Mayor Katie Wilson issued two executive order on Thursday. The first is aimed at speeding up the production of shelter in the run-up to this year’s World Cup games and beyond. The second will help speed up the city’s slowest bus, the 8, by finally painting a long-planned bus lane on Denny Way.
Wilson announced the orders at a meeting of her transition team at El Centro de la Raza on Beacon Hill.
More news is expected out of Wilson’s team in the next week, including the dismissals of several high-profile department heads appointed by her predecessor, Bruce Harrell.
City Light CEO Dawn Lindell, appointed in 2024, is out, internal sources tell PubliCola (no word on her replacement yet). So, we’ve heard, is interim Office of Labor Relations interim director Chase Munroe—a Harrell appointee who worked, on city time, on behalf of the Royal Esquire Club, a private men’s club with longstanding ties to Harrell. Adrienne Thompson, a onetime labor policy advisor to ex-mayor Jenny Durkan who applied for the labor relations in 2022, will reportedly be Munroe’s replacement as interim director.
Other departments that could see changes in the next week include the Office of Housing (currently headed by Maiko Winkler-Chin) and the Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs (headed by Hamdi Mohamed, who’s also a Seattle Port Commissioner.)
Wilson’s first executive order, on homelessness, sets a deadline of March for a multi-department work group to “identify all possible financial incentives, permitting changes, and policy changes” that could help the city build new shelters and housing quickly. The group will also “identify City-owned property that could be used temporarily or permanently to support shelter and housing opportunities.”
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The order also directs the city’s Office of Intergovernmental Relations to work with other governments to identify additional public land that could be used for shelter and housing, and directs the Human Services Department to identify existing shelter programs that have room for expansion.
Wilson has pledged to add 4,000 new shelter beds and housing units by the end of her term, with a short-term goal of adding 500 before the World Cup games here in June.
Wilson will have to find funding for the new shelter projects in the existing city budget. Last year, the city council set aside a little over $11 million to help address potential funding cuts from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, which had changed its guidelines for funding housing projects to emphasize short-term housing over the type of permanent housing projects that rely on HUD funding locally.
After a judge ruled that HUD couldn’t change its standards in the middle of a funding cycle, the department allowed the application process to move forward under the old criteria. HUD could still pull the rug out from under providers by refusing to fund projects next year, but if it doesn’t, that $11 million could be used to fund Wilson’s shelter push.
There’s also the 116-member Unified Care Team, which removes encampments and costs the city upward of $30 million a year. Although the council adopted a Rob Saka-sponsored amendment prohibiting Wilson from spending the UCT’s budget on other purposes, some creative reallocation could put the giant team to better use.
Wilson said she’s evaluating how the UCT prioritizes encampments for removal and may change them. As an interim step, Wilson halted a planned removal of an encampment in Ballard after meeting with encampment residents earlier this week; on Thursday, she said she wanted to gain an “understanding, from the perspective of folks who are living outside, what can we do to make the process of an encampment removal more comprehensible and just maximize the the opportunities for people to get into a better situation.”
Wilson’s second executive order directs the Seattle Department of Transportation to immediately paint a long-delayed bus lane on Denny Way, a change that will help the most infamously delayed bus in the city, Metro’s Route 8, be a little less late. Last year, under Harrell, SDOT rejected the bus lane, arguing that giving buses priority would make drivers late. Wilson said the bus lane would run, at a minimum, from Fifth Ave. to Fairview, the most congested section of the route.
“I know the feeling of waiting at the stop for the bus to come and it’s 30 minutes late or 40 minutes late,” Wilson said. “I know the feeling of sitting on the bus knowing that you could be walking up that hill faster than that bus is going.”
The Burien City Council—which acquired two new members, Linda Akey and Alex Andrade, at the beginning of this year—declined to add a discussion of The More We Love’s $49,000 contract to respond to encampments to its agenda during its meeting on Monday, leaving the public without important information about what the group did with the public’s money..
As we’ve reported, Burien City Manager Adolfo Bailon signed a contract with The More We Love, founded and led by Kirkland mortgage broker and Union Gospel Mission (UGM) volunteer Kristine Moreland, to respond to and remove encampments in Burien.
The More We Love has claimed to be far more successful than any other group working in Burien at permanently housing people and getting them into treatment, but those claims have been met with skepticism by established homelessness organizations. Permanent housing is expensive and in short supply across King County, and there are nowhere near enough slots in licensed treatment centers for all the people seeking inpatient or outpatient rehab. Meanwhile, there is no year-round general shelter in Burien, so The More We Love reportedly transports people to UGM’s high-barrier, faith-based shelter in Seattle.
