Tag: Andre Taylor

City Council, Police, Uncategorized

Council Vote Leaves Fate of Proposed SPD Cuts In the Air
Breakdown of Estimated Salary Savings Under Herbold Proposal

By Paul Kiefer

Months of debate on the City Council about how to distribute millions of dollars in unpaid Seattle Police Department salaries came to an end on Tuesday, though no one seemed satisfied with the result.

During the meeting, the committee considered a proposal to cut $2.83 million from SPD’s budget while simultaneously lifting a budget proviso on another $5 million that the council has withheld from SPD’s budget since the beginning of the year. Ultimately, the committee sent the ordinance to the full council with a ‘do not pass’ recommendation.

The committee’s discussion was part of the ongoing debate over the council’s promise to curtail overspending by SPD last December. When department leadership informed the council that SPD had overspent their budget by $5.4 million, the council expressed its intent to cut the same amount from SPD’s budget this year. The council hoped that the $5.4 million would support the participatory budgeting process this spring.

The planned cut didn’t jeopardize SPD’s plans to hire new officers, because the council had already passed a budget that provided enough money to pay the salaries of all officers SPD expected to hire or retain in 2021.

But the proposal set off alarm bells at SPD. In March, interim SPD Chief Adrian Diaz appeared before the public safety committee to argue that the department is already hamstrung by earlier budget cuts and staffing losses. Cutting an additional $5.4 million from the department’s budget, he argued, would plunge the department into a staffing crisis “beyond mitigation” by spurring more officers to leave for greener pastures.

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Later that month, in response to pressure from SPD to reconsider the cut, public safety committee chair Lisa Herbold revised the proposal: instead of cutting $5.4 million from the police department budget, the council could reduce the cut to $2.83 million. Most of the money taken from SPD’s budget would go to the participatory budgeting process; the rest would pay for civilian staff in other city departments who could support SPD, including evidence storage staff and five new mental health crisis responders. Herbold also proposed offsetting the $2.83 million cut by lifting a proviso the council passed last November that withholds $5 million in salary savings from SPD; the department’s budget also includes several million more dollars in salary savings unaffected by the proviso because of the abnormally high attrition from the department in the past year.

From Herbold’s perspective, the reduced budget cut still allowed the council to penalize SPD for spending beyond their budget in 2020 while also giving the department greater flexibility to fill budged holes as they appeared.

But Herbold’s proposal to reduce the size of the budget cut didn’t assuage SPD’s concerns. And it drew the attention of Dr. Antonio Oftelie, who leads the monitoring team appointed by a federal district court to track the progress of reforms to SPD. Oftelie’s team directed the committee to delay acting on their plans to cut SPD’s budget until department leadership answered a list of questions about the impacts of staffing losses and additional budget cuts on the department’s day-to-day responsibilities. Continue reading “Council Vote Leaves Fate of Proposed SPD Cuts In the Air” →

criminal justice, Equity, Health, homelessness, human services, Mayor Durkan, Media, Police, public safety, race, Renters, Taxes, Transit

PubliCola’s Most Popular Posts of 2020

By Erica C. Barnett

As we say a not-so-fond farewell to 2020, we’re taking a look back at some of the work we did over the year, starting with the most popular stories of the year, measured on a month-by-month basis. Tomorrow and Thursday, we’ll have some updates on stories we covered earlier in the year, including a police shooting, access to public restrooms during the pandemic, and a group of people forced into homelessness when the city declared the hotel where they lived uninhabitable.

January

Durkan Withholds Funding for Nationally Recognized LEAD Diversion Program

The year began with a story that would have reverberations for the next 12 months, when Mayor Jenny Durkan decided to withhold funding from the nationally recognized LEAD arrest-diversion program, which provides case management and other services to people engaged in crimes of poverty. (LEAD, which at the time stood for Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion, is now short for Let Everyone Advance with Dignity.)

