City Council

Cathy Moore Directs $1 Million for Survivor Services to The More We Love, Bypassing Competitive Bidding Process
The city’s schedule for the competitive bidding process for $2 million that got underway last year.

By Erica C. Barnett

Last week, Seattle City Councilmember Cathy Moore directed the city’s Human Services Department to award $1 million in funding for survivors of commercial sexual exploitation (CSE) through a direct contract with The More We Love, a group that began as a company offering private encampment sweeps and now holds most of the city of Burien’s homelessness contracts.

Moore’s move, which the city’s Human Services Department immediately agreed to implement, effectively ended a competitive bidding process that had been underway since last year, when providers who work with sexually exploited adults and minors in Seattle began meeting to discuss what a fair and equitable competitive distribution of new local funding could look like. The groups first met with Moore’s office last September, and came away believing that the funds would be distributed to various groups through a fair, competitive bidding process, according to several people involved in those discussions. HSD later created a timeline for this process and distributed it to the potential bidders.

City staff reiterated their commitment to a fair, open process in meetings that included organizations that work with survivors as well as law enforcement, Harborview, and other “system partners” that could potentially refer people to the new services the $2 million was going to fund.

“From the very beginning, when we heard there might be an opportunity for additional funding and resources to support the community of survivors that work against trafficking, we were thrilled—and the next thing out of our mouth was, ‘Providers deserve an open and fair process,'” said Amaranthia Torres, co-executive director for the Coalition Ending Gender Based Violence.

Unless Moore rescinds her directive—or HSD decides not to fulfill her request—the funding decision will be final. The mayor’s office, which oversees HSD and was included in email conversations about Moore’s directive to forego the usual bidding process, directed all of our questions to HSD. After this story posted, HSD responded to PubliCola’s questions with the following statement: “No contract or award has yet been processed for [Moore’s budget action[. HSD is continuing conversations around next steps for implementing these investments.”

“It was shocking that all of the work to engage with the community this whole time is being thwarted,” Torres said. “It seemed obvious to me that the way city funds get allocated shouldn’t feel like its rigged. Everyone should have a fair shake.”

The $1 million, which is supposed to add 10 beds to The More We Love’s shelter for sexually exploited women in Renton, was part of $2 million Moore set aside to help survivors of commercial sexual exploitation in the city budget last year to help providers respond to a new law reinstating Stay Out of Areas of Prostitution (SOAP) zones. Currently, the only overnight space specifically for people escaping the sex trade in Seattle is a six-bed temporary housing facility run by Real Escape from the Sex Trade (REST).

Representatives from existing Black-led groups that work with survivors said that by giving $1 million to a white-led group that has not previously held a contract to work with CSE survivors, the city is ignoring and undermining the expertise of organizations that focus on Black and brown survivors, who make up a disproportionate number of people in the commercial sex trade. In recent years, organizations that help survivors have made concerted efforts to end what several described as a “white savior” mentality, in which white leaders (often women) believe they know what’s best for Black and brown survivors.

The news was “a slap in the face,” a leader from one Seattle organization, who requested anonymity because her group works with the city, said. “It’s more than a funding issue—it’s about power and whose voices get amplified.”

Another longtime organizational leader said she was disappointed, but not surprised, that Moore was directing the funds to The More We Love.  “It’s not to say their organization couldn’t have been funded, but you should not be giving this organization all the funding,” she said. “You’re saying, ‘We’re going to fund this white-led group and let them run this pilot without any of you,’ but they need all of our support.”

It’s highly unusual for an individual council member to ask an executive department to spend a large amount of money on a single organization through a direct contract without holding a vote to release the funds. It’s perhaps even more unusual for an executive department to take this kind of direction from a legislator.

And there’s another odd wrinkle in this case: Moore apparently asked HSD to give $500,000 of the $2 million to REST to expand its own receiving center in February, but rescinded that offer after HSD had already informed REST that they were getting the money, according to emails and sources familiar with the offer. REST participated in all the conversations leading up to the planned RFP and supported the process; the organization’s leaders were reportedly surprised to learn that the city had decided to bypass the RFP and award some of the money to them directly.