Without detailed information about where the money went, how many people The More We Loved helped, and how, Burien residents (and at least some city officials) simply don’t know what Moreland and her group did with public dollars.
A basic report, with data on specific performance metrics, could affirm that Moreland’s claims are true; or it could confirm that The More We Love has exaggerated its success. Such reports are standard practice for other homelessness outreach contracts. For example, REACH—a longstanding outreach group affiliated with Evergreen Treatment Services—provides detailed reports showing how many people at a specific encampment accessed a specific list of services over each reporting period, along with a breakdown of how they spent each public dollar they received.
Without that kind of detailed information, Burien residents (and at least some city officials) simply don’t know what Moreland and her group did with public dollars.
In response to a public disclosure request, PubliCola did receive two brief documents described as “30 day reports” on The More We Love’s contract. The narratives, which are attached to invoices for $24,500 each, do not include specific data such as itemized expenditures or results. Instead, they consist of bullet-pointed lists with items such as:
• Family meeting for Detox for a human in the encampment;
• Working with SCORE [the South King County jail] on resources.
• Work with local sheriffs to guide and strategize on how much pressure to put in what areas for successful moving.
• Helped de-escalate around the transit station and gas station where that group was creating friction between themselves and the business owner.
• Worked alongside OPS (Operation of Prosecution Survivors) [sic] and successfully address several needs involving vulnerable and sensitive females, connecting them to case management, and getting them in an environment where they are lifted up.
The Organization of Prostitution Survivors is a group that views sex work as “a form of gender-based violence.”
Despite Explicit State Guidance, Burien Keeps City Manager’s Performance Evaluation Secret
In related news, the city of Burien has categorically refused to provide PubliCola with City Manager Bailon’s performance evaluation, along with related emails and email attachments, claiming that they are exempt from disclosure under the state Public Records Act.
PubliCola requested the records after the private firm that conducted the evaluation, Nash Consulting, terminated its contract with the city, saying that their evaluation was “not met with the seriousness it deserved by several key stakeholders, and unfortunately, we have concerns that constructive action was not taken in response to the feedback presented in the evaluation report.”
In response to PubliCola’s request, the city provided a brief two-page “summary” of the evaluation from former mayor Sofia Aragon that we had already published back in December. That document summarized the evaluation process and included six brief bullet points about the goals Bailon should work toward, such as “evaluate the capacity of the organization to meet urgent challenges.”
Although the Public Disclosure Act does exempt some personnel records, guidance from the state Attorney General’s office says that the performance evaluations of city managers, specifically, are subject to disclosure. Citing a case out of Spokane, the Attorney General’s Open Governance Resource Manual says “the performance evaluation of a city manager—the city’s chief executive officer, its leader, and a public figure—was not exempt because it was of legitimate concern to the public.”
Burien’s disclosure office got so overzealous with their redaction tool that they blacked out the Employee Identification Number for Discover Burien, The More We Love’s fiscal sponsor. EINs (30-0048516, in Discover Burien’s case) are unambiguously public and readily accessible; the city has not responded to a followup about why they blacked out this public information.
In addition to the performance evaluation, the city of Burien is refusing to provide an email from Bailon and documents about a “complaint of improper government action” that appears related to Bailon’s failure to inform all city council members about a deadline from King County to spend $1 million on shelter or lose the money. Instead, the city provided a set of mostly redacted emails, along with notes about attachments that are purportedly also exempt from the public records act.
Initially, Bailon said he didn’t see an email from Deputy County Executive Shannon Braddock because his inbox was swamped with emails about an unrelated sanctioned encampment at a Burien church, but he later admitted that he had opened and responded to Braddock’s email without informing the council, to whom he reports.
Burien’s public disclosure officer did not respond to our email objecting to their refusal to disclose Bailon’s performance review; we have asked the Attorney General’s Office to review the documents in light of their guidance that city manager performance evaluations are public records.
Incidentally, Burien’s disclosure office got so overzealous with their redaction tool that they blacked out the Employee Identification Number for Discover Burien, The More We Love’s fiscal sponsor, on both of the documents they provide. EINs (30-0048516, in Discover Burien’s case) are unambiguously public and readily accessible; the city has not responded to a followup about why they blacked out this public information.
