Category: King County

homelessness, King County

Burien Officials Make Threats, Cast Blame—But Continue to Defend Their Ban on “Living” in Public

By Erica C. Barnett

Burien city officials escalated the drama over the city’s total ban on “living” outdoors last week after King County Sheriff Patti Cole-Tindall sued the city for what she called the city’s “unconstitutional” new law. As we reported last week, City Manager Adolfo Bailon immediately responded to the lawsuit by instructing employees to stop paying the sheriff’s office, which serves as Burien’s police department. (The move makes Burien, ironically, the first local city to actually defund its police.) Bailon also canceled the city’s recently signed homelessness outreach contract with REACH, leaving Burien without any professional homeless outreach services.

On Thursday, a man died in an encampment in downtown Burien; his body was discovered by outreach workers from REACH. Burien officials  immediately politicized the tragedy.

Speaking to the B-Town Blog, Burien Mayor Kevin Schilling lashed out at Cole-Tindall and a nonprofit run by a former city council member that ran a short-lived sanctuary encampment at a local church. Schilling said the man’s death, from an overdose, was a “direct result of the Sheriff’s Department and the County Executive suing us so they don’t have to enforce our common sense tent regulating measure, as well as not enforcing drug laws in the Downtown core. … I sure hope the Sheriff and County Executive staff taking their roles seriously, and stop wasting taxpayer time and money with their stunts that are leading to deaths.”

“We do not have capacity to provide continual management and oversight of conduct in encampments of unhoused persons that have been part of the community for the entire time I have worked with the City.”—Burien Police Chief Ted Boe

The new ban on “living” in public spaces includes appearing in public with any “indicia of camping,” including blankets, sleeping bags, and cooking equipment.”

The sheriff’s department has repeatedly told city officials that their priority is 911 calls and serious crimes, not the presence of homeless people in Burien. In a deposition last week, Burien Police Chief Ted Boe said his deputies spend most of their time responding to emergency calls, which “means we do not have capacity to provide continual management and oversight of conduct in encampments of unhoused persons that have been part of the community for the entire time I have worked with the City.”

Boe, who has been Burien’s police chief since 2018, said he had no issues getting people living unsheltered in Burien to “voluntarily move” when asked— until the city council hired Bailon in 2022.

Starting that year, Boe said, Bailon “put continual pressure on me to redeploy resources away from other public safety matters such as 911 calls and to address several non-criminal aspects of camping. I requested he provide support for addressing non-criminal behaviors to prevent police from being responsible for managing camp rules.”

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

Support PubliCola

 

Boe also revealed that during a recent conversation with Bailon, the city manager told him he “would be demanding that I be removed as the City’s Chief” and replaced by someone who would be willing to accede to Bailon’s demands.

Another option the city is reportedly considering: Hiring their own police force, and ditching their contract with the county. This, however, would almost certainly be more expensive than the county contract. When the city looked into creating its own police force in 2011, a consultant concluded that it would cost between 12 and 35 percent more for the city to fund a similar level of service. Policing makes up about 45 per cent of Burien’s annual general-fund budget.

“I have grown to love this community and it is upsetting to have this assignment taken away for doing what I not only believe is right, but what I think our courts expect me to do as a police leader in Washington,” Boe said in his deposition.

At tonight’s Burien City Council meeting, the council will discuss a proposal to take away federal ARPA dollars that the council allocated to a day center for homeless Burien residents at Highline United Methodist Church last year. Opponents of providing shelter and services to homeless Burien residents have made similar arguments against providing them an indoor space to be (and access services) during the day, claiming that they will bring drugs and violence into the area.

Courts, criminal justice, King County

New Caseload Standards Aim to Improve Ailing Public Defense System, But Could Take a Bite Out of County Budget
Larry Jefferson, director of the state Office of Public Defense, testifies at the state bar association’s board of governors on Friday.

By Erica C. Barnett

The Washington State Bar Association’s governing board adopted new standards for public defenders last week that could dramatically reduce caseloads for defense attorneys and other staff at the King County Department of Public Defense (DPD), which represents indigent people accused of crimes.