Earlier this year, the Mayor’s Office on Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault (MODVSA), which is part of HSD, launched a series of meetings to discuss the upcoming request for proposals (RFP) for the funds, which was supposed to come out in May. Under an expedited schedule, the city was set to release the funds to the winning bidders in September.

“We’re going to focus on how to get that $2 million and get all of this work organized and coordinated in a very timely fashion,” HSD Director Tanya Kim told Moore’s housing and human services committee during a public meeting in January. “That $2 million requires us to expedite an RFP to get those services online as soon as possible.”

Elizabeth Dahl, executive director of Aurora Commons, said a competitive RFP “is the only way to ensure a fair and equitable process, with appropriate oversight, to ensure the funds allocated to respond to the SOAP legislation are used effectively. Organizations and leaders in the [gender-based violence] field, including ours, were leaned on for their expertise throughout the SOAP legislation process, and we were ensured there would be a fair process for distributing the funds awarded through an RFP. That is not what is happening.”

“Bypassing the RFP process is a blatant dismissal of the work we did and the expertise of those of us who have been doing this work for years,” the first CSE organization leader who requested anonymity said.

Neither Moore’s office nor HSD responded to questions by press time, but we’ll update this story if we hear back.

Emails between Moore and her staff and Kim, Deputy Mayor Tiffany Washington, and other city officials show that Moore directed HSD to give the funds to The More We Love about a week after visiting their shelter in Renton, where she spoke to women living there and found their stories “compelling.”

“Given the urgency of the need for additional receiving beds in a safe location … and The More We Love’s ability to immediately add an additional 10 beds with wrap-around support and 24/7 access, I am requesting $1 million of the $2 million [allocation] be awarded to The More We Love for the provision of 10 emergency receiving center beds at their facility as soon as a contract can be finalized,” Moore told Kim in a March 12 email.

“HSD will move forward with the below, piloting The More We Love’s emergency receiving center—ensuring there’s a clear nexus to Seattle given the location [in Renton]—at $1 million, and implementing the remaining as proposed by HSD,” Kim responded. Renton is about 20 miles away from Aurora Ave. North, where Seattle’s street sex trade is concentrated.

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In a subsequent email directing HSD staff to “move forward with implementation,” Kim said it was unclear how much will be left over from the original $2 million, which also has to pay for a new city staffer, consultants, and any costs associated with the work the city has already done on the planned competitive bidding process.

The More We Love recently opened a small shelter at a house in Renton, but otherwise does not have any track record working with CSE survivors; the group’s leader, Kristine Moreland, worked at REST for a couple of years but was never a direct service provider, according to several people familiar with her role there.

Moreland did not respond to a request for an interview.

In an email inviting Moore to visit The More We Love’s Renton shelter, Moreland said a staffer for the group had recently sat down with the group of women and learned about gaps in service they faced, finding the revelations “both eye-opening and heartbreaking because many of the challenges they described seem like they should be simple to fix, yet they persist.”

The language is similar to the pitch Moreland made to city officials in Burien, where she claimed that she, unlike existing groups with more experience working with chronically homeless people, could easily get people into housing and treatment; subsequently, the Burien council ended the city’s contract with the longstanding outreach group REACH and handed that money to The More We Love.

It’s unclear what services The More We Love provides at its Renton facility. According to Moore’s email to HSD Director Kim, Moreland told the city her organization offers  “substance use treatment, counseling, job training, advocacy in the criminal legal system as victims as well as defendants, and assistance accessing housing.”

But people that have been working in the field for years or decades are skeptical. Because the groups that assist CSE survivors have varying levels of funding and offer different services, they typically work together to provide wraparound support rather than trying to do everything themselves, several representatives from these organizations said. Moreland’s group has never been part of those conversations.

A slide from The More We Love’s five-page “year end report” for 2024

Moreland’s claims about The More We Love’s results have been hard to verify.

