Tag: Adolfo Bailon

City Council, homelessness, King County, Morning Fizz

Morning Fizz: COVID at City Hall, Why “Consolidation” Won’t Fix the City Budget, and More on Burien’s Efforts to Kill a Church Encampment

1. Seattle City Councilmember Bob Kettle recently contracted COVID after coming in to his City Hall office while a family member was home sick with the highly infectious disease. During the period when he was not yet testing positive, he and his staff continued to work at City Hall without wearing masks, according to sources on the floor.

Although Kettle told PubliCola that he personally stayed home for a week after his first positive COVID test (including five days after his symptoms receded), his presence on the second floor during the time when his family member was sick unnerved at least one council member, Tammy Morales, who wrote in an email to the city clerk and council HR, “I just learned that a couple folks on the floor are home with Covid. Can I ask you to send around our policies to remind folks WHEN TO STAY HOME.”

According to a staffer for his office, Kettle “took multiple tests and the moment he received a positive result, he immediately began to work from home, and followed the five-day protocol once he received a negative test(s).” The city asks employees to isolate for five days after a positive test and stay home if they still have symptoms; however, even asymptomatic people can be contagious. Kettle and a staffer confirmed that no one else in his office contracted COVID from him.

Council president Sara Nelson and other council members have frequently touted the benefits of in-person work to council members and their staff as well as the recovery of downtown businesses. The council now holds all its meetings in person; previously, some council members attended remotely, including one council member with a young child and one who is immunocompromised.

Saka and Strauss are correct that the city has arborists in multiple departments. It has a total of two: One in the Parks Department, and one in SDOT. It’s unclear how moving both positions into one department or the other would save the city money.

2. Facing the largest budget shortfall in recent history, many city council members have latched on to the idea that city departments are inefficient and full of costly redundancies—a problem council budget committee chair Dan Strauss has recently taken to illustrating with the example of city arborists. “We have multiple different departments that have arborists,” Strauss said at a committee meeting last month, and “I think it makes more sense to have them all in one department.”

Earlier this week, Councilmember Rob Saka took up the mantle, calling the city’s many arborists the “canonical example” of the need for “consolidation” at the city on an episode of the Seattle Channel’s “City Inside/Out,” which features panel discussions with city council members.

“Do we need 17 different departments with arborists, or can they sit under one [department]—parks, for example, or whatever it is. But we need to better consolidate our functions, services, our lines of business, avoid duplication of efforts, [and] I think we’ll achieve some some great savings through that,” Saka said.

Curious, we looked to see how many arborists the city has and in how many different departments. As it turns out, Saka and Strauss are correct that the city has arborists in multiple departments. It has a total of two: One in the Parks Department, and one in SDOT. It’s unclear how moving both positions into one department or the other would save the city money.

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3. As PubliCola reported late last year, Burien City Manager Adolfo Bailon failed to inform the city council about a letter from Deputy King County Executive Shannon Braddock telling him the city needed to come up with a plan to spend $1 million the county was offering to build a shelter or lose the money.

Bailon sat on the letter for a week before telling the full council about it, claiming he was too busy responding to to emails opposing a temporary encampment at a local church that was run by a nonprofit started by then-council member Cydney Moore.

Although Bailon later changed his story, documents obtained through a records request show that he did spend a great deal of time responding to opponents of the encampment and raising questions about its legality. Those emails included:

• A note to the Burien fire chief asking him if the city could ensure that all the tents at the encampment would be “flame retardant”;

• An email to Burien Police Chief Ted Boe asking him to send an officer to a meeting to refute “potentially false claims” by the encampment’s sponsor that sex offenders would be barred from the encampment (which they were);

• An email warning the superintendent of the Highline Public School District about the church encampment’s “proximity to Highline High School” and claiming that the encampment violated city law;

• At least seven emails to people who wrote him to oppose the encampment, saying he was “very sorry to hear” about the problems the encampment would cause them and encouraging them to attend an upcoming meeting where they could express their opposition.

The encampment closed in February.

