Tag: 2019 Year in Review

The Year in Review: Defining Stories of 2019

Throughout 2019, I returned to some stories again and again, zeroing on issues like homelessness, equity, the influence of big money in local elections, criminal justice, and transportation. This isn’t a list of the year’s biggest posts—that’s over here—but a look at some of the themes that emerged on this site throughout the year. These stories include deep dives into the work of the city’s ever-expanding Navigation Team (a group of police and human service employees that removes homeless encampments), Sound Transit’s fare enforcement policies, the city’s retreat from its ambitious bike infrastructure plans, and the ongoing (d)evolution of the regional homelessness authority.

All this work has been made possible by readers who support the site and allow me to do this as my full-time job. If you’re one of the thousands of readers who use this site as a resource for news and analysis of what’s going on in the Seattle area, I urge you to take the next step and become a sustaining supporter by contributing a few dollars a month or making a one-time contribution today. Keep independent media alive in Seattle in 2020 by donating to the C Is for Crank. You’ll be glad you did.

Big Money Swamps Local Elections, Voters Say “Nah”

In addition to being the first major test of democracy vouchers (publicly funded vouchers that went directly to voters to spend on the candidate or candidates of their choice), this was also the year when big corporations (most notably Amazon, which spent nearly $1.5 million on a Chamber-backed slate of candidates), former elected officials (Tim Burgess, who started the People for Seattle PAC) and conservative groups (most notably Moms for Seattle, which backed most of the Chamber slate plus too-conservative-for-big-business D5 candidate Ann Davison Sattler) spent millions to influence council races. In the end, the only business-backed candidate who won was former Burgess aide Alex Pedersen, whose anti-development views are more in line with socialist Kshama Sawant’s than with the Chamber’s.

Sawant, Predicting $1 Million in PAC Spending Against Her, Won’t Participate in Democracy Voucher Program

Big Business, Labor, and Activist Money Set to Dwarf Individual Spending on Council Campaigns

Fueled by Unprecedented Spending, Seattle City Council Elections Defy Easy Interpretation

Seattle Finally Upzones

Yesterday, the state Growth Management Hearings Board dealt what may be a death blow to opponents of the city’s Mandatory Housing Affordability legislation, which modestly upzones the city’s multifamily areas and allows more housing in 6 percent of the city’s existing single-family land. For years, a group called SCALE (led, in large part, by new Alex Pedersen council aide Toby Thaler) has delayed the zoning changes, arguing that the new rules violate the state Growth Management Act and the State Environmental Policy Act. The GMHB’s ruling rejected every single one of SCALE’s arguments. The group (sans Thaler) can still appeal to the King County Superior Court, but the standard for consideration gets tougher the higher the appeals go.

I covered the MHA battle this year, along with a related debate over whether to make it easier for homeowners to build secondary units in their basements and backyards—a proposal that was also subject to delay tactics by single-family activists.

Takeaways From Seattle’s Upzoning Endgame

Morning Crank: “I Have Not Seen Any Speculative ADU Bubble”

Durkan’s Backyard Cottage Plan Would Have Kept Some Old Restrictions, Imposed New Ones

City Didn’t Know How Many Were Moving from Homelessness to Housing

Although Mayor Jenny Durkan frequently touted the fact that All Home’s annual one-night count found fewer people living outside, the city was forced to admit last year that they did not know how many individual people were actually moving from homelessness to housing as the result of their efforts. This admission came after I (and subsequently others) reported that the city was conflating the number of households that exited specific programs with the number of individual people leaving homelessness. The city eventually updated its numbers, but the city’s initial reaction—the director of the Homeless Strategy and Investment division suggested that the details were less important than the trendline—suggested a troubling lack of attention to detail for a “data-driven” department.

Fact-Checking the Homelessness Claims in the Mayor’s State of the City Speech

Evening Crank: “No Matter How You Look at It, It’s Getting Better”

Turmoil in the Human Services Department

As the Human Services Department prepared to cede control over its homelessness-related work to a new joint city-county authority, the itself was in turmoil, starting at the very beginning of the year, when council member Kshama Sawant held hearings at which HSD workers denounced Durkan’s nominee to lead the department, interim director Jason Johnson. Eventually, the council decided not to approve Johnson, infuriating the mayor, who decided to keep him on without a formal appointment. Also this year, an internal survey showed high dissatisfaction among HSD employees, a number of key staffers left and have not been replaced, and a pilot program to give people living in their cars a safe place to park at night was quietly scuttled by the mayor, who later ramped up efforts to crack down on “extensively damaged” RVs.