The 12-1 vote could also have implications for public defense departments around the state, DPD director Anita Khandelwal says, because the state Supreme Court—which adopts rules that counties across the state must follow—asked the bar association’s Council on Public Defense to come up with these recommendations to respond to the statewide public defender shortage.

“We’ve seen a high rate of attrition and burnout, because the caseloads… are too high,” Khandelwal said. “And what happens is people leave is that the same cases get concentrated onto a smaller number of people. It’s basically like we’re in a death spiral.”

The new rules would have a more immediate impact in King County, according to DPD, because King County operates under its own unique rules: Under the King County Code, public defenders are required to follow the standards the WSBA adopts.

According to DPD director Anita Khandelwal, that means the county must either hire enough attorneys—along with support staff like paralegals, social workers, and investigators—to meet the new standards or invest in alternatives to prosecution and incarceration, reducing caseloads by reducing the number of cases.

“I think we have a chicken and egg problem here. I recognize that there’s a shortage of attorneys, but I think that shortage of attorneys is in part due to the fact that this work is impossible.”—King County DPD supervising attorney Michael Schueler

The guidelines, which would also change the requirements for attorneys to qualify for various types of cases (felonies that carry sentences of life without parole, for instance), include a phasing-in period that ends in 2027.

One criticism of the old standards, which have not changed significantly since they were adopted in the 1970s, is that they don’t distinguish between different types of crimes—treating murder, for instance, as if it’s no more complex than a car theft. The new standards no longer dictate a maximum caseload for each broad category of crime; instead, they use a formula that weighs each type of case separately; on average, the new formula would give attorneys about twice as much time to work on each case.

King County Executive Dow Constantine was alarmed enough about the proposed new rules that his general counsel, David Hackett, took the unusual step of sending a letter urging the bar association’s governing board not to adopt the new recommendations. Doing so before the state supreme court can issue its own statewide guidelines, Hackett wrote, would “contradict a standing court rule”—specifically, the current state guidelines for public defense attorneys. Khandelwal says there is no contradiction, because the state standards set a ceiling, not a floor, on cases.

Under the current WSBA standards, each public defense attorney is expected to handle as many as 150 felony cases or as many as 400 misdemeanor cases a year—a workload that would work out to as little as 11 hours per felony, or 4.5 hours per misdemeanor, if attorneys didn’t work overtime. “That’s obviously absurd,” Khandelwal said. “If you were charged with a misdemeanor, you would want an attorney who’s going to spend more than four and a half hours on your case.”

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

Support PubliCola

As it is, high caseloads are leading to an epidemic of burnout among public defenders, and leaving some jurisdictions with so few attorneys that people are languishing in jail for months waiting for a lawyer.

During the WSBA hearing last week, a steady stream of attorneys described the impacts severe overwork has had on their ability to spend time with their families and adequately represent their clients. Larry Jefferson, director of the state’s Office of Public Defense, said his family reacted with shock when he spent a Sunday at home when he was a public defender, because he was rarely able to take even one day off “An normal week for public defenders 60 to 80 hours of work, and [that’s when] they’re not doing a trial. So these standards represent us taking the best step forward to making sure that people get adequate assistance of counsel.”

Kitsap County prosecutor Chad Enright was the lone voice of opposition at Friday’s hearing, calling the standards “frankly comical” in light of the ongoing shortage of public defense attorneys across the state. His “friends in public defense,” Enright said, had two theories. The first was that the new standards are “designed to create chaos” in the hope of creating a new state agency to oversee public defense. The second was that by lowering the number of people public defenders can represent, defense attorneys are hoping to turn the current defense attorney shortage into a crisis, forcing prosecutors to dismiss some charges and effectively “decriminalizing” certain crimes.

Responding to those claims, King County DPD supervising attorney Michael Schueler said, “I think we have a chicken and egg problem here. I recognize that there’s a shortage of attorneys, but I think that shortage of attorneys is in part due to the fact that this work is impossible.” Last year, Schueler’s client D’Andre Glaspy was found not guilty of murdering his girlfriend’s two-year-old son after languishing behind bars, unable to pay bail, from 2017 to 2023—a situation Schueler attributed to the crippling caseloads he was working under during those years.

