Tag: Egan Orion

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.

Support The C Is for Crank
Sorry to interrupt your reading, but THIS IS IMPORTANT. The C Is for Crank is a one-person operation, supported entirely—and I mean entirely— by generous contributions from readers like you. If you enjoy the breaking news, commentary, and deep dives on issues that matter to you, please support this work by donating a few bucks a month to keep this reader-supported site going. I can’t do this work without support from readers like you. Your $5, $10, and $20 monthly subscriptions allow me to do this work as my full-time job, so please become a sustaining supporter now. If you don’t wish to become a monthly contributor, you can always make a one-time donation via PayPal, Venmo (Erica-Barnett-7) or by mailing your contribution to P.O. Box 14328, Seattle, WA 98104. Thank you for keeping The C Is for Crank going and growing. I’m truly grateful for your support.

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” →

City Hall, Elections, homelessness, human services, Morning Crank

City Contractor Charged Homeless Men for Shelter; Orion Campaign Failed to Report Using Ike’s-Owned Office Space

1. Compass Housing Alliance, a nonprofit housing and shelter agency, was charging men $3 a night to sleep at the Blaine Center shelter on Denny Way until last month, when the city’s Human Services Department informed them that charging for shelter violated the expectations of their contract with the city.

The city became aware that Compass was charging shelter clients when a former shelter resident contacted council member Sally Bagshaw to complain. (The specific details of the resident’s claims are in dispute). Meg Olberding, a spokeswoman for HSD, says the department was unaware that Compass was charging its residents what amounted to $90 in monthly rent until officials talked with the Blaine Center client in late September. At that point, Olberding says, “we instructed Compass that charging a shelter fee was a violation of their contract expectations and that they must stop the practice immediately.  Secondarily we communicated an expectation that Compass refund every person in the shelter the entirety of the payments that have previously been collected.”

Compass’ chief advancement officer, Suzanne Sullivan, says the agency used the $3 nightly charge as “a teaching tool about managing finances” and says residents get the money back in the form of a check once they find permanent housing

Olberding says that every resident who paid money to stay at the Blaine Center—or other charities, such as the Millionair Club, that paid the fees on their behalf—was reimbursed in cash. “Since receiving the complaint, the HSD Contract Manager has spoken with Compass leadership to reflect the concerns that they are implementing rules and policies inconsistently,” Olberding adds.

Compass’ chief advancement officer, Suzanne Sullivan, says the agency used the $3 nightly charge as “a teaching tool about managing finances” and says residents get the money back in the form of a check once they find permanent housing. “A lot of people who are in Blaine Shelter are employed, so it was an element of helping them to figure out how to budget their money,” Sullivan says. She does not know precisely how long the Blaine Center has charged for shelter, but says that no one is turned away from Blaine Center if they don’t have the money to pay.

However, charging for shelter creates, at a minimum, the perception of a financial barrier that could lead unsheltered people who don’t know about the shelter’s fee waiver policy to stay away. And the promise that any nightly fees will be paid back in the future, if and when a person gets permanent housing, does not alleviate the burden of coming up with an extra $3 a day in the short term.

Most shelters do not charge fees or rent for service, and HSD says it is unaware of any other city contractor that does so. The Emerald City Resource Guide published by Real Change indicates that one other shelter charges for beds—the Bread of Life Mission men’s shelter (which charges $5 a night, according to the resource guide.

2. District 3 city council candidate Egan Orion’s campaign, which was just fined $1,000 for failing to properly identify the campaign as the sponsor of a controversial ad on the front cover of the Stranger, has failed to report its use of a property owned by Uncle Ike’s pot shop owner Ian Eisenberg as an in-kind contribution to the campaign, The C Is for Crank has learned. The campaign moved into a former Shell station owned by Eisenberg at 21st Ave. and East Union Street back in September. The free office space should have been reported either as an expenditure or an in-kind contribution by Eisenberg to the campaign.

City council contributions, including in-kind contributions, are limited to $250 for candidates participating in the city’s Democracy Voucher public-financing program (as Orion is). The Shell property has a taxable value of $1.8 million, according to King County Tax records. Kshama Sawant, the incumbent Orion is challenging in District 3, pays $1,558 a month to Madrona Apartments, LLC for her office space.

Orion campaign manager Olga Laskin says the campaign’s failure to report an expenditure or contribution for the use of Eisenberg’s space “was an oversight on the part of our treasurer. She is amending the C4 [expenditure report] so we should be set.” The campaign did not respond to a followup question about the fair-market value of the space. Wayne Barnett, the head of the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission, says that any campaign office space that has a fair-market value has to be reported as an expenditure or in-kind contribution.