 

 

homelessness, King County

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

By Erica C. Barnett

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

homelessness, King County

What Did Burien Get From Its No-Bid Contract for Encampment Response? We May Never Know.
Image via City of Burien

By Erica C. Barnett

The Burien City Council—which acquired two new members, Linda Akey and Alex Andrade, at the beginning of this year—declined to add a discussion of The More We Love’s $49,000 contract to respond to encampments to its agenda during its meeting on Monday, leaving the public without important information about what the group did with the public’s money..

As we’ve reported, Burien City Manager Adolfo Bailon signed a contract with The More We Love, founded and led by Kirkland mortgage broker and Union Gospel Mission (UGM) volunteer Kristine Moreland, to respond to and remove encampments in Burien.

The More We Love has claimed to be far more successful than any other group working in Burien at permanently housing people and getting them into treatment, but those claims have been met with skepticism by established homelessness organizations. Permanent housing is expensive and in short supply across King County, and there are nowhere near enough slots in licensed treatment centers for all the people seeking inpatient or outpatient rehab. Meanwhile, there is no year-round general shelter in Burien, so The More We Love reportedly transports people to UGM’s high-barrier, faith-based shelter in Seattle.

Without detailed information about where the money went, how many people The More We Loved helped, and how, Burien residents (and at least some city officials) simply don’t know what Moreland and her group did with public dollars.

A basic report, with data on specific performance metrics, could affirm that Moreland’s claims are true; or it could confirm that The More We Love has exaggerated its success. Such reports are standard practice for other homelessness outreach contracts. For example, REACH—a longstanding outreach group affiliated with Evergreen Treatment Services—provides detailed reports showing how many people at a specific encampment accessed a specific list of services over each reporting period, along with a breakdown of how they spent each public dollar they received.

Without that kind of detailed information, Burien residents (and at least some city officials) simply don’t know what Moreland and her group did with public dollars.

In response to a public disclosure request, PubliCola did receive two brief documents described as “30 day reports” on The More We Love’s contract. The narratives, which are attached to invoices for $24,500 each, do not include specific data such as itemized expenditures or results. Instead, they consist of bullet-pointed lists with items such as:

• Family meeting for Detox for a human in the encampment;

• Working with SCORE [the South King County jail] on resources.

• Work with local sheriffs to guide and strategize on how much pressure to put in what areas for successful moving.

• Helped de-escalate around the transit station and gas station where that group was creating friction between themselves and the business owner.

• Worked alongside OPS (Operation of Prosecution Survivors) [sic] and successfully address several needs involving vulnerable and sensitive females, connecting them to case management, and getting them in an environment where they are lifted up.

The Organization of Prostitution Survivors is a group that views sex work as “a form of gender-based violence.”

Despite Explicit State Guidance, Burien Keeps City Manager’s Performance Evaluation Secret

In related news, the city of Burien has categorically refused to provide PubliCola with City Manager Bailon’s performance evaluation, along with related emails and email attachments, claiming that they are exempt from disclosure under the state Public Records Act.

PubliCola requested the records after the private firm that conducted the evaluation, Nash Consulting, terminated its contract with the city, saying that their evaluation was “not met with the seriousness it deserved by several key stakeholders, and unfortunately, we have concerns that constructive action was not taken in response to the feedback presented in the evaluation report.”

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In response to PubliCola’s request, the city provided a brief two-page “summary” of the evaluation from former mayor Sofia Aragon that we had already published back in December. That document summarized the evaluation process and included six brief bullet points about the goals Bailon should work toward, such as “evaluate the capacity of the organization to meet urgent challenges.”

Although the Public Disclosure Act does exempt some personnel records, guidance from the state Attorney General’s office says that the performance evaluations of city managers, specifically, are subject to disclosure. Citing a case out of Spokane, the Attorney General’s Open Governance Resource Manual says “the performance evaluation of a city manager—the city’s chief executive officer, its leader, and a public figure—was not exempt because it was of legitimate concern to the public.”

Burien’s disclosure office got so overzealous with their redaction tool that they blacked out the Employee Identification Number for Discover Burien, The More We Love’s fiscal sponsor. EINs (30-0048516, in Discover Burien’s case) are unambiguously public and readily accessible; the city has not responded to a followup about why they blacked out this public information.