“These caseloads are crippling. It is an impossible task to sit down with a client and tell them, ‘I can’t work on your case effectively and quickly,'” Schueler said.

In his letter, Constantine’s general counsel Hackett warned that adopting the new standards could create “practical problems of adequate legislative funding from the state to fund the new caseloads and the daunting question of whether there are enough defense attorneys to staff the caseloads proposed.” The county is currently facing a $100 million two-year budget shortfall; DPD’s annual budget is currently around $170 million.

Khandelwal argues that the new standards don’t necessarily require the county to increase spending on attorneys.

“It doesn’t have to be a budget question,” she said. “The three-year implementation phase for the standards is also an opportunity to ramp up alternative programming for the next three years, so that we are using our criminal legal system for fewer things.”

Constantine’s office has not yet responded to questions about Hackett’s letter or the impact the new standards will have on the county’s public defense department.

King County, Tech

King County’s Baffling Website Redesign, (Sorta) Explained
From King County’s “Services” web page.

By Erica C. Barnett

After the disastrous launch of a new website that crashed due to traffic from people seeking election results last November, the King County Council passed a budget proviso, or restriction, late last year—holding back $200,000 from the project until the county’s IT department produced a status update “addressing concerns about the King County website upgrade.”

That upgrade, which started in 2017, has cost King County taxpayers $15 million so far (not counting the salaries of county employees), and will be out of date as soon as 2027, when Sitecore—the county’s content management system—changes its technology for web platforms and will no longer support King County’s website. When that happens, the county will have to find a new content management system. (A content management system, or CMS, is the “back end” of a website; PubliCola, a much simpler site than the county’s, uses WordPress).

As we reported last year, the new website design is bare-bones—more than one county employee told us they thought it was an “interim” or “intermediate” step before the “real” website launched—and confusing to navigate.

Many basic government services are hidden somewhere in an alphabetical site index that’s often redundant or counterintuitive—the county assessor’s heavily used property mapping services is buried under the label “GIS services,” in addition to its official name, “Parcel Viewer,” for instance—and the main site features a list of seemingly random county services arranged in no discernible order.

Currently, for example, visitors to kingcounty.gov are greeted with a full screen about dog adoptions, followed by a banner about the March Presidential primary election, followed by highlighted links to King County Metro, rural traffic camera feeds, the pet adoption page (again), and the county’s “careers” site (which requires additional clicks to get to a list of jobs).

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

Support PubliCola

“It’s not an improvement from what we had before,” County Councilmember Claudia Balducci, who represents Bellevue, told PubliCola. “There have been improvements since [the new site] first went up—we’ve put in some requests for changes—but they’re modest. It’s things like borders and white space, and can we have pictures of the council members on their council member pages.” (Originally, the site included text-only links to text-only councilmember pages.)

Beyond those “aesthetic issues,” Balducci continued, “the biggest problem is that people need to be able to find what they need, and it’s just not easy. I stopped using the website to search for things that I wanted to find. I would just use Google, because that was far more reliable.”

A spokesperson for King County said the new website templates “were designed to be user-friendly based on modern best practices. The goal was to simplify content for improved navigation, ADA access, and translations.” The county uses Google Translate for all languages other than English.

At Tuesday’s meeting, county Chief Information Officer Megan Clarke, who became head of the IT department in November 2022, said the issues with the website stem partly from a lack of communication between the IT staffers who were creating the new website and the people who would ultimately have to use it. One example of this was when the IT division determined that 90 percent of web traffic went through 10 percent of the pages on the site, and assumed it would be fine to “eliminate 90 percent of the pages and keep the 10 [percent] that were meaningful. … Unfortunately, those assumptions weren’t vetted.”

Balducci, who noted during the meeting that many of the problems predated Clarke’s appointment, expressed a type of frustration that’s probably familiar to anyone who’s hired a technical expert to build their website: “You know how to build a website. But we know what we do, and you don’t know what we do,” she said.  “The only way this stuff works is if this is a partnership.”

