Category: Mayor Harrell

Drugs, King County, Mayor Harrell, Police

County Jail Will Begin Booking Again for Drug Use, Other Misdemeanors In the “Downtown Activation Zone”

By Erica C. Barnett

The King County Department of Adult and Juvenile Detention has agreed to begin booking people arrested for simple misdemeanors, such as violating a recently passed law criminalizing public drug use and possession, at the request of interim Seattle Police Chief Sue Rahr, PubliCola has learned. The new policy will only apply to people arrested in the so-called Downtown Activation Zone, which stretches from the Chinatown-International District to the Denny Triangle, north of Belltown.

According to the mayor’s office, the agreement is no different than other agreements with the county to jail people committing otherwise non-bookable misdemeanors in special “emphasis areas” like the corner of 12th and Jackson; however, the downtown zone is orders of magnitude larger than prior emphasis areas, and the change in policy has no end date, unlike hot spot policing efforts.

Since the COVID pandemic, the jail has not been booking people arrested for most misdemeanors. Initially, the jail stopped booking because of health concerns; more recently, the King County Department of Adult and Juvenile Detention has restricting bookings because of a chronic shortage of guards at the downtown jail.

According to SPD spokesman Eric Muñoz, the new policy is already in effect, and officers have been given authority to use their “discretion” to decide which people to book into jail and which to divert to other non-law-enforcement options, such as the CARE Team, We Deliver Care, and LEAD. Muñoz said officers haven’t been directed to focus on any offense in particular. The jail currently books people accused of driving under the influence and domestic violence, as well as people identified by City Attorney Ann Davison’s office as “high utilizers” of the court system.

“It really will come down to the individual officer and the discretionary decision they make,” Muñoz said. “Obviously, downtown, we do have prolific drug use, so I imagine a lot of officers will make that arrest, but we do have a CARE program, we have diversion, so there are a lot of options. So it will come down to the discretion of the officer.”

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Sending people to jail is unlikely to have a significant impact on drug use and other misdemeanors downtown, because the vast majority of people jailed for misdemeanors are in jail for three days or less. According to numbers provided by the DAJD, among this group of people held for short periods, the average stay is 1.2 days, or just over 24 hours.

The average daily population of the downtown jail is typically somewhere between 800 and 900 people, with another 600 or so in the Maleng Regional Justice Center in Kent. DAJD spokesman Noah Haglund said the department is “approaching the upper for the number of jail residents we can safely house with current staffing.” The department hopes to hire another 70 corrections officers for the jail, which is down from a shortfall of about 100 officers for most of last year.

Haglund added that it’s ” impossible to predict an exact number of jail residents we can house, since staffing numbers are always in flux. Our capacity varies day-to-day based on factors such as the number of people we are guarding in the hospital as well as court appearances and medical appointments outside the jail that require transports. Also, the need to separate people into different housing units based on gender, medical needs, or behavioral problems means that some housing units won’t be completely full but will still require the same number of staff to operate.”

The decision is separate from Mayor Bruce Harrell’s decision this week to move forward on a contract with the South Correctional Entity, a jail in Des Moines where the city hopes to send misdemeanor defendants from Seattle. According to an internal SPD memo, the city plans to use SCORE to jail people who commit misdemeanors outside downtown.

A spokesperson for Harrell said that “booking in the King County Jail will remain the preferred option for the City. Prior to beginning bookings at SCORE, the City will create clear policies providing guidance on which crimes and detainees may be booked at SCORE.”

At least six people have died at SCORE in just over a year. Under the proposed interlocal agreement between the city and SCORE, Seattle would have to pay to transport inmates from Des Moines to downtown Seattle for all court hearings, which are frequent in misdemeanor cases. King County ended its short-lived contract with SCORE last year.

Through a contract that has not been “rebased,” or updated to account for inflation and capital costs since 2017, the city pays for about 195 beds in the downtown jail, of which about 80 were filled, on average, last month. In the past, the city and county have agreed to use some of the funding for unused beds for health and housing programs, and last year, the council voted to place a proviso, or hold, on $3 million of the jail bed funding with the intent of putting that money toward inflation on future jail costs or other, non-jail purposes.

Earlier this week, Council President Sara Nelson said that when she learned only 80 city-funded beds were full, her response was “I want my money back.” However, Haglund says that because the city hasn’t been paying the true cost of those beds, “there is no underspend, no money to return.”

