Tag: Dan Strauss

Elections, homelessness, human services, King County, Mayor Durkan, Morning Fizz, Parks, Police

No Charges Against Cops Who Violated Voting Law; City Finally Buys Shower Trailers

1. Eight Seattle police officers who registered to vote using the addresses of Seattle Police Department precincts instead of their home addresses—including Seattle Police Officers’ Guild President Mike Solan—will not face criminal charges. Instead, after an investigation by the Office of Police Accountability (OPA), two of the officers (including Solan) received one-day unpaid suspensions and three received oral reprimands; the remaining three officers retired or resigned before the investigation ended.

The South Seattle Emerald first reported that eight SPD officers had registered to vote using their precinct addresses in July 2020, after a search of county voting records found at least one officer registered at each of the department’s five precincts. Because registering to vote using an incorrect residential address is a felony in Washington—one punishable by a five-year prison sentence or a $10,000 fine—the OPA initially referred the case to SPD for a criminal investigation.

The department decided not to investigate; according to the OPA’s report on the case, an SPD captain justified the decision by noting that the officers were already under investigation by the King County Department of Elections, and by claiming (incorrectly) that all of the officers lived in Seattle.

While all acknowledged that they had used their precinct addresses when registering to vote, most argued that they did so to avoid making their home addresses a public record for safety reasons. In response, OPA Director Andrew Myerberg advised the officers to lobby the state legislature to pass tighter privacy protections instead of breaking state law.

In lieu of an investigation, the OPA began its own investigation of the officers’ alleged policy violations, ultimately ruling that all eight officers violated SPD’s professionalism policies, as well as a policy prohibiting officers from using their precinct addresses for personal business. OPA Director Andrew Myerberg didn’t say whether he believed the officers knowingly violated state law, though he noted that King County Elections’ investigation will eventually resolve the question. “Ignorance of the law is not a defense,” he wrote in his report. “This is especially the case for police officers who are entrusted with the responsibility of enforcing it.”

If the elections department does rule that the officers knowingly broke state law, county election officials told the OPA they are unlikely to press charges—the law targeting incorrect voter registration addresses is frequently broken and rarely enforced.

Only five of the officers agreed to interviews with OPA investigators. While all acknowledged that they had used their precinct addresses when registering to vote, most argued that they did so to avoid making their home addresses a public record for safety reasons. In response, Myerberg advised the officers to lobby the state legislature to pass tighter privacy protections instead of breaking state law.

2. The city will replace two rented shower trailers, which have been stationed at Seattle Center and King Street Station in Pioneer Square since last fall, with trailers it bought from a Pittsburgh-based company called Restroom2Go Restroom Trailers. According to a Seattle Public Utilities spokeswoman, the trailers cost the city just over $188,000.

As the COVID pandemic abates, the city has begun closing down and relocating facilities and services for people experiencing homelessness, including “de-intensified” mass shelters and hygiene facilities like the two shower trailers. For now, the spokeswoman said, people will still be able to shower at King Street Station, but the shower trailer at Seattle Center will have to move as summer programming returns to the former World’s Fair grounds. A temporary shelter run by the Downtown Emergency Service Center at Seattle Center’s Exhibition Hall has already started shutting down, with residents moving back into the Navigation Center (a congregate shelter in the International District).

Another DESC shelter whose residents moved to Exhibition Hall during the pandemic, the Queen Anne Shelter, remains closed.

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As PubliCola has reported over the past year, Mayor Jenny Durkan’s administration was reluctant to provide mobile showers for people experiencing homelessness even before the pandemic. Although the city council provided funds to purchase shower trailers in 2019, SPU, under Durkan, didn’t spend the money, forcing a mad scramble to rent trailers at an exorbitant cost once the pandemic began. (Even then, the city took months to actually deploy the trailers.) Eventually, the city ditched its gold-plated trailer provider for a more affordable service.

According to SPU, the city is still looking for a place to move the Seattle Center trailer “on the campus,” and is also working out what to do with the two trailers in the long term. “City staff are considering exploring the best options for the trailers, including making them mobile, keeping them stationary or a hybrid approach, to meet the needs of our clients and maximize utilization.”

