitional housing for domestic violence victims, and other places where homeless and formerly homeless people live.

City Council, human services, Taxes, Utilities

No Local Capital-Gains Tax This Year; Water Tax Repeal Also On Hold

By Erica C. Barnett

The Seattle City Council won’t take action on a proposed local capital gains tax or a related proposal to repeal the city’s water utility tax until after an effort to repeal the state capital gains tax, which pays for public schools, has run its course. The news of the delay, which will put both tax proposals in the hands of a mostly new council next year, came during a meeting of the council’s budget committee on Thursday.

Opponents of the state tax, which has brought in far more than expected in its first year, have filed an initiative to repeal it, part of a suite of anti-tax proposals backed by Redmond hedge fund CEO and Republican donor Brian Heywood. The campaign will have to gather more than 300,000 valid signatures to get the measure on the ballot.

Councilmember Alex Pedersen proposed repealing the water tax, currently 15.4 percent, and offsetting the lost revenues—around $40 million a year—with a 2 percent tax on capital gains, effectively replacing a regressive tax with a progressive one. The two proposals came as a package, with the capital gains tax proposal explicitly calling the tax “a more progressive method of taxation to replace revenues from regressive taxes no longer collected by The City of Seattle including, but not limited to, the tax on water.”

“People aren’t filling up my inbox complaining to me about the water tax. They’re complaining primarily about crime and homelessness and other issues that Seattle is facing and wondering why aren’t we doing more about these issues.” — City Councilmember Sara Nelson

An analysis by city council staff estimated that the capital gains tax could raise around $38 million a year, based on Seattle’s share of state capital gains tax revenues from the state capital gains tax. However, the staff report cautions, that estimate doesn’t take into account “tax avoidance” by wealthy people who can move their assets around, and is based on “an extremely concentrated tax base,” which could make it an unreliable revenue source from year to year. Just 163 people are responsible for 85 percent of state capital gains tax revenues originating in Seattle.

Councilmember Lisa Herbold proposed amending Pedersen’s proposal to increase the capital gains tax to 3 percent, which would offset the water tax and provide a modest cushion against next year’s estimated $218 million budget deficit.

After the meeting, council budget chair Teresa Mosqueda said the council decided to put off the decision on capital gains “to protect the viability of that [revenue] source,” noting that a new, local capital gains tax might increase support for the campaign to repeal the statewide tax.

Councilmember Sara Nelson said during the meeting that she showed up “prepared to vote against this today. And I just wanted to make sure that I got this on the record if it does come back” in the future, she added.

Enjoying this article? PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you. Help keep PubliCola sustainable by CLICKING HERE to become a one-time or monthly contributor.

“People aren’t filling up my inbox complaining to me about the water tax,” Nelson said. “They’re complaining primarily about crime and homelessness and other issues that Seattle is facing and wondering why aren’t we doing more about these issues.” 

If the council’s goal was “really to help low -income people,” Nelson continued, the city should be “working harder to enroll them into our utility discount program,” which provides a 50 percent discount to eligible residents. Unlike the proposed utility tax repeal, however, the utility discount program requires a lengthy application process, and is only open to very low-income residents: For single people, the cutoff is a little over $41,000 a year, and a two-person household has to make less than $54,000 to qualify.

Pedersen said his intent in proposing both tax proposals was to make the city’s overall tax system less regressive. “As a centrist who cares about business in the city and worked really hard on public safety issues here in the city, I support a capital gains tax,” he said. “I think it’s fair, and we should do it…. And I think we could also repeal the water tax. We could do both.”

Whether the council will do either is now up to the incoming council, which will no longer include Pedersen, Herbold, or Mosqueda. Nelson, who actively campaigned for several of the council’s new centrist majority, reportedly wants to be council president, a role that would give her authority over how (and whether) legislation moves through the committee process.

The budget committee did pass two proposals imposing new transparency requirements on the budget process on Tuesday, along with an ordinance requiring human services providers that receive funding for worker wage increases to spend that money only on worker pay, not for other purposes.

human services, King County

County Council Votes Down Last-Minute Proposal to Cut Levy Funding for Human Service Worker Wages
King County Councilmember Rod Dembowski

By Erica C. Barnett

A King County Council committee rejected a last-minute proposal by King County Councilmember Rod Dembowski to cut $6 million from a five-year plan to improve human service workers’ wages on Wednesday, voting to reject an amendment passed by the countywide Regional Policy Committee (RPC) this past Monday.