Tempers Fray Over Human Services Director Nomination

“Intentional Healing”: Council Members (Including Sawant) Grill Human Services Nominee

Survey Says: City’s Homelessness Staff Feel Unrecognized, Out of the Loop

Finally, a Regional Homelessness Authority 

After more than a year of efforts, King County and the city finally agreed on a plan to create a new regional authority that will oversee the entire region’s homelessness efforts. Sort of. The plan the county and city ultimately approved had little to do with the original plan, which was designed to insulate expert decision-makers from political considerations by putting authority over the new body in the hands of subject-matter experts, not elected officials.

Elected officials didn’t like the idea of losing power, and suburban elected officials especially didn’t like the fact that they did not have direct representation on the board overseeing the authority, so the plan was inverted to return most of the power to politicians and to give suburban cities five guaranteed representatives on the 12-member oversight board, despite the fact that suburban cities will not contribute financially to the authority. The new rules also bar the authority from ever raising money, a sharp departure from the recommendations of last year’s One Table process, which concluded that the region needed additional revenue to address homelessness.

Long-Awaited Details of New Regional Homelessness Authority Announced, Though Many Questions Remain Unanswered

City, County Close to Deal on Regional Homelessness Plan that Ditches New Governing Body for “Interlocal Agreement”

As County Heads Into Homelessness Vote, City Council Considers Putting On the Brakes

“Nobody Thinks We’ve Gotten This 100% Right”: City Joins Regional Homelessness Authority

 

 

 

 

The Ever-Expanding Navigation Team

Mayor Durkan has repeatedly expanded the Navigation Team, a group of police officers and city staffers that removes unauthorized encampments and, in theory, “navigates” their displaced residents to shelter and services. The team came under fire this year for failing in that second mission, first in an audit that the Human Services Department denounced as “not factual,” and later when the city’s social services partner, REACH, decided to stop participating in encampment removals because it was hampering their ability to build trusting relationships with clients.

The biggest change Durkan made to the Navigation Team this year, though, was when she redirected them to focus primarily on removing “obstruction” encampments, such as tents in public parks, rather than on “72-hour cleans,” which require the team to provide advance warning and offers of shelter and services. Later, the city opted to train SPD bike officers to remove encampments even when the Navigation Team isn’t present. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Navigation Team rarely refers people successfully to shelter or services. Instead, most of the people they encounter “navigate” themselves to their next encampment.

More Encampment Removals, Less Notice? Durkan to Make Navigation Team Announcement

100 Officers Trained to Implement Anti-Camping Rules as Navigation Team Expands to 7-Day Schedule

Morning Crank Part 1: City Acknowledges Navigation Team Rarely Provides Services or Outreach

Most Navigation Team Referrals Don’t Lead to Shelter, Previously Unreleased City Data Shows

 

Crackdown on “Prolific Offenders”

Even before KOMO ran viral anti-homeless propaganda video, “Seattle Is Dying,” law-and-order activists like former city attorney candidate Scott Lindsay were already building a case that something had to be done to address so-called downtown disorder—petty thefts, unsightly outbursts, and people exhibiting other visible signs of mental illness and drug addiction in the downtown core. In May, Lindsay released a report titled “System Failure,” which took a highly selective look at a list of 100 “prolific offenders”—a group of people, hand-picked by Lindsay, who have been arrested again and again for crimes such as theft and disorderly conduct downtown. The report  became a kind of source text for “Seattle Is Dying,” as well as the template for a proposal to deal with “high-barrier offenders” that would have expanded probation, created a new program “navigator” inside the jail, and implemented a new “case conferencing” system that could have resulted in additional criminal charges for people released from jail who failed to comply with its requirements.

Criminal justice reform advocates and city council members objected to the proposals, particularly the plan to expand probation, and reduced or froze funding for the plans. Still, the idea that there are “prolific offenders” downtown who must be addressed with a criminal justice response—as opposed to people with mental illness and addiction who could benefit from programs like Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion—will surely persist in 2020, and could come up again when the mayor makes her third State of the City speech next month.