Eisenberg responded to questions about Orion’s use of his space by saying, “I don’t think it is appropriate to talk about tenants and their leases.” In fact, state campaign-finance law requires campaigns to report all contributions and expenditures, including rent.

This article has been edited from its original version to remove a reference to the YWCA charging women to stay at the Angeline’s Center enhanced shelter. A representative from the group contacted me to say that the information in the Real Change Emerald City Resource Guide linked above is inaccurate, and that some residents voluntarily put 30% of their incomes into savings accounts held by the agency.

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

Election Crank: Three Weeks Out

I’ll be rolling out my remaining city council candidate interviews, with Phil Tavel, Mark Solomon, and Debora Juarez, this week. (Kshama Sawant and Alex Pedersen did not respond to repeated requests to sit down for an interview, and Ann Davison Sattler canceled our interview and has not yet responded to a request to reschedule.)

In the meantime, a quick roundup of campaign news from the past week:

• Heidi Wills, the former city council member who’s running to represent District 6, held a fundraiser last week that was hosted by a who’s who of anti-Burke Gilman Trail, anti-transit, anti-authorized encampment, and anti-worker interests, along with some elected officials and neighborhood activists.

Among the sponsors:

Pacific Merchant Shipping Association director Jordan Royer, who was a spokesman for Save 35th, the group that fought to kill a planned bike lane on 35th Ave. NE  in Wedgwood;

Sonja Foster, the former vice president of Enterprise Washington and current Seattle director of the Associated General Contractors, which gave $25,000 to the Seattle Metro Chamber of Commerce’s political action committee. AGC is currently suing to overturn the state’s new prevailing wage law;

Eugene Wasserman, president of the anti-Burke Gilman Trail North Seattle Industrial Association, which sued to stop the Move Seattle transit initiative; 

Ballard Alliance director Mike Stewart, who once called on Ballard residents and businesses to  flood the city’s Find It Fix It app with reports of homeless encampments; and

Former Seattle Times reporter Marty McOmber, who organized a meeting for people opposed to a city-authorized encampment in Ballard and created a petition blaming current District 6 council member Mike O’Brien for homelessness and crime in Ballard.

Both Wills and her opponent, Dan Strauss, oppose completing the Missing Link of the Burke-Gilman trail as originally planned; Wills wants to go back to the drawing board and build an elevated pathway, while Strauss supports a plan, endorsed by the business-backed group whose court challenges have stalled the trail’s completion for years, to add a bike lane to Leary Way in lieu of the trail.

Support The C Is for Crank
Sorry to interrupt your reading, but THIS IS IMPORTANT. The C Is for Crank is a one-person operation, supported entirely—and I mean entirely— by generous contributions from readers like you. If you enjoy the breaking news, commentary, and deep dives on issues that matter to you, please support this work by donating a few bucks a month to keep this reader-supported site going. I can’t do this work without support from readers like you. Your $5, $10, and $20 monthly subscriptions allow me to do this work as my full-time job, so please become a sustaining supporter now. If you don’t wish to become a monthly contributor, you can always make a one-time donation via PayPal, Venmo (Erica-Barnett-7) or by mailing your contribution to P.O. Box 14328, Seattle, WA 98104. Thank you for keeping The C Is for Crank going and growing. I’m truly grateful for your support.

• As I mentioned above, District 4 council candidate Alex Pedersen did not respond to my repeated requests to sit down for an interview. Turns out I’m in good company: Pedersen has failed to appear at a number of events, and respond to a number of questionnaires by, groups ranging from the Seattle Human Services Coalition to the Seattle Police Officers Guild. Laura Loe Bernstein of Share the Cities has been keeping a running tally.

The groups Pedersen has failed to respond to also include the MASS Coalition (Pedersen skipped their forum); Citizens for a Progressive Economy, sponsored by Working Washington, OneAmerica, and other progressive groups (Pedersen did not respond to their questionnaire); Rooted in Rights and Disability Rights Washington (Pedersen skipped their forum); and Seattle Subway and the Urbanist (Pedersen did not respond to their questionnaires). Continue reading “Election Crank: Three Weeks Out” →

City Council, Elections, Featured

The 2019 City Council Candidates: District 3 Challenger Egan Orion
Image via Egan Orion campaign

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.