After the city council passed a budget that would have allowed the program to expand and reduce caseloads, Durkan balked, holding back the council’s adds until a consultant could write a report on whether LEAD was producing results. Ultimately, LEAD’s plans for 2020 were upended by the pandemic, but the story touched on themes that would recur all year: Social-service programs as an alternative to policing and incarceration; the battle between the council and Durkan over the city’s budget priorities; and Durkan’s reluctance to fund LEAD, which did not abate during the pandemic.

February

Police Lieutenant Had Navigation Team Haul Her Personal Trash

The Navigation Team, a group of police and social workers that removed encampments and offered shelter beds to their displaced residents continued to be a flashpoint for most of the year. (The team was formally disbanded after an ugly budget battle; its non-police members now make up a still ill-defined group called called the HOPE Team.)

In this story, we broke the news that the SPD lead for the encampment-removal team directed a city contractor hired to remove trash from encampments to pick up some bulky garbage at her home, because it was “on the way” to their next stop. The fact that the Navigation Team included a large number of SPD officers made it especially controversial among advocates for people experiencing homelessness. In the year before the pandemic, the team removed more encampments without notice than ever before, on the grounds that homeless people’s tents were “obstructions” that prevented others from enjoying the city’s greenbelts, planting strips, and parks.

March

Emergency Orders, School Cancellations, and Planning for Those Who Can’t “Quarantine At Home”

In March, as the gravity and severity of the pandemic was just starting to set in, PubliCola shifted our coverage to the impact COVID-19 was having on the city, including people experiencing homelessness. Our most popular post that month featured a report from a crowded in-person press conference (!!) at which Gov. Jay Inslee banned gatherings of more than 250 people (we!!!). At the time, March 11, regional governments did not yet have access to federal relief funds or a solid plan for isolating and quarantining people without homes who were unable to “shelter in place.” A story we ran four days later, about an Inslee directive banning gatherings of 50 people or more, was headlined “Advice for Keeping Grandma Alive Depends on Whether Grandma is Homeless.”

April 

Downtown Seattle Hotel Rented by City for $3 Million Has Had Just 17 Guests

The city of Seattle’s reluctance to simply put homeless people in hotels became one of PubliCola’s major recurring stories of 2020. (Although several homeless service organizations have rented rooms for their clients, the city won’t rent its first hotel units for people living unsheltered until early next year).

This story (and its many followups) was about a downtown hotel that the city rented out, at a cost of around $3 million, to serve as temporary housing for “first responders” such as police officers and firefighters to isolate or quarantine. Almost no first responders took the city up on its offer, so Seattle eventually opened the rooms up to nurses and other medical personnel, who also failed to show up in significant numbers. The city never offered the rooms to people experiencing homelessness, preferring to pay for empty rooms than make them available to people living on sidewalks and in growing tent encampments that eventually took over several downtown parks.

May

Tickets or Passes, Please! Sound Transit, Citing Damage Caused by Homeless Riders, Will Resume Fares and Enforcement

Both of the region’s major transit agencies, Sound Transit and King County Metro, removed fares and instituted social distancing on trains and buses this year, but the two providers took vastly different approaches to both fare enforcement and fares themselves. While Metro revised its policies, taking tickets out of the criminal justice system and adopting what a spokesman called a “harm-reduction” attitude to fare enforcement, Sound Transit doubled down, reinstating fares a little more than two months after the pandemic began. Even now, the agency has not committed to decriminalizing fare nonpayment, committing only to a yearlong experiment to see if it’s possible to ease up on enforcement without cutting into fare revenue. Continue reading “PubliCola’s Most Popular Posts of 2020” →

City Hall, Featured, homelessness, human services, Mayor Durkan, Morning Fizz

City Spends $150,000 on “Street Czar”; Mobile Shower Immobilized; Human Service Contracts Extended
Activist Andre Taylor speaks to reporters inside the Capitol Hill Organized Protest zone in June.

Today’s Morning Fizz:

1. The city of Seattle has signed a $12,500-a-month contract with Not This Time, the grassroots group founded by community activist Andre Taylor after his brother, Che Taylor, was shot and killed by two Seattle police officers in 2016. The contract includes office space in the city’s Municipal Tower.

