Tag: homeless encampments

Courts, homelessness, King County

Burien Moves Forward on Tiny House Village as Mayor Vilifies Police Chief for Not Enforcing Camping Ban

 

Burien Mayor Kevin Schilling

By Erica C. Barnett

The Burien City Council advanced a zoning change during its meeting last night that would allow a tiny house village on a piece of property owned by Seattle City Light. The zoning rule, as amended by the council, will allow future transitional housing only on properties between one and two acres, and will cap the size of such housing at 30 residents—a change that cuts the potential size of the long-planned tiny house village by half.

Before voting for the zoning change, Burien Mayor Kevin Schilling complained at length about the “previous council” and King County, which has offered $1 million to fund the project, saying that the proposal “was thrown at us” by the county with no room for dissent.

“What we have the ability to do here is amend that ridiculous process that happened last year from the county,” Schilling said. “We are making decisions about the future of land use in the city of Burien, not just for this one singular project, which was not organically decided by our planning commission or our city council. It was something that was shoved to us by the county without any flexibility. So we have an opportunity here to reverse the process.”

The council voted 6-1 (with Stephanie Mora dissenting) to place the rezone on next week’s consent agenda, after a public comment period in which two veteran Burien police officers denounced City Manager Adolfo Bailon and the council for demanding the removal of longtime Burien Police Chief Ted Boe. Boe works for the King County Sheriff’s Office, which provides police services to the city under a contract; Sheriff Patti Cole-Tindall recently sued the city after the council banned sleeping or “living” outdoors 24 hours a day.

Boe provided a statement supporting the lawsuit, which claims the ban violates the 8th and 14th Amendments, and has not been enforcing the law.

Both officers who spoke said they were speaking on their own accord and did not tell Boe they planned to testify on his behalf.

“I cannot sit back and let one man be insulted, demeaned and vilified for issues that are clearly failures by the city government for the last several years,” Officer Mark Hayden told the council. A second officer, Henry McLauchlan, said that if the city ousts Boe, it will result in an officer exodus to “more supportive organizations within the county. … Nobody, except the least senior deputies and sergeants, will be forced to work a place that does not support constitutional policing.” 

Schilling has claimed repeatedly (including a meeting of the council majority that apparently violated the state Open Public Meetings Act last week) that Boe could simply choose to “enforce the parts of the ordinance” that ban unsheltered people from occupying public space during the day. (In city manager-council governments like Burien’s, the council picks one of their members to serve as mayor every two years, and the city manager serves as the executive.)

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In fact, the total ban the council passed last year “repeal[s] and replace[s]” the older law. Boe has no legal authority to enforce a law that doesn’t exist, even if the council later regrets repealing it.

Schilling also claimed, during an interview on KIRO Radio, that the city never stopped paying the King County Sheriff’s Office for its services (as Bailon, in fact, directed city staff to do in response to the lawsuit earlier this year). “The only part that we’re not paying them for is the part that they’re not enforcing,” Schilling said, referring to the homeless ban. “So we’re not paying for that element of it because they’re not doing their job.” 

A spokesman for the sheriff’s office, Captain Cory Stanton, said the office has not billed Burien yet for the first half of 2024, so there is no way to know yet whether they plan to pay their bills for police service, and how much. “The fact is, we’re going still provide [police] services to the city of Burien, and if they don’t pay, that’s a conversation the command staff will have to have,” Stanton said.

It’s unclear how long the tiny house village will be able to stay at the City Light property, assuming the council approves it next week. The city has delayed approval of the project, which includes a $1 million no-strings contribution from King County, for most of the last year. PubliCola has reached out to City Light for more information about how long the property will be available and will update this post when we hear back.

homelessness

Burien Sued Over Camping Ban that “Banishes” Homeless Residents From City
Burien threatened legal action against a church-based encampment created in response to the city’s camping ban. Image via Sunnydale Village Sanctioned Encampment GoFundMe.

By Erica C. Barnett

The Seattle/King County Coalition on Homelessness and three homeless Burien residents, represented by the Northwest Justice Project, filed a lawsuit against the city of Burien on Wednesday over the city’s “camping” ban, which makes it a misdemeanor to sleep, prepare food, use items like sleeping bags or backpacks, or otherwise “live” in public spaces in the city.