1. The city’s Unified Care Team, which removes homeless encampments and informs their displaced residents about open shelter beds, “extended a total of 1,830 offers of shelter” between July and September 2023, converting 587 of those offers into “referrals” to specific shelters, according to a report released earlier this month. Of those referrals, according to the report, only 209 people, or just over 11 percent of the people who received shelter “offers,” actually showed up at a shelter and stayed for at least one night. (This number, the report notes, could be a slight undercount due to incomplete data.)
This means that almost nine in ten people the UCT contacted prior to encampment sweeps did not end up in any form of shelter—a decline from the UCT’s previous report, which showed a 15 percent shelter enrollment rate. The UCT (which includes the Human Services Department’s team of outreach workers) does not make contact with everyone at an encampment, so the official numbers don’t include people who move elsewhere before a sweep or don’t engage with city workers for other reasons, such as a lack of outreach or because they know they don’t want to move into congregate shelter.
The city’s “One Seattle Homelessness Action Plan” website includes the UCT’s offer and referral numbers, but not the much lower number of people who actually ended up in shelter.
The numbers show some geographic differences, and includes some of the reasons people gave for declining the UCT’s offers of shelter. The highest shelter acceptance and enrollment rates were in Northwest Seattle, and the lowest were in West Seattle and the center city, which includes downtown and Capitol Hill. In West Seattle, just 4 percent of people who received shelter offers ended up going to shelter (largely because only 11 percent accepted these offers), while just 8 percent ended up in shelter in central Seattle. Mayor Bruce Harrell has focused a huge amount of attention on “reopening” downtown Seattle, which has included swiftly removing encampments or tents that pop up in the area.
When asked why they didn’t accept a shelter offer, most people told the UCT they didn’t want the specific bed they were being offered. Often, the data indicates, this was because they were only offered an “enhanced shelter bed”—a term that encompasses group shelters that are open 24 hours and offer services—rather than permanent housing or a spot in a tiny house village. Others said they wanted to stay with their partners, family members, or pets; didn’t want to relinquish the car or RV where they were living; or didn’t find the shelter location acceptable. The UCT does not offer transportation to shelter, which may be far away from the communities where unsheltered people live.
The UCT is required to produce quarterly reports on their work under a statement of legislative intent imposed by the City Council in 2022. The council imposed a similar requirement for next year as part of its 2024 budget.
2. As Josh reported in his column last week, Seattle doesn’t have a program to activate or site corner retail in residential areas—yet.
According to Office of Planning Construction and Development director Nathan Torgelson, OPCD is “considering allowing corner stores in [neighborhood residential] zones as part of the Comprehensive Plan Update process.” Torgelson is referring to the city’s Environmental Impact Statement Scoping Report, released last November, which outlined potential policy and zoning changes that should be studied in advance of considering alternatives for Seattle’s 2024 Comprehensive Plan update. The comp plan is a document that guides future growth across the city over a 20-year time span; the plan undergoes a “major” update every eight years.
On its final pages, the 29-page scoping document says that in order to “support City goals such as allowing more people to walk or bike to everyday needs,” the city could consider “Allowing more flexibility for commercial uses such as more retail on arterial streets, home businesses, and corner stores in certain areas” and “Combining the multifamily and mixed-use/commercial designations on the Comprehensive Plan’s Future Land Use Map categories to reflect that commercial space may be reasonable in a wider variety of areas.”
As we’ve reported, the release date for the EIS has been pushed back repeatedly, so there’s no word yet about any substantive corner store proposal.
As Josh noted, Spokane’s planning department identified 95 spaces, including in residential areas, that could be converted to retail. This fall, Vancouver, BC’s planning department surveyed the public in a proactive corner store push to “gather feedback on how residents feel about corner stores and potential opportunities for expanding uses, locations, and building types.”
City attorney Ann Davison announced Monday that the city has filed an amicus brief asking the US Supreme Court to overturn a Ninth Circuit District Court ruling that restricted the ability of Grants Pass, a city in southwestern Oregon, to criminalize sleeping in public places. In a statement, Davison said Johnson v. Grants Pass “strips local authority from a complex problem” and denies “local autonomy” to cities like Seattle.
Under a separate Ninth Circuit ruling called Martin v. Boise, cities are not allowed to remove homeless people from public places in most circumstances unless there is shelter available. In the Grants Pass ruling, a panel of three Ninth Circuit judges agreed with lower courts that the city’s anti-camping ordinance, which imposed fines and criminal penalties for sleeping in public and banned homeless people from using items like blankets, cardboard boxes, and pillows, is unconstitutional.