Earlier this year, Moreland presented The More We Love’s “year end report” to the Burien City Council. The five-page document says The More We Love “assisted” 303 people, including “25 survivors helped,” between August and December 2024, with a numberless pie chart providing a very high-level breakdown of the services the group claims to have provided. The More We Love provided the same five-page report to Seattle leaders, including Moore, as part of their pitch for funding.

The group has not published a more detailed breakdown of its services or data showing more detailed measures of effectiveness, such as how many people obtain and remain in permanent housing, how many people are able to stay sober or in recovery after treatment or detox, and how many people return to the sex trade after going through their program.

The More We Love has been criticized in the past for distributing private health information about their clients to police, elected officials and at least one private business owner in Burien, and one provider we spoke to expressed concern about the fact that the organization publishes the photos of sexual exploitation survivors on its Facebook page, potentially revealing information about their location and lives to their former traffickers.

Despite holding a major homelessness contract with Burien and securing a million-dollar promise from Seattle, The More We Love just organized as a nonprofit in mid-2023, and did not have enough revenue to file a full 990 tax form with the IRS that year. “They haven’t been on the scene long enough to have results,” the longtime provider said.

Many of the organizational leaders who spoke to PubliCola said they felt the city had not only wasted their time but violated their trust.

The longtime CSE leader called the outcome “really sad, because at the end of the day, the city is breaking the trust of the community. … The city talked about providing a forum to share critical information about investments, and now they’re going behind our backs.”

“We already know that white people are in power and that Black and brown people have to fight ten times as hard to get the same respect,” the other CSE organization leader who requested anonymity said. “It reinforces a harmful pattern where white-led groups secure resources and Black-led groups that have the solutions to these critical issues are sidelined.”

Jails

SCORE Director Calls the Jail “Safe and Secure” Despite Recent Fatalities and Claims of Substandard Care
Renton Police Chief Jon Schuldt and SCORE director Devon Schrum

By Andrew Engelson

At a Renton City Council committee meeting last week, Devon Schrum, the director of South Correctional Entity (SCORE), defended her record and her staff at the jail, which is owned by six cities in south King County. “We are a human-centered culture,” Schrum said. “Our jail is safe and secure. … Our emphasis is on respect for all of the people that we come into contact with, whether that’s in the jail, their families, folks coming to the lobby, our police, professionals that visit the jail, or any attorneys that come through.”

PubliCola reported last month on 10 people who have died while incarcerated at the jail, along with one who died shortly after being released. Former staff and people previously incarcerated at SCORE described hostile staff, substandard medical care, and filthy conditions at the jail. 

Her voice cracking with emotion, Schrum said the deaths at the jail were “hard. It is awful. And [that’s] why we have invested so much in our staff, in the facility and our training and the equipment to try to prevent the next death.”

During her presentation, Schrum noted that SCORE’s medical and opioid treatment programs are accredited by the National Commission on Correctional Health Care and that SCORE spent at least $7 million, more than a fifth of its budget, on health care. The presentation was followed by just 12 minutes of questions, and there was no opportunity for public comment.

Councilmember James Alberson told Schrum she shouldn’t “feel like you’ve been called to the principal’s office. Because I think you have an excellent facility.”

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But Councilmember Carmen Rivera, an assistant professor in criminal justice and forensics at Seattle University, said that while she understands the difficult task SCORE and other jails face taking care of people with an array of untreated medical problems, she also finds it “unacceptable” that so many people have died at SCORE, and would like to get the number closer to zero.

“Before I demand any level of accountability or follow through, I want to check in with these families,” of people who’ve died in the jail, she said. “At the heart of it, people died — someone’s daughter, someone’s brother, someone’s uncle.”

Rivera was the only one of 45 city leaders from the six cities that own SCORE who agreed to speak to PubliCola about conditions at the jail. She said was disappointed that there wasn’t much opportunity to ask Schrum questions at last week’s meeting. She did ask Schrum about a $200,000 pilot program that will equip some SCORE residents with monitoring devices that track vital signs. Schrum said she hopes the devices “alert us that somebody is in crisis, maybe even before they do it themselves.” Schrum did not respond to a request for information about the pilot.