Even with the two trailers remaining in service, there are very few options for people living unsheltered to take a shower citywide. Lack of access to hygiene is a major quality of life issue, and a barrier to accessing public facilities like transit and libraries, not to mention applying for a job. According to the city’s current hygiene map, there are just 14 places in the city that offer free showers, most of them concentrated near the downtown core; neighborhoods south of I-90, including all of West and Southeast Seattle, have just one shower location each.

3. Someone—perhaps the same brave long-lens photographers who add images of unsheltered people to Google Maps results for various Seattle parks—took the time recently to rename the Ballard Commons Park “Straussville” in Google Maps.

Dan Strauss is the city council member for District 6, which includes the Commons; unsheltered people have lived and congregated in the park, which is next to the Ballard branch library, for many years, but have become more visible during the pandemic as the city decreased encampment sweeps. As of Monday morning, the fake park name had been removed.

City Council, Maybe Metropolis, neighborhoods, Urbanism

Maybe Metropolis: Launching Seattle’s New “Neighborhood Character”

District 6 Councilmember Dan Strauss’ legislation is an acknowledgment that Seattle’s neighborhood character is changing.

by Josh Feit

City Council member Dan Strauss passed legislation this week that extends the city’s sidewalk and curbside permitting program for Seattle businesses for another year. Standing next to one of the semi-permanent “pergolas” that now line Ballard Avenue, Strauss said, “we want them here forever.” Mike Stewart, head of the Ballard Alliance, noted the “great symbiotic relationship between restaurants, retailers, and the Ballard Sunday Farmers Market. By supporting any one of those,” Stewart said, customers help support the neighborhood’s whole urban core.

It’s a good start. In fact, I inaugurated the “Maybe Metropolis” column during the tumult of the pandemic last Fall by seizing on the street seating program as a promising sign that the COVID-19 crisis was unlocking Seattle’s larger urbanist sensibility.

But…

Strauss’ legislation doesn’t fully capitalize on this pivotal moment. Public momentum is currently pushing Seattle in an urban direction. In just one year, the city has now issued 233 outdoor restaurant permits, compared to about 384 outdoor dining permits issued over the previous 12 years combined.

Obviously, part of that increase is related to that fact that the permits were free this year; ordinarily there’s a square footage charge and a $232 up-front free. Nonetheless, this year’s permits represent an increase of more than 700 percent over the previous years’ average—a tremendous spike.

If there’s one thing we’ve learned from the pandemic, it’s that Seattle’s “neighborhood character” has a different personality type than we thought. Long a coded excuse against everything from more mother-in-law apartments, to triplexes, to nighttime lights in parks, it turns out Seattle’s “neighborhood character” is far more malleable and exciting than Seattle’s reactionary reflex suggests.

If we miss this opportunity to transform Seattle’s non-downtown neighborhoods on a grander scale than simply allowing outdoor seating while failing to make our local communities places that actually support our lives—as opposed to supporting Stepford lives—we will have squandered 2021’s urban revelation.

Certainly, some of the pent-up energy is specific to the pandemic, but given that trends like working from home were already in play prior to 2020—teleworking in Seattle increased 113 percent between 2010 and 2019—it seems the pandemic has actually revealed, rather than invented, neighborhood needs and preferences.

For example, the jump in working from home was not a function of Seattle’s simultaneous population boom, as it dramatically outpaced other modes like driving (which actually decreased) and walking. The need for more neighborhood options to do business, shop, and go out nearby isn’t going away if people continue to work in greater numbers at home.

The pandemic has actually revealed, rather than invented, neighborhood needs and preferences..

The change in mood that has coincided with the need for more activated neighborhoods has certainly nudged the city to already relax some rigid rules this past year. In addition to making it easier for businesses to set up sidewalk and street dining, the council has also eased restrictions on small home businesses and made some streets pedestrian and bike only zones.

It’s a good look. But rather than taking a piecemeal approach, council members need to think comprehensively about making all our city neighborhoods more neighbor-friendly. This means recalibrating zoning (more density and uses), restriping existing pavement (more bus and bike lanes), and retaking the public right of way (with bioswales, bike racks, P-Patches, microparks, and closing streets to cars.)

In March, I published a list of seven neighborhood Must Dos for meeting this moment, which mostly focused on increasing housing density in non-downtown neighborhoods (end single family zoning, please!) and increasing the density of indie businesses as well. Along those lines, I wrote: “With hundreds of businesses getting street (or sidewalk) seating permits … it needs to be a permanent option.” Since the council seems to be responding to the zeitgeist, I’d like to take advantage of the momentum and offer some more necessary fixes for Seattle’s neighborhoods.