In addition to the performance evaluation, the city of Burien is refusing to provide an email from Bailon and documents about a “complaint of improper government action” that appears related to Bailon’s failure to inform all city council members about a deadline from King County to spend $1 million on shelter or lose the money. Instead, the city provided a set of mostly redacted emails, along with notes about attachments that are purportedly also exempt from the public records act.

Initially, Bailon said he didn’t see an email from Deputy County Executive Shannon Braddock because his inbox was swamped with emails about an unrelated sanctioned encampment at a Burien church, but he later admitted that he had opened and responded to Braddock’s email without informing the council, to whom he reports.

Burien’s public disclosure officer did not respond to our email objecting to their refusal to disclose Bailon’s performance review; we have asked the Attorney General’s Office to review the documents in light of their guidance that city manager performance evaluations are public records.

Incidentally, Burien’s disclosure office got so overzealous with their redaction tool that they blacked out the Employee Identification Number for Discover Burien, The More We Love’s fiscal sponsor, on both of the documents they provide. EINs (30-0048516, in Discover Burien’s case) are unambiguously public and readily accessible; the city has not responded to a followup about why they blacked out this public information.

homelessness, public disclosure

Firm That Evaluated Burien City Manager’s Performance Resigns, Saying Critical Report “Was Not Met With the Seriousness It Deserved”
Burien City Manager Adolfo Bailon

By Erica C. Barnett

A consulting firm that conducted a six-month performance evaluation for Burien City Manager Adolfo Bailon terminated its contract with the city in late December, telling city officials that continuing the contract would be “more detrimental than beneficial” to their reputation.

“We have observed that the initial evaluation conducted for the City Manager was not met with the seriousness it deserved by several key stakeholders, and unfortunately, we have concerns that constructive action was not taken in response to the feedback presented in the evaluation report,” the contractor, Ethan Nash of Nash Consulting, told Burien’s senior human resources manager, Connie Roberts, in an email. The city has not released the full evaluation, which was reportedly critical of Bailon’s performance.

A majority of the Burien council supported Bailon over the last year as he shot down efforts to stand up a homeless shelter on land owned by the city,  threatened legal action against a church that hosted homeless people on its property, and signed a no-bid contract for encampment removals with a controversial group that has no demonstrated track record or previous government contracts. Over the last year, Bailon also declined to share information about potential shelter solutions with the council and waited several days to share a time-sensitive email about a $1 million shelter offer from King County, leading some on the council to conclude he was withholding information deliberately.

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Earlier this year, Burien resident Charles Schaefer—the former Burien Planning Commission chair the council removed from his position because he informed a group of displaced encampment residents about their legal right to sleep on city-owned property—requested all records summarizing the evaluation along with “council and staff feedback” on the evaluation. (After the city council ousted Schaefer, the entire Planning Commission resigned in protest).

In response to Schaefer’s request, the city provided a two-page summary written in August by then-mayor Sofia Aragon, which characterized Bailon’s performance as “mainly on track” and laid out six bullet-pointed goals. These included “institute quarterly Coffee with the City Manager meetings with various themes,” “present a realistic timeline for fiscal cliff measures, with staff input,” and two items related to “crisis communications.” The letter also says the city supports Bailon seeking a voluntary accreditation with the International City/County Management Association “to strengthen your skills in this role.”

In lieu of the council and staff feedback he requested, Schaefer received a list of exemptions to the state public disclosure act that, the city argued, rendered Bailon’s entire performance evaluation, including redacted or anonymized feedback from staff, categorically exempt from disclosure.

A state appeals court ruling found that a city manager’s position, specifically, is “not like that of other public employees” because the city manager functions as “the city’s chief executive officer, its leader, and a public figure.” In that case, the state appeals court found that the performance evaluation “was not exempt because it was of legitimate concern to the public.”

The exemptions the city claimed fell into two broad categories. First, the city said that every aspect of the evaluation itself was confidential and conducted in closed executive sessions, making any staff feedback, along with an evaluation worksheet exempt from disclosure. Second, the city claimed that disclosing any information about the evaluation would be “highly offensive” and an invasion of Bailon’s privacy, citing a 1993 case involving a school principal, in which a state appeals court ruled that performance evaluations are exempt from disclosure as long as they don’t include “specific instances of misconduct or public job performance.”