Dembowski’s amendment, which went out to RPC members the Friday after Thanksgiving, would amend the spending plan for the voter-approved Veterans, Seniors, and Human Services Levy to reduce funding for human service worker raises by $1 million a year, or between 9 and 12 percent every year the levy is in effect, with the money going to unspecified future capital grants to improve food access

The RPC, which is in charge of approving the levy spending plan before it goes on to the county council, passed Dembowski’s proposal with minimal discussion on Monday. (The amendments didn’t go out to RPC members until the day after Thanksgiving, and the discussion lasted less than five minutes). “We’ve really got a rising need in this county for folks who are hungry,” Dembowski said Monday. While he would have preferred to pass a more generous levy in the first place, Dembowski added, $6 million “didn’t seem to me to have a tremendously adverse impact in the scale of things.”

King County Councilmember Claudia Balducci, one of two county council representatives on the RPC, disagreed, telling PubliCola that Dembowski’s amendment “fundamentally changed the proposal by taking 10 percent out of a program that was fundamental to the levy.” Dembowski, she added, “didn’t do any outreach to me” before putting his amendment forward.

“I am sympathetic to Councilmember Dembowski’s desire to add more funds to the food strategy. We know that food banks everywhere are seeing huge increases in clients. … I’m sympathetic to the intent, but not to the impact.”—Seattle City Councilmember Lisa Herbold

Dembowski did not return a call or text messages seeking comment.

Human services providers seemed blindsided by the amendment, which only Seattle City Councilmember Lisa Herbold and King County Councilmember Claudia Balducci opposed at Monday’s meeting. “It was extremely disappointing to see this unfold in a process with effectively no notice, engagement, or opportunity to comment before the Regional Policy Committee took action during a special meeting,” Seattle/King County Coalition on Homelessness director Alison Eisinger said.

But by Wednesday, when a county council committee took up Dembowski’s amendment, providers had mobilized, urging the council not to pit food security against human service providers’ wages. Councilmember Girmay Zahilay said that in the last two days, he had “heard from so many organizations that I work with regularly that they didn’t have an opportunity to make their voice heard on on those changes…. [and] are terrified that depriving them of the needed resources at this time would really jam up their services.”

“I am sympathetic to Councilmember Dembowski’s desire to add more funds to the food strategy,” Herbold told PubliCola after the vote on Wednesday. “We know that food banks everywhere are seeing huge increases in clients. … I’m sympathetic to the intent, but not to the impact.”

Enjoying this article? PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you. Help keep PubliCola sustainable by CLICKING HERE to become a one-time or monthly contributor.

The levy funding, on its own, isn’t enough to give human service workers a living wags—a fact Dembowski used to argue for repurposing the funds, noting that by his math, $1 million a year across 10,000 human service workers works out to only “about two bucks a week.” But the money, combined with similar increases adopted as part of the city of Seattle’s 2024 budget and in the county’s Crisis Centers Levy, would help keep these workers from falling further behind.

For years, nonprofits in King County have struggled to recruit and retain workers because they can’t afford to pay them living wages, much less competitive salaries. A study conducted by University of Washington researchers in 2022 and released earlier this year found that people who left jobs in human services for jobs in other fields saw their wages increase 7 percent relative to what they would have received if they had stayed in their human services jobs. The 7 percent figure accounts for factors like workers moving into higher job classifications and working more hours, according to the researchers.

Eisinger, from the Coalition on Homelessness, said she was “grateful” to the county council for restoring the funding for human service worker wages. “I hope every elected official in King County understands that achieving our shared goals for the Levy requires a strong human services workforce,” she said.

On Wednesday, Dembowski urged his county council colleagues to support his proposal, arguing that it was too late in the process to start second-guessing amendments now. “It would sadden me if we were to zero this out,” Dembowski said, “and I’m very worried about a whole back and forth at the year-end.” This argument might hold more water if Dembowski himself hadn’t initiated the back and forth with his last-minute amendment moving funds from provider pay into a vaguely defined capital fund, which the council will now have to “zero out” to return things to the way they were.