“While the city’s bed use is lower than the total outlined in the contract, they have not been paying what it actually costs the county to house people they bring to the jail,” Haglund said. If they had and were being billed at the actual cost to the county, even at their current lower billable population, they would be paying a similar amount as what they’re paying now. There is no underspend, no money to return.”

City Hall, Mayor Harrell

Harrell Installed Gym in Basement of City Hall for Himself and His Security Detail

By Erica C. Barnett

Down in the basement of City Hall, at the end of a corridor most city employees have little reason to visit, is a faux-wood paneled section of wall with an unmarked door and a small ledge that looks like it once served as a customer service counter. The only indication that there’s anything behind the wall, besides a jutting door handle, is a red-lit security panel, indicating that someone has the ability to badge their way into this unmarked room, and that it isn’t you.

The space, located just past the Boards and Commissions room, was at one time a walk-up counter for the city’s credit union, but was vacant for years—until 2022, when Mayor Bruce Harrell had it converted into a workout facility. The unmarked gym is only open to the mayor and members of his security detail, who are SPD officers; in an unscientific poll of a half-dozen current and former City Hall staffers, not one was aware of the gym’s existence.

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The insider who told PubliCola about the gym said Harrell didn’t end up using it very often, preferring a private club nearby that has better facilities. According to Jamie Housen, a spokesman for Harrell’s office, the mayor used the gym “a handful of times, maybe five or six. Housen said the equipment in the gym is all the “personal equipment” of the SPD officers on Harrell’s security team, and includes “a 10+ year-old treadmill and used weight equipment”—definitely a step-down from the Washington Athletic Club, where Harrell is a member.

The basement of city hall also contains a lactation room that one staffer described as the equivalent of a “supply closet.” Seattle Channel is also down there, as is the office for the city’s janitorial division and a garage access point for city staffers.

It’s unclear how often members of Harrell’s security team use the gym. SPD officers have access to a fully equipped gym at SPD headquarters right across the street from City Hall, as well as at every police precinct, but Housen said the mayor’s detail “is unable to use those spaces because they are required to keep close proximity to the mayor at all times.” Housen said SPD pays a lease for the gym to the city’s fleets and facilities department, and let us know that Jim Brunner of the Seattle Times passed on writing about the gym last year.

We filed a records request for more details about the gym, and will file an update if we learn anything interesting, like the max incline on that decade-old treadmill or whether there’s an explicit policy against dropping weights.

City Council, Elections, Equity, Mayor Harrell, Transportation

Final $1.55 Billion Transportation Levy Saves Equity-Based Projects Committee Chair Saka Derided as “Slush Fund”
Little Brook Street Mural in Lake City, a Lake City Collective project funded by SDOT’s Neighborhood Street Fund

The council also decided not to fund a controversial Burke-Gilman Trail alternative and to hold off on studying impact fees on new apartments.

By Erica C. Barnett

The Seattle City Council’s transportation levy committee, which includes all nine council members, approved a $1.55 billion transportation levy package on Tuesday, one of the final steps before the levy heads to the November ballot.

Progressive Councilmember Tammy Morales didn’t manage to pass her proposal to add $150 million to the levy for sidewalks, arterial paving, and other projects, but she did score a significant victory: Her amendment to restore funding for the neighborhood-initiated safety partnership program, a revamp of the Neighborhood Street Fund designed to increase access to city funding for marginalized communities, passed 4-3 after two of the nine council members, Sara Nelson and Maritza Rivera, abstained.

Morales’ amendment also zeroed out a proposed $14 million “district fund” that would have empowered council members to direct the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) to build specific projects in their districts. The proposed levy still funds Councilmember Rob Saka’s new “neighborhood scale traffic safety programs,” which Saka said could be used to fund various types of “smaller scale safety improvements in neighborhoods and communities” that emerge in the future.

Councilmember Cathy Moore expressed confusion about this late addition, wondering aloud how it was different from the neighborhood-initiated projects, which came out of the work of a task force focused on creating more equitable access to small-scale transportation funding. Saka responded by saying the new fund would be a kind of catch-all for many types of projects. “The idea is that it could be for neighborhood-initiated safety [or] it could be for the district projects fund,” Saka said. “You can call whatever you want, whatever bucket or subcategory you so choose, but broadly what it is, it’s all the same thing. It’s smaller scale safety improvements in neighborhoods and communities.”

The neighborhood-initiated projects initiative, an equity-focused revamp of the popular Neighborhood Street Fund, has proved surprisingly controversial. (On Tuesday, several council members groused that most of the money would probably just end up in Morales’ Southeast Seattle district, the most diverse in the city.) The basic idea is that SDOT, with the help of its equity work group, would reach out to historically marginalized communities without a history of applying for or receiving transportation grants and work with them to develop small-scale projects.