However, a subsequent court ruling involving a performance evaluation for the Spokane City Manager found that a city manager’s position, specifically, is “not like that of other public employees” because the city manager functions as “the city’s chief executive officer, its leader, and a public figure.” In that case, the state appeals court found that the performance evaluation “was not exempt because it was of legitimate concern to the public.”

In his letter ending the contract, Nash refers to a “recent Public Records Request” whose handling “raised concerns regarding our ability to guarantee the confidentiality of interviewees and survey participants. This situation has likely undermined the trust placed in our firm by those participating in the evaluation, thereby compromising the effectiveness of any future evaluations we might conduct.”

It’s unclear what records request Nash was referring to (including whether it was Schaefer’s); neither Nash nor a spokesperson for the city of Burien had responded to questions before this story posted. We’ve asked the city for more information about what “constructive action” the consultants recommended and will update this post if we hear back.

PubliCola has also requested a copy of Bailon’s full performance evaluation. Bailon’s initial base salary, according to the B-Town Blog, was $215,000. Previously, he was the town manager for Randolph, Vermont, a sleepy town that disbanded its police force in 2018. Prior to joining the city of Burien in 2022, he was up for similar positions in Grand Rapids, Michigan and Nogales, Arizona, where the city council decided not to hire him in November 2021.

homelessness, human services, King County

Faced With Monday Deadline to Lose $1 Million for Shelter, Burien Takes No Action
Burien City Manager Adolfo Bailon

By Erica C. Barnett

Facing a November 27 deadline to take action on a longstanding offer of $1 million and 35 Pallet shelters from King County, the Burien City Council decided last night to do nothing.

Well, not exactly nothing: After rejecting two potential locations for a tiny shelter village—a city-owned lot in downtown Burien that currently serves as storage for a Toyota dealership and a property owned by Seattle City Light—the council voted to ask the county for an extension on the deadline to use the money, which has been available to Burien for the last six months.

UPDATE: On Tuesday afternoon, Deputy King County Executive Shannon Braddock formally declined Burien City Manager Adolfo Bailon’s request for a deadline extension. In an email, Braddock noted that the county originally started working with Burien to site a shelter in the city in March, after the city evicted an encampment from its original location outside City Hall, and formalized its $1 million offer in June.

“Since our conversations began, the only requirement to utilize this offer has been for the city to identify a location and willing property owner to site the Pallet shelters,” Braddock wrote. “We have identified funding, shelter resources, and off-set parking capacity. To the best of our understanding as of today, the city has not yet identified any location or property owner, including city-owned property, to utilize what we have secured in response to the original request for assistance.” The council will hold a special meeting next Monday, the day the deadline expires, for a final discussion, but the months-long deadlock is unlikely to change.

ORIGINAL POST CONTINUES: The votes on both locations deadlocked 3-3-1, with Councilmember Jimmy Matta—ordinarily part of the four-member anti-shelter majority—abstaining. “I’m not going to make a call for any of the sites until we as a community come together and have a real conversation,” Matta said.

A third proposal to build a temporary Pallet shelter or tiny house village on a vacant lot in Boulevard Park—a low-income food desert with minimal services—failed, after Mayor Sofia Aragon could not get anyone to second it. As Councilmember Cydney Moore noted Monday, the Boulevard Park location is directly in a flight path, with noise levels frequently exceeding 80 decibels.

Aragon also proposed a code of conduct for any future temporary shelter that would prohibit people living in the tiny structures from drinking or using drugs, including marijuana, and would bar anyone convicted of a sex offense, but because her motion to consider the code of conduct violated parliamentary procedure, it didn’t get a hearing, either.

“I don’t believe that it should be the government that has a say or even touches homelessness. I think that should be [done by the] private sector. It should be the organizations that are funded on their own that are able to come up with funding on their own to do this, which is why I don’t support accepting the King County money.”—Burien City Councilmember Stephanie Mora

Although the Boulevard Park location didn’t get a formal vote, it would have likely failed by a similar margin as the other two locations, since conservative council member Stephanie Mora indicated she would not vote for any proposal to accept the money from King County, including the Boulevard Park location supported by her council allies.

“I don’t believe that it should be the government that has a say or even touches homelessness. I think that should be [done by the] private sector,” Mora said. “It should be the organizations that are funded on their own that are able to come up with funding on their own to do this, which is why I don’t support accepting the King County money.”