Because District 6 Councilmember Strauss is showing such leadership on this issue, I’m proposing Ballard, which makes up the bulk of District 6, as the first neighborhood to implement the following recommendations for acknowledging and activating our new neighborhood character.

We can call it the Ballard Action District, or BAD.

Ballard Ave.

First, while allowing multifamily housing in Seattle’s exclusive single-family zones must be central to any plan to reinvent our neighborhoods, let’s start by upzoning the real estate that’s adjacent to our neighborhood parks and schools, creating Parks Oriented Development (POD) and Schools Oriented Development (SOD).

Eighty-nine percent of the city’s parks and open spaces are in single family zones. Similarly, the vast majority of the city’s top-performing elementary schools are in single-family areas. Let’s give more people access. In order to redistribute these assets, let’s start undoing those single-family enclaves, which make up 65 percent of the city’s developable land, by prioritizing real estate around parks and schools for multi-family and affordable housing.

Continue reading “Maybe Metropolis: Launching Seattle’s New “Neighborhood Character”” →

City Council, Courts, homelessness, human services, Mayor Durkan, Morning Fizz, Police

D.C. Protest Cops Sue for Secrecy, Questions About “Shelter Surge,” and Concerns About Police Contract
Seattle Deputy Mayor Casey Sixkiller

1. Six Seattle Police Department officers who were in Washington, DC on January 6 for the “Stop the Steal” rally that preceded the attack on the US Capitol building have sued the Seattle Police Department and four individuals who filed public records requests with the department to prevent the department from disclosing their names. The six officers are currently under investigation by the Office of Police Accountability (OPA) for their potential involvement in the attack on the Capitol.

According the complaint, which the officers filed in King County Superior Court on Tuesday, the six are seeking a temporary restraining order that would stop SPD from releasing their names and unredacted personnel files. SPD and the OPA will release their names and unredacted personnel files to the public unless they receive a temporary restraining order by February 25, the officers noted in the complaint.

“It is highly inappropriate for a public employer to demand that its employees disclose their attendance at a political event, and then release the identities of any employees who attended that political event to the public,” the complaint says.

The lawsuit claims that the officers will be “targeted, harassed, subjected to violent acts or sustain other irreparable harm” if their names are made public, particularly while the OPA investigations are still ongoing.

“It is highly inappropriate for a public employer to demand that its employees disclose their attendance at a political event, and then release the identities of any employees who attended that political event to the public,” the complaint says. “Just as it would be anathema for a public employer to require its employees to disclose who they voted for in any particular election, and then disclosure that information to members of the public.”

The complaint says the officers did not take part in the Capitol attack, and that if their names come out, the officers will be “painted as ‘criminals’ or ‘extremists’ solely by virtue of their constitutionally-protected attendance at a political speech and rally.” It also argues that releasing the officers’ names may violate state law, which prohibits government agencies from disclosing records connected to ongoing investigations into violations of federal, state or local laws.

If the officers receive a temporary restraining order from the court, they will then seek a permanent injunction preventing SPD from disclosing their names in the future.

2. During a wide-ranging briefing about the hotel-based shelters Mayor Jenny Durkan announced this week, deputy mayor Casey Sixkiller fielded questions from the council about the scope of the program, who it will serve, and why the mayor’s office seems so attached to partnering with a specific hotel in downtown Seattle, the Executive Pacific Hotel. The city fully rented the same hotel at the beginning of the pandemic for first responders and, when first responders didn’t use the rooms, for nurses and other essential workers. The hotel remained almost entirely vacant for the duration of the lease, which cost the city about $4 million.

Not all of these rooms will be used as shelter.

As we reported earlier this week, the announcement confirms PubliCola’s previous reporting that Chief Seattle Club will operate a shelter and rapid rehousing program out of King’s Inn in Belltown, and LIHI and Chief Seattle Club will run a similar program out of the Executive Pacific.

Although Sixkiller echoed Durkan’s announcement that the two hotels will provide 220 rooms for people experiencing homelessness, the actual number is closer to 200, because some of the rooms at both hotels will be used for case management, live-in staff, and other purposes. That’s about 100 less than the 300 hotel rooms the city announced it would provide last October, when the estimate for the hotels to open was no later than January. The city now says both hotels will open sometime in March, more than a year after the mayor declared a COVID-19 state of emergency.