Rivera provided an email that Renton Mayor Armando Pavone sent to all Renton city council members in response to PubliCola’s reporting, saying the mayors of the six cities that own SCORE had decided “that the individual cities will not comment on the article or conduct interviews. We unanimously believe that the SCORE administration is best positioned to answer those questions and address some of the misinformation presented in the article.”

When Renton Councilmember Ryan McIrvin asked Schrum if she thought the jail was underfunded, Schrum said it was not, but that if her staff had a “wish list” it would be to add a second nurse to the night shift.

SCORE nurse Lisa Rogers, who told PubliCola she was fired for speaking up about substandard conditions at the jail, said she was the only staff member qualified to give full medical care during the night shift to more than 400 residents in custody at SCORE.

City Council, Elections, housing, land use, Mayor Harrell, public safety

This Week on PubliCola: March 23, 2025
Mayor Bruce Harrell spoke this week at an announcement about the CARE team’s expansion into south Seattle.

Monday, March 17

Seattle Nice: Sound Transit’s New Leader, Katie Wilson’s Run for Mayor, and Ann Davison’s Challengers

On our latest episode of Seattle Nice, we discused King County Executive Dow Constantine’s likely appointment as head of Sound Transit; mayor Bruce Harrell’s first potentially viable challenger, Katie Wilson; and a new candidate, Erika Evans, who’s joining the race against Republican City Attorney Ann Davison.

Tuesday, March 18

PubliCola Questions: City Attorney Candidate Nathan Rouse

Nathan Rouse, a public defender who’s also challenging Davison, talked with PubliCola about his agenda for the office. If elected, he said, he’ll bring back community court, end Davison’s “high utilizers” initiative that targets repeat offenders for extra punishment, and focus more resources on prosecuting wage theft, protecting tenants, and providing resources to crime victims.

Wednesday, March 19

“We’re Gonna Throw It Away.” Dan Strauss, on Losing End of Stadium Housing Vote, Predicts Disaster for Industrial Seattle

After months of deliberation, the council voted 6-3 to allow a limited amount of housing near the city’s two stadiums south of downtown. Dan Strauss, a vocal adversary of the plan, dominated the five-hour meeting with increasingly dour speeches predicting the downfall of the maritime industry in Seattle, due primarily to traffic caused by people living in apartments in the area.

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Thursday, March 20

CARE Crisis Response Team Moves into South Seattle As Council Complains It’s Ineffective

The city’s CARE crisis response team—a team of social workers that responds, accompanied by police, to certain 911 calls—announced this week that it’s expanding citywide. Last week, the city council complained that the the team has not produced visible reductions in misery on Seattle’s streets; in response, CARE’s director noted that the team is limited under an agreement with the police union to 24 responders.

Friday, March 21

When a Top Mayoral Staffer Was Accused of Sexual Assault, These Women Decided It Was Time to Come Forward

Mayor Bruce Harrell’s external affairs director, Pedro Gomez, was accused of raping a woman he met through the mayor’s office last year. After she came forward, several other women spoke to PubliCola about their own experiences with Gomez, including a coworker who said she never reported her own assault. Harrell’s office said there was never any indication that Gomez had any history of inappropriate behavior with women.

 

Crime, Mayor Harrell

When a Top Mayoral Staffer Was Accused of Sexual Assault, These Women Decided It Was Time to Come Forward
A description of evidence submitted as part of Delostrinos’ rape kit—an invasive, lengthy procedure that victims are encouraged to undergo to preserve DNA and other evidence immediately after a sexual assault

By Erica C. Barnett

Late last September, Mayor Bruce Harrell put a high-ranking longtime staffer, external affairs director Pedro Gomez, on paid administrative leave after learning that Gomez was under investigation for alleged sexual assault. His accuser, Cheryl Delostrinos, met Gomez through his work at the mayor’s office, and filed a report with the Seattle Police Department five days after the incident in June. Gomez remained on the city’s payroll until January, when the case advanced to the King County Prosecutor’s office, prompting his resignation.