The brief—which was also joined by the National League of Cities, the North Dakota League of Cities, Colorado Springs, San Diego, and about a dozen other cities across the country—argues that by restricting cities’ authority to ban sleeping in public, Martin and Johnson “compel local governments to choose between providing shelter or surrendering public lands to encampments that harm local communities.”
The city of Seattle, in other words, is arguing that Seattle should be able to sweep homeless people without the city having to “choose” to provide them places to go.
Additionally, they are arguing that calling unsheltered people “involuntarily homeless” grants a special status on people who are, in reality, engaging in a voluntary behavior by sleeping outdoors, much as an alcoholic who is caught being drunk in public has chosen to drink of his own volition. (This is from a real Supreme Court case from 1968, whose conclusions many modern addiction experts would probably dispute).
Seattle has its own ban on sleeping in public that allows sweeps in two general situations. In some cases, the city gives people living in an encampment 72 hours’ notice that they have to leave the area, then offers shelter to the people who remain. This, in theory, meets the requirements of Martin—even though, as many advocates for unsheltered people have pointed out, the city’s “offer” may be for shelter that is across town, requires a person to abandon their spouse or partner, or is inappropriate for a person’s behavioral or physical health conditions.*
Many people decline to “accept” these untenable shelter offers, which has caused city to suggest the real problem is people “refusing” shelter, rather than a lack of appropriate shelter and housing. “A 2021 study in Seattle found that offers of shelter were declined 52% of the time,” the brief notes, echoing these perennial claims. “Undoubtedly, sleeping outdoors can afford more freedom and autonomy than congregate sleeping arrangements. But this also shows that, at least for some people sometimes, personal decisions and preferences can play a role in whether someone continues to be unsheltered.”
The brief even suggests that rules banning encampments are like city zoning laws that prohibit certain uses in residential areas, citing a 1974 Supreme Court ruling (on frat houses, of all things) that allowed to establish “zones where family values, youth values, and the blessings of quiet seclusion and clean air make the area a sanctuary for people.” Unsheltered people, according to the brief, “directly undermine these legitimate aims and turn zoning schemes into hollow promises.”
In recent years, it’s become common for the city to exploit a loophole in the rules governing encampment sweeps to remove people and throw away belongings, such as tents and survival gear, without notice. In these case, the justification is that any person or object occupying a public space, including remote areas of public parks, constitutes an “obstruction” to the public’s use or potential use of that space. Earlier this year, a King County Superior Court judge ruled this interpretation of the city’s rules unconstitutional on privacy grounds; Davison immediately appealed that case, and the sweeps continue.
The city’s argument, as expressed in the brief, is a muddle of conflicting perspectives. The brief argues that requiring cities to choose between sweeps and shelter for every homeless person is an unconstitutional imposition; cities already spend hundreds of millions of dollars on homelessness, but the problem is only getting worse, which shows that spending money isn’t going to fix the problem. Since that’s the case, the brief continues, cities should be allowed to sweep encampments using whatever criteria they deem necessary, because encampments “monopolize common spaces like parks and sidewalks” and create “enormous volumes of garbage, human waste, and other health hazards like used needles.”
“A town that is not allowed to keep its sidewalks clear and parks open is not really a town at all. It is just a cluster of people living close together,” the brief concludes.
The brief even suggests that rules banning encampments are like city zoning laws that prohibit certain uses in residential areas, citing a 1974 Supreme Court ruling (on frat houses, of all things) that said cities could establish “zones where family values, youth values, and the blessings of quiet seclusion and clean air make the area a sanctuary for people.” Unsheltered people, according to the brief, “directly undermine these legitimate aims and turn zoning schemes into hollow promises.”
“A town that is not allowed to keep its sidewalks clear and parks open is not really a town at all. It is just a cluster of people living close together,” the brief concludes.
If the Supreme Court takes up the case, it could overturn rules specific to the Ninth District that make it harder for cities to simply sweep homeless people from public places. But even if Seattle wins the right to sweep people with impunity, it won’t change a basic reality: Homeless people don’t stop existing—and needing to sleep, eat, discard trash, and use the restroom— just because cities pass bans on sleeping and deny them access to resources, like trash cans and indoor plumbing, that the rest of us take for granted.
*Other programs exist that do route people to appropriate shelter, services, and housing, but these involve extensive outreach and engagement, and are generally separate from the city’s encampment removals.
For months now, the city of Burien has been locked in a stalemate over how to address a group of unsheltered people who remain in the city after repeated sweeps.