“Our goal here is sort of a ‘both, and,’ council member—both individuals who have high acuity needs as well as others.”—Deputy Mayor Casey Sixkiller

The mayor’s office has referred to the hotels as a yearlong program, but the plan includes a total of at least two months to ramp up and ramp down the programs, so the planned duration of the actual shelters is more like nine to ten months. 

The program has changed in other ways. Although the budget action appropriating city funds for the “shelter surge” explicitly said the hotel program would serve people with the greatest service needs—who happen to be the group causing the greatest “disorder” in areas like downtown and Pioneer Square—LIHI plans to serve people who can more easily transition into the rapid rehousing program that is also a key component of the mayor’s plan.

Councilmember Dan Strauss asked Sixkiller whether the program would also help “high-acuity” clients, as the deputy mayor said it would as recently as last December, when Sixkiller brought advocates from the Public Defender Association and REACH, two groups that serve high-needs unsheltered people, along with him to the council’s homelessness committee to promote the program.

“[With] all of our shelter units, we are trying to pair individuals with the housing that best meets their needs and the services that they need to be successful in making that transition from being outside and into housing and on the journey, hopefully, into permanent housing,” Sixkiller told the council yesterday, “so our goal here is sort of a ‘both, and,’ council member—both individuals who have high acuity needs as well as others.”

LIHI has indicated that at least some of the people who will move into the Executive Pacific will come from other LIHI programs; Chief Seattle Club did not return a call seeking more information about their program. Referrals will go “through” the new HOPE Team, which replaced the Navigation Team, but the exact details of how that will work and how the agencies will identify hotel clients are vague; the HOPE team does not actually do outreach, but coordinates referrals from their offices.

Sixkiller would not get into the cost of each hotel room, saying that was proprietary information until the city had inked the contracts. But a back-of-the-envelope calculation indicates that if the city spends all of the available money on these two hotels, the cost will work out to about $28,000 a bed, or around the same amount as the expansion of the JustCARE program the city rejected as too expensive.

Councilmember Lisa Herbold asked Sixkiller whether the “125 new shelter beds” the mayor announced this week were actually new. The two new tiny house villages were actually council additions to the mayor’s budget last year, and the WHEEL shelter opened earlier this month after the organization spent months pressuring the mayor’s office to allow them to open a nighttime shelter in City Hall, a plan the mayor’s office rejected. Sixkiller responded that he could get back to her about the “color of money” funding each part of the “surge,” prompting Herbold to respond, “This isn’t merely an academic exercise” about “the color of money” but a question of how many actually new beds will be available.

3. The Community Police Commission voted on Tuesday to approve a list of recommendations for Seattle’s upcoming contract negotiations with the Seattle Police Officers’ Guild (SPOG), the largest of the city’s police unions. The recommendations address both the transparency of the city’s bargaining process and the city’s priorities during bargaining.

The commission generally agreed on the transparency proposals, which included a recommendation to require the city to make public the membership of its negotiating team, its bargaining priorities, and any concessions it makes during negotiations. Commissioners also broadly supported a recommendation that negotiators try to remove the parts of the SPOG contract that allow the agreement to supersede city law; Officer Mark Mullens, the only SPD officer on the commission, was the only member to oppose that proposal.

Continue reading “D.C. Protest Cops Sue for Secrecy, Questions About “Shelter Surge,” and Concerns About Police Contract” →

Morning Fizz

Morning Fizz: As the City Debates Police Accountability and Homelessness, Brutality Allegations and Encampments Proliferate
Seattle Police Department officers and other members if the Navigation Team watch as a person experiencing homelessness gathers their possessions during an encampment removal at the Ballard Commons earlier this year.

1. Last Wednesday, acting Seattle Police Chief Adrian Diaz announced a new partnership between his department and the Los Angeles-based Center for Policing Equity (CPE), which specializes in producing “analyses to identify and reduce the causes of racial disparities in policing.”

In a press release, Diaz said the CPE will spend the next several months studying SPD’s “functions, training, policies, accountability measures and impacts on communities of color”; the researchers will then “convert” their findings into “strategies to ensure [that] SPD eradicates public safety inequities moving forward.”