In King County IT’s official, written response to the proviso, the department emphasized how many times it met with people from county departments to discuss the website and noting that some departments haven’t reorganized their site content yet in the latest version of the content management system—suggesting, in effect, that the reason “some users experience challenges with finding what they are looking for on Kingcounty.gov” is because county departments aren’t doing their part or signed off on things and later changed their minds.

Balducci, who noted during the meeting that many of the problems predated Clarke’s appointment, expressed a type of frustration that’s probably familiar to anyone who’s hired a technical expert to build their website: “You know how to build a website. But we know what we do, and you don’t know what we do,” she said.  “The only way this stuff works… is if this is a partnership.”

Clarke—taking a more conciliatory tone than the department’s official report—told the council that many of the county staffers who worked on the website didn’t have experience working with the platform they were using and didn’t get the training they needed. “There was not someone in charge who had done this before,” Clarke said. “KCIT was trying to manage something that really required a lot of depth and breadth of voices involved, and that just did not happen.  We treated the website as a project rather than a product.”

Clarke told the council she’s hiring an outside consultant to try to identifying some of the underlying issues with the site, including why it couldn’t handle traffic on a low-turnout odd-year election night, in order to fix some of the most glaring problems. (The King County spokesperson told PubliCola that the IT department did anticipate the spike in traffic on election night, and that “although [the site] initially failed to function properly, KCIT was able to resolve the issue on Election Night”—albeit long after everyone had turned to KING 5’s website, which had the results on time.)

was designed to handle traffic, and only failed when people were seeking results at 8:00, when they’re ordinarily available.

However, she noted, the county is facing a budget deficit; even if Sitecore can support the website for a couple of years after 2027, it doesn’t make much sense to sink more money into the current site.

“I look at it as, how much more do we want to sink in this area [if] we are going to move to something else?” Clarke said. “I’ve seen website projects with twice the number of pages finish on time and on budget. I absolutely know it’s possible.”

PubliCola has reached out to the King County Executive’s Office and the IT department and will update this post when we hear back.

King County, Police, public safety

Officer Who Killed Jaahnavi Kandula While Driving 74 MPH Will Not Face Felony Prosecution
Felony traffic prosecutor Amy Freedheim and King County Prosecutor Leesa Manion point to locations on a map of Dexter Ave., where Seattle police officer Kevin Dave struck and killed 23-year-old Jaahnavi Kandula in January 2023.

By Erica C. Barnett

King County Prosecutor Leesa Manion will not prosecute Seattle Police Department officer Kevin Dave in the killing of 23-year-old international student Jaahnavi Kandula last year. Manion’s office informed Kandula’s family of the decision Wednesday morning and discussed it with reporters this afternoon.

According to senior deputy prosecutor Amy Freedheim, who deals with felony traffic cases, the office can prosecute people for vehicular homicide  only under three circumstances: If the person is impaired by drugs or alcohol, if the person is driving recklessly, or if the person is driving with a “disregard for the safety of others,” which requires a “conscious disregard for safety,” Freedheim said.

“In the case of a police officer on a legitimate call, using lights and sirens, they are authorized to exceed the speed limit,” Freedheim said, adding that in this case, that the officer was “on a legitimate, life-threatening call”—that is, an overdose call.

The police department initially claimed Dave was responding to an emergency “at the request of” Seattle Fire Department first responders; later, they said he was heading to the scene “alongside” SFD to provide backup because people coming out of opiate overdoses can be violent or unpredictable. Later still, Police Chief Adrian Diaz said Dave was responding “as an EMT” to a medical emergency.

In reality, the caller was lucid and standing outside his South Lake Union apartment when he called 911 to report that he might have used too much cocaine.

Dave was driving a police department SUV 74 miles an hour on Dexter Ave., which has a speed limit of 25 miles an hour, when he hit Kandula, who was entering a marked crosswalk when she saw Dave’s vehicle approaching and appeared to panic, running further into the crosswalk in an attempt to escape.

The three chairs of the Community Police Commission—Rev. Harriett Walden, Rev. Patricia Hunter, and Joel Merkel—issued a statement questioning the prosecuting attorney’s finding that Dave’s driving did not meet the legal standards for recklessness or disregard for others’ safety. “At what speed would Officer Dave have had to drive for his emergency response to be considered reckless or disregarding the safety of pedestrians in the area?” they wrote.