The latest plan: A potential contract with Kirkland mortgage broker Kristine Moreland, who offers private sweeps, at a cost of $515 per “camper,” or about $20,000 for a “40 person sweep,” through a new nonprofit called The More We Love, incorporated under the name The More Wee Love on April 10.
Moreland is a longtime volunteer at Seattle’s Union Gospel Mission, a religious charity that offers shelter, housing, and a Christian treatment program, and used to run a small nonprofit called the MORELove Project, which was dissolved in 2019. In interviews and public comments, Moreland has argued that homelessness is a drug problem, not a housing problem. This view is in conflict with a more widely accepted approach called “housing first,” which holds that people can’t achieve lasting recovery if their basic needs aren’t met.
Burien officials have been debating how to deal with encampment residents since March, when the council and King County Library System voted to evict a group of people living in tents outside the building that houses Burien City Hall and the local library branch. Ever since, the city has swept this group of several dozen unsheltered people from place to place; in June, King County offered the city a million dollars, a shelter location, and 35 Pallet shelters, but a four-member council majority voted to reject that offer in July, arguing it was a bad deal for the city.
Meanwhile, the same council majority has spent the better part of the summer proposing sites that are unavailable or uninhabitable—like a contaminated Port of Seattle property located right at the end of a SeaTac Airport runway.
On August 21, the council plans to take up a new proposal to criminalize unsheltered homelessness in the city, modeled on Bellevue’s near-total “camping ban.”
Last week, the council—at the request of Mayor Sofia Aragon—directed City Manager Adolfo Bailon to “explore a contract with Kristine Moreland” for homeless services, “given what we’ve seen in terms of outcomes.”
According to people who work with Burien’s homeless population, Moreland started showing up at encampments in April, shortly after the initial sweep at City Hall. By the next month, Moreland was pitching herself to Burien leaders as a more effective alternative to longstanding nonprofit groups like Let Everyone Advance with Dignity (LEAD) and REACH, which she described in an email to City Manager Adolfo Bailon and the council as “struggling” and “not…successful.”
“As you may know,” Moreland wrote to Bailon in May, “we have been monitoring the encampment downtown and have been working with a number of individuals living there to provide essential services such as food, shelter, and healthcare. While we have been successful in our efforts, we have also noticed that other resources have been struggling to address the needs of the encampment and its residents.”
“Our organization has worked with other local governments and non-profit organizations to provide compassionate and respectful assistance to those in need,” Moreland continued, “and we believe that we can help the city do the same.”
A majority of the council was apparently impressed by Moreland’s pitch. Last week, the council—at the request of Mayor Sofia Aragon—directed City Manager Adolfo Bailon to “explore a contract with Kristine Moreland” for homeless services, “given what we’ve seen in terms of outcomes.”
What outcomes was Aragon referring to? According to Bailon, who singled out Moreland’s group during a presentation on Burien’s homelessness efforts last week, Moreland got a group of unsheltered people to move on from a piece of vacant land near Burien Town Square, and then performed a similar feat when an encampment popped up outside a nearby Grocery Outlet, clearing around 20 tents from the property and “identifying housing for multiple people” at the site.
Moreland declined to speak to PubliCola, and did not respond to a list of detailed questions about her work. Speaking to conservative commentator Jason Rantz on August 11, said The More We Love had “successfully removed 27 people” from the site by guiding them into “truthful, real, intentional services”—like detox and treatment—and getting “real organizations in there that can do the real work and understand how to actually help these humans.”
It’s unclear how many people Moreland has actually referred to detox, treatment, or housing. But here are some facts. For people with little or no income, getting into detox and treatment can take weeks or months. King County offers only two detox facilities for people who can’t pay for private detox, including the 33-bed Recovery Place center in Seattle, so competition is high. Even after longer-term treatment, relapse is extremely common, especially for people who have nowhere to live; sober housing is an option for some, but beds are rare, and most facilities immediately evict people when they relapse.
Comparing her work favorably to longstanding nonprofits like the Downtown Emergency Service Center, Moreland told Rantz it was high time for the government to stop spending resources on people experiencing homelessness and let “the private sector step up”—including her own group, which she called one of “the most effective organizations I’ve seen yet.”
Aragon did not respond to a request for an interview. Bailon referred PubliCola’s questions to a spokesperson for the city, who said they had “no update to share on the nature or scope of any potential contract at this time as the directive was just issued this week during the City Council’s meeting.” The spokesperson then directed the rest of our questions to Moreland.
