Tag: Claudia Balducci

Morning Crank: “Sound Transit Is Not Felt To Be a Safe Workplace”

1. Sound Transit CEO Peter Rogoff escaped serious reprimand on Wednesday for alleged behavior toward agency employees that included looking women up and down and giving them “elevator eyes,” using racially insensitive language, swearing at employees, and using an abrasive style that both the public memo on the investigation into his behavior and King County Executive Dow Constantine described as “East Coast” (whatever that’s supposed to mean). With only Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan and Seattle City Council member Rob Johnson dissenting (because they believed Rogoff’s punishment was insufficient), the board voted to require Rogoff to create a “leadership development plan” to improve his listening, self-awareness, and relationship building” skills and to  assign a three-member panel, made up of Sound Transit board members, to monitor his progress on the plan for six months.

Durkan skipped the launch of an NHL season ticket drive and the raising of the NHL flag over the Space Needle to be at today’s board meeting, an indication of how seriously she took the charges. Before voting, Durkan read the following statement:

“The issues raised and on which we were briefed led me to believe the conclusion that these [performance] factors cannot be met, and so I will be voting against this motion. I think the facts that we have been briefed on and the conclusions reached by our Counsel demonstrate that Sound Transit is not felt to be a safe workplace for all employees, that they do not feel that they can act without repercussions, and that there are many who feel that their work is not valued. I am also concerned that the statements that were alleged to have been made by the CEO, and the actions that were raised – raised the issue of racial bias and insensitivity, as well as other workplace harassment issues. I do not believe that these issues have been resolved as completely as indicated by Counsel, and that having three Board Members oversee the daily work of this CEO is not the resolution, and so I will be voting against this motion.”

Neither Durkan nor Johnson had any further comment after the meeting.

The memo on the investigation lays out a few specific examples of behaviors that the investigation deemed inappropriate, including a Black History Month event in 2016 at which Rogoff “reportedly made comments condescending toward persons of color” and a 2017 incident in which he dismissively told a female employee, “Honey, that ain’t ever going to happen” in response to a question. But the memo, and most of the Sound Transit board, is also quick to chalk much of Rogoff’s reported behavior up to difficulty navigating the politeness of Pacific Northwest culture and the fact that the previous CEO, Joni Earl, was so beloved that Rogoff faced built-in challenges from the time he was hired, in late 2015. To wit:

In the meeting, King County Executive Dow Constantine, who was chair of the Sound Transit board when Rogoff was hired, said he talked to Rogoff when he applied for the position and “cautioned him that his directness was going to run up against a very different way of interacting  to which we are accustomed here in the Pacific Northwest, and that he was going to have to modify his manner and understand the local culture if we were going to be successful.” Constantine also described Rogoff as “bracingly direct” before praising his effectiveness.

Rogoff echoed Constantine’s complimentary assessment of his style in his own memo responding to the allegations. In the memo, Rogoff acknowledges (using language that reads a bit like a job applicant saying that his worst flaw is his “relentless attention to detail”) that his “directness and unvarnished clarity did not sit well with some staff” and that he was, at times, “overly intense in articulating my expectations for performance.” Rogoff goes on to explicitly deny some of the allegations,” calling some of the claims made during the investigation “misquoted, misunderstood, mischaracterized or false. I don’t yell at people.  I don’t disparage small city mayors and I don’t shove chairs to make a point,” two incidents that were detailed in the documents released today. “I was shocked to read some of the characterizations on this list.”

A document labeled “Peter Rogoff, CEO ST: Note to file” describes some of those alleged incidents. They include: Directing a staffer to tell Seattle Times reporter Mike Lindblom to “go fuck himself”; yelling over the phone at a staffer in a conversation that lasted from 11pm to 1am; standing up at a meeting and saying “When I give direction, it’s for action, not rumination” and shoving a chair; saying that he “couldn’t give a flying fuck about how things were when Joni [Earl] was here, because she’s not here anymore”; using the term “flying fuck” constantly “to everyone”; and the aforementioned incidents in which he allegedly looked women up and down and gave them “elevator eyes.”

King County Council member and Sound Transit board member Claudia Balducci said after the meeting that she has “seen a lot of improvement” in Rogoff’s behavior. “I think that at least shows that it’s possible, and therefore that we could have a successful CEO. If he can manage people with respect and dignity then I felt he deserves the opportunity.” Balducci disagreed that Rogoff’s management style could be explained away by “regional” differences. “I’m from New York,” she said, and “I think everybody, no matter where they’re from, knows how to be respectful. The things that we were talking about were more than just style.”

Although Rogoff did not receive a bonus this year, he did receive a five percent cost of living adjustment, which puts his salary at just over $328,000.

2. The city’s progressive revenue task force held its final meeting on Wednesday morning, adopting a report (final version to come) that recommends new taxes that could bring in as much as $150 million a year for housing and services for homeless and low-income people in Seattle. Half of that total, $75 million, would come from some version of an employee hours tax; the variables include what size business will pay the tax ($8 million vs. $10 million in gross revenues), the tax rate and whether it will be a flat per-employee fee or a percentage of revenues; and whether businesses that don’t hit the threshold for the tax will have to pay a so-called “skin in the game” fee for doing business in the city. The task force also talked about making the tax graduated based on employer size, but noted that such a tax may not be legal and would almost certainly be subject to immediate legal challenges.

The original memo on the head tax proposals suggests that the “skin in the game” fee should be $200 and that the fee would kick in once a business makes gross revenues—not net profits—of $500,000. During the conversation Wednesday morning, some task force members floated the idea of lowering that threshold to just $100,000, a level that would require many small businesses, such as street-level retailers, to pay the fee, regardless of what their actual profit margins are. However, after council member and task force chair Lorena Gonzalez pointed out that the city has not done a racial equity analysis to see how any of the head tax proposals would impact minority business owners, the group decided to keep the trigger at $500,000 in gross revenues. Additionally, they decided to raise the recommended fee to $395—a number that was thrown out, seemingly at random, by a task force member who called it “psychological pricing” (on the theory that $395 feels like significantly less than $400).

The other $75 million would come, in theory, from a combination of other taxes, some of them untested in Seattle and likely to face legal challenges, including a local excise tax, an excess compensation tax, a tax on “speculative real estate investment activity,” and an increase in the real estate excise tax. Legal challenges could delay implementation of new taxes months or years, and—although no one brought it up at yesterday’s meeting—REET revenues always take a nosedive during economic downturns, making them a fairly volatile revenue source.

3. The Teamsters Local 174 confirmed yesterday that they will no longer allow the King County Democrats to hold meetings at their building in Tukwila, after a contentious meeting Tuesday night that lasted until nearly midnight. My report on that meeting, at which the group decided to extend and expand the investigation into sexual harassment and financial misconduct claims against the group’s chairman, Bailey Stober, is here.

According to Teamsters senior business agent Tim Allen, the decision wasn’t directly related to the allegations against Stober, but had to do with the behavior of some of the group’s members and their treatment of a custodial worker who had to clean up after the group, who may have been drinking alcohol on the premises. “We have standards of conduct that people are supposed to live up to” around how guests treat the building and whether they “treat our [staffers] properly,” Allen said. “They had the whole building to clean, and usually we expect [groups that use the building] to clean up after themselves. Stober, contacted by email, said “I’ve heard varying degrees of that story” (that people were drinking, continued to do so after they were asked to stop, and left a mess), “but I can’t confirm that because I was sitting in the front of the room and have no knowledge of what was happening outside of the room.” Many other local progressive groups, including some legislative Democratic groups, have alcohol at their meetings (many provide beer or wine for a suggested donation), but some venues do not allow alcohol without a banquet license.

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County Presses Pause on Safe Consumption Sites

Two weeks ago, rejecting the unanimous recommendation of the King County Heroin and Prescription Opiate Addiction Task Force, the King County Council voted to prohibit funding for supervised drug consumption sites except in cities that explicitly approve them—a sop to suburban cities and rural areas where residents are vehemently opposed to the sites and a slap in the face for the task force, which recommended a pilot project that would include one supervised consumption site in Seattle and one somewhere else in the county. (The county refers to supervised consumption sites by the clunky acronym CHELs, for Community Health Engagement Locations).

The council also voted to prohibit the county from funding safe consumption sites anywhere outside Seattle, and barred spending any of the county’s general fund on a Seattle site. As a result of those restrictions, any money for the pilot project would have to come from the county’s Mental Illness and Drug Dependency levy—a tax that generates about $66 million a year but is already largely spoken for. The supervised consumption pilot was never supposed to be funded entirely through the MIDD, and supporters say that as the cost estimate for the pilot has ballooned to more than $1 million, the likelihood that it can be funded MIDD dollars alone is virtually zero.

“EFFECT: Restricts the General Fund Transfers to DCHS and Public Health such that 86 no General Funds can be used to establish CHEL sites. Restricts the MIDD  appropriation such that no MIDD funds can be used to establish CHEL sites outside 88 the city of Seattle.” – King County budget amendment barring county spending on safe consumption sites outside Seattle

Kris Nyrop, who wrote an op/ed for the Stranger comparing the council’s move to the “state’s rights” politics of the 1980s, says the vote “effectively kills” safe consumption sites, at least for the next two years, because “The MIDD dollars are all already accounted for until the fall of 2018” and because “the [King County] health department has dithered so long on this that they have given the opposition time to really organize” against it.