In a jury trial, deputy prosecuting attorney Freedheim said, “any defense attorney [for Dave] would be looking at the superceding cause”—that is, the fact that Kandula stepped into the street while a police officer was approaching. Manion added later that the office did not intend to blame Kandula for running, but “we would still have to look at her decision to run” in deciding whether to prosecute Dave.

As we’ve reported, SPD’s emergency driving policy is vague, advising officers that they should engage in emergency driving when there is “legitimate concern for the preservation of life” and “only when the need outweighs the risk.” These policies, according to Manion, were not part of her office’s decision not to press charges; even if Dave was driving negligently, that would be a civil matter, not a potential felony.

Prosecutors said they also had to consider Kandula’s actions—that is, her decision to step into a part of the marked crosswalk that the office says was in the “lane of travel”—because “it is against the law to suddenly leave the curb and move into the path of a vehicle that is so close it is impossible for a driver to stop.”

In a jury trial, Freedheim said, “any defense attorney [for Dave] would be looking at the superceding cause”—that is, the fact that Kandula stepped into the street while a police officer was approaching. Manion added later that the office did not intend to blame Kandula for running, but “we would still have to look at her decision to run” in deciding whether to prosecute Dave.

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

Support PubliCola

Three other witnesses reported hearing lights and sirens; in fact, Dave had “chirped” his siren at the intersection of Dexter and Thomas before accelerating to 74 miles an hour on Dexter.

SPD referred the felony traffic case to the prosecutor’s office last summer. Since then, the office has delayed making a decision repeatedly—most recently in October, when the office announced it was hiring an outside consultant to  to analyze in-car and body-worn video and other materials submitted by the Seattle Police Department as part of the investigation.

Prosecutors—highlighting the contrast between Dave’s behavior and that of Seattle Police Officers Guild vice president Daniel Auderer, who was caught on body camera footage joking with SPOG president Mike Solan about Kandula’s death—pointed to the fact that Dave was “appropriately upset” in the aftermath of the collision and immediately began administering CPR to Kandula.

“This has nothing to do with Auderer and his deplorable comments,” Freedheim said.

Manion said she was not authorized to comment on what Kandula’s family said to her when they spoke. “I do know that there are some people who will be disappointed in my decision,” she said.

Manion said she has scheduled a second call with Kandula’s family, including her mother, and would meet with members of the Community Police Commission and representatives from Indian American Community Services. Last month, members of IACS appeared at a CPC meeting to call for changes to SPD’s emergency driving policy, expressing outrage at the idea that any emergency would justify driving so fast on a city street.

In their statement, the CPC co-chairs said the commission is “currently finalizing recommendations to SPD regarding much-needed changes to
their vague emergency vehicle operation policy. SPD must adopt policies that protect life and do not put the community at further risk.” They also said the the CPC will continue looking into the “apparent policy of SPD responding to Seattle Fire Department responses to drug overdoses. The community deserves more answers from SPD and SFD as to why Officer Dave was responding to an overdose call in the first place.”

Dave is still employed by SPD. The Office of Police Accountability confirmed it will renew its own investigation of Dave, which has been on pause while the prosecutor decided whether to pursue felony charges. The formal complaint against Dave accuses him of behaving unprofessionally and violating the emergency driving policy, among other potential violations.

Guest Contributor, immigration, King County

Beyond the Border: Addressing the Asylum Seeker Surge in Our Own Backyard

By Palmira Figueroa and Ben Maritz

It was one of Pedro’s sons who gave him the idea. A friend of his made the trip earlier that year and experienced no issues getting across the border, posting about the entire journey on TikTok. Pedro, an asylum-seeker from Venezuela, had been living in Colombia with his family of six for the past three years, doing odd jobs when he could find them, and decided to set out for a better life in the north.

Salvador, an Angolan from the embattled exclave of Kabinda, had been bouncing around various African countries, unable to return home. He learned from a friend that it was possible to buy a cheap ticket to Brazil, a country which doesn’t require a visa for entry. Once in São Paulo, he joined the stream of migrants from every part of the world heading to the United States for safety and economic opportunity.