Saka, who previously refused to hear a presentation on SDOT’s strategy for incorporating equity into the levy, derisively called the entire program a “slush fund” while cross-examining SDOT director Greg Spotts about whether the program would really do anything new.

“In the absence of this slush fund, does SDOT not undertake any of that work, currently, now?” Saka asked.

“I’m sorry, but I don’t see it as a slush fund whatsoever,” Spotts responded.

“Does SDOT engage—so, characterize it however you want—does SDOT not engage in this underlying work you’re talking about now?” Saka said.

“This program is proposed by the executive to supplement previous waves of investment and make investment in a new way, to bring people into the circle of power who previously have not felt included.,” Spotts said.

Morales’ amendment restores all but $1.5 million of the $41 million Harrell initially proposed for the program.

An amendment from Councilmember Dan Strauss that would take $20 million away from a proposed arterial road maintenance program and spend it building the controversial Leary Way alternative for completing the Burke-Gilman Trail through Ballard failed on a 5-4 vote. S

trauss has been a vocal advocate for the Leary option, a dog-leg detour preferred by industrial businesses who have spent decades fighting against a direct route connecting the two long-finished segments of the trail through Ballard. In hyping his amendment, Strauss derided the option long preferred by cyclists—a direct connection between the two incomplete segments of the existing path—as “a narrow strip of asphalt through an industrial area without a sidewalk.”

Another Strauss proposal to spend $5 million turning Ballard Ave. NW into a more pedestrian-friendly “curbless street” failed 8-1.

A proposal from Councilmember Cathy Moore to study transportation impact fees on new housing to pay for sidewalks also failed. Last year, the council considered, and ultimately rejected, legislation that would have amended the city’s comprehensive plan to allow the city to charge the fees, which are based on the premise that dense, urban living causes negative impacts on the city’s transportation system.

Sara Nelson, who joined last year’s narrow majority in defeating the impact fee proposal, said that because transportation fees would still require amending the comp plan, the council should consider them as part of the “big, long discussion and legislation on the comp plan update this coming year.” Mayor Bruce Harrell released his proposed update to the comprehensive plan earlier this year. “We’ve had developers, yes, weigh in on this. We’ve also had affordable housing providers weigh in in opposition to transportation impact fees, and so it’s clearly a discussion that merits a lot of sort of complex thinking,” Nelson said.

The final version of the levy proposal, which would cost the median Seattle homeowner around $45 a month, heads to the full council for approval next week.

Courts, homelessness, Mayor Harrell

City Attorney Praises Homelessness Ruling; Mayor Says Seattle’s Encampment Removal Policies Won’t Change
Image via City of Seattle

By Erica C. Barnett

Seattle City Attorney Ann Davison released a statement praising the US Supreme Court’s decision in Grants Pass v. Johnson, which effectively overturns a Ninth Circuit ruling, Martin v. Boise, that has forced cities to make at least a nominal offer of shelter before removing homeless encampments.

“Today’s ruling makes it clear that determining policy to address homelessness is a task for locally elected leaders,” Davison said in a statement. “This decision emphasizes the importance of local authority. The variety of local jurisdictions throughout the country that supported Grants Pass in this litigation demonstrates that local governments recognize the importance of creating safe and healthy environments for everyone in the community, a challenging task made even more difficult by the constraints of the Ninth Circuit’s prior ruling.”

In the ruling, which was widely anticipated by homeless advocates and service providers, the court upheld a law in Grants Pass, Oregon that criminalizes the use of blankets, pillows, and protective gear while sleeping in public, including inside a vehicle. Homelessness, the court majority ruled, is not a state of being like mental illness or addiction, but an action that a person could effectively choose not to engage in.

Davison, a Republican, previously wrote an amicus brief in the Grants Pass case, arguing that encampments “have an intensely negative impact impact on neighboring residents. Most report a plummeting quality of life, and businesses exasperated by the increased crime and decreased sales will often relocate to new markets.”

In the brief, Davison also claimed that living unsheltered (and thus sleeping unsheltered) is a form of voluntary “conduct,” not a state of being. The court echoed this argument in its ruling, saying that the anti-camping laws in Grants Pass criminalize sleeping outdoors regardless of a person’s “status.” A housed person who chooses to sleep in a park overnight, the court majority wrote, is not treated differently under the law than someone who sleeps in a park because they don’t have a home.