First up: My interview with Egan Orion, running against Sawant in a race that’s shaping up to be the most expensive City Council contest in Seattle’s history. Orion has been a retail worker, a barista, a tour guide, and a data analyst. He’s also worked as a web designer, a Microsoft engineer, and an event producer—and, for a brief time, the head of the Capitol Hill Chamber of Commerce, which shut down after Orion left (after two months on the job) to run for council. We started out by talking about his departure from the Chamber.

The C Is for Crank (ECB): Why did you decide to leave the Capitol Hill Chamber to run for council? They shut down right after you left, and it seemed like the two events were related.

Egan Orion (EO): They had been working on the expanded [business improvement area] effort across Capitol Hill for about five years. And they had spent so much time and energy on that—to the neglect, in my mind, of some of the basics of expanding a local chamber—and it was clear that they needed more leadership. And they didn’t have an executive director at the time, just an admin who was very good at keeping things going. So I helped them write the Only In Seattle grant to get funding for 2019, and helped them plan the State of the Hill event on February 1, and then we started talking about, what would it look like if I came on board as a part time ED? So I gave the State of the Hill address on my first day working for them, and it wasn’t a week or ten days later that the admin who had been with the organization for so long decided abruptly that she was going to start to make her exit. And there wasn’t enough time for that transition. And that’s when the snowstorms happened as well.

I was doing the best that I could with what I knew about the organization. And then, two weeks into my tenure at capital chamber, Beto [Yarce] dropped out of the city council race. And I just started to think about it. I was really just praying that someone would step up that could defeat Kshama. And as the weeks passed, I just kept on waiting and not seeing anyone. And I started to think maybe this was a better way for me to advocate for my community. So I made that decision, and the chamber decided that they didn’t have the capacity to hire someone.

ECB: You’ve been the biggest beneficiary of spending by outside groups like People for Seattle and the Civic Alliance for a Sound Economy (CASE), the Chamber of Commerce PAC. Do you have any misgivings about the fact that the business lobby and Tim Burgess’ PAC have decided to invest so heavily in getting you elected?

EO: Oh, sure. I’ve got misgivings about it. I would prefer to run a race where we didn’t have to worry about money coming from outside the city, from powerful forces from within the city—where we as candidates had to connect with voters in our district. Districts are fairly small in the scheme of things. They’re very walkable. I know because I’ve walked all those precincts at one point or another connecting with voters. And I think that that’s one of the reasons why people responded to my campaign, is that me and my campaign manager and our volunteers knocked on 16,500 doors for the primary alone, and we’re going to surpass that in the general. We’ve been running a very local race and talking about the issues that matter, not just to a narrow set of constituents, like Kshama Sawant, but to all the communities in the district.

I look at this as a quality of life election. And the quality of life for someone that lives in Portage Bay or Madrona is just as important to me as the quality of life for people on Capitol Hill.

Support The C Is for Crank
Sorry to interrupt your reading, but THIS IS IMPORTANT. The C Is for Crank is a one-person operation, supported entirely—and I mean entirely— by generous contributions from readers like you. If you enjoy the breaking news, commentary, and deep dives on issues that matter to you, please support this work by donating a few bucks a month to keep this reader-supported site going. I can’t do this work without support from readers like you. Your $5, $10, and $20 monthly subscriptions allow me to do this work as my full-time job, so please become a sustaining supporter now. If you don’t wish to become a monthly contributor, you can always make a one-time donation via PayPal, Venmo (Erica-Barnett-7) or by mailing your contribution to P.O. Box 14328, Seattle, WA 98104. Thank you for keeping The C Is for Crank going and growing. I’m truly grateful for your support.

ECB: So is there any position where you would say you dramatically differ from CASE?

EO: I didn’t realize CASE had political positions. What they laid out for us [during endorsement discussions] was some basic stuff around transportation, safety and prosperity. And of course, I had a small business background and also represented a couple of different nonprofits that represent small business. I really had an obvious resume that they would respond to, because they have 2,000 small businesses that are part of their chamber.

So I don’t really pay attention to the political desires of CASE beyond those general values that, that I share with them. I don’t mean to be coy about that either. I really don’t look at the positions of what CASE wants. Businesses are as varied as voters in their views.

ECB: Mayor Durkan has continued expanding the Navigation Team, which has shifted its focus to removing encampments without providing 72 hours’ notice or offers of shelter and services. Do you support this approach?