Supervised consumption sites, where addicts can use illegal drugs under medical supervision in a location that also offers medical care, detox, and referrals to treatment, are common in Europe but almost unheard-of in North America, where more puritanical attitudes toward addiction have made them controversial. The idea behind supervised consumption is that it keeps people from dying of overdoses and treatable conditions (like wound infections), prevents disease transmission via dirty needles, and gets people who may not have seen a doctor in years into the health care and social service system, providing a lifeline toward housing, treatment, and recovery.

“We haven’t yet done the work that we need to do at the council to understand the proposal, the benefits, or the criteria for when and where these [safe consumption sites] make sense.” – King County Council Democrat Claudia Balducci

The sites are controversial for obvious reasons: Intuitively, giving drug addicts a safe place to consume dangerous, illegal drugs seems like condoning their behavior. (This view assumes that addiction is a choice and ignores the fact that forcing people into treatment, an alternative that safe consumption opponents frequently suggest, is cost-prohibitive and doesn’t work, but it’s ultimately an emotional argument, not a rational one.)

“Trust me, you don’t treat alcoholism by inviting alcoholics to the bar,” Republican county council member Reagan Dunn, who has been public about his own struggles with addiction, said before the vote. “Fifty-six percent of my constituents said they are extremely against these sites. Only 20 percent of people indicated they were open to considering these sites.” Dunn said he was concerned about the county’s liability if users OD and die inside the facility (in almost 15 years, not one person has died at Insite in Vancouver) and worried that the sites would become magnets for heroin dealers. He suggested that Seattle should be a test case for the site, “before we take the show on the road” to suburban areas that don’t have the same capacity to provide treatment and emergency services.

Republicans weren’t the only ones arguing that safe consumption sites should be limited to the state’s largest city. Suburban Democrats like Claudia Balducci (a former Bellevue City Council member) and Dave Upthegrove, who represents South King County, argued that the county would be overstepping its authority if it opened a safe consumption site where residents opposed the idea. “One of the things that always drove us crazy at the city level was when higher levels of government told us what to do at our city,” Balducci said. “I come from a city that has decided this is not what they want in their city. It doesn’t fit the needs or the desires of their community…. [Safe consumption sites] work best in locations where there’s a lot of street drug use,” she added.

Public Defender Association director Lisa Daugaard, who sat on the heroin task force, argues that “it sets a dangerous precedent to withhold funding for health services from residents of towns whose elected officials have ideological problems with those medical strategies. … The health and well-being of people who live in Kirkland and Kent affect that of people in Seattle, and vice versa.”

Larry Gossett, a Seattle Democrat, scoffed at the implication that drug addiction—particularly heroin addiction—is a problem restricted to big cities like Seattle. Noting that, nationally, heroin and opioid addiction is largely a rural and suburban problem, Gossett said, “I do not understand this concept that people who live outside of Seattle and in suburban and rural areas are different than people who live inside of cities.” Council member Rod Dembowski, whose district includes Shoreline, Kirkland, and Woodinville, added, “There is a serious rural crisis going on, with people dying every day, and I don’t think it’s fair to the citizens of my district to say, ‘No, you don’t get to have return on your investment’ if such a facility would serve their needs. … I don’t think the public health of the 2.1 million residents of this county should be decided based on fear.”

On the  phone last week, Balducci defended her vote, arguing that the budget amendment is a temporary pause, not a permanent spending prohibition. “We haven’t yet done the work that we need to do at the council to understand the proposal, the benefits, or the criteria for when and where these [safe consumption sites] make sense,” she said. “We have to do a little more background work and figure out, what are these [safe consumption] sites and who do they serve.” Balducci also suggested that a huge debate about safe consumption sites could blow up her ongoing efforts to establish the first permanent men’s shelter on the Eastside in Bellevue. “We are facing a really tremendous backlash about that, and one aspect of the opponents’ position is that this is just the camel’s nose under the tent and they’re going to legalize heroin next and [addicts] are going to be out in all the neighborhoods.”

Of course, they’re already there.

Daugaard, who still holds out hope that the council could reverse its decision during the ongoing budget process, says that if they don’t, “it will be very difficult to keep the promise that the heroin task force made to neighborhood leaders in Seattle: that Seattle would not be left alone to respond to this need, which is fundamentally unfair given the widespread use of heroin and opiates throughout the county.  Waiting until 2019 to move forward inevitably will mean avoidable overdose deaths, and no solution to drug use in unsupervised public sites like bathrooms and parks.  Hopefully we all can agree that the status quo is unacceptable. Waiting is not a plan.”

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