Morning Crank: The Council Takes a Closer Look at the “Prolific Offenders” Report

New Plan for Dealing With “Prolific Offenders” Substitutes Punishment for Harm Reduction, Advocates Say

As Council Seeks Funding for Successful Arrest Diversion Program, Mayor Proposes “Doubling Down on Probation”

Durkan vs. Cyclists

This was the year that cycling advocates went to war with Mayor Durkan, protesting her decision to eliminate a long-planned protected bike lane on 35th Ave. NE and cut a number of top-priority bike infrastructure improvements from the city’s Bicycle Master Plan, leaving south Seattle without a single direct bike connection to downtown. Durkan decided to kill the 35th Ave. bike lane after businesses and neighborhood activists protested that adding a lane for cyclists would eliminate too much parking and argued that cyclists could use a different route several blocks away from the neighborhood thoroughfare. The South Seattle bike lanes were cut to save money in the wake of Move Seattle Levy cost overruns. The city’s Bicycle Advisory Board recommended different cuts, and identified South Seattle as its top priority for bike infrastructure, largely on the grounds that the city has failed to adequately fund safe bike lanes in South Seattle for decades.

Although funding for a small piece of the south Seattle bike infrastructure, which the city’s Bicycle Advisory Board had identified as a top funding priority, was eventually restored, 35th Ave. was repaved without parking or a bike lane—a configuration that contributed to reckless driving and crashes almost as soon as it opened.

All this came just one year after Durkan opted to delay another bike lane that had been in the works for years—the planned Fourth Avenue bike lane downtown, which the mayor’s office said could interfere with bus mobility during light rail construction.

Mayor Kills Controversial Northeast Seattle Bike Lane; New Design Also Lacks Parking

Bike Master Plan Update: Fewer Protected Lanes, Longer Delays

“The Mayor Does Not Care About Bikes”: Advocates United In Opposition to Bike Plan Cuts

Durkan, SDOT Get an Earful from Advocates About Proposed Bike Plan Cuts

“I’m Here Because I’m Worried”: South Seattle Responds to Scaled-Back Bike Plan

Sound Transit Fare Enforcement Practices Debated

This was the year that critics of Sound Transit’s fare enforcement policies got serious about calling for reducing or eliminating fare enforcement, and some board members seemed receptive. Early in the year, board members questioned why Sound Transit still criminalizes fare nonpayment, pointing to King County’s own decision to revise its practices so that no one ends up in jail because they couldn’t pay their fare. A King County survey concluded that most “fare evaders” were people who couldn’t afford the fare; Sound Transit CEO Peter Rogoff responded by suggesting that reducing fare enforcement efforts might lower the agency’s farebox recovery, the amount of money Sound Transit gets from people who pay their fares.

Fare enforcement came up later in the year when Sound Transit’s own numbers showed that African American riders were far more likely to receive tickets for fare evasion than other customers. And an incident in September raised additional questions about whether Sound Transit officers were treating black riders differently than white ones, after a fare enforcement officer was caught on tape photographing the ID of a high-school student on her way to school on the first day of classes, when all high-school students were to receive free ORCA transit passes.

Sound Transit Board Members Raise Concerns About Punitive Fare Enforcement Policy

Sound Transit Tickets Disproportionate Number of Black Riders, New Numbers Show

Georgetown Sobering Center Canceled, Sound Transit’s Tone-Deaf Fare Enforcement Tweet, and Seattle Times Loses Another African American Writer

 

The C Is for Crank’s Most Popular Posts of 2019

As we close out the year here at The C Is for Crank, here’s a look back at the year’s most widely-read posts—the ones that grabbed readers and got them sharing and talking.

Although the year’s most popular posts span the gamut of topics—from a local media scandal to the legal battle over the Showbox to efforts to track homeless people using biometric scans—one theme that unites almost all of these posts is that they were reported exclusively here at The C Is for Crank. In most cases, if I hadn’t reported these stories, no one else would have. That’s one reason I urge you to support this site by kicking a few bucks a month to help me keep doing this work. When you provide a financial contribution to keep this site going, you’re directly supporting an independent media outlet free from ads, sponsored content, or influence from corporate backers.

In addition to helping me make a living as an independent journalist—a rarity in today’s contracting media landscape—your contribution today will make it possible for me to expand and improve the site in the coming year. (More on that soon). So if you’re one of the thousands of readers who visit this site regularly and if you learned something you wouldn’t have known otherwise, consider taking the next step and becoming one of the hundred of individual contributors who make my work possible. Just $5, $10, or $15 a month—or a one-time contribution—makes a huge difference.

Thanks for your support, and happy 2020.

1. Homelessness Agency Director Suspended, Investigation Launched After Racy Drag Show at Annual Conference (Exclusive)

Earlier this month, King County’s coordinating agency on homelessness, All Home, hosted a topless drag performance by a formerly homelessness trans woman at their annual conference. The performer, who came to Seattle from Spokane to speak about her experiences as a formerly homeless trans woman of color, did not get paid, although an emcee encouraged conference attendees to throw dollar bills at her as tips. The show raised questions about consent (some attendees said they were not warned about the overtly sexual nature of the performance) and what All Home had been thinking. Participants at the midday conference included representatives from both Muslim and Christian religious groups that provide services to homeless King County residents.