A lot has been written about Texas paying for buses to send migrants to New York and Chicago, but the federal government itself is also paying for people to travel away from overwhelmed shelters near the border—a policy that has impacts in unexpected places, like Seattle.

Pedro and Salvador both recently passed through an informal asylum-seeker encampment at the Riverton Park Church in Tukwila, a community-run facility that is now overwhelmed. Every week, 30 to 50 new asylum-seekers arrive, most with young children. The federal government has policies in place that allow people to cross our border, but has provided no resources to help provide them resettle. The church is woefully overcrowded and the vulnerable people staying there are getting desperate.

How we got here

Today, most people who reach the border seeking asylum—about 2.3 million a year—are processed and released, especially those who are traveling with children. They are assigned the next available court date, which the most recent arrivals have told us is currently sometime in 2029. Federal law makes asylum-seekers eligible to work six to eight months after they apply for asylum; in the meantime, they receive no assistance or accommodation.

Three-quarters of the migrants are from places further afield than Mexico, including South America and Africa. Some people cross 20 countries before they arrive in the United States. Because the migrant facilities at the southern border are completely overwhelmed, authorities are encouraging migrants to travel to other places within the United States, ideally where people have access to family or other resources. A lot has been written about Texas paying for buses to send migrants to New York and Chicago, but the federal government itself is also paying for people to travel away from overwhelmed shelters near the border—a policy that has impacts in unexpected places, like Seattle.

The local crisis

Both Salvador and Pedro passed through shelters near the border that had no capacity to accommodate them, and so paid for them to travel to Seattle—Salvador by plane, and Pedro and his family by bus. They arrived at the church just like the dozens that are still arriving each week – disoriented, penniless, and full of hope.

The Riverton Church, under the leadership of Pastor Jan Bolerjack, has long played a leading role in caring for our most disadvantaged neighbors. It was the site of a sanctioned homeless encampment until early 2023, when the Low Income Housing Institute built a tiny house village on the site. Seattle police officers and other law enforcement agents had been referring people to the Riverton Shelter ever since the first migrants started showing up in Seattle about a year ago. The officers knew Pastor Jan would welcome them.

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

Support PubliCola

Today the church is a buzz of languages and chaos, with hundreds of people from around the world overflowing its fellowship hall, sanctuary, parking lot, and green spaces. It’s wet, muddy, and cold, but smiles abound and a spirit of optimism is palpable. Children play, families cook and sing, teens gossip. After a harrowing journey across South and Central America, the American dream is palpably just around the corner.

The people at the church, like those at similar overflowing facilities around the country, are here to seek safety and happiness. They are ready to learn, work and to fully take part in our society. But they still face tremendous short-term obstacles and have essentially no resources available to help them. Most are from countries without families or established communities in the region and so don’t have a natural network to turn to. Unlike refugees, a different category of migrants, they are not eligible for federal assistance.

The asylum-seekers in Tukwila and elsewhere need help filing their immigration cases. They need English language training. They need jobs. But most of all, in the immediate term, they need housing and basic sanitation so they can restart their lives.

What’s Needed

In December, King County allocated $3 million to rent 100 rooms in a hotel in SeaTac through June for some of the most vulnerable asylum-seekers. This is a costly, partial, and temporary solution. During our most recent cold weather emergency, many families living outside the church were moved to hotels by volunteers who used their own funds, but only for a few days.

What is needed is a permanent resettlement center which can welcome the migrants and be a base from which local and state governments can provide assistance. Since there is no end in sight to the flow of migrants, this facility and its funding must be open-ended, not time-bound. It should be located near transit, services and amenities such as schools for the many children in the community.

This group of people is very different from other homeless community members who are living unsheltered. While they certainly carry their share of trauma, they do not generally suffer from the issues that our urban unsheltered community goes through. They are ready, able, and eager to work and grow in their new community. A small amount of targeted assistance will get most asylum seekers into a place where they have work permits, a job, and stable housing.