Under the contract, the city will pay Taylor a total of $150,000 over 12 months to act as a “Street Czar” providing “community safety de-escalation services”; to “provide recommendations to the City on de-escalation, community engagement, and alternatives to policing”; and to continue Not This Time’s Conversation With the Streets program, among other responsibilities.

The contract says that Not This Time will work on “urgent de-escalation of conflict and violence between the police and the community assembling in the Capitol Hill neighborhood” —an issue that was very much on the mayor’s mind when the contract was signed in June.

While Taylor was a frequent presence inside the Capitol Hill Organized Protest Zone, he did not make significant inroads among its leaders, some of whom viewed him as an outsider trying to convince them to cede ground to the mayor and then-police chief Carmen Best, who were desperate to get people to leave the area.

Taylor, who has been criticized by other activists for appearing alongside the mayor at press conferences and events, says he has little patience for “professional agitators” bent on conflict rather than coming to agreement; this is how he saw the leaders of CHOP, which helps explain why they never saw eye to eye.

Although the contract itself refers repeatedly to “de-escalation,” Taylor says the goal of the contract is really to serve as a “liaison between communities and the city” and facilitate conversations that lead to policy change.

“Street czars are people who have some credibility from the streets, that have changed their lives, [and] that are also working within the system,” Taylor says. “Seeing, around the country, the lack of these type of people, I’d seen how problematic it was and I encouraged the mayor to be forward-thinking, and she understood our concern and was in agreement with me.”

Taylor says he’s aware of the criticism that Durkan is using his organization to boost her own image as an advocate for changes to the police department. He says that isn’t his concern. “I’m not looking for a perfect person,” he says. “I’m looking for an open door and an opportunity to help my people wherever I can.”

Mayor Durkan’s office did not respond to questions about the contract, directing me first to the Department of Finance and Administrative Services and then to the Department of Neighborhoods, which technically holds the contract. Nor did her office respond to followup questions about whether she had initiated the contract, as sources inside and outside the city say she did. “Unfortunately the contract isn’t with the Mayor’s Office,” Durkan spokeswoman Kamaria Hightower said in response to questions.

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2. If you were wondering to yourself, “What ever happened to those pricey mobile shower trailers Erica couldn’t shut up about about a couple of months ago?”, here’s your update: After the city’s contract with California-based VIP Restrooms ran out, the city signed a monthly contract with United Site Services, a national company with local offices, to provide new trailers.

The mobile showers were supposed to include one “roving” trailer that traveled between Seattle Center and Lake City. But after discovering that there was little interest in the the weekend-only Lake City location, the city decided to rotate the trailer to the University Heights Center, which is hosting a safe lot for people living in their cars.

However, that siting was short-lived; according to Seattle Public Utilities spokeswoman Sabrina Register, during a “routine move” in July, “the trailer was involved in a minor accident” and the city had to dock it at Seattle Center. The city replaced that trailer with a new one owned by Snohomish-based OK’s Cascade Company LLC in August.

Register says the city plans to start moving the new trailer from site to site in late September; a third trailer is providing showers outside Green Lake Community Center, which is undergoing renovations.

The showers appear to be getting used significantly more than the city anticipated. Compared to an expected average usage of three showers per hour, the King Street and Seattle Center sites are averaging a shower approximately every ten minutes, for a total of more than 6,500 showers since the trailers started operating in May.

SPU did not immediately respond to requests for copies of the new shower contracts.

3. Homeless service providers across King County were informed in a meeting last week that, because the city and county are significantly behind schedule in recruiting and hiring a CEO for the new King County Regional Homelessness Authority, the city and county are extending all their existing homeless service contracts through the end of 2021, and extending the COVID-era suspension of performance pay requirements—which can result in money being withheld—until the end of next year.

The authority was supposed to hire its new leader no later than September, but that has been pushed back until November at the earliest.

If this contract extension also applies to funding, that means homeless services provided through city and county contracts won’t be cut, but they won’t grow, either—which could prove problematic as eviction moratoriums expire and the ranks of people experiencing homelessness grow.