EO: In general, no. I think that that when REACH was really embedded with the Navigation Team, they really brought that human services touch to that work. I mean, at the end of the day, if we’re sweeping people from a public place where they’re camping and we’re not providing any place for them to go,  I see that as inhumane and a waste of money, because they’re just going to pop up somewhere else and then we’re just going to spend the money to sweep them somewhere else. That doesn’t make any sense to me. Continue reading “The 2019 City Council Candidates: District 3 Challenger Egan Orion” →

City Council, Elections, Featured, homelessness, human services, King County, Morning Crank, Poverty

One-Way Tickets Out of Town, Tiny House Villages’ Future In Question, and a Poll Asks, Hey, Did You Know Sawant Is a Socialist?

1. Reagan Dunn, a Republican King County Council member who has been vocal in his opposition to a proposal to merge Seattle and King County’s homelessness agencies, told me last week that one of his concerns about the plan was that it would be responsible for implementing the same policies he believes have failed at reducing homelessness, including lenient “Seattle-centric” policies like the (basically moribund) plan to open a safe drug consumption site in King County and county prosecutor Dan Satterburg’s decision not to prosecute people for simple drug possession. On Tuesday, he proposed a few policies he thinks will work better.

The first proposal would allocate at least a million dollars a year for bus tickets to send homeless people to “reunite” with family members out of town—as long as those family members don’t live in King or any adjacent county. These “Homeward Bound” programs have had mixed success, both at getting homeless people to go somewhere else and actually reuniting people with their families; according to a 2017 Guardian investigation, there’s often little tracking of what happens to homeless people once they’re sent away, and little way of knowing if they’ve been reunited with loved ones or simply become some other city’s problem. “Seattle has nothing like [Homeward Bound] and we’ve become a dead-end street,” Dunn says. “Sometimes you have to have a tough-love solution.”

Support The C Is for Crank
Sorry to interrupt your reading, but THIS IS IMPORTANT. The C Is for Crank is a one-person operation, supported entirely—and I mean entirely— by generous contributions from readers like you. If you enjoy the breaking news, commentary, and deep dives on issues that matter to you, please support this work by donating a few bucks a month to keep this reader-supported site going. I can’t do this work without support from readers like you. Your $5, $10, and $20 monthly donations allow me to do this work as my full-time job, so please become a sustaining supporter now. If you don’t wish to become a monthly contributor, you can always make a one-time donation via PayPal, Venmo (Erica-Barnett-7) or by mailing your contribution to P.O. Box 14328, Seattle, WA 98104. Thank you for keeping The C Is for Crank going and growing. I’m truly grateful for your support.

Surveys of people experiencing homelessness in King County consistently show that the overwhelming majority—84 percent of those surveyed as part of the 2019 point-in-time count—lived (in housing) in King County before becoming homeless.

Dunn’s other two proposals would set up a county team to do outreach to homeless people in Metro bus shelters and on buses (two of the principle places people without homes go to get dry and warm), and a plan to notify opiate prescribers when a patient dies of an opiate-related overdose.

Dunn says he thinks the proposed new regional body, which would be governed by a board of “experts” that would not include any elected officials, would be “unaccountable to the public” and could siphon funding away from King County’s other cities to Seattle. He may not be alone. County Council members Dave Upthegrove and Rod Dembowski, both Democrats, are reportedly on the fence, and Bellevue Democrat Claudie Balducci expressed some misgivings last week. The county’s regional policy committee, which includes members from many of the cities that were not included in the plan, meets to discuss the proposal this afternoon.

The language is so similar to the verbiage on People For Seattle’s vitriolic, often highly misleading primary election direct mail pieces (particularly that “back to basics,” anti-“ideology” stuff) that I’m going to go out on a limb and say this is their poll.

2. A lawsuit by the group Safe Seattle that sought to shut down a “tiny house village” in South Lake Union was rejected just as the city announced plans to extend the permits for the three officially temporary villages—in Othello, Georgetown, and West Seattle—for six more months. But the future of these “tiny house” encampments is still in question.

The three villages originally supposed to move after two years, but their permits have been extended twice, and it’s unclear whether the Human Services Department has a long-term plan for what to do with them after the extensions are up. (When I asked HSD about the future of the villages, a spokeswoman initially said they would have something to announce “soon,” then pointed me to the agency’s blog post about the six-month extension.) Continue reading “One-Way Tickets Out of Town, Tiny House Villages’ Future In Question, and a Poll Asks, Hey, Did You Know Sawant Is a Socialist?” →