Since this story ran on December 12, All Home acting director Kira Zylstra stepped down from her position. According to King County, an investigation is ongoing.

2. “You Uppity F*cking Bitch”: The Response to the Viral Public Comment Video Was Predictable and Avoidable 

Richard Schwartz, a perennial public commenter, broke a basic city council rule when he used the council’s public comment period, at which comments are limited to items on the council agenda, to rant about cyclists going “too fast” in the bike lane on Westlake Ave. Council member Debora asked Schwartz to stay on topic, but he refused, demanding extra time and assailing the other council members for failing to pay rapt attention to his off-topic rant. The video went viral on right-wing media, which portrayed Schwartz as a victim of an imperious council woman who thought she was too good to pay attention to the common man.

What happened next was predictable: Emails and calls poured in from across the country, unleashing a torrent of racist and sexist abuse against Juarez and every woman of color on the council, including women who were not even at the meeting. More hateful emails were addressed to Teresa Mosqueda, who was not at the meeting, than to Mike O’Brien, who was.

3. Showbox Building Owner Terminates Lease Amid Preservation Discussions (Exclusive)

The fate of the Showbox in downtown Seattle was a recurring theme this year, as the owner of the building duked it out with music fans who opposed plans to redevelop the building as a 40-story tower. Although the city council had just adopted new zoning rules intended to encourage precisely this kind development—dense housing—downtown, the council became the club’s most ardent defenders, “saving” the nondescript two-story building by including it in the Pike Place Market Historic District and subjecting it to the same strict controls designed to save the farmers’ market across the street in 1971. 

The owners of the building sued, noting both the zoning change that made their planned development possible and the fact that the building had only been a rock club for short stretches of its existence, mostly in the 1990s. A legal battle is still ongoing, but in the meantime, the owners announced that they would terminate the lease held by Anschutz Entertainment Group, the multinational entertainment corporation that actually owns the Showbox brand, when it ends in 2024.

4. City’s Outreach Partner Disengages from Navigation Team as City Removes More Encampments Without Notice (Exclusive)

As Mayor Jenny Durkan ramped up homeless encampment sweeps and directed the Navigation Team to shift its focus toward removing “obstruction” encampments (eliminating the requirement that the team provide advance notice or offers of shelter and services), the city’s longtime nonprofit outreach partner, REACH, decided it could no longer participate in encampment removals. Among their reasons: Homeless encampment residents had begun associating the outreach workers with the police who lead encampment removals, making it difficult for these social-service workers to develop trust with encampment residents.

After the story ran, REACH implemented a geographically based approach to encampment outreach, and Durkan expanded the Navigation Team to include two new “system navigators,” city employees who are supposed to take the place of REACH workers by offering shelter and services to encampment residents during sweeps. Judging from the tiny percentage of Navigation Team referrals that actually lead to shelter, and the even tinier number of Navigation Team contacts that lead to referrals in the first place, the “outreach and engagement” part of encampment removals has a lot of room for improvement.

5. Durkan Pushes City to Study Biometric Tracking of Homeless “Customers” (Exclusive)

Mayor Durkan asked the Human Services Department to study mandatory biometric screening of homeless shelter and service clients, using fingerprints or other biometric markers to track the city’s homeless population as they move through the homelessness system. The idea, the mayor’s office said, is to create “efficiencies” that improve on the scan cards currently used by some Seattle shelters, and to reduce duplication of data across various shelters.

Privacy and homeless advocates recoiled at the idea of digitally tracking homeless people, on the grounds that biometric scans are invasive and likely to keep some potential clients (or, as the city calls them, “customers”) from seeking shelter and services—particularly people with mental illnesses that cause paranoia, domestic violence survivors, and undocumented immigrants. Internal memos indicate that HSD staffers are also skeptical; one staffer suggested that Durkan had “probably just heard about a cool thing” and was not trying to solve any actual problem. I’ll be following up on this story in early 2020, when HSD sends its report on biometrics to the mayor.

6.  Where Is Durkan’s $195,000 Cabinet-Level General? “Out and About,” According to His Schedule (Exclusive)

This story was based on a public disclosure request I filed about Durkan’s cabinet-level “director of mobility operations coordinatigron,” Mike Worden—a retired Air Force officer who insisted that city employees refer to him as “General Worden” or simply “The General.” Worden was a runner-up for the job of Seattle Department of Transportation director, a position filled by a series of interim leaders through most of Durkan’s first two years and finally filled by Sam Zimbabwe from Washington, D.C.