Delostrinos, who spoke with the Stranger earlier this year,  was the first woman to make public allegations against Harrell’s longtime staffer. In recent weeks, however PubliCola has spoken with several other women who said many of the circumstances Delostrinos described in her police report were unnervingly familiar, down to the Capitol Hill restaurant where he bought them drink after drink, bragging that he was a part-owner of the business. That restaurant, Mercado Luna (previously known as Mezcalaria Oaxaca) shut down in September.

Two of the women said Gomez offered to mentor them or collaborate on future business opportunities, then took them out for a night of heavy drinking and surprised them by suddenly kissing them at the end of the night. Those two women ended up in what they described as consensual (and overlapping) relationships with Gomez that they now regret. “I ended up feeling very violated,” one said.

Another, who worked with Gomez at the city, said she had a single, nonconsensual sexual encounter with Gomez after a night that began as a meeting to discuss city business and ended in a blackout. “I’d have weird sight, where I could see him sitting on my couch and I was very confused,” she recalled. “Somehow it progressed to the bedroom—it was like flashes of memory. I was just like, ‘There’s no way I can be this drunk.'”

Before he resigned last September, Gomez had worked for the city for more than a decade, including several years as a staffer for former mayor Ed Murray. During the Jenny Durkan administration, Gomez was the small business development director for the city’s Office of Economic Development. He returned to the mayor’s office in 2021, before Harrell even took office, as part of an initial wave of insider hires.

Delostrinos said she decided to go public with her story because she wants to reduce the stigma and shame associated with sexual assault and to help other survivors see that they have options. “I have nothing to be ashamed of. This is something that happened to me,” she said.

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Years before Delostrinos filed her report alleging Gomez had raped her, another woman—a city employee who worked with Gomez directly—had a similar experience, she told PubliCola. The woman has never spoken publicly about what happened to her, but says she was inspired to come forward after news of the allegations came out and she began comparing notes with one of Gomez’ ex-girlfriends, who posted on social media about Gomez.

The city employee told PubliCola Gomez sexually assaulted her after a night of drinking that began as a meeting to discuss her progress at work. She never called the police or pursued charges, she said, because as a young, single mom, she couldn’t afford to lose her job. Additionally, the woman said, she belongs to an immigrant community with a deep-seated “stay in culture” ethos of resolving issues internally, rather than going to police, and a lot of “cultural shame and stigma” around sexual assault.

Unlike the other women, the city employee felt she couldn’t say no to meeting Gomez for drinks to discuss work matters. She said she tried to keep their frequent meetings, which took place after hours, focused on business, but Gomez would often turn the conversation to more personal matters—like their previous romantic relationships, their common background as immigrants, and their obligation to support each other.

“It felt really fucked up—really cheap, really dirty, really sad,” she said. “Because what he’s saying is the truth—it is hard, especially as a young Black immigrant woman. We share some of the character traits that he used to prey on me—like, ‘We really have to make a lane for ourselves,’ and talking about what a big deal he is in the community.”

One evening around 6:00, the woman recalled, she met Gomez at Mercado Luna (then known as Mezcalaria Oaxaca) for what she assumed was a routine meeting to talk about issues at work. Very quickly, though “the conversation swayed away from work, and the drinks kept flowing. … “I’m talking about rounds and rounds, just continuous.” Gomez kept saying things were “‘on the house, because I take care of my people,'” she said. As Gomez watched her drink, she said, he nursed a glass of mezcal, which she had never heard of, telling her it was meant to be “sipped.” As the night wore on, things got “blurry” and “kind of messy.”

She had never expressed any romantic interest in Gomez, the woman said. “There was never a progression, like, ‘Oh my god, I have feelings for him.’ It was never, ever, ever, ever mutual.”

By the end of the evening, she recalled, she was disoriented, weak, and losing patches of time.”It was almost as if my vision had a stutter —it was like, ‘Okay, my body’s betraying me and I’m not sure what’s going on.'” When Gomez offered to drive her home, she thought, “this is a good guy taking care of a coworker who got messy.”

Back at her house, she thought to herself, “There’s no way I can be this drunk.” Things seemed to be happening in flashes: Gomez was on her couch, then, the next minute, in her bedroom, and suddenly she was in the middle of a sex act to which she says she did not consent. The next thing she remembers, she was waking up the next day.

“I have no idea when I went to bed. I don’t know how long he was there afterward or when he let himself out,” she said. The next day, she found her phone and wallet “neatly put in a place that I would never normally put them in my house.”

“I felt gross. I was filled with so much deep shame,” the woman said.

Apart from a text saying something along the lines of “last night got crazy,” she said Gomez “pretended like it never happened.” At one point, she said, he seemed to be “testing” her to see what she remembered about that night. “He was like, ‘Do you remember what tattoos I have?’ And I said, ‘You have tattoos?”

The woman stayed at her job for another year. She said she never confronted Gomez, but there were many times when she would have “random outburst of anger” and lash out at him over text. She felt furious that he wouldn’t acknowledge he had done anything wrong. “I’m pretending like this shit didn’t happen. I didn’t tell a fucking soul. And I know for a fucking fact that he remembered more than I did.”

Shortly before she left her position, the woman said Gomez drove to her home one night and invited himself in. “Conveniently, he had a bottle of mezcal in his car.” The woman said he tried to convince her to “do what we did last time. He was like, ‘I can really trust you. You’re good people because you don’t gossip.  You don’t tell other people your business.” She told him her brothers were coming to drop her kids off, she said, and “he was quick to get out of there.”

Because Gomez was involved in Harrell’s campaign and said he could help her get a better position at the city once Harrell was in office, “I didn’t want to burn a bridge, because he really put a heavy emphasis on how a recommendation from him goes so far,” she said. “He said, ‘Bruce is going to win and I’m going to be working for him. … I’ll be the reference of a lifetime.'”

The woman said Gomez never followed through on his promises to help her get a better job at the city, and after she left, she fell into a deep depression. At one point, she went to a barber in the Central District and asked him to shave off her hair—and suddenly found herself facing a placard from the city touting Gomez’ work relocating the shop as part of an anti-displacement effort. “This guy was raving about how much a savior he was. He had a great rapport with all these small businesses, and you felt it,” she sighed.

Continue reading “When a Top Mayoral Staffer Was Accused of Sexual Assault, These Women Decided It Was Time to Come Forward” →

Addiction, City Council, Mayor Harrell

CARE Crisis Response Team Moves into South Seattle As Council Complains It’s Ineffective

 

CARE Team director Amy Barden (l) along with two members of the crisis-response team.

By Erica C. Barnett

The city’s CARE Team, a group of 24 civilian first responders who respond to 911 calls that don’t require a police presence, announced Wednesday that they’ll soon be expanding into Southwest and Southeast Seattle. The team is part of the city’s 911 department, now called the CARE (Community Assisted Response and Engagement) Department.

In a news conference outside the Delridge Community Center Wednesday morning, CARE Department chief Amy Barden compared the pilot program to the construction of the waterfront tunnel that replaced the Alaskan Way Viaduct, making the new Overlook Walk park at Pike Place Market possible.

“The vision was to recapture and acknowledge the spirit of our ancestry, the essence of our shared values, to reaffirm our connection to nature and to each other,” Barden said. “And so then my thoughts naturally turn to the past two years, to my adventures and the questions and comments and skepticism and incredulity I’ve encountered.”

The viaduct replacement may not be the most auspicious metaphor (just south of the Market, the waterfront street widens into a vast, ugly highway), but the skepticism about the CARE team’s progress is just as real as criticism of the tunnel project was a decade ago.

That skepticism, Barden noted, has sometimes come from people who think it’s unsafe to send social workers to respond to 911 calls, or asking why the city is spending money on the CARE pilot instead of police. More recently, though, it came from members of the City Council, who interrogated Barden last week about why CARE hasn’t shown more progress at improving conditions on Seattle streets.

The pilot program, which began with six staffers in 2023, is now a 24-person team (plus three staff who don’t respond directly to calls) for which the city spends a little more than $2 million a year.

In a meeting of the council’s public safety committee last week, council members interrogated Barden about what they described as a lack of results from that spending. Cathy Moore (whose district was not served by the pilot program until very recently) said she was dismayed to hear that her constituents were calling 911 for people in crisis and CARE wasn’t being dispatched.