We are calling on our local, county, and state government to step in and do what the federal government has failed to do: Care for the asylum-seekers and help them become a part of our community while they wait for their asylum cases to be adjudicated. Concerned citizens should write to their elected officials (a list of state local officials can be found on the new VoteWA Voter Portal) and let them know that helping this worthy group of new Americans should be a priority.

What is needed is a permanent resettlement center which can welcome the migrants and be a base from which local and state governments can provide assistance. Since there is no end in sight to the flow of migrants, this facility and its funding must be open-ended, not time-bound. It should be located near transit, services and amenities such as schools for the many children in the community.

Today, Salvador is living in the county-funded hotel and working as a translator and community organizer among the asylum seekers; he’s also enrolled at Seattle Central College, working toward his GED. Pedro and his sons are working in construction and building toward a life of independence in their new country.

Meanwhile, in December 2023, the most recent month for which data is available, 302,034 people were processed at the southern border, an annualized rate of 3.6 million and an increase of roughly 50 percent increase over the record-breaking rate of the most recent fiscal year.

Washington has long taken pride at being a Sanctuary State and rejecting xenophobic, anti-immigrant sentiment. Now is the time to invest in welcoming and embracing our new neighbors and letting them join our community with dignity.

Palmira Figueroa is an immigrant, a community organizer and long-time immigrant rights advocate. Ben Maritz is an affordable housing developer based in Seattle.

homelessness, King County, Mayor Harrell

Harrell Asks Embattled Homelessness Authority to Come Up With Budget Cuts

By Erica C. Barnett

Mayor Bruce Harrell has reportedly asked the King County Regional Homelessness Authority to come up with budget cuts of between 2 and 5 percent; the city has the authority to do this because the KCRHA receives more than half its funding from the city. The request is a sign that the city’s budget crunch will directly impact the homelessness authority’s ability to expand or maintain the work its contractors do to address homelessness in the region.

It’s also more evidence, for those who are looking for it, of Harrell’s disillusionment with the agency, which has gone through tremendous upheaval (and a number of unsuccessful, very high-profile initiatives) in its first two years. Harrell has repeatedly expressed skepticism about the KCRHA’s approach, ranging from the agency’s efforts, under former CEO Marc Dones, to invest in new approaches like medical facilities for people with significant needs and single-family group homes for people exiting homelessness, to the size of the KCRHA’s budget itself, which Harrell has declined, even in good budget years, to significantly increase.

Harrell’s office would not specifically confirm the request for KCRHA to come up with cuts, but spokesman Jamie Housen said that “[g]iven the 2025 forecasted budget deficit facing the City, we are evaluating all options to drive efficiencies, optimize investments, and prioritize the needs of residents.”

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.

According to multiple accounts, Harrell chose the KCRHA’s new interim director, L. Darrell Powell, without much direct input from the KCRHA or King County, which provides nearly half the agency’s budget. Powell—a former financial director at the YMCA of Greater Seattle, United Way of King County, and the College Success Foundation—was Harrell’s teammate on the Garfield High School football team and more recently served on his mayoral transition team and fentanyl task force.

At a recent press conference announcing the new CARE Team, Harrell jokingly praised the “proud pop,” who was among the assembled supporters, for being the father of starting Husky cornerback Mishael Powell, who “won the Husky game singlehandedly” the previous week.

Housen said Powell’s “name came out of a meeting with the mayor and several members of the Mayor’s Office where multiple names were discussed and considered. I do not know if it was the mayor who first originated his name, but he certainly agreed with the suggestion.”

King County Executive Dow Constantine said he learned about the selection of Powell from Deputy County Executive Shannon Braddock, who “brought this name to me and told me about his qualifications and background. … I did not talk directly with the city, but others did, and understood that … the mayor knows him, and he sounded like a person who would be able to bring some good qualities to this still interim role, and hopefully gaining the confidence of the various parties [involved in] KCRHA, including the city of Seattle.”

The KCRHA has hired a search firm that ordinarily does executive searches for regional nonprofits to identify candidates for the permanent CEO position. As we reported, the search has been going slowly; the search firm, Nonprofit Professionals Advisory Group, just finalized a job description for the position last month.