After one sweep, REACH case manager Stephanie Tidholm said, Moreland said she had housed 14 people, but Tidholm saw many of them in the relocated encampment a couple of weeks later. “We keep a spreadsheet of all our clients in Burien, and there is no way she housed 14 people.”
Moreland has told interviewers that her father struggled with addiction and was often homeless, an experience that has shaped her approach to people living unsheltered and struggling with addiction. “Nobody wants to be living in this hell, but the fact of the matter is it’s drug addiction, and that drags you down to the depths of despair,” Moreland recently told FOX 13 News. “So, it’s our job to lift them up and out of that.”
Talking to KIRO News before the Grocery Outlet sweep last last week, Moreland said she had already moved several people from the site into shelter or housing, and had “beds” available for at least another six people who remained at the location. “[We] do an intake at the beginning when they come into our care, Moreland explained. “Once we’ve done the intake, [and] we understand their full story, from there, we can connect them to services, and sometimes that looks like sending them home to their families. It just depends on what the greater story is.”
Jeff Rakow, the owner of the Grocery Outlet property, confirmed that he hired Moreland to remove the encampment, and called her work at the site “remarkable.”
“In response to widespread drug use and unsafe conditions for the unhoused and the community, coupled with the absence of urgent government action, we engaged The More We Love to connect those living in the encampment with human services,” getting people into “detox, shelter, back with family, or other solutions best suited to their individual needs.”
But people familiar with the homeless population in Burien say they continue to see the same people month after month, including people who have accepted Moreland’s housing and shelter offers and ended right back where they started. In one case, according to encampment volunteer Charles Schaefer, an encampment resident “told [volunteers] she transported him down to [a place in] Lacey,” about 50 miles south of Burien. Schaefer was head of the Burien Planning Commission until June, when the council majority ousted him for telling unsheltered people about a city-owned lot where they had a legal right to sleep.
The Lacey site was neither housing nor shelter, Schaefer said; “it was a detox or treatment facility, and that wasn’t what he was looking for or led to believe. So he took three buses to get back to Burien from down there,” Schaefer said. “He was lured with some offer that did not materialize.” PubliCola was unable to connect directly with this individual, but heard about his experience from Schaefer and two other sources.
In other cases, sources familiar with the homeless population in Burien say, Moreland’s clients received hotel beds for a few nights, then ended up back on the streets in Burien when the money for their rooms ran out. After an earlier sweep, REACH case manager Stephanie Tidholm said, Moreland claimed she had housed 14 people, but Tidholm saw many of them in the relocated encampment a couple of weeks later. “We keep a spreadsheet of all our clients in Burien, and there is no way she housed 14 people.”
Kristine Moreland speaks to KIRO News in front of the pile of rocks that has replaced an encampment near the Grocery Outlet in Burien. KIRO News screenshot.
During the recent Grocery Outlet sweep, longtime clients contacted Tidholm to tell her Moreland was offering housing and detox services to people who agreed to leave the site. “Nobody she was with knew where they were going,” Tidholm said. “Somebody told me they weren’t allowed to go [with her] because they weren’t going to do detox. They thought they had to leave no matter what.”
A video posted by Discovery Institute staffer Jonathan Choe, who was fired by KOMO News for promoting a rally held by the insurrectionist group the Proud Boys, features a seemingly impaired woman describing how grateful she is for Moreland’s work to secure “the hotel we’re going into.”
According to Tidholm and others familiar with the encampment, Moreland moved as many as 12 encampment residents to a hotel in Renton owned by the company REBLX. Although REBLX has partnered with the King County Regional Homelessness Authority and LEAD to provide rooms for their clients in the past, the company is not itself a service or shelter provider. Proposals to turn the whole 116-room hotel into a shelter for Burien residents fell flat, in part, because Renton law effectively prohibits new shelters in the city.
Already, according to sources familiar with the situation, REBLX has kicked out one of the former encampment residents Moreland placed there for violating the hotel’s code of conduct, which applies to anyone staying in its rooms. REBLX did not respond to a request for comment.
Since the sweep, Tidholm said she has only managed to reconnect with clients who didn’t go to Renton; the others, she said, “are now gone.”
The size of any potential contract between Moreland and the city of Burien remains unclear. A sample budget sent to council members by one of Moreland’s allies, Dan Mathews (of the commercial real estate company Kidder Mathews) suggested that King County could use the $1 million it proposed spending on shelter in Burien, plus additional funds the city could save by “redirecting resources away from current less effective solutions for the unhoused” to hire Moreland at an annual cost of $1.8 million.