The ordinance does say police can’t enforce the law if there is no shelter “available,” but doesn’t explain what “available” means, or how broad of a geographic area that term encompasses. Currently, there are no year-round nighttime shelter beds in Burien, so the city has been referring people to shelter out of town, essentially deporting its own homeless population to places like Kent, Auburn, and Seattle. “By criminalizing the very act of being homeless in the City of Burien, the City of Burien is attempting to banish homeless individuals from the City of Burien,” the lawsuit says.

The law, SKCCH director Alison Eisinger said, “makes it impossible for [unsheltered] people to be in Burien. And what we’ve seen … is that far more effort has gone into drafting and writing and arguing about this unconstitutional ordinance than has gone into answering the question, where should Burien residents who don’t have homes find safety, stability, and support?”

“What this ordinance is trying to do is banish them for being homeless,” NJP attorney Scott Crain said. “The effect of the ordinance appears to be to sweep people out of Burien entirely.”

According to the lawsuit, Burien’s law violates several provisions of the Washington State constitution, including the state prohibition on cruel punishment, the right to due process, the right of homeless people to be “free from disturbance in their private affairs,” and the privileges and immunities clause, which prohibits discrimination.

Of all the attempts to criminalize homelessness across Washington state, “The Burien ordinance certainly stands out in its vagueness, but also its breadth, Crain said. Even many of the officials who drafted and voted for the law offered conflicting explanations about what it does and when it applies, Eisinger noted. “This law and its intent are nearly incomprehensible,” she said.

The ordinance, which bans people from “camping, dwelling, lodging, residing, or living on nonresidential public property” at all hours of the day (with an exception for unspecified “permits”), amounts to “an intent to banish homeless people” from the city, because it deprives them of the ability to protect themselves from the elements or do things necessary to live, like sleep, Crain said—plus, if taken literally, it could prohibit people from having picnics in city parks, because it bans all “cooking equipment use or storage” in public spaces.

Somewhat unusually, both the Burien and Bellevue law give police the authority to arrest unsheltered people if, in an officer’s opinion, they’re engaged in  “voluntary actions such as intoxication, drug use, unruly or assaultive behavior, or violation of shelter rules.” According to NJP attorney Scott Crain, “That is unconstitutional cruel punishment, in the sense that there is no shelter for somebody because of their disability.”

The ordinance does include a vaguely worded exception for “permitted” encampments in public spaces, but these appear to be theoretical; in months of debate about whether to allow a single 35-unit pallet shelter anywhere in the city, Burien officials have not publicly discussed permitting an encampment on public property, much less permitted one. As the lawsuit notes, Burien’s homeless residents remain at constant risk (and must live in fear) of being displaced and losing their personal belongings in sweeps.

The city started enforcing the sleeping ban on December 1, when police swept an encampment on Ambaum Way. Although no one was arrested, the city did not offer shelter to everyone, telling some encampment residents they should seek out shelter in Seattle, about an hour’s bus ride away. When some took refuge at a church nearby, the city threatened to sue because the church lacked a temporary-use permit for the encampment.

“The City of Burien has not released plans or guidance to homeless individuals in the City of Burien, explaining the steps the City of Burien intends to take to enforce the ordinance, where individuals are permitted to camp, or how shelter offerings will be made available,” the lawsuit says. “Moreover, the City of Burien has yet to release plans explaining how it intends to ascertain available shelter capacity on any given night and which shelters it will consider in making such a determination.”

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A spokeswoman for the city of Burien said she could not comment on pending litigation.

As we’ve reported, Burien’s ordinance is modeled on a similar ordinance in the city of Bellevue, and raises some of the same issues around people’s right to survive in public. (One key difference is that Bellevue, unlike Burien, does have a year-round men’s shelter.) Both ordinances criminalize sleeping outdoors if shelter is unavailable, and empower police to enforce the law.

Somewhat unusually, both the Burien and Bellevue law give police the authority to arrest unsheltered people if, in an officer’s opinion, they’re engaged in  “voluntary actions such as intoxication, drug use, unruly or assaultive behavior, or violation of shelter rules”—a provision that suggests disabilities like substance use disorder and mental illness are voluntary choices, Crain said. “That is also unconstitutional cruel punishment, in the sense that there is no shelter for somebody because of their disability.”