City insiders questioned why Durkan needed both an SDOT director and a mobility operations director, and city outsiders wondered what it was, exactly, that Worden did. The answer, according to his schedule? A lot of “out and about time,” much of it apparently riding buses and trains around the city. In addition to “rid[ing] buses, light rail, or the [S]ounder to talk to transit drivers and riders,” a Durkan spokeswoman told me, “Sometimes Mike goes to traffic pinch points or other points of observation to watch traffic, incident responses, traffic clearing, traffic officers, etc.”

After I broke the story about Worden’s schedule, the mayor announced he had “completed the foundational work” of coordinating post-viaduct traffic operations and removed funding for his position from her 2020 budget.

7. Election Crank: Facebook Rules Catch Up With Moms For Seattle; Burgess’ Left-Baiting Rhetoric as Subtle as a Hammer and Sickle

This year’s city council elections were notable not only for the astonishing amount of outside money spent to promote a mostly unsuccessful slate of candidates, but by the emergence of new independent groups attempting to influence Seattle races. In the August primary, Moms for Seattle and People for Seattle stood out for their willingness to mislead voters with manipulative mailers. Moms, whose largest contributor was a Bellevue charter schools advocate, was busted for running Facebook ads that violated the company’s (ostensible) ban on political advertising, and for Photoshopping trash and tents into images of playgrounds in an effort to scare voters into choosing law-and-order candidates. People for Seattle, founded by former city council member and mayor Tim Burgess, bombarded the city with mailers associating the candidates they opposed with socialist firebrand Kshama Sawant, targeting candidates in every race (including Burgess’ former colleague Lisa Herbold) with incendiary rhetoric.

In the end, the only Moms/PfS-backed candidate who won was Alex Pedersen—Burgess’ former council aide.

8.  KIRO RV Reporter Out, Big Money Swamps Seattle Mailboxes, and Where Is the 2019 Parking Study? (Exclusive)

After right-wing radio host Dori Monson and former city council candidate Ari Hoffman encouraged listeners to make a point about homeless people living in RVs by buying up derelict RVs, filling them with trash, and parking them, locked, in front of council members’ houses, it appeared that someone had done just that, parking a trailer in front of council member Lisa Herbold’s West Seattle home. Without bothering to look into the details, Monson assumed his listeners had heeded the call, and encouraged them to show up at Herbold’s home to join the “protest.” Monson singled out one man who vandalized the trailer with “Dori for President” graffiti for particular praise, running video of the vandal in action and praising the “protest.” His station, KIRO Radio, also sent a reporter, Carolyn Ossario, to the scene. Upon arriving at what she also called the “protest,” Ossario entered the trailer and posted video of herself commenting snidely on its contents.

Within a day, it became clear that the trailer belonged to a family who had planned to move into it until it was broken into and vandalized. They had not realized that Herbold lived in the adjacent house. Instead of apologizing, Monson doubled down, inviting the family onto his show and handing them a “hunski” from his money clip that he said should take care of all the damage. The station fired Ossario for entering the family’s trailer without permission; Monson suffered no apparent consequences.

9. Durkan’s Comms Director To Depart; Mayor’s $250,000 General Submits One-Pager on What He Does All Day; and HSD Expects Long Contract Delays (Exclusive)

This Morning Crank grab bag featured the news that Mayor Durkan’s communications director, Mark Prentice, was leaving the city; an effort by Durkan’s office to justify spending $195,000 on Worden in the 2020 budget (among his listed job duties: Implementing a “Lean/Six Sigma initiative throughout the city”); and news about significant delays to human services contracts after HSD decided to disband the office that ensured that contracts were accurate and legally compliant earlier in the year (a story I also reported exclusively).

10. Exclusive: Times Reporter Rosenberg Resigns In Wake of Harassment Allegation (Exclusive)

When a New York-based freelance writer published a series of sexually explicit (and unsolicited) Twitter messages she received from Seattle Times real-estate reporter Mike Rosenberg, the Times limited its comments to a brief statement and did not assign a reporter to cover the allegations—a break in longstanding media tradition of newspapers reporting on themselves. The paper’s silence led to weeks of internal and external speculation that Rosenberg would not face serious consequences for his actions. Finally, on June 11, I learned that Rosenberg had resigned. The Times confirmed his departure with a statement calling his actions an isolated case that was “not reflective of our culture.”