Had Dembowski made a proposal much earlier in the spending plan discussions about “specific needs at specific food banks, that could have been compelling, but it was at the last minute and the end of the process,” Balducci noted. The RPC will now have to hold a special meeting to reconsider the plan, as amended, and the county council will have to approve it before December 14, when the council starts its winter recess.

homelessness, human services

In Divided, Last-Minute Vote, Burien Says “Yes” to County’s $1 Million Shelter Offer
Burien City Manager Adolfo Bailon and City Attorney Garmon Newsom II

By Erica C. Barnett

The Burien City Council voted Monday night to take King County up on a six-month-old offer to provide $1 million and 35 Pallet shelters, voting 4-3 to accept the money and locate the temporary shelter on a vacant lot owned by Seattle City Light. The late-night vote, which came almost literally at the 11th hour, just barely met the November 27 deadline set by King County for Burien to or lose the funding, provided through a federal ARPA grant.

The Burien council has been debating what to do about the encampment, whose residents the city has repeatedly swept from place to place, since March. In September, the council prohibited homeless people from sleeping outdoors at night; that ban goes into effect on December 1.

The money will be administered through the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, which will choose a shelter provider through a competitive bidding process that, according to KCRHA spokeswoman Anne Martens, typically takes about three months. The Low-Income Housing Institute, a nonprofit that operates many tiny house villages around the region, has sent its chief strategy officer, Jon Grant, to testify in favor of the agreement at recent Burien City Council meetings, but Grant said the shelter and housing agency has not decided yet if they’ll bid on the project.

Asked about next steps, KCRHA, King County, the city of Burien, Seattle City Light, and the Seattle Human Services Department all gave different versions of the same response: They’ll have to meet and hammer out the details, so stay tuned.

One of the most important of those details is a lease between KCRHA and the city of Seattle for the use of City Light site, which a City Light spokesperson said “has not yet been negotiated [or] received.” Burien city manager Adolfo Bailon has declined to answer Burien council members’ questions about the site, claiming it would be premature to provide details before the council approved the plan to put the shelter at that location.

According to a spokesman for the Seattle Human Services Department, if the city receives a formal proposal from KCRHA, “HSD will work with KCRHA and the City of Burien to discuss next steps including potential terms and costs associated with use of the site.”

Last week, the council deadlocked over the City Light location and another potential shelter site in Boulevard Park, a low-income neighborhood near SeaTac Airport. Monday’s meeting was a hail-Mary, and a bit of a fluke: At the end of last week’s meeting, just three council members voted to support Councilmember Cydney Moore’s motion to hold one last meeting to discuss the offer, but because three others abstained (with Deputy Mayor Kevin Schilling voting “no”), Moore’s motion passed.

Councilmember Stephanie Mora—who said last week that she would not attend Monday’s meeting because she doesn’t think the government should play a role in addressing homelessness—attempted to enhance this language with an amendment saying no one could enter the site if they were “under the influence” of drugs or alcohol.

Proponents of the Boulevard Park site argued that it had plenty of access to services and food thanks to the presence of two bus lines and a nearby Dollar Tree. Opponents countered that the site was poorly served by transit, lacked access to services, and would subject tiny house village residents to particulate and noise pollution from planes overhead.  The council had already voted against allowing the shelter on a piece of city-owned land in downtown Burien, which would have given residents access to homeless services, multiple bus lines, and several full-service grocery stores.

The City Light site, Moore noted Monday, was a “compromise” between a piece of city-owned land in downtown Burien that the council had previously rejected and the Boulevard Park location, which came with its own significant baggage. Councilmember Hugo Garcia, who supported the original downtown Burien site, said the council majority’s proposal to put the shelter in a low-income, majority-minority neighborhood “smacks of white supremacy.”

“I personally don’t feel that this is necessarily ideal, but in the spirit of compromising to find something that we can move forward with I am willing to accept these terms,” Moore said.

Enjoying this article? PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you. Help keep PubliCola sustainable by CLICKING HERE to become a one-time or monthly contributor.

The “terms” Moore was referring to included a stipulation that residents can’t drink alcohol or use illegal drugs on site or in the surrounding neighborhood, among many other parameters. Councilmember Stephanie Mora—who said last week that she would not attend Monday’s meeting because she doesn’t think the government should play a role in addressing homelessness—attempted to enhance this language with an amendment saying no one could enter the site if they were “under the influence” of drugs or alcohol.