Because this lawsuit is based on the state constitution, which has stronger protections against cruel punishment than the US constitution, Crain says it won’t be directly affected if the US Supreme Court effectively overturns the landmark Martin v. Boise ruling, in which the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that cities can’t force homeless people to move if there is no shelter available. Seattle City Attorney Ann Davison wrote an amicus brief asking the Supreme Court to overrule the Ninth Circuit in that case, Grants Pass v. Johnson, and allow cities to conduct sweeps without offering shelter.

homelessness, human services, King County

As Camping Ban Looms, Burien Considers Privately Owned Lot Near Library as Potential Shelter Site

By Erica C. Barnett

On Monday night, the Burien City Council decided not to immediately approve a bill that would ban sleeping outdoors in the city “at any time between sunset and sunrise,” opting to request more information from city staff about the implications of the ban before passing it.

During the same meeting, City Manager Adolfo Bailon said the city had been contacted by a private landowner who is interested in renting out their property to the city for use as a temporary shelter site for up to 24 months. According to a spokesperson for the city of Burien, Bailon learned about the site when Deputy Mayor Kevin Schilling introduced him to the property owner.

Although Bailon declined to provide any details about the lease proposal, PubliCola has confirmed that the property is a commercially zoned lot sandwiched between a King County Housing Authority building and the Boulevard Park branch of the King County Library System (KCLS), about three miles east of the traffic circle where most of the encampment residents are currently living. Nearby businesses include a Dollar Tree, a laundromat, and a liquor store.

Over the years, the owners of the property have filed permits to develop the overgrown, unfenced lot into a mixed-use apartment building, a parking lot for the library, and a mixed-use townhouse development, but none of these plans have ever materialized. One of the current owners,Dan O’Neill of the O’Neill Design Company, did not respond to a call on Tuesday.

A spokesperson for the King County Library System was unable to comment Tuesday about plans for the site. When the city first evicted encampment residents from outside City Hall in downtown Burien, some supporters justified the move by saying the encampment endangered patrons at Burien’s main KCLS branch, which is located in the same building.

King County Regional Homelessness Authority spokeswoman Anne Martens said the KCRHA hasn’t received much information yet about the potential shelter site. “We will be pulling together a meeting with all relevant parties to discuss,” Martens said. “This is still being scheduled, but we hope to do it soon.”

Earlier this year, King County offered the city $1 million, along with 35 Pallet shelters, and proposed a land swap that would have allowed a shelter to open on city-owned land, but the council narrowly rejected that proposal. Any action to turn the privately owned lot into a shelter will likely take several months, and will almost certainly require funding beyond $1 million King County has offered, depending on how much it costs to rent the land and hire a homeless service provider to run the shelter. The council may also need to rezone the lot.

“We have lots of tents throughout the city. These people are breaking into our houses, they’re breaking into our cars. Yes, I get that they’re trying to feed a [drug] habit, but that’s not acceptable to me.”—Burien City Councilmember Stephanie Mora

Meanwhile, the outdoor sleeping ban will take effect, assuming it passes, on October 1—meaning that even in a best-case scenario, there will be a period when homeless people are effectively banned from Burien after dark.

Although the legislation, modeled on a nearly identical law in Bellevue, is a bit of a fait accompli—four of seven council members support it—a strong council majority was still interested in getting more information about its impacts.

The exception was Councilmember Stephanie Mora, who proposed an unsuccessful motion that would have actually accelerated the legislation, allowing the council to pass it without additional review, last night, and putting the ban into effect immediately. “We are not criminalizing being homeless,” Mora said. “We are criminalizing criminal activity. We have lots of tents throughout the city. These people are breaking into our houses, they’re breaking into our cars. Yes, I get that they’re trying to feed a [drug] habit, but that’s not acceptable to me.”

Burien City Manager Adolfo Bailon and City Attorney Garmon Newsom II

Neither Mora nor several public commenters who claimed the encampment was a haven for child sex trafficking produced specific evidence to back up their claims. According to a state crime report, which Burien Police Chief Ted Bo presented earlier in the evening, crime dropped 8.5 percent in Burien last year, with significant reductions in burglary and robbery reports. There were no human trafficking reports in Burien in either 2021 or 2022.