“We have enough money in the city. We have enough services in the city to make it work. You’ve been in place now for a while. Why are we not doing a better job with the resources that we have?” she asked.

Other council members piled on, saying the city already had “an abundance of services” to help people in crisis (Rob Saka), that CARE was failing to call designated crisis responders to force people into treatment (Moore), and that the project, in general, “isn’t working” and shouldn’t be expanded until it is (Maritza Rivera).

“It’s a very broken system, and we have to fix it,” Moore said. “And just creating one more … agency, and [spending] another $100 million, is not going to fix it if we don’t come together holistically and talk about how it’s broken, be honest about where it’s not working, and the fact that we have different ideological positions about what should be happening. And we need to be evidence-based and be prepared to say sometimes, ‘Your civil liberties do you no good if you’re dead.'”

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Barden noted that the CARE team has just 24 members, spread across the city, which means that in Moore’s council district, there probably won’t be more than two to four people available to respond to calls at any time. “North is absolutely a priority for me,” she said. “We are studying those crisis hot spots, but I want to manage your expectations.”

One thing Barden didn’t bring up explicitly is that the CARE Team can only refer to services that are available, and that those services—including long-term treatment, case management, housing, and even basic detox—are not as ample and widely available as council members repeatedly suggested. Nor is it a great use of resources to send people through inadequate light-touch services again and again, Barden noted.

After Barden said 14 days in a facility isn’t long enough for someone to make major, necessarily life changes before sending them back out onto the street, Moore objected, citing the common refrain that relapse is a part of recovery and it often takes “many rounds” of treatment for people to get sober.

The other solution Moore suggested, involuntary commitment, is not a simple matter of pulling people off the street and taking them to treatment; even those who meet the standards in state law can only be confined for five days against their will, plus a potential 14 more with a judge’s order.

Speaking with PubliCola a few days after the council meeting, Barden expressed frustration at council members who say “‘Hey, Amy, can’t we round everybody up and detox them?’ … I don’t know why it’s so difficult to grasp that different levels of support work for different people. A lot of people [on the street] are demonstrably getting worse, but we’re like, ‘Sentence fulfilled, return to community!'”

In its first 18 months, the CARE team has responded to just under 1,800 calls. While council members like Saka expressed skepticism about expanding the pilot “unless and until” the pilot “is starting to achieve better results,” the primary constraint on the CARE Team’s size is a memorandum of understanding between the CARE department and the Seattle Police Officers Guild limiting the total number of CARE responders to 24. Any future expansion—Barden has suggested 96 responders as a near-term goal—will have to be bargained with SPOG, which has historically resisted reducing the police department’s authority in any way, including for jobs such as directing traffic at special events.

On Wednesday, PubliCola asked Harrell whether he shared the council’s concerns about CARE’s effectiveness. “I think that there was somewhat of a misunderstanding of the role and scope of these fine people,” Harrell said. “So we will take the feedback. … And hopefully, a year from now, we’ll have even more success stories on the lives we save.”

 

City Council, housing

“We’re Gonna Throw It Away.” Dan Strauss, on Losing End of Stadium Housing Vote, Predicts Disaster for Industrial Seattle

By Erica C. Barnett

On a 6-3 vote yesterday, the Seattle City Council approved legislation sponsored by Council President Sara Nelson to allow new apartments in the area immediately south of Seattle’s two stadiums, after weeks of often acrimonious debate between supporters of the bill (including affordable housing developers, community groups, small manufacturers, and the Building Trades union) and opponents (representatives from maritime industries, the Port, and housing advocates who argue it’s unhealthy to allow apartments on arterial streets near an industrial zone.)

Councilmember Rob Saka, considered the swing vote, voted “yes,” as did Councilmember Joy Hollingsworth, who voted against the bill in committee.