In her September executive order launching an assessment of SPD’s functions and possible areas for civilianization, Mayor Jenny Durkan also included the CPE as a source of “subject matter expertise” alongside the city’s own accountability partners, including the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) and the Community Policing Commission (CPC).

This is not the CPE’s first time in town. In 2015, after the CPC asked SPD to review its crowd control policies in the wake of that year’s Black Lives Matter protests, then-police chief Kathleen O’Toole included the CPE on a panel of experts tasked with reviewing the department’s crowd control tactics and presenting recommendations for improvement. The CPE did not release its 23-page report until 2017, and the panel never presented their recommendations publicly. The CPE’s recommendations were generally unremarkable: for instance, the analysts suggested that “SPD should further pursue explanations of the elevated severe use of force during demonstrations.” 

Diaz’ announcement gave no indication that the new CPE study will be any more transformative than its last one, not least because he did not name any accountability mechanism attached to the analysts’ recommendations (some accountability mechanism may exist, but a CPE representative didn’t respond to a request for comment on that front). 

Moreover, the scope of work that Diaz described suggests that the CPE’s study could easily overlap with the work of the city’s existing accountability bodies, including the Office of the Inspector General and the Office of Police Accountability. Inspector General Lisa Judge, whose office is currently working on a sentinel review of SPD’s protest response, told PubliCola that the CPE analysts should “engage with the current accountability structure and assess whether they’re actually doing anything different and whether there is value added.” There could be room for the analysts to collaborate with her office, she added, so long as they respect “the ongoing work of accountability partners.”

2. As the city council and Mayor Jenny Durkan continue debating what will will replace the Navigation Team, which Durkan formally dismantled in September, encampments have continued to proliferate around the city. Although one could argue that encampments are merely a symptom of a longstanding crisis Seattle has failed to adequately address, the city’s decision to temporarily stop sweeping people aggressively from place to place during the pandemic has exacerbated the visibility of the crisis. 

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Prior to COVID, the Navigation Team was conducting hundreds of encampment removals a year. Post-COVID, they dramatically scaled back this work, doing sweeps only at encampments that were the source of large numbers of complaints or that presented significant public safety issues, like the large encampment that was recently removed from a cracking, partially demolished pedestrian bridge downtown.

A large encampment at the Ballard Commons, across the street from the Ballard public library, was removed in May after neighborhood residents and community groups complained that it made the park feel dirty and unsafe. Like all sweeps, this one redistributed, but didn’t visibly reduce, the number of people living unsheltered in the neighborhood. Since then, not only has the Commons been thoroughly repopulated by unsheltered people, the people who were ordered to leave in May seem to have simply moved a few blocks away, a predictable outcome whenever encampments are swept. Continue reading “Morning Fizz: As the City Debates Police Accountability and Homelessness, Brutality Allegations and Encampments Proliferate” →

City Council, criminal justice, Featured, human services, Mayor Durkan, Police, South Seattle Emerald

Does the City Council Want to “Fire Half the Police Department Overnight”? Fact-Checking the Mayor and Police Chief’s Claims

This piece originally appeared at the South Seattle Emerald.

After announcing proposals to shift 911 dispatch, the Office of Emergency Management, parking enforcement, and the Office of Police Accountability away from the Seattle Police Department Monday morning, Mayor Jenny Durkan delivered a fiery broadside against the city council, accusing them of proposing an ill-considered plan to slash police spending without giving any consideration to what comes next. Durkan, up for reelection next year, was in full campaign-speech mode, positioning herself as the lone adult among squalling children.

“Seven out of nine council members committed to cutting the Seattle Police Department’s budget by 50 percent without a plan,” Durkan said. “This is simply not responsible. You can’t govern by Twitter or bumper sticker.” Later, Durkan accused the council of making the “arbitrary” decision to “just cut 50 percent because that’s what people put on a placard.” Police Chief Carmen Best piled on, accusing the council of wanting to eliminate the jobs of half the police department this year.

But is that narrative accurate? And is it fair of the mayor to suggest that the council went to a demonstration and was convinced to cut half the police department by a protest sign? Here are some of the primary factual claims the mayor and police chief made to reporters and the public on Monday morning, and an assessment of their accuracy.

