Tag: CARE Team

City Council, Equity

Councilmember Rivera Questions 2026 Funding for CARE Team, LEAD Diversion, and Equitable Development Initiative

 

By Erica C. Barnett

At the city council’s first meetings on Mayor Bruce Harrell’s proposed budget this week, Councilmember Maritza Rivera repeatedly suggested that she has not gotten sufficient information, since joining the council last year, about several programs the city funds that are designed to help people living unsheltered or in crisis. Rivera has opposed some of the

On Thursday morning, Rivera suggested it might be premature to expand the city’s CARE Department, which responds to 911 calls, and the related CARE Team, which responds to a limited subset of emergency calls alongside police and can take over those calls once police sign off. As we’ve reported, the CARE Team is set to sign a new agreement with SPD that will allow it to respond to calls without police in tow, and expand the types of calls team members, who are social workers, are allowed to respond to.

The city expanded CARE to 24 people last year, the maximum allowed under the agreement with SPD that expires at the end of this year. A proposed 0.1 cent sales tax would increase that number to 48, on the assumption that the new agreement will allow the expansion.

“I don’t know how well that expansion is going,” Rivera said. “I know there are issues underlying all of that. Nevertheless, we are not done with this full year and  the proposal in this budget is to go from 24 to 48… and I have not seen any information about the work that CARE is doing that warrants the expansion,” given that the 2025 budget year isn’t over yet.

Largely in response to council questions, CARE launched a detailed data dashboard, currently accessible only the city’s internal network (to which Rivera has access) earlier this year. CARE has also repeatedly presented data and results to the council and publicly answered their questions.

Rivera did not raise similar concerns about a lack of data when the council approved an expansion of live police cameras into several new neighborhoods earlier this month. The council started discussing that expansion in late July, just weeks after SPD turned on new surveillance cameras in three initial “pilot” neighborhoods. The pilot program added almost $6 million to the 2025-2026 budget along with 21 new positions at SPD; the new budget anticipates SPD will need to hire another nine people to staff the surveillance center, and cost around $500,000 on cameras alone. A majority of the council, including Rivera, green-lit the surveillance expansion without any data showing that the cameras helped SPD solve or stop crimes that would have gone unaddressed without the cameras.

Later in the day, Rivera said she also didn’t have enough information to know whether LEAD and CoLEAD, two programs run by the nonprofit Purpose Dignity Action, were worth the funding provided in the mayor’s budget, which includes about $15 million for LEAD pre-booking diversion and $5 million for the CoLEAD encampment resolution program. That money, Rivera observed, is enough to “fund an actual department,” like the Office of Arts and Culture.

“I just want to make sure I understand how well we’re doing with diversion services,” Rivera said. “I just don’t feel, since I got here last year, that I have that information that I can really speak to. How really are we helping people? I understand there’s a lot more people in the system. Ideally we’d be people should be going into recovery, and then we’re taking up new people. I don’t necessarily think that’s happening, but I don’t want to be unfair, so I just need more information.”

Andrew Myerberg, Harrell’s chief of staff, said the people LEAD and CoLEAD work with, who are often homeless and involved in the criminal legal system, don’t just “go into recovery” and cycle out; their complex needs can take years to address, and relapse is common. LEAD, founded in 2021, is an internationally renowned diversion model that has been implemented around the world, while CoLEAD has been widely praised as the most successful approach to addressing unsanctioned encampments by permanently housing people living in state-owned rights-of way.

Speaking more broadly, Rivera said she was not “supportive of Housing First”—programs based on the premise that housing is a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for long-term stability, health, and recovery—because “I don’t think it’s fair. … They’re not going to be able to stay housed if they don’t have the treatment services.” This reflects a misunderstanding that has become a talking point among the right across the country—that “housing first” means “housing only,” and that programs like LEAD simply dump people in empty houses and leave them there to rot.

On Friday, Rivera appeared eager to reignite her efforts last year to gut the city’s Equitable Development initiative, which helps fund community-based efforts by small, often first-time, developers to help their projects get off the ground. Last year, Rivera proposed legislation that would have frozen all new funding for the program and required the community groups it funded to spend down every penny they received from EDI by the end of the year or lose all their funding—a virtual impossibility for long-term capital projects that typically take five to seven years to complete.

Rivera’s proposal resulted in an outcry from communities that were slated to benefit from EDI projects (which are concentrated in Southeast Seattle) as well as panicked EDI recipients, who begged the council not to withdraw city funding for their projects. (Eventually, Rivera withdrew her amendment and replaced it with new reporting requirements for EDI projects.) Rivera suggested Friday that she still thinks EDI is completing projects too slowly, noting that 20 of 75 EDI projects that have received funding at some point in the last 10 years, through 2025, are finished.

“You know, ideology is great, but what is really great is when we [take] action and these projects actually open to help community,” Rivera said. “Just talking about it, that’s great, but we have to do it. And so this was my concern, as you know last year, is a lot of these projects are not not moving along fast enough where they’re actually going to benefit community, and that’s a concern.”

Rob Saka backed Rivera up, saying that while he didn’t “remember all the ins and outs and twists and turns of that… [I] remember there being a fair amount of confusion around the original purpose and goals of that underlying effort. And I also remember my colleague being unfairly attacked, in some cases based off of race, which, you know, check your privilege! White saviorism in the city of Seattle is particularly real.”

Saka did not give any examples of anyone making a racist argument against Rivera’s proposal to gut the Equitable Development Initiative, which is explicitly designed to benefit underserved communities of color. The original EDI initiative was sponsored by former councilmember Tammy Morales, who, like Rivera, is Latina.