Moore attempted to bring the council back at some point before next Monday—the county’s deadline for Burien to use the money—but Aragon, Matta, and Deputy Mayor Kevin Schilling all said they would be too busy with Thanksgiving obligations. (Mora said she would not attend any meeting to discuss the matter further, period.) If the county does not grant an extension, the council will meet next Monday night.

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Instead, they asked the county for another week to discuss options, though it’s not clear what could possibly break the six-month-long logjam. If Burien decides it doesn’t want the million dollars, the county will offer it to other South King County cities through a competitive bidding process.

Prior to last night’s meeting, the city appeared to be teeing up the Boulevard Park location as the preferred alternative.

In a memo purporting to weigh the pros and cons of each option, City Manager Adolfo Bailon used cherry-picked and inaccurate information to make the decision seem obvious, relying on assumptions and unsourced claims about how much a shelter at each location would cost, the ease of obtaining each location, and the kind of access each site would provide to transit, food, and services.

For example, the memo suggested that if the city accepted the money, it would be forced to eliminate specific public safety and human services programs from its budget in the future, including programs aimed at preventing youth violence, feeding people, improving downtown safety, and providing mental health services. Cities can’t actually constrain future budgets in this way, and every item on the list seemed purposefully to suggest that helping unsheltered people would mean abandoning other, more worthy Burien residents.

The city manager’s memo did not include the cost of leasing the other two sites, which are not city-owned, or include this additional expense in the sections describing the pros and cons of these locations. On Monday, Bailon said he had no idea how much renting either the privately owned Boulevard Park lot or the City Light lot would cost.

The memo also included incomplete or inaccurate descriptions of each of the three potential shelter locations. It claims, for instance, that the Boulevard Park site has a “Walk Score” of 68, based partly on its exceptional access to “food sources.” However, the actual Walk Score for the site is 56—”somewhat walkable”—and the only source of nearby food or beverages is a Dollar Tree, which does not offer any fresh or healthy food, and a liquor store.

Dismissing concerns about the lack of healthy food at this location on Monday night, Aragon said, “There’s food there. It may not be a full blown grocery store, which the neighborhood definitely needs. But there is food available there [from] either mini marts or the Dollar Tree.”

The nearest full-service grocery store, a Red Apple, is two miles and a 40-minute walk away. In contrast, the city-owned lot in downtown Burien is five minutes from three full-service grocery stores and 500 feet from the Burien Transit Center.

Bailon’s memo also made a number of unsourced assumptions about the financial impact of each location, including a claim that ending the lease with the Toyota dealership would cost “tens of thousands of dollars” in lost taxes and “potential loss of jobs”—which appears to assume the dealership would close if it had to move its cars 500 feet away to a secure covered parking lot at the transit center.

In fact, while Burien would lose $24,000 a year in lease revenue if the Toyota dealer no longer rented the lot, the dealer would save the same amount, because King County would provide its lot for free. That amount, notably, is less than half the size of a contract Bailon signed with a controversial nonprofit that provides private sweeps and distributed homeless people’s private information to police and sympathetic councilmembers less than a month ago.

Nor did the memo mention the cost of leasing the other two sites, which are not city-owned, or include this additional expense in the sections describing the pros and cons of these locations. On Monday, Bailon said he had no idea how much renting either the privately owned Boulevard Park lot or the City Light lot would cost, claiming he could not even inquire about cost until the council chose a location and “authorized me to negotiate on behalf of the city.” Bailon also suggested Seattle might “say [that] 50 percent of whatever housing units are built at the location will be for the city of Seattle, but did not provide any reason for this estimate.

A spokeswoman for the city of Burien declined to respond to a detailed list of questions on Monday.

A spokesman for King County Executive Dow Constantine could not immediately say how the county planned to respond to the Burien City Council’s request for an extension on the county’s six-month-old offer.

homelessness, King County

As Deadline to Use or Lose $1 Million in Shelter Funding Looms, Top Burien Official Offers New Explanation for Failing to Inform Some on Council

By Erica C. Barnett

Burien city manager Adolfo Bailon offered a novel explanation last night for why he failed to inform the full city council about a November 27 deadline for using $1 million in shelter funding from the county: He had, contrary to his previous claim, opened and responded to the email from Deputy County Executive Shannon Braddock, but he had “left it [marked] unopened to deal with the following week.”

The email then got buried, Bailon said, underneath a pile of messages about a sanctioned encampment at a church proposed by a nonprofit headed by Councilmember Cydney Moore, and he was unable to get back around to it until the next Friday, November 3, when he finally told the rest of the council. The encampment proposal “monopolized our time and led to a number of different things occurring” last week, Bailon said.

Aragon confirmed during the meeting that she was also aware of the deadline last week and had discussed it with Bailon during their agenda-setting meeting on Wednesday. It’s unclear which other council members besides Aragon, if any, also knew about the deadline before Bailon informed the full council in an email on November 3.

As we reported on Monday, Bailon initially said that he had not seen or responded to the time-sensitive email until a full week after it landed in his inbox, a claim PubliCola revealed as false after obtaining Bailon’s response to Braddock from King County, sent shortly after he received the letter informing him of the new deadline.

Since March, the Burien council has been debating how to respond to a group of several dozen unsheltered people who the city initially swept from a site next to City Hall and the downtown Burien library and who have since been swept from place to place. King County offered the city $1 million and 35 Pallet shelters, which can each hold two people, back in June, suggesting that the shelters go on a piece of city-owned land that currently serves as excess inventory storage for a local Toyota dealer; under the deal, the county would provide space in its own garage for the cars. In July, the council’s four-member majority voted to reject that offer, and in September, the council enacted a nighttime “camping” ban.

As we reported on Monday, Bailon initially said that he had not seen or responded to the time-sensitive email until a full week after it landed in his inbox, a claim PubliCola revealed as false after obtaining Bailon’s response to Braddock from King County, sent shortly after he received the letter informing him of the new deadline.

“I am sorry to share with you that the email from Shannon Braddock went unopened and became lost until today due to the more than 150 email messages that I have received since Sunday regarding the proposed encampment at Oasis Church,” Bailon wrote in an email to the full council and the city attorney. “I have since reviewed all unopened email messages.”

Moore challenged Bailon on his changing story, noting that by withholding the information from certain council members, Bailon deprived the council of a full week—out of four until the deadline—to secure a location for the shelter King County has been offering to fund since June. “I would like to know why the misinformation was given to council that the letter wasn’t read or open until Friday,” Moore said. However, she was interrupted repeatedly by Bailon and Aragon, who said Moore was stirring up irrelevant “drama” and creating a “distraction” from important issues.

Bailon said Moore’s claim that he had withheld information from certain councilmembers was “tantamount to slander,” and the council almost went into a closed executive session on the grounds that Moore was threatening legal action against the city.

Instead, the council meeting continued until a public commenter who opposes the encampment ban, Jennifer Fichamba, suggested Bailon should resign and return to California, where he lived before taking the job in Burien, because he lacked “compassion” for homeless residents and had “not done due diligence to understand what our community is about.”

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This led Councilmember Kevin Schilling to suggest Fichamba, an outspoken advocate for immigrant rights, was racist for saying “our Hispanic city manager [should] go back to California” and demanding that she apologize. “I am ashamed at what I just heard!” Schilling yelled. As the room erupted, Aragon shut down the meeting, clearing the chambers for 10 minutes before returning with a warning that the council could end the meeting and reconvene in private if people didn’t behave.

This wasn’t the first time in recent weeks that members of the pro-sweeps council majority had accused someone on the other side of the issue of being racist. Earlier this year, Councilmember Hugo Garcia, one of three council members who have voted against efforts to crack down on Burien’s unsheltered residents, expressed his opposition to a potential new encampment site in Boulevard Park. The fact that the council majority wanted to move people from a wealthy, white neighborhood into a poor, Black and brown one “reeks of white supremacy,” Garcia said. Both Schilling and Councilmember Stephanie Mora expressed shock at Garcia’s comment, and Mora called for Garcia to be censured for his “very racist remark.”

The city council has two more council meetings scheduled before the county’s deadline, including one on November 27. The $1 million is time-limited federal money; if Burien doesn’t come up with a plan by the deadline, the county will make it available to other jurisdictions through a standard bidding process.