The new law will allow a maximum of 990 apartments, half of them affordable to people making less than 90 percent of median income (smaller units would lower income limits). Under amendments adopted yesterday, renters would have to affirm in their lease that they know they’re living in a “geologic hazard” area that’s vulnerable during earthquakes; building owners would have to post several prominent warning signs saying the same; and housing would be prohibited along the west side of First Ave. S., the main artery through the area. The amendments also prohibit building owners from seeking any public subsidy at any point, including for future environmental remediation.

Without belaboring the five-hour meeting (which I covered in real time over on Bluesky), one key dynamic jumped out: Councilmember Dan Strauss, who opposed Nelson’s legislation from the jump, dominated yesterday’s meeting, first by attempting repeatedly to delay the vote, and then by reiterating his arguments against the proposal long after it was clear that the vote wasn’t going to go his way. In about three and a half hours of deliberation, which included nine amendments by other councilmembers, Strauss spoke for well over an hour, returning to the same points again and again and suggesting repeatedly that if his colleagues had only done their homework, they would be voting with him.

It’s common for city councilmembers to speak out in vociferously when they know they’re going to lose (as Bob Kettle, who also opposed the bill from the beginning, did yesterday, even accusing his colleagues of being “aligned with the Trump administration” by voting to put housing near a polluted area). It’s unusual, with the notable exception of former councilmember Kshama Sawant, for a council member to use every opportunity for comment to make the same repetitive points long after it’s clear they’ve lost.

Strauss returned more than a dozen times to the fact that hotels are already allowed around the stadiums, suggesting at one point that his colleagues probably weren’t even aware of that. (There’s a Silver Cloud Inn right next to the stadiums, so it’s hard to imagine they aren’t). Strausswas chair of the land use committee when the city adopted an updated industrial lands policy that was changed at the last minute to allow hotels and offices in the stadium district, but not housing, a decision Strauss characterized as a maximalist and permanent compromise. (Proponents of housing in the area have argued that the deal was actually the opposite—the city would approve industrial lands without the contentious housing element, then revisit the housing question later.)

“Again, say it with me now,” Strauss intoned, some four hours in. “This proposal could be built today, if the units were hotels.” Since one of the main arguments against housing in the area is that renters’ cars would jam up traffic to and from the Port’s freight terminals, it’s hard to see how hotels would be much better—unless the idea is that tourists would use transit and renters would not, a conclusion that isn’t borne out by Seattle’s own experience with parking mandates, which have shown that renters in areas served by transit are far less likely to own cars than other Seattle residents.

As the meeting neared its 7pm conclusion, Strauss went so far as to imply that the 990 proposed apartments would actually obliterate the city’s maritime and industrial industry. Gesturing toward the “orange cranes” on the waterfront outside City Hall, he wondered aloud, “how much training does it take to get a skilled operator? How much investment does it take? And we’re gonna throw it away. We’ll keep the picture of it, though, in the conference room.”

Strauss repeatedly suggested shadowy forces were at play in some of his colleagues’ yes votes, fixating on a comment from Cathy Moore about a walking tour she and Maritza Rivera took at which, they said, a neighborhood group member suggested vacating South Occidental Street near the stadiums so it could become a pedestrian-only zone.. “The package of amendments today clearly demonstrates that council members have good intent, and that they know that housing in this area is a bad idea, but feel compelled to vote on this proposal or for this proposal,” Strauss said. “Today, for even me, new information has come to light, which further leads me to believe there were commitments or things shared in private.”

“If the next step from here as an alley vacation, this isn’t about affordable housing or union-built anything—this is back to 2016 about a whole different conversation,” Strauss said. The apparent implication was that the owner of much of the property rezoned for housing yesterday, Chris Hansen, had cut a side deal with other council members to bring back his 2016 stadium proposal without Strauss’ knowledge; that proposal died after the council narrowly rejected a proposal to vacate Occidental. Rivera and Moore denied this and said they regretted bringing it up.

Strauss said the zoning change, if approved, would “possibly be the first decision before this council that cannot be taken back.” While it’s true that once a building goes up, the council doesn’t have the power to tear it down, the city does change zoning laws all the time. It seemed like what Strauss wanted to say is that he didn’t like the way his colleagues were voting. But that’s sometimes just part of the job.