PubliCola’s own coverage at the time showed that the overwhelming majority of those who asked the council to allow EDI projects to keep moving forward were people of color who worked on or whose communities directly benefited from these grassroots community projects.

Mayor Harrell, Police, Taxes

Harrell Proposes New Sales Tax to Expand CARE Team, Fund Treatment, and Backfill Budget
Mayor Bruce Harrell, with Seattle Fire Chief Harold Scoggins.

About half the $39 million in funding from the sales tax increase would backfill spending on existing programs; the rest would shore up the city’s crisis response system and fund new treatment beds.

By Erica C. Barnett

Mayor Bruce Harrell announced his plans to allocate a new 0.1-cent sales tax to a slate of non-police public safety programs yesterday, including programs that might otherwise face budget cuts as well as an expansion of existing programs such as Health 99 and the CARE team, which responds alongside police to low-risk 911 calls.

Standing inside Fire Station 10 a few blocks from City Hall on Thursday afternoon, Harrell called the new tax plan part of a “comprehensive approach to investing in both quality, safety and public health as two sides of the same coin and interconnected and not in conflict.” The city council has to approve the tax before it can go into effect.

In all, Harrell announced, the city would be investing $39 million from the new sales tax on non-police public safety investments. Governor Bob Ferguson’s budget, passed earlier this year, authorizes local jurisdictions to pass a 0.1-cent sales tax to pay for public safety.

King County just passed its own 0.1-cent sales tax increase to help fund the county’s public-safety budget; assuming the Seattle tax increases passes, the combined sales tax in Seattle will total nearly 10.6 percent.

Only about half of the funding Harrell announced yesterday will be new. Of the $39 million, $15 million will supplant existing general-fund spending for the city’s CARE Team, a group of 24 civilian first responders who respond alongside police to certain 911 calls—freeing up general fund dollars to fund other city priorities.

Another $5 million will replace one-time federal funding (from several sources) for LEAD, whose operator, Purpose Dignity Action, was facing a budget cliff for the nationally recognized diversion program. Last year, in response to a new law that made simple drug possession and use a misdemeanor, LEAD started taking referrals exclusively from police, rather than community members; the new funding, according to PDA co-director Lisa Daugaard, will allow the group to help about 100 more people next year.

The remaining $19 million will including funding to:

  • Add 20 new fighter recruits in 2026 ($2 million);
  • Expand the Downtown Emergency Service Center’s “field-based” work to provide opioid treatment and medicine to people living in shelters and permanent supportive housing, among other locations ($1.2 million);
  • Expand the fire department’s Health 99 response team, including two new case managers and new vehicles ($1.6 million);
  • Add funding for the Seattle Indian Health Board’s Thunderbird Treatment Center, a rehab center that was previously located in Rainier Beach that’s reopening on Vashon ($1.8 million);
  • Add funding for future detox and inpatient treatment beds through a competitive bidding process ($2.8 million);
  • Hire 12 new 911 call takers, plus three trainers and three administrative staff—an investment that will offset current overtime spending at the city’s 911 call center ($2.6 million);
  • Double the CARE team  from 24 to 48 responders, a change CARE Department director Amy Barden said will allow them to respond to calls across the city for about 20 hours every day ($6.9 million).

Council president Sara Nelson, who proposed dedicating 25 percent of the new tax to treatment earlier this year, said she was not “going to split hairs” about how much of the funding in the new plan will go to fund new treatment beds (in all, the treatment portion of the proposal amounts to about 16 percent of the overall proposal).

“Because of my subject [expertise], my personal experience, because I see such a great need—throw all the money at this,” Nelson continued. Nelson has talked publicly about her own experience going to treatment for alcohol addiction and has frequently advocated for more direct city funding for rehab, which has not traditionally been under the city’s purview.

The CARE team is currently under a memorandum of agreement that restricts its size to 24 responders, does not allow CARE to go out on calls without police, and restricts the kind of calls CARE can respond to. This has limited the team’s ability to do what it was established to do: Respond to calls that are more appropriate for social workers than police.

Additionally, because police officers can choose whether to respond to calls themselves or hand them off to CARE, the volume of calls CARE can respond to has fluctuated fairly dramatically over time.

According to Barden, a city analysis of more than 50,000 calls the CARE team believes they can respond to, but can’t because of the MOU, that only 300 included any kind of police action, such as a citation.

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The MOU expires at the end of the year, and any new agreement with CARE will be part of the next contract between the city and the Seattle Police Officers Guild (SPOG). Ordinarily, SPOG contract negotiations tend to drag out for months or years, but the union is reportedly amenable to reaching an agreement quickly now that it appears likely that Katie Wilson, not Bruce Harrell, will be mayor next year. It now appears likely that the new contract will allow CARE to respond to more types of calls, expand to 48 members, and respond to calls without police in tow—a huge turnaround from the extremely restrictive MOU.

Harrell said he couldn’t comment on the MOU because the negotiations with SPOG are ongoing. But Barden, who is not a party to the negotiations, said she was optimistic. “I get along with [SPOG president] Mike Solan personally and I feel his support is genuine.”

If the city doesn’t manage to reach a contract with the police union that gives CARE more freedom to respond to calls, Barden continued, she has about “47 contingency plans,” such as working with King County to direct the CARE team to respond to calls to 988, the mental-health crisis line. Because 988 isn’t a city system, responding to those calls wouldn’t require negotiations with Seattle police. But that’s the nuclear option. Reading through the lines of Harrell’s and Barden’s comments Thursday, the city appears to believe SPOG will work with them to let CARE’s responders actually perform the jobs they were hired to do.

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.

 

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.”