Claim #1: The city council has made “made the arbitrary decision to defund the Seattle Police Department by 50 percent this year in 2020 and 50 percent next year” without any plan or consideration of the impacts such a “blunt cut” would have on the city’s ability to respond to crime and other emergency calls. “The city council decided in the space of hours … that they were going to cut the police department by 50 percent,” Durkan said Monday.

The seven council members who committed to making significant cuts to the police department all made slightly different statements, so it’s difficult to generalize about what each of them, individually, believe.

However, the one thing that was unambiguous during last week’s budget meeting was that in 2020, the council intends to cut not 50 percent of the total police department budget (a scenario Durkan has used to suggest the council would immediately shut down the entire police department as soon as the budget passes in August, since half the money for 2020 has theoretically been spent) but half of the budget that will remain for the last four months of the year, or about $65 million over the $20 million in cuts the mayor’s office has already proposed.

Council budget committee chair Teresa Mosqueda said as much last Wednesday, as has public safety committee chair Lisa Herbold, who also emphasized that she supports cutting the remaining police budget over a four-month period, not all at once.

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Jackie Vaughn, an organizer with Decriminalize Seattle, which is working with the council to come up with a detailed plan for replacing some police functions with community-based organizations, said, “This scale-down of police will happen in a phased way, [and] the corresponding scale-up of community-based organizations would happen at the same time,” also “in a phased way, starting this year to prepare us for 2021.”

And council member Dan Strauss, who has said he supports eventual cuts of around 50 percent, called it “a false narrative to say that these approaches will not work and cannot work because they are not ready to [start] today. … The worst thing we can do is give organizations the responsibility of responding [to calls for service] without giving then the time they need to be successful.”

Like Durkan, who noted that her own proposal to cut the department by a total of 5 percent this year came about “in three weeks,” the council plans to come up with a plan to reallocate police dollars on a short timeline, but the cuts themselves will be phased in starting in September.

Moreover, since cuts that will involve actual layoffs will require a separate bargaining process with the Seattle Police Officers Guild (and some of the proposed changes will require approval by the court monitor overseeing the federal consent decree over the department), it’s possible, perhaps likely, that the biggest changes will be pushed back to the end of the year, possibly beyond. What the council is proposing is an acceleration, not an immediate, wholesale gutting of the department.

Claim #2: Cutting the police department means cutting cops… or perhaps an entire police precinct… or possibly no longer responding to 911 calls.

Durkan and Best have repeatedly made the alarmist claim that a 50 percent reduction to the police department’s budget would require them to “fir[e] half the police department overnight,” as Best put it Monday. At the press conference, Best said she wanted to “thank our officers for continuing to answer calls, running into the face of danger to offer aid, all while hearing a political conversation that half of them aren’t needed.” Best explained that “our budget is almost entirely personnel,” so cutting police would mean cutting an equivalent number of jobs.

The police department’s budget is actually 75 percent personnel; it has also grown tremendously over the years, usually outpacing the growth of the city budget as a whole. As Kevin Schofield of SCC Insight has demonstrated, the lion’s share of this growth has come not from adding officers but from salaries that have ballooned well beyond the average salary in Seattle, even before overtime is factored in. Simply eliminating overtime (such as the $6.3 million officers were paid for guarding the East Precinct like a citadel under siege during recent Hill protests) would reduce the department’s annual budget by more than $30 million.

As for the department being forced to “quit responding to 911 calls,” as Durkan put it, or eliminating the entire Southwest police precinct… Neither activists nor the council have proposed eliminating the 911 system. (Decriminalize Seattle’s plan, for example, calls for phasing in the replacement of 911 operators with civilian dispatchers.) And as Herbold pointed out during the city council briefing on Monday, the mayor and police chief do not have the authority to shut down a police precinct; only the council can make that kind of decision.

Claim #3: The city of Seattle has already taken the steps to “rethink policing” that other cities are just beginning to consider, so there’s no reason to make radical changes.