Although Mora’s amendment passed, the KCRHA, not Burien, will actually set the terms of its request for proposals for the site, and it’s extremely unlikely that the KCRHA, the city of Seattle, or any homeless service provider would agree to such stringent terms.

In an email to city manager Adolfo Bailon last Wednesday, KCRHA intergovernmental relations manager Nigel Herbig attempted to explain this—noting, for example, that while KCRHA can set broad parameters for shelter providers, such as “congregate or noncongregate,” shelter providers have the authority to establish their own rules. LIHI and other shelter providers do ban drug and alcohol use at some of their locations and have behavioral codes of conduct, but they don’t restrict access to shelter based on whether a shelter resident is “under the influence”—a standard that could require drug testing every person entering a site.

After this year’s elections, the Burien City Council will have a five-member supermajority of members who support the city’s hard-line approach to homelessness. King County’s money will run out in a year, but it’s likely that additional funding will materialize if the shelter is successful and the next council doesn’t oppose keeping the shelter open.

A poison-pill amendment, also by Mora, that would have shuttered the shelter as soon as the million dollars ran out, effectively barring outside funding for the shelter, failed.

Grant, of LIHI, said his agency “would need to see the details before deciding to move forward with an application”; their questions, he said, include when the program would end and whether LIHI would be required to use the Pallet-branded shelters that were part of the county’s initial offer, or if they could bring in their own stick-built “tiny houses,” which are larger and more homey than Pallet’s utilitarian sheds.

homelessness, human services, King County

Faced With Monday Deadline to Lose $1 Million for Shelter, Burien Takes No Action
Burien City Manager Adolfo Bailon

By Erica C. Barnett

Facing a November 27 deadline to take action on a longstanding offer of $1 million and 35 Pallet shelters from King County, the Burien City Council decided last night to do nothing.

Well, not exactly nothing: After rejecting two potential locations for a tiny shelter village—a city-owned lot in downtown Burien that currently serves as storage for a Toyota dealership and a property owned by Seattle City Light—the council voted to ask the county for an extension on the deadline to use the money, which has been available to Burien for the last six months.

UPDATE: On Tuesday afternoon, Deputy King County Executive Shannon Braddock formally declined Burien City Manager Adolfo Bailon’s request for a deadline extension. In an email, Braddock noted that the county originally started working with Burien to site a shelter in the city in March, after the city evicted an encampment from its original location outside City Hall, and formalized its $1 million offer in June.

“Since our conversations began, the only requirement to utilize this offer has been for the city to identify a location and willing property owner to site the Pallet shelters,” Braddock wrote. “We have identified funding, shelter resources, and off-set parking capacity. To the best of our understanding as of today, the city has not yet identified any location or property owner, including city-owned property, to utilize what we have secured in response to the original request for assistance.” The council will hold a special meeting next Monday, the day the deadline expires, for a final discussion, but the months-long deadlock is unlikely to change.

ORIGINAL POST CONTINUES: The votes on both locations deadlocked 3-3-1, with Councilmember Jimmy Matta—ordinarily part of the four-member anti-shelter majority—abstaining. “I’m not going to make a call for any of the sites until we as a community come together and have a real conversation,” Matta said.

A third proposal to build a temporary Pallet shelter or tiny house village on a vacant lot in Boulevard Park—a low-income food desert with minimal services—failed, after Mayor Sofia Aragon could not get anyone to second it. As Councilmember Cydney Moore noted Monday, the Boulevard Park location is directly in a flight path, with noise levels frequently exceeding 80 decibels.

Aragon also proposed a code of conduct for any future temporary shelter that would prohibit people living in the tiny structures from drinking or using drugs, including marijuana, and would bar anyone convicted of a sex offense, but because her motion to consider the code of conduct violated parliamentary procedure, it didn’t get a hearing, either.

“I don’t believe that it should be the government that has a say or even touches homelessness. I think that should be [done by the] private sector. It should be the organizations that are funded on their own that are able to come up with funding on their own to do this, which is why I don’t support accepting the King County money.”—Burien City Councilmember Stephanie Mora

Although the Boulevard Park location didn’t get a formal vote, it would have likely failed by a similar margin as the other two locations, since conservative council member Stephanie Mora indicated she would not vote for any proposal to accept the money from King County, including the Boulevard Park location supported by her council allies.