In his pitch to Burien officials, Mathews credited Moreland with leading the team that swept a notorious Seattle encampment called the Jungle in 2016; building the city’s first “mobile shower truck”; and providing “outreach services for SPD Seattle’s Navigation team,” which removed encampments during the Jenny Durkan administration. The first two items appear to refer to Moreland’s work as a volunteer with UGM, which provided outreach before the city swept the Jungle. The city has not responded to questions about whether Moreland ever provided “services” for the Navigation Team, but the team itself was made up entirely of city employees. Mathews did not respond to a request for an interview.
Two incidents in Moreland’s past could raise concerns for the city as it considers signing a contract for her services. The first is her arrest for DUI last August, when Kirkland police pulled Moreland over for allegedly driving 52 mph in a 35 mph zone. (In an incident in 2021, an officer who pulled Moreland over for speeding said she drove “past my vehicle fast enough that it shook” and acted “inconvenienced” by the stop.)
When Moreland rolled down the window, according to the police report, her “eyes were watery and her speech was slurred,” and the “odor of intoxicants was emanating” from her breath. Moreland failed a field sobriety test and blew 0.133 on a blood alcohol breath test—significantly above the legal limit of 0.08 percent. Subsequent tests showed she had a blood alcohol level between 0.11 and 0.13 percent.
Between 2014 and 2016, according to the charges, Moreland facilitated “short-term, high-cost loans” with an unlicensed lender for at least four home buyers, then turned around and refinanced the loans through the company that employed her as a mortgage broker, pocketing the commission.
The court initially suspended Moreland’s license for 90 days. Instead of accepting the penalty, she contested the charges, arguing that the breath test was inadmissible. Her case is now on hold pending the results of an unrelated lawsuit challenging the alcohol testing method used by agencies across the state. In that case, lawyers for a man arrested for a DUI argued that because the state’s standard testing equipment truncates test results after the second decimal instead of rounding them up or down, it could indicate that a driver was more intoxicated than they actually were, resulting in unfair charges.
A drunk driving charge is not, in itself, disqualifying for a job working with people who are actively using drugs and alcohol; in fact, many drug and alcohol counselors get into the work because of their own personal experiences with addiction and recovery. Given the zero-tolerance views Moreland has expressed about drug and alcohol use among homeless people, though, her own recent alcohol-related arrest and decision to fight the charges instead of taking responsibility seem inconsistent with the kind of policies she advocates for others.
Another incident that could be relevant to the council’s contract deliberations took place in 2020, when the state Department of Financial Institutions found Moreland had violated the state Consumer Lending Act while working for the licensed mortgage company Caliber Home Loans. The charges included engaging in unfair or deceptive practices, aiding and abetting violations of of the law, and making false statements to the department, among other violations.
Between 2014 and 2016, according to the charges, Moreland facilitated “short-term, high-cost loans” with an unlicensed lender for at least four home buyers, then turned around and refinanced the loans through Caliber, pocketing the commission. Later, according to DFI documents, Moreland failed to report on her license renewal application that she was under investigation for violating state law, which is itself another violation.
Moreland could have lost her license over the charges or been permanently barred from practice. Instead, the department agreed to a consent order in 2021 in which Moreland would pay a $15,000 investigation fee, plus another $14,000 to fund financial literacy and education programs. State records indicate that the department put her on a $500-a-month payment plan for her $24,000 unpaid balance the following year; a spokesperson for DFI said Moreland still owes the state $18,500, and has paid $10,750 so far. “Ms. Moreland has missed periodic payments and payments have been modified to $50 per month,” the spokesperson said.
Many people who spoke to PubliCola for this story noted that no matter what approach a service provider takes with their clients, access to shelter and housing is dictated by the availability of shelter and housing—and currently, there isn’t enough of either. According to every estimate of King County’s homeless population, there are thousands more unsheltered people than shelter beds—perhaps tens of thousands.
Housing is even harder to come by, especially for people living in encampments. Under federal rules, service providers have virtually no ability to allocate housing themselves; instead, applications go through a process called Coordinated Entry that prioritizes people based on need. Private entities that don’t participate in the official housing system like Union Gospel Mission, can house people directly, but the housing they offer often comes with high barriers to entry, including drug testing, work requirements, and even dress codes for women.