Because a Ninth Circuit ruling called Martin v. Boise bars most encampment sweeps unless people have somewhere to go, the city will only be able to enforce the ban if shelter is “available.” However, the bill the council is considering defines “available” shelter broadly, as “any public or private shelter with available overnight space, open to individuals experiencing homelessness at no charge.” As written, the bill could strip away people’s right to decline shelter that requires attendance at religious services, discriminates against LGBTQ+ people, forces people to abandon partners and pets, or does not accommodate people’s physical and behavioral health care needs.

The bill explicitly defines drug and alcohol use as a “voluntary” choice among people who turn down spots in shelters that require strict sobriety, effectively criminalizing physical dependence on alcohol and other drugs.

Council members asked Bailon to come back with more information about how the King County Sheriff’s Office would enforce the sleeping ban, what kind of legal liability Burien will be taking on by passing the ordinance, and how far away shelters can be located to count as “available,” among other unanswered questions. Burien has no year-round beds for single men, who make up the majority of those living unsheltered in the city; the nearest year-round men’s shelters are in Seattle and Bellevue.

“I am not in favor of this ban, but I do think it’s important for us to know exactly what we are banning and what we are defining [as shelter] when we do it,” Councilmember Sarah Moore said.

Councilmember Cydney Moore, who also opposes the ban, requested information about how much enforcing the new law will cost the city—a question that could be critical, given that the city could face cuts or layoffs next year, according to a budget Bailon delivered earlier in the meeting. A spokesman for King County, which provides Burien’s police force through the King County Sheriff’s Office, said the county has not done an analysis of what would be involved in enforcing a potential sleeping ban.

homelessness, housing, human services, Morning Fizz

Burien Leaders Face Crisis of Confidence on Homelessness, More on Former KCRHA Director’s Next Steps

1. The Burien City Council is still seeing fallout from its 4-3 decision to oust Burien Planning Commissioner Charles Schaefer two weeks ago, ostensibly because he directed unsheltered people to a piece of city-owned land prior to the May sweep of an encampment outside Burien City Hall earlier this year.

Schaefer said he was acting as a private individual, and not in his capacity as a volunteer member of the planning board, when he, along with Councilmember Cydney Moore, informed people who had been living at an encampment next to City Hall that it would be legal for them to set up tents on a nearby piece of city-owned property that some condo owners have been using as a dog relief area.

The vote to oust Schaefer sparked a wave of resignations by other volunteer commission members, including the entire Planning Commission.

The city later rented out the land to a local animal shelter run by the head of the Burien business group Discovery Burien for a future dog park, displacing encampment residents again. Many moved their tents to a small strip of city-owned land along SW 152nd St., the “Main Street” of Burien. Within weeks, large boulders had popped up along the strip, along with campaign signs for Alex Andrade, a city council candidate running on a public safety and accountability platform who’s endorsed by three members of the Burien council’s four-person anti-encampment majority.

The Burien Human Services Commission’s letter was a toned-down version of the initial draft, which accused city leaders of “choosing … to invest time and energy on show trials that do nothing to provide access to housing and other support for our neighbors.”

“We’re running out of space and Burien does not have any piece of public property that’s not parks that’s remotely habitable,” Moore told PubliCola this week. “Over the last several months, at almost every council meeting since the first sweep happened, I have asked at the start of meetings if we could amend our agenda to have a discussion about where these people can go.” But every time, Moore said, her request has been deemed out of order—a claim that is not supported by the city’s council rules, which allow proposals to “alter the current agenda” near the beginning of each meeting.

Although council members, including Deputy Mayor Kevin Schilling, have claimed that encampment residents are simply refusing to accept shelter and housing, the city’s own Human Services Commission noted in a letter to the council last week that this claim “is simply not true.” The letter also decries a recent decision by the council and city manager Adolfo Bailon to reject an offer from King County to provide $1 million and 35 Pallet shelters, which can house two people each, along with a land swap that would open up a city-owned site for the shelter.

It was a toned-down version of the commission’s initial draft, which accused city leaders of “choosing … to invest time and energy on show trials that do nothing to provide access to housing and other support for our neighbors.”

Meanwhile, Bailon, who was hired by the city council, is undergoing a performance review by an outside consultant. It’s unclear whether the council plans to publicly discuss the details of that review, which is reportedly less than flattering. In Burien, which has a population of just over 50,000, the council hires (and can fire) the city manager, who manages the daily operations of the city.

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2. Former King County Regional Homelessness Authority CEO Marc Dones, whose last official day at the authority was June 16, is negotiating a contract from the city of Seattle, through the Human Services Department  for work “related to using Medicaid funding for homelessness services,” an HSD spokesman confirmed.