“I don’t believe that it should be the government that has a say or even touches homelessness. I think that should be [done by the] private sector,” Mora said. “It should be the organizations that are funded on their own that are able to come up with funding on their own to do this, which is why I don’t support accepting the King County money.”

Moore attempted to bring the council back at some point before next Monday—the county’s deadline for Burien to use the money—but Aragon, Matta, and Deputy Mayor Kevin Schilling all said they would be too busy with Thanksgiving obligations. (Mora said she would not attend any meeting to discuss the matter further, period.) If the county does not grant an extension, the council will meet next Monday night.

Enjoying this article? PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you. Help keep PubliCola sustainable by CLICKING HERE to become a one-time or monthly contributor.

Instead, they asked the county for another week to discuss options, though it’s not clear what could possibly break the six-month-long logjam. If Burien decides it doesn’t want the million dollars, the county will offer it to other South King County cities through a competitive bidding process.

Prior to last night’s meeting, the city appeared to be teeing up the Boulevard Park location as the preferred alternative.

In a memo purporting to weigh the pros and cons of each option, City Manager Adolfo Bailon used cherry-picked and inaccurate information to make the decision seem obvious, relying on assumptions and unsourced claims about how much a shelter at each location would cost, the ease of obtaining each location, and the kind of access each site would provide to transit, food, and services.

For example, the memo suggested that if the city accepted the money, it would be forced to eliminate specific public safety and human services programs from its budget in the future, including programs aimed at preventing youth violence, feeding people, improving downtown safety, and providing mental health services. Cities can’t actually constrain future budgets in this way, and every item on the list seemed purposefully to suggest that helping unsheltered people would mean abandoning other, more worthy Burien residents.

The city manager’s memo did not include the cost of leasing the other two sites, which are not city-owned, or include this additional expense in the sections describing the pros and cons of these locations. On Monday, Bailon said he had no idea how much renting either the privately owned Boulevard Park lot or the City Light lot would cost.

The memo also included incomplete or inaccurate descriptions of each of the three potential shelter locations. It claims, for instance, that the Boulevard Park site has a “Walk Score” of 68, based partly on its exceptional access to “food sources.” However, the actual Walk Score for the site is 56—”somewhat walkable”—and the only source of nearby food or beverages is a Dollar Tree, which does not offer any fresh or healthy food, and a liquor store.

Dismissing concerns about the lack of healthy food at this location on Monday night, Aragon said, “There’s food there. It may not be a full blown grocery store, which the neighborhood definitely needs. But there is food available there [from] either mini marts or the Dollar Tree.”

The nearest full-service grocery store, a Red Apple, is two miles and a 40-minute walk away. In contrast, the city-owned lot in downtown Burien is five minutes from three full-service grocery stores and 500 feet from the Burien Transit Center.

Bailon’s memo also made a number of unsourced assumptions about the financial impact of each location, including a claim that ending the lease with the Toyota dealership would cost “tens of thousands of dollars” in lost taxes and “potential loss of jobs”—which appears to assume the dealership would close if it had to move its cars 500 feet away to a secure covered parking lot at the transit center.

In fact, while Burien would lose $24,000 a year in lease revenue if the Toyota dealer no longer rented the lot, the dealer would save the same amount, because King County would provide its lot for free. That amount, notably, is less than half the size of a contract Bailon signed with a controversial nonprofit that provides private sweeps and distributed homeless people’s private information to police and sympathetic councilmembers less than a month ago.

Nor did the memo mention the cost of leasing the other two sites, which are not city-owned, or include this additional expense in the sections describing the pros and cons of these locations. On Monday, Bailon said he had no idea how much renting either the privately owned Boulevard Park lot or the City Light lot would cost, claiming he could not even inquire about cost until the council chose a location and “authorized me to negotiate on behalf of the city.” Bailon also suggested Seattle might “say [that] 50 percent of whatever housing units are built at the location will be for the city of Seattle, but did not provide any reason for this estimate.

A spokeswoman for the city of Burien declined to respond to a detailed list of questions on Monday.

A spokesman for King County Executive Dow Constantine could not immediately say how the county planned to respond to the Burien City Council’s request for an extension on the county’s six-month-old offer.