If Burien’s elected officials aren’t aware of the fact that that sweeps don’t actually address homelessness it seems like Burien’s business owners are. As Schaefer, the former planning commissioner, notes, every time an encampment gets swept, business owners fill the vacant property with rocks. “I think the businesses know it’s not going to be permanent and the homeless folks are going to show back up at some point.” If most people were actually accessing untapped shelter and housing resources through private groups like Moreland’s, why would there be any need to keep them from coming back?
1. Last Friday, a state appeals court issued a ruling staying any enforcement of a King County Superior Court decision finding Seattle’s rules on “obstruction” encampment removals unconstitutional. The city defines an “obstruction” as any encampment, tent, person, or property that is located in virtually any public space, including remote areas of public parks. The stay comes in response to an appeal filed by City Attorney Ann Davison’s office on Friday, and allows the city to continue its practice of no-notice sweeps, which have ramped up dramatically under the Harrell Administration. Attorneys for the plaintiffs in the case have until August 11 to respond to the city’s appeal.
As we reported last month, two formerly homeless people, Bobby Kitcheon and Candace Ream, sued the city, with the help of the ACLU of Washington, after the city subjected them to repeated sweeps. According to the lawsuit, both Kitcheon and Ream lost all their possessions, including irreplaceable family mementos as well as IDs, insulin and other medications, and food, each time the city arrived to remove their tents from a new location.
In his order, Superior Court Judge David Keenan found that the city’s rule violates people’s privacy and constitutes “cruel punishment” under the state constitution because the city’s definition of “obstruction”—which includes any tent or person sleeping in any area of a public park, for example—”allows the City to move unhoused people who are not actual obstructions, without offering unhoused people shelter.” Under a Ninth Circuit ruling called Martin v. Boise, cities are not allowed to remove homeless people from a location without offering them shelter except in certain circumstances, including when a tent or person is blocking others from using a public space, such as a sidewalk.
The city’s appeal of the superior court ruling rests on the argument that the city’s rule allowing no-notice removals of encampments when they are “obstructions” can’t be “facially” invalid—that is, unenforceable on its face— because the rules can be applied constitutionally; in other words, because there are cases where a tent is actually obstructing the public use of a space, such as a sidewalk, the city is claiming the law can’t be invalid in its entirety.
The city attorney’s office, using outside attorneys, is also arguing that because the two plaintiffs are now housed and were never subject to civil or criminal charges, they lack standing to challenge the city. It’s worth noting that as a matter of practice, the city does not fine or charge people for sleeping in public; instead, it conducts sweeps.
Additionally, according to the city’s appeal, “even if respondents had standing, Mr. Kitcheon and Ms. Ream were not involuntarily homeless because they were repeatedly offered shelter by the City and voluntarily left City-funded shelter.” As we have reported many times, people often decline shelter or leave the shelter beds the city assigns them because the beds are not appropriate for their circumstances; in Kitcheon’s case, according to the lawsuit, the only shelters that were generally available were single-gender and would have forced him and his wife to separate.
Davison’s office also argued that people have no right to privacy inside their tents when those tents are located on public property. PubliCola is not a lawyer, but this does raise an obvious question about how far the city’s right to invade people’s personal space extends.
Over the weekend, for example, housed people camped out along Lake Washington during Seafair; would Davison claim a right to send workers to barge into those tents and seize everything inside them, since they are, according to the city’s own rules, obstructing the use of public space? Or does the city’s “heightened interest in protecting the health and safety of the community (both housed and unhoused) and accessible use of public property and rights of way” only apply when the people camped out in public space have nowhere else to go?
Page two of the four-page document representing 10 hours, or $2,500, of Dones’ $60,000 contract with the city.
2. PubliCola has received the second of 10 “deliverables” provided by former KCRHA director Marc Dones as part of their ongoing, $60,000 contract with the city of Seattle, which involves researching how Medicaid funding might be used to pay for homeless services.
The document, which—according to Dones’ contract—represents 10 hours’ worth of work, is a spare timeline and 375-word summary of the work Dones is supposed to do, including “framework development,” interviews with stakeholders, and “iterating the framework report” with Harrell’s office. The city is paying Dones through December.
As we’ve reported, Dones left the KCRHA at a time when many agency staffers and government officials with oversight authority over the agency had begun to express a lack of confidence in their leadership. The contract is worth three months’ salary for Dones—the minimum they would have been likely to receive in severance if they had been fired instead of leaving voluntarily.
This means that almost nine in ten people the UCT contacted prior to encampment sweeps did not end up in any form of shelter—a decline from the UCT’s 
As we reported 