“We have done so much of what is being called for nationally. We’re already there,” Best said. Durkan said people pointing to Camden, NJ, which dismantled its police force seven years ago, as a model for the future of policing in America have “misunderstood” what happened there. After reassessing a costly and often violent force, Camden did “the things that we’ve been doing in the last 10 years in Seattle— deescalation training, outreach, mental health interventions.” In Minneapolis, where George Floyd’s murder sparked similar calls to disband the police, “all the things that they are [proposing], we have already done,” Durkan said. “The Seattle Police Department’s deescalation training is literally the model for the nation.” Continue reading “Does the City Council Want to “Fire Half the Police Department Overnight”? Fact-Checking the Mayor and Police Chief’s Claims” →

campaign finance, City Council, Elections, Featured, Morning Crank, Politics

Campaign Crank: Complaints and Accusations Fly in Final Week Before Election

Image via Phil Tavel PDC complaint

1. Egan Orion, the former Capitol Hill Chamber of Commerce director who’s challenging District 3 City Council incumbent Kshama Sawant, has filed amended reports indicating that the campaign retroactively paid Uncle Ike’s pot shop owner Ian Eisenberg $500 a month for the use of a former Shell station owned by Eisenberg as its headquarters.

Under state and Seattle law, expenses like rent have to be reported in the same month in which they’re incurred, and the campaign treasurer has to update the campaign’s books to reflect expenditures within five days. After I broke the news that the campaign had not reported its use of the space as an expenditure, the campaign filed several amendments to its expenditure report, including two changes filed late last night.

The first amendment filed yesterday retroactively reported debts of $500 in rent for September and October—an amount that appears to be significantly below the average market rent for the area where the office is located, at 21st and Union in the Central District. (Olga Laskin, Orion’s campaign manager, said the office includes 350 square feet of “usable” space and was in poor condition when the campaign arrived. It has since been upgraded and painted with a large street-facing sign for the campaign.) The second change, filed as part of a report covering a longer time period 18 seconds later, reports the same $1000 as having been paid on October 28, along with another $500, presumably for November’s rent. One person has already filed a complaint at the state Public Disclosure Commission about the initial lack of reporting, which the campaign has called an oversight.

Eisenberg, who initially refused to comment on whether or how much he was charging the Orion campaign to use the space, has since gone on a Facebook rampage aimed at me and this website, calling me “fake news” for reporting factually (via Twitter) on the campaign’s use of the space he owns. (In his initial refusal to comment, Eisenberg politely told me that the rent he charges on the space was none of my business.) Failing to report an expenditure in a timely fashion, or undervaluing the office space, would amount to a campaign finance violation and could result in a fine. The Orion campaign has already paid one fine of $1,000 after the Public Disclosure Commission determined that the campaign had failed to report who paid for an ad it ran on the cover of the biweekly Stranger newspaper, as required under state campaign finance law.

The Orion campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

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2. Speaking of Eisenberg, the Central District and Capitol Hill business owner is one of the top five funders of a group called “District 1 Neighbors for Small Business,” which recently sent out a mailer that featured a list of “neighborhood mom & pop small local businesses” (including Uncle Ike’s) who are supporting Phil Tavel over incumbent council member Lisa Herbold. Eisenberg’s name appears on that list, with about 20 other people who either are not small business owners or who do not own businesses in the district. Eisenberg has an outlet called Ike’s Place in White Center, just outside Seattle city limits.

Also on Tavel’s list of small local businesses: Roger Valdez, a lobbyist for developers who does not live in the district; one of the owners of Smarty Pants and Hudson, two restaurants in council District 2; several partners at downtown Seattle law firms; Ryan Reese, one of the employee-owners of Pike Place Fish Market in downtown Seattle; and seven people who list their occupation as “retired.”

Besides Eisenberg, the top contributors to the District 1 Neighbors PAC are developer Dan Duffus; NUCOR PAC (the political arm of the local steel company); Seattle Hospitality for Progress (the political arm of the Seattle Hotel Association and the Seattle Restaurant Alliance); and Donna and Ken Olsen, who are retired). The top three contributors to the PAC contributors are Vulcan, the Washington Hospitality Association, and Hyatt hotels. Continue reading “Campaign Crank: Complaints and Accusations Fly in Final Week Before Election” →

Bikes, City Council, Elections, Environment, Featured, homelessness, labor, Politics

The 2019 City Council Candidates: Dan Strauss

 

 

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This year’s council races include an unusually high number of open seats, an unprecedented amount of outside spending, and eight first-time candidates. To help voters keep track, I’m sitting down with this year’s city council contenders to talk about their records, their priorities, and what they hope to accomplish on the council.

Today: Dan Strauss, a legislative aide to retiring District 7 council member Sally Bagshaw and nearly lifelong Ballard resident who is running to replacing District 6 representative Mike O’Brien, who’s leaving the council after 10 years. We sat down at Ballard Coffee Works on NW Market Street, which becomes pertinent a couple of times during this interview.

The C Is for Crank (ECB): When you’re knocking on doors, how do you respond to complaints that the city isn’t doing enough to address visible homelessness in District 6, particularly in Ballard?

Dan Strauss (DS): I talk to them about the need to be able to provide everyone who is experiencing homelessness the opportunity to come inside four walls with a door that they can lock, that’s connected to the services that they need. I mean, that’s the baseline of what we need to be doing. And it’s a travesty that we aren’t providing enough enhanced shelters or places for people to be able to keep their things during the middle of the day, that folks are pushed out of their overnight shelters very early in the morning and haven’t gotten a good night’s sleep, and so now they’re sleeping during the day. That’s what we need to be focusing on. And that’s how I direct their commentary.

When I was growing up, there was a single resident occupancy hotel [in Ballard], which burned down in 2000. That was a place where people would be able to have four walls and a door that they could lock if rent was short that month, or if they were off of a fishing boat for a minute, or something like that. And so I think that’s something that is sometimes lost when we’re talking about what’s going on in Ballard—there have always been people experiencing homelessness in our community.

“In my perfect world, we would be bonding against our existing tax streams, using our total bonding capacity to build the housing we need today.”

ECB: You’ve also mentioned that you supported safe consumption sites. It’s been more than three years since the King County Opiate Task Force recommended opening two safe consumption sites in the county, and obviously it hasn’t happened. Are you just stating your values, or are you planning to actively push for safe consumption if you’re elected?

DS: There’s not a legal pathway given the federal government’s current position. So these are values I hold, because I know that harm reduction models work. This is the most extreme harm reduction model available, and there’s other ways that we can reduce harm in our communities. We know that there are drug addiction is a medical disease and it can be treated with medical interventions.

ECB: You said at a recent forum that you don’t support sweeping homeless people from place to place. What would you do with the Navigation Team, and is there more nuance that you weren’t able to express in that yes/no question?

DS: The nuance with that is that the Navigation Team, in its essence, is supposed to navigate people to services and to a safe, warm, dry place to live. And the problem is that we don’t have enough of those resources, right? So if we did have enough places with four walls and a door that someone can lock, that has the services on site, the Navigation Team would be effective.

ECB: In the absence of that, what would you propose to address people’s short-term needs?

DS: In the short term, we need to treat this like the emergency that it is. The fact that it’s taking three to five years for the modular houses from King County to come online—that’s not satisfactory. We know what the solutions are and that we need to get going, and we need to put this at the front of the queue.

“All [the Office of Police Accountability] does is file complaints and grievances. We should also be giving commendations and saying, ‘You did a good job.’“

ECB: You’ve mentioned finding efficiencies in the system as one way to save money and be able to invest more in things like housing and shelter. Do you think that there needs to be a new revenue source as well?

DS: I mean, at this point, especially for the capital side of things, there’s no way around that. The ride share tax that [Mayor Jenny Durkan just proposed]—that’s another revenue source. I would love to see the state do more. I’d love to see the county do more. I’d love to work with my colleagues to develop good proposals that aren’t putting the burden on property or sales tax. What I would love to see is us fully use our bonding capacity. In my perfect world, we would be bonding against our existing tax streams, using our total bonding capacity to build the housing we need today.  We’re in an emergency—we’re just straight-up in an emergency. If there is any untapped [bonding] capacity, that needs to be used.

ECB: What do you think of how the mayor has proposed allocating the revenues from the ride share tax, splitting it between housing and the streetcar?

DS: I think we’re at the point where we’re going to need to connect the streetcars or rip them up. It’s just such an example how Seattle does things halfway. And we’ve had such a long history of doing things halfway. And that’s one of the reasons that I decided to run. I’m tired of seeing it done that way. We need to have Yesler Terrace connected to South Lake Union and South Lake Union connected to the International District. The frustrations that I have with the streetcar is it needs to have dedicated lanes, and we need to have a connected system. It’s also frustrating that this was a premier mode of transportation when it was first proposed and we never got behind it and now we’re behind the times.

I don’t think that the housing dollars should expire in five years. And I would love to see a way that we could get those funds to be bondable. Continue reading “The 2019 City Council Candidates: Dan Strauss” →