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In its ruling, the court zeroed in on statistics from the city of Seattle, which claimed that 60 percent of people simply “refuse” legitimate offers of shelter. As we’ve reported many times, an “offer” of shelter may not be viable for any number of reasons. Many shelters have strict abstinence or behavioral policies that make them inappropriate with addiction or mental illness. Many are individual or single-gender shelters that require people to leave their partners; many ban pets or do not allow people to bring more than a few possessions.

Additionally, shelters are often located far away from the places homeless people live. Like housed people, homeless people build communities with other people and live in neighborhoods; someone who grew up in Ballard and became homeless there may be understandably reluctant to relocate across for a temporary shelter bed.

Seattle adopted rules (known as the Multidisciplinary Administrative Rules, or MDARs) in 2017 saying that the city won’t remove an encampment without providing 72 hours notice and offering each resident a shelter bed, except in limited circumstances in which a tent or encampment constitutes an “obstruction or immediate hazard.”

In practice, the city has interpreted “obstruction” to include virtually any tent or encampment located on public property, including all areas of public parks, allowing the city’s encampment removal team to bypass the required notice and shelter offer.

A spokesman for Mayor Bruce Harrell’s office says Harrell has no plans to propose legislation changing the rules to make it easier to remove encampments now that there’s no requirement that cities offer shelter to people they displace.

“Our approach to resolving encampments is based on data, best practices, and our values – and the Supreme Court decision will not affect that approach,” Harrell said in a statement. “Our approach leads with offering shelter and services as part of the encampment resolution process, ensuring people come indoors at the same time as we keep public spaces clean and accessible for everyone. The City’s Unified Care Team closely follows the requirements set out in the MDARs, grounding the City’s encampment resolution work in the compassionate approach we believe in.”

City Council, Mayor Harrell

Seattle Nice: Is This the “Do-Nothing” Council?

 

By Erica C. Barnett

It’s been nearly six months since most members the new city council took office (the exception, Tanya Woo, was appointed on January 23), and so far, they haven’t proposed or adopted a single substantive piece of policy legislation—or even managed to overturn any of the laws they criticized the previous council for passing.

Despite coming in with what some of them described as a mandate to make swift, dramatic changes, the new council has spent huge amounts of its public meeting time getting briefed on what various city departments and offices do—homework they arguably could be doing on their own time, or have done in the two months between last year’s election and their inaugurations.

Even the legislation council members have proposed, or are in the process of developing, is focused on reversing previous policies, rather than constructively creating new ones. Reversing a brand-new minimum wage for “gig” delivery workers, rolling back renter protections, bringing back loitering laws and laws that prohibit people arrested for drug offenses from being in certain areas of the city, like downtown—these are all ways of saying “no” to laws and policies adopted in very recent times—a purely negative agenda. And in any case, most of these ideas are still in the discussion phases—the only one that’s made it in to legislation, Sara Nelson’s proposal to reduce delivery workers’ minimum wage, has stalled.

So what’s going on with this new council, and is it fair to expect first-time council members to propose original legislation by this point in their terms? In preparation for the podcast, I looked back at the most recent pre-COVID election in which all seven districted council seats were on the ballot, 2015. (The council elected in 2019 had just over two months on the job before COVID hit, making 2016 the last “normal” first year for a new set of district council members).

The council elected in 2015 had five rookie members. By around this time the following year, that council had proposed, considered, or passed legislation barring landlords from raising the rent on apartments with maintenance violations; requiring landlords to rent to the first qualified person who applies for a unit; limited deposits on commercial leases; limiting security deposits and move-in fees, expanded access to the city’s Utility Discount Program, and banned “conversion therapy” for LGBTQ+ youth, among other legislation.

Even the new 2020 council (with four rookie members) passed substantial legislation during and after the COVID pandemic hit the city in mid-March, including a ban on independent expenditure contributions from companies partly owned by foreign investors; legislation expanding the maximum number of tiny house village shelters in Seattle; the JumpStart payroll tax on big businesses (which has provided hundreds of millions of dollars for affordable housing and other priorities every year since); legislation repealing laws against “drug loitering” and “prostitution loitering”; and a law (which the police have failed to follow) barring cops from questioning children until they’ve spoken to an attorney. That’s on top of all the local COVID relief laws the 2020 council began passing in March of that year.

Sandeep and I are usually on opposite sides when it comes to the current council, but even he acknowledged that this council has not been particularly productive, although he suggests that the mayor, not the council, may be to blame. We discussed this theory, along with how well Council President Nelson has stuck to her vow to use her “supermajority” to bring “big changes” to city hall, on this week’s episode.

City Council, Equity, Mayor Harrell, neighborhoods, Transportation

In Transportation Levy Amendments, Councilmembers Saka and Moore Propose Cutting Program to Fund Community-Led Safety Projects

By Erica C. Barnett

Seattle City Council members have proposed stripping away funding proposed as part of the 2024 transportation levy for small, community-initiated transportation safety projects and giving themselves the authority to decide which neighborhood projects get funded in their districts.

The program, known as the Neighborhood-Initiated Safety Partnership Program (NSPP) is an expansion of an existing participatory budgeting program that gives neighborhood residents a direct say in which small-scale local projects the city funds. The current program, called the Neighborhood Street Fund, has funded work on the Garfield Superblock, safety and connectivity improvements on the Delridge Greenway, street lighting and traffic calming at Bailey Gatzert Elementary, and dozens of other projects.

According to SDOT spokesman Ethan Bergerson, the new program would “co-create safety projects with residents to directly respond to emerging community requests for safety improvements. The community engagement would go beyond the nomination and selection process of the Neighborhood Street Fund, and would also incorporate ongoing and iterative neighborhood engagement similar to our Home Zone Program,” an equity-focused neighborhood street program.

The proposal came out of the work of the Transportation Equity Workgroup, which recommended that SDOT “include a participatory budgeting process in the next transportation levy package” specifically to “meet the priorities of BIPOC and vulnerable communities.”

Harrell’s levy proposal included $41 million for the neighborhood-based projects, plus $14 million for a new spending category called District Projects, which would fund emergent safety concerns and requests” in each council district.  Transportation levy committee chair Rob Saka proposed an amendment that would cut funding for neighborhood-initiated projects to $25.5 million—a 38 percent reduction—and increasing the District Projects fund to $21 million.

At the levy committee meeting on Tuesday, Saka said he considered the new District Projects program a mere “rebranding” that would accomplish the same purpose as the Neighborhood-Initiated Safety Partnerships program; the only difference, he said, was that instead of community members, “the seven individual council members would decide” how to spend the money. “At that high level, it’s intended for smaller-scale capital projects, so there’s alignment and consensus” even if “we have competing visions right now, currently, for what that looks like and who specifically decides on the neighborhood-initiated safety, neighborhood street funding.”

Earlier this month, Saka abruptly shut down a presentation by SDOT transportation equity program manager Annya Pintak, which Bergerson said would have been about “how the levy proposal is integrated with the City’s Race and Social Justice Initiative,” telling SDOT director Greg Spotts that the council already had “a good baseline on that.”

A proposed amendment by Councilmember Cathy Moore would go further than Saka’s, eliminating the entire community-initiated program and adding $21 million to the District Project fund, tripling it to a total of $42 million. Moore had to leave when her amendments came up and did not discuss this amendment when she returned.

Not everyone on the council supports cutting or eliminating the participatory budgeting program, which has been around since 2007.

Council member Tammy Morales proposed an amendment to Saka’s proposal that would restore funding for the neighborhood-initiated projects program to the $41 million in Harrell’s initial proposal by reducing the District Projects fund to $7 million.

“I know that as district council members, we know our districts best, but the truth is, we can’t know every corner of our neighborhood because we don’t live on every corner of our neighborhood and see how traffic moves around,” Morales said. “So this funding would allow residents to work directly with SDOT to implement transportation solutions directly that directly affect them

Council president Sara Nelson also proposed an amendment to Saka’s proposal that would reduce the new District Projects program to the $14 million in Harrell’s, but would do so by restoring the old Neighborhood Street Fund, rather than increasing the size of the new participatory budgeting program.

“I am putting this forward as a way to bring [the Neighborhood Street Fund] back,” Nelson said. “I am open to conversation about this. I’m not completely wed to this. I would like to understand more what the new program will do versus what the old program did, but I’m just saying that [the Street Fund] seemed to be something that was working well.”

In a letter to the council, Harrell, and SDOT, the co-chairs of the Transportation Equity Workgroup, Jessica E. Salvador & LaKeisha Jones, said the work group was “disappointed to see the recommendations from Committee Chair Saka to divert funds from community to district-level decision making.

“Diverting the $15.5M from Neighborhood-Initiated Safety Partnership Program would also divert us from our goal of equitable investment,” they wrote. “Equitable investment means that we are better able to serve communities by creating programs or initiatives that can be quickly implemented. Diverting the decision-making processes from neighborhoods is the opposite of empowerment. We need to ensure that our decisions are driven by community, for community.”