As we reported earlier this month, the contract will serve as a kind of payment in lieu of severance. It’s unclear what work product Dones will be expected to produce, and the city did not reveal the size of the potential contract; PubliCola has filed a public disclosure request for this information.

As CEO of the homelessness authority, Dones was a vocal proponent for using a Medicaid program called Foundational Community Supports, which provides pre-tenancy services for chronically homeless people, to fund the KCHRA’s Partnership for Zero effort to eliminate visible homelessness downtown.

Neither Dones nor the city provided further details about this contract, which they said would be finalized this week, except that, according to Dones, “broadly[,] it’s pulling together the policy framework to integrate the systems.”

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this item said that Dones was going to work for the Schultz Family Foundation; Dones followed up to say that they are not taking a position there. 

City Council, homelessness, housing, Mayor Harrell

Harrell Budget Would Permanently Expand Encampment Cleanup and Removal Team
Deputy Mayor Tiffany Washington and Mayor Bruce Harrell

By Erica C. Barnett

Previewing a budget proposal the council will discuss Friday morning, Mayor Bruce Harrell said on Thursday that unless the city council renews and expands funding for encampment removal and response, the “significant decrease in tents in parks and on sidewalks” since he took office might go away.

“If that funding is not renewed … this level of service that we’re demonstrating will lapse. The progress we’re making in the city, building our ‘One Seattle,’ will lapse,” Harrell said.

Harrell has proposed spending just over $38 million on the Unified Care Team and the Clean City Initiative, two initiatives that encompass a wide variety of spending and staff across several city departments, including Parks, the Seattle Department of Transportation, and Seattle Public Utilities. The two programs include all of the city’s spending related to encampment removals, outreach, and trash pickup, including the city’s “purple bag” encampment trash abatement program.

A majority of that money, about $23 million, would continue existing programs. The rest would be new funding—$10 million to replace temporary federal dollars added during COVID, and $5 million in brand-new programming. 

According to council presentation, the new funding “could significantly increase the Unified Care Team’s capacity to conduct encampment removals” across the city.

Overall, Harrell’s budget would 61 new permanent positions to the city’s encampment removal, outreach, and cleanup efforts. Among other new positions, the money would pay for two new customer service representatives to respond to encampment complaints, six new “system navigators” to do outreach and make offers of shelter in advance of encampment removals, and 48 new permanent positions in SDOT and the parks department to coordinate and conduct encampment removals.

In addition to making a number of positions funded with one-time federal emergency dollars permanent, Harrell has proposed changing the way UCT staff are deployed. Instead of working as a citywide team, staffers would be assigned to one of six geographic areas, a change Harrell said would enable encampment response workers to become more familiar with the communities and organizations where they work.

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Deputy Mayor Tiffany Washington said that since Harrell took office, the city has eliminated a backlog of “1,500 complaints related to unauthorized encampments” and continues to develop more tools to respond to and resolve encampment complaints.

“What that means,” Washington said, “is that… we send someone from the Unified Care Team to do an inspection and then we resolve the issue if we can. ‘Resolve’ could be RV remediation. It could be hauling away a burnt RV that had been sitting there for weeks. It could mean making a referral to shelter and then resolving the site. And so when we say we cleared [a request], it means that for all of those [1,500] requests, someone went to the site to do an inspection, put the data in the database, and then we either addressed it, or it self-resolved.”

Harrell’s proposal would also eliminate funding for street sinks that would have provided unsheltered people places to wash their hands, and would reduce spending on public “hygiene stations” (temporary restrooms) and mobile shower trailers for people experiencing homelessness, saving a total of $1.3 million.

The request for millions in additional funding for encampment cleanups comes at a time when the city is trying to close a $141 million shortfall that is projected to grow larger every year until at least 2025. According to an issue-identification presentation prepared for the city council’s budget committee, which will discuss Harrell’s proposal tomorrow morning, the new funding “could significantly increase [the UCT’s] capacity to conduct encampment removals” across the city.  A memo accompanying that presentation adds that, legally speaking, there’s no guarantee that the new funding won’t be used to “accelerate encampment removals.”

Harrell’s proposal would also eliminate funding for street sinks that would have provided unsheltered people places to wash their hands, and would reduce spending on public “hygