We began the week with an in-depth feature about a statewide digital equity program, started during the pandemic to provide laptops and training in marginalized communities, that has not been able to pay its contractors for six months. The result: Small nonprofits, including some with just one or two employees, have been forced to shut down programs that help people exiting prison, non-English speakers, and folks living in isolated rural communities access the internet and learn digital skills.
On this week’s podcast, we discussed the past, present, and future of the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, an agency established with the lofty goal of rebuilding the region’s homelessness system from the ground up. It hasn’t panned out that way.
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The Seattle City Council approved a 30-year agreement to allow IKE Smart City, a Columbus, Ohio-based advertising company, to install 30 digital billboards, each 8’4” tall, on sidewalks throughout downtown Seattle, plus another 50 in other business districts across the city in the future. The Downtown Seattle Association, a private business group, will receive the profits from ad sales.
City Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck and Mayor Bruce Harrell proposed a ballot measure that would increase the city’s business and occupation (B&O) tax rates while exempting gross revenues under $2 million, producing an estimated $90 million a year in new revenue to pay for housing stability, homeless services, food security, and small business sustainability.
The city council took up two bills designed to crack down on what Councilmember Bob Kettle calls the “permissive environment” in Seattle. One would empower the City Attorney to fine graffiti taggers and those who “encourage” them at a rate of $1,000 per tag. The second would give the city authority to penalize and shut down businesses because of crimes their patrons commit in “proximity” to their property, including misdemeanors like using drugs or drinking in public.
The Seattle City Council discussed two new laws this week that will, if passed, give the city new powers to crack down on nightclubs and graffiti—although the impact of the latter is very much in question, given that the police department currently refers only a few dozen cases to the City Attorney’s Office for prosecution every year.
The graffiti proposal, which PubliCola reported on when it was introduced, would fine taggers $1,000 per “graffiti violation,” defined in the proposal as “a single piece of graffiti, including but not limited to a graffiti tagger name or design, in a single location.”
Under state law, graffiti is already a gross misdemeanor punishable by a fine of up to $5,000 and up to a year in jail, or (if the graffiti causes more than $750 in damage) a felony, so the new local law would add an additional penalty. The new fines would be cumulative, so the cost to prolific taggers could add up quickly.
The city already spends several million dollars a year on graffiti abatement. The money, part of Mayor Bruce Harrell’s “One Seattle Graffiti Plan,” pays for 11 full-time city staffers (including two new positions added last year), including seven “Graffiti Rangers,” and a contract with Uplift Northwest to remove graffiti.
Previewing the legislation at a meeting of the council’s public safety committee this week, City Attorney Ann Davison said fining prolific taggers would serve as a deterrent and help ensure “that our city is known as a place of order,” particularly in preparation for next year’s FIFA World Cup games, when people driving through Seattle might be endangered by graffiti along I-5, “where you maybe can’t read the exits that you’re trying to safely take.”
The taggers whose cases SPD has referred to her office, Davison continued, aren’t “lost young people” but “fully functioning, employed adults, oftentimes,” most of them white men. “Oftentimes, these are people that have strategically engaged in this activity for a long time, and again, looking to increase their social reputation and notoriety by damaging our property and costing us millions of dollars,” Davison said.
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Davison declined to say how much, if anything, the city expects to take in from fining taggers $1,000 per tag. (The legislation would also allow people to do graffiti abatement work for the city in lieu of fines). But her deputy, Scott Lindsay, said the city attorney’s office has already identified 20 or so people it plans to pursue based on their social media posts, and believes they’ll have more success imposing fines because civil cases have a lower standard of proof than criminal cases.
“The initial goal really is focused on those top 20 or so graffiti taggers … most of whom have already been identified” and bringing cases against them, Lindsay said, in order to “create the deterrence effect at the top and let that filter down.”
The proposed legislation would also allow the city attorney’s office to bring civil cases, and impose fines, on anyone who “assists or encourages” another person who violates graffiti laws. According to council staff analysis, the point of this provision is to empower Davison’s office to ”seek restitution and penalties from on-line graffiti promoters, who incentivize tagging and publish graffiti on Instagram.”
Council President Sara Nelson, who said she’s eager to vote “hell yes” on the legislation, said she expected the potential for fines to deter taggers from doing so in the future. After all, she said, “how many of us don’t speed because of the ticket we might get?”
Nelson was also enthusiastic about another bill the public safety committee discussed this week—an amendment to the city’s existing “chronic nuisance property” ordinance that would dramatically expand the city’s power to fine or shut down businesses by holding them responsible for activity that takes place “in proximity” to the business (a term that is undefined), and adding alcohol violations in or around a business to the list of activities that could enable the city to shut a business down.
Could the legislation be used, Nelson asked Deputy Mayor Tim Burgess, to target businesses like the McDonald’s at Third and Pine, where people have historically congregated to buy and sell drugs?
Yes, Burgess responded, the new law would allow police to target people using or buying drugs near any property, as long as the Seattle Police Department could demonstrate that the people were “associated with” the property (a term that the bill analysis interprets to mean customers or patrons) and that there was some “nexus” between the property and the drug activity (a term that is not defined).
Burgess—who as a city councilmember, fought fiercely for a bill that would have criminalized “aggressive panhandling” by people he characterized as “street thugs“—assured the council that the city would use their new powers judiciously. “We answered [stakeholders’] concerns about enforcement by pointing to the history of the [nuisance] ordinance being used only 17 times in 16 years,” Burgess said.
But by expanding the ordinance to hold businesses liable for what happens on other people’s properties, or on nearbt streets and sidewalks, the ordinance is explicitly designed to increase that number.
The expansion to offsite does represent a significant expansion of the city’s authority,” the council’s central staff director, Ben Noble, told the committee. “I think there’s there’s no question about that, and there really is a question of whether the due process measures that are in place are sufficient to balance the interest of the property owners and the interest of the public.”
Committee chair Bob Kettle said the ordinance is necessary to reduce gun violence outside nightclubs. Committee vice chairman Rob Saka said he had been working on similar legislation on his own but Mayor Bruce Harrell beat him to it, and asked to be added as a cosponsor until Kettle reminded him that he was already cosponsoring the bill.
On Wednesday, City Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck and Mayor Bruce Harrell proposed a ballot measure that would increase the city’s business and occupation (B&O) tax rates by about 50 percent and use the proceeds to fund programs that support housing stability, homeless services, food security, and small business sustainability.
The proposal, which could appear on the November ballot, would exempt businesses’ gross receipts up to $2 million, which would increase the number of businesses who don’t have to pay B&O taxes to about 16,500, or around 76 percent of businesses in Seattle. The remaining businesses would have to pay the tax on all revenues above $2 million. The exemption has been a longtime goal of the Seattle Metro Chamber of Commerce, which has argued that the current exemption is set too low, at $100,000, to provide tax relief to most of the city’s small businesses.
After accounting for the expanded exemption, which would cost the city about $30 million, the tax increase on larger businesses would bring in an estimated $90 million a year.
Speaking to PubliCola on Tuesday, Rinck acknowledged that the business and occupation tax is “not without shortcomings”— for instance, high-revenue, low-margin businesses like grocery stores and restaurants tend to increase prices in response to higher taxes, passing costs on to consumers. But, she said, the city is “looking at an urgent situation, where we’re being confronted with federal funding cuts” that stand to harm Seattle’s most vulnerable residents, including potentially steep reductions in federal spending on homelessness, housing, and human services.
“[The plan] creates some tax relief for small businesses, and it’s a really great opportunity for us to provide that support for small businesses while asking some of our large businesses to pay more of their fair share to keep the city running and help our most vulnerable neighbors,” Rinck said.
On Wednesday, Rinck said the tax increase, which she has dubbed the Seattle Shield law, will protect essential programs from Trump-era cuts. “And here’s what makes this moment special: We’re not imposing this on Seattle, we’re trusting Seattle,” Rinck said. “You choose whether we protect each other or abandon each other, and you choose what kind of city we want to be.”
State law prohibits the city from increasing the business and occupation tax without a public vote. One advantage of a voter-approved tax is that, unlike the council-approved JumpStart tax, it can’t be easily reallocated to new purposes based on the transitory whims of a mayor or city council.
The proposal includes specific spending categories—broadly, housing stability for low-income tenants; small business assistance; services for people facing homelessness, food insecurity, or gender-based violence, and protections for vulnerable workers through the city’s Office of Labor Standards. If the measure passes, these categories would have the force of law.
According to the most recent revenue forecast, the city is facing an unanticipated budget shortfall of more than $240 million over the next two years, with or without additional cuts to federal programs that fund services in Seattle.
The city has two business and occupation tax rates for different kinds of businesses; one, which applies to all retail businesses (and five other business categories) would increase from 0.222 percent to 0.34 percent if voters approved the new tax. The other, which applies to freight transportation and professional services, would increase from 0.443 to 0.65 percent.
By pairing a tax increase with a tax exemption, the proposal puts the reflexively anti-tax business community in a somewhat awkward position. In an email blast about the forthcoming proposal last Friday, Seattle Metropolitan Chamber CEO Rachel Smith praised the proposed exemption, while arguing that a new tax will harm Seattle’s economy and drive businesses away.
“While proposal details have not been released, one component would expand the B&O exemption for very small businesses with an annual gross under $2 million—a good policy that we support,” Smith wrote. “But taxing all of our other businesses to pay for it—when the city has $800 million in unspent revenue—is the wrong move.”
In a statement on Wednesday, Smith said the new proposal “has been rushed, [and] the beneficiaries and payers have not been sufficiently identified or engaged. Everyone deserves to understand the impact of any proposed tax restructuring with more than just 45 days of consideration before heading to the ballot.”
The Chamber’s $800 million estimate refers to the money allocated, but not yet spent, from the JumpStart payroll tax (which funds, among other things, the Equitable Development Initiative, programs to mitigate the impacts of climate change, and affordable housing); funds allocated by the Office of Housing through the voter-approved housing levy; and an estimated $200 million in budget funds that were allocated, but not spent, last year.
“Let’s be clear: Seattle isn’t facing a deficit, in fact, they can’t spend the money they have budgeted today,” Smith wrote.
Budget experts and proponents of the legislation confirmed that most of the money Smith identified can’t easily be moved from place to place—it isn’t possible, for example, to pull money allocated to a signed contract away from that project just because it didn’t get underway by the end of the year.
Additionally, the city’s annual “underspend” stretches across multiple city departments that have different reasons for failing to spend their full budget by the end of the year. It’s legitimate to ask city departments to explain why they aren’t spending all the money they get, and to establish polices to address this perennial issue, but the answers are bound to be complicated. Requiring city departments to unilaterally forego unspent money at the end of each year without knowing the reason each department ended up under budget could be a recipe for budget chaos.
Harrell, whose 2021 run for mayor got a big boost from Chamber members like Vulcan and Goodman Real Estate, stands to benefit politically from allying with Rinck on the taxing measure even as he risks pissing off his deep-pocketed business backers: His leading opponent, Katie Wilson, is outflanking him on the left with a campaign focused on progressive revenue, housing abundance, and access to safe, reliable transit. Recent polling described to PubliCola suggests that Harrell is vulnerable to a challenge from the left.
Wilson, a longtime proponent for progressive revenue, said in a statement that she’s “glad that Mayor Harrell is backing this proposal coming from Councilmember Rinck’s office,” because it will help the measure move through the mostly Harrell-aligned council.
“It’s clear that Harrell is terrified he won’t win re-election and he suddenly feels the need to show progressive leadership,” Wilson added. “It’s disappointing that it takes the threat of being unseated for our mayor to do the right thing.”
While progressives who support raising revenue to preserve city services and respond to federal budget cuts argue that a higher B&O tax that exempts smaller businesses is progressive, the tax is generally considered regressive because it has a greater impact on smaller businesses and those that operate on slim margins, and because businesses generally pass B&O tax increases on to consumers in the form of higher prices. Exempting most businesses from the tax arguably eliminates the first problem, but it doesn’t directly address the second.
Complicating matters, the city is planning to take up separate tax increase soon: A 0.1-cent sales tax hike to pay for public safety, which the state legislature authorized earlier this year. King County is currently considering its own 0.1-cent tax increase; together, the two tax increases, which do not require voter approval, would increase the sales tax in Seattle to 10.55 percent, the highest combined sales tax rate in the country.
Asked about the potential sales tax increase on Wednesday, Harrell said it’s “on the table for discussion, but because we understand the regressive nature of it, we are treading very carefully.”
The Seattle City Council approved a long-term permit on Tuesday that will allow IKE Smart City, a Columbus, Ohio-based advertising company, to install 30 towering vertical billboards on sidewalks throughout downtown Seattle, plus another 50 in other business improvement areas in the future. Profits from the ads will go to the Downtown Seattle Association, which will also be responsible for maintaining the billboards. The kiosks are eight feet and four inches tall.
Cathy Moore and Alexis Mercedes Rinck voted against the permit; Dan Strauss was absent. The permit is for 30 years, with a renewal after 16 years and 6 months, meaning that—at a minimum—the council is committing to allow what are essentially giant iPhones on public sidewalks well into the 2040s.
Seattle’s sign code strictly prohibits “off-premises” ads and billboards downtown, and the council has historically been reluctant to permit new clutter in the pedestrian right-of-way.
The DSA’s proposal gets around that prohibition by seeking a special 30-year permit called a “term permit,” which was previously reserved for “significant structures,” like skybridges and tunnels, that need access to city right-of-way on a long-term basis. According to a council staff memo on the proposal, the workaround will “allow for off-premises advertising in the right-of-way which would otherwise not be allowed under existing code.”
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Under the permit, the DSA will receive all excess advertising profits (after IKE takes its cut) up to $1.1 million a year; anything above that would go to the city. Beyond that, the city is only guaranteed the $13,000 annual permit cost. Proponents, including council president Sara Nelson, have argued that the city will receive substantial non-financial benefits from the kiosks themselves, which will display art, maps, information about local events, and emergency updates.
By allowing illuminated sidewalk billboards, the city council has set a precedent that will make it hard to turn down similar requests to put ads in public rights-of-way in the future.
The kiosks have also raised privacy concerns because they come equipped with cameras—an optional feature that not all cities have agreed to. During a demonstration at City Hall last month, representatives from IKE said the cameras will only turn on when a kiosk user activates the kiosks’ “photo booth” feature. The memorandum of understanding with the DSA includes a legally binding commitment that the kiosks will not include “any video camera recording functionality whatsoever” and will only allow still images when a user activates the photo booth.
Privacy advocates have expressed concerns that these reassurances could be reversed in the future. “My concern is that this is a slippery slope—once the kiosks are out there, you can retrofit them” to include cameras, Tee Sannon, technology policy program director for the ACLU of Washington, told PubliCola last year.
In a Seattle Nice episode that’s already earning raves like “Depressing!” and “God damn it!,” we discussed the past, present, and future of the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, an agency established with the lofty goal of rebuilding the region’s homelessness system from the ground up.
The KCRHA, which came out of discussions in the late 2010s about the need for a (say it with me) “regional approach to homelessness,” was supposed to bring King County and its 39 cities together and reach a consensus on the most effective approach to homelessness, then rebid the entire homelessness system to fund only the most effective programs, using money that would come not just from the city and county but other King County cities where homelessness is rampant, including the ones that have historically opposed homeless services inside their borders.
Things didn’t pan out that way. Early missteps, resistance from suburban leaders, and the failure of a heavily hyped public-private partnership that focused the agency’s attention on downtown Seattle (about as far from “regional” as you can get) set the KCRHA back in its early years, and the promised “total system rebid” never materialized.
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Now, the agency is essentially an administrative body responsible for administering existing contracts and taking on political blame (and legal risks) when something goes wrong. And its staff, including the CEO, answer directly to politicians pursuing their own parochial interests, leaving the agency vulnerable to unilateral decisions by elected officials—like when Mayor Bruce Harrell began clawing back control over homeless services, starting with outreach and homelessness prevention.
With the news last week that the KCRHA is threatening to cut one-fifth of its staff if they don’t get $4.7 million this year to increase their administrative budget, the agency’s future feels more tenuous than at any point in its brief history. (It doesn’t help that the threatened cuts are tanking morale that was already low, or that the infighting between the agency’s top leaders has become an open secret).
So will the KCRHA end up being a short-lived experiment, like the Seattle Monorail Project? Or is it, as some have argued, too big to fail? Sandeep and I discuss all that and more on this week’s show.
As a state program to improve digital equity shuts down, the group that distributes state funds to dozens of small nonprofits and the State Department of Commerce are at an impasse, with millions of dollars in the balance.
By Erica C. Barnett
Terrence Morgan, the CEO of Fresh Start Professional Services, was excited to receive grant funding in 2023 through a state initiative called the Digital Navigator Program. For the first time, Fresh Start would be able to rent an office to hold digital literacy classes and provide a modest monthly subsidy for program participants—people from marginalized communities, including survivors of domestic violence and people coming out of prison or treatment, for whom computer training classes could provide a pathway to higher educat,ion or better-paying jobs.
For more than a year, the state money that paid for the program showed every month, as expected. But then, this past January, the funding stopped.
Fresh Start was able to keep its classes going for a while by spending down its reserves and canceling the stipends that made it feasible for many of its clients to participate in the program, Morgan said. By April, though, “we started really feeling the brunt of it, because our funds were depleted. Our funds are totally completely depleted now.” After six months without any reimbursement for its work, Fresh Start has taken out a line of credit and laid off staff. Morgan and two other top staffers stopped taking pay three months ago.
“We’re doing the bare minimum we can do” until the program ends this month, he said. At this point, he isn’t convinced the state Commerce Department, which funds the Digital Navigator Program, has any intention of paying the dozens of groups that signed contracts for the funding in 2023. “”My guess is—and I’ve been saying this for the last four months—we ain’t never getting paid.”
•••
To understand why Fresh Start and the other organizations have gone unpaid for months requires some background on how the state’s Digital Navigator Program works. In 2021, at the height of the pandemic, the Commerce Department began giving out grants to local organizations to distribute laptops, set up internet connections, and provide digital literacy training to people in underserved communities.
Since then, the Digital Navigator Program has expanded and evolved, granting tens of millions of dollars to dozens of organizations to pay for digital literacy classes, laptops, help lines, and internet service across the state. A dashboard on the EEC’s website documents nearly 230,000 “interactions” made possible by the Digital Navigator Program, which include classes, home visits, calls to technical support lines, and other one-on-one encounters with people who participated in the program.
In 2023, the Commerce Department selected one of those grant recipients, the Seattle-based Equity in Education Center, to distribute more than $20 million in digital equity grants to 39 smaller nonprofits run by and for people of color in marginalized communities—a departure from the department’s previous practice of distributing dozens of grants directly. The EEC headed up the largest of three such “consortiums”; the other two were run by the Community Health Network of Washington and the Nisqually Indian Tribe.
For the first year or so, EEC director Sharonne Navas said, the payments from the Commerce Department came regularly. “We’d submit [invoices] for January, get paid in February, and reimburse our subcontractors by the first week of March,” she said. Last year, the state started asking for additional proof of how the organizations were spending their money, like payroll reports, bank statements, and copies of paper receipts. Navas said the EEC provided all the requested documentation, despite chafing at what they saw as shifting, sometimes arbitrary requirements.
Then, in November, a state audit found issues with 12 of the 62 digital navigator contracts with the organizations heading up the three consortiums. The Commerce Department, according to the audit, had failed to ensure that some forms had signatures, hadn’t verified certain contract requirements, and had paid out a total of $1,510 for “food/snacks that were not approved,” including energy drinks.
Shortly after the audit came out, then-Governor Elect Bob Ferguson appointed a new Commerce Director, former state senator Joe Nguyen, who started in January. That same month, the department stopped paying the EEC, telling the group in April that it was going back over every invoice they had submitted between August and December of 2024, and would start paying them again once they were satisfied that everything was in order.
After the checks stopped coming, Navas said, she was forced to first run through the EEC’s reserves to pay her own staff and the subcontractors, and then to take out a line of credit, using her own house as collateral.
“We’ve floated nine payrolls. We’ve used up all our savings,” Navas said in early June. “I had to furlough 11 staff, and then we had to let nine of them go this week, because we just don’t have the cash anymore.” According to Navas, the state now owes the EEC more than $3 million, with no guarantee that the organization and its subcontractors will ever get paid.
The Commerce Department doesn’t dispute that they haven’t paid the EEC and its sub-grantees since January, but they say it’s the EEC’s fault—not theirs. According to Commerce Director Joe Nguyen, appointed by Governor Bob Ferguson in the EEC was always supposed to pay groups like Fresh Start out of its own funds, in advance, and then submit receipts and other documentation to the state to get reimbursement for the money, which amounts to about $1 million a month. To get paid, Nguyen said, all the EEC needs to do is show that it has paid each of the 39 organizations that are part of its consortium, then show the state exactly how each group spent the money.
In April, Nguyen told Navas in an email that “there is no freeze on the funds” and that “the delays and issues with reimbursement are not due to Commerce’s actions. We have expedited payment as soon as the proper documentation are submitted.”
“I don’t understand why they can’t produce some of these basic receipts,” Nguyen told PubliCola. “It’s all on a reimbursement basis—you submit the receipts, we pay you back.”
In a recent “listening session” with the organizations that contract with the EEC, Nguyen told the groups it was the EEC’s fault, not the state’s, that they haven’t gotten paid this year. (PubliCola received a recording of the meeting, which was not public.) The old leadership at Commerce, Nguyen said, had been paying the EEC without proper documentation, which was out of line with state policy and law. All he was asking for, Nguyen said, was receipts and invoices—and for the EEC to pay everyone in advance, which he said they should have been doing all along.
Navas said there are two flaws in the state’s position. The first, she said, is the Commerce Department keeps changing its requirements. When the program was set up under the agency’s previous director, Mike Fong, subcontractors were only required to submit invoices showing how they spent their grant funding. When Nguyen took over, the requests grew more and more specific, and rejections more common. “We’ve shown proof of payment throughout this whole entire thing,” Navas said. (PubliCola reviewed many of the documents the EEC submitted to Commerce and confirmed that they included receipts, payroll reports, and other detailed documentation.)
“The goalposts have moved so much that I don’t think they want to pay us,” Navas said. “Personally, I think that they want to show that we’re incompetent and then show that the new leadership at Commerce has saved the state $6 million.”
The second issue, Navas said, is that the EEC can’t pay people out of money it doesn’t have. “This grant was created during COVID, when nobody had any money,” she said. “The reimbursement process that we were under was, okay, let’s just be a little bit more flexible with this grant, because we have promised to give out 10,000 laptops and pay 200 digital navigators, and there is no organization that can do that and upfront all the money.”
What Commerce is asking now, Navas said, “is that I pay people before they pay us, and I can’t because I have used all my money to keep the organization open. … It is genuinely impossible” to pay out $1 million a month without having the money in hand, she said.
Nguyen said his only goal is to get the Digital Navigator Program in compliance with state standards that apply to all other contracts. “We have an obligation at the state to adhere to the State Administrative and Accounting Manual,” he said. “We want to make sure that any time people work with Commerce, we are being as supportive as possible, but we literally have [laws] and rules we have to follow.”
During the listening session, which did not include EEC representatives, Nguyen said he was trying to find a way to pay each of the 39 contractors individually, rather than through their contracts with EEC—a deal that would require each contractor to independently cut ties with the Equity In Education Center in the hope that they’d stand a better shot of getting paid by working with Commerce directly. So far, none of the groups have taken him up on his offer.
***
Emails between Commerce and the EEC throughout 2025 show that the relationship between the two is strained, if not broken. The two sides seem unlikely to resolve their impasse by the time the Digital Navigator program ends on June 30. Meanwhile, the nonprofits that received funding through the program are scrambling to figure out how to make up their losses.
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Mission Africa, a Federal Way-based organization that provides case management, mentorship, job training, and other services to immigrant and refugee women and youth, used its Digital Navigator grant to provide broadband access and digital literacy skills to a wide range of participants, from kids in high school to recent immigrants who didn’t need to have computer skills in their home countries.
Since 2022, when Mission Africa first applied for a Digital Navigator grant under an earlier iteration of the program, digital navigation has grown to be the group’s biggest program, according to its CEO, Ndudi Chuku.
“You have people who are medical doctors who come here and they’re not computer literate, maybe they have a serious language barrier. These are the people who are coming her, and we say, ‘This is a mouse. This is a desktop,'” Chuku, who is from Nigeria, said. “And these people end up getting good jobs, and they get a living wage to take care of their families.” In addition to basic digital literacy, Mission Africa teaches classes to train young people in coding, SQL, robotics, and cloud computing—skills that help them access better-paying jobs in the tech sector.
Chuku never stopped paying her staff, she said—”I couldn’t tell them, ‘We can’t pay you because we haven’t been paid,’ because that’s not my agreement with them”—but the loss of regular funding from the state has been “very, very impactful.”
Mission Africa, she said, has given the state no reason to believe they’ve been dishonest about how they’ve spent the money, and they’ve submitted meticulous invoices, including bank and payroll statements that include costs that have nothing to do with the Digital Navigator Program, which Chuku considers “an invasion of our privacy.”
“We did good work, we did it well, with integrity and honesty. We did not cut corners in any way and we did not make up numbers,” Chuku said. “For the past 18 months, Commerce has paid EEC for them to pay us. It has never been the other way around. I don’t know why they won’t pay us now.”
Ana Perera, the CEO of Adonai Counseling and Employment Services, said the Digital Navigator Program has funded four staffers, including one who works one-on-one with migrant workers and other Spanish speakers in Eastern Washington. The group has also provided broadband service to people who are “getting out of prison and going out to places like Omak or Clallam Bay,” Perera said, teaching them how to access their medical records, look for job or entrepreneurship opportunities, and access digital services.
“The heart of our agency is reentry,” Perera said, with a focus on employment, training, and behavioral health. The digital navigator funding has allowed Adonai to expand their work into 31 of the state’s 39 counties, “with a huge focus on rural areas” where broadband access is sparse and where participants lack access to digital literacy and training programs.
Perera, who had to start paying staff out of her own salary, said she thinks Nguyen is trying to drive a wedge between the small community organizations like hers and the EEC, which was previously just one of many organizations receiving direct grants from the state.
“I felt like the listening session was there to make sure to create division among our group so it would break down—’This is all EEC’s fault, they haven’t done thism they haven’t done that,'” Perera said.
Morgan, from Fresh Start, offered a similar assessment. “All they’re doing is stall tactics to get to the end of the grant and say, ‘You didn’t comply, you lost funding.’ At the listening session, they said, ‘We can’t pay you because Sharonne was supposed to pay you all up front.’ But she was paying us up front until you stopped paying her.”
Navas said her organization “absolutely made mistakes,” especially in the early days, when the EEC was a $300,000 organization that rapidly expanded to a budget of $13 million. But none of those errors, she said, justifies cutting off funding to so many small community organizations, including some whose staff have had to go on food assistance, couch surf, or take out personal loans in the months they haven’t been paid.
“When it’s a good day, [I think] it might just be new leadership, under a new governor, trying to come in and trying to enforce internal ways of doing things that should have always been in place,” she said. “On a bad day, it’s hard to give people grace who have so much power, and flippantly say that they’re not going to move any faster.”
The state and the EEC have until July 7 to resolve their impasse. Although the state legislature included an extension of the Digital Navigator Program in its 2025-2027 budget, the governor eliminated the program through a line-item veto, citing “the state’s significant fiscal challenges and funding cuts from the federal government.”
Donate to The C Is for Crank's Laptop Retirement Fund
My computer is the single most important piece of equipment I own, and for much of the last five years, I’ve relied on my trusty 2015 MacBook Pro to write and edit posts, tweet up a storm from public meetings, file public records requests, edit transcripts and photos, and generally keep The C Is for Crank in operation. Now it’s time to retire my old machine and trade it in for a newer model.
I’d really appreciate any help my readers are willing to provide to help me defray the cost of this critical piece of office equipment. A new, faster machine (not to mention one without—ahem—an ever-so-slightly cracked screen) will make it easier to bring The C Is for Crank to you every day. My back will also be grateful as I rush from candidate debate to city council meeting to coffee shop back to City Hall. I accept contributions via Venmo (Erica-Barnett-7), Paypal, and by check at the address on my Support page. Thank you so much for your support!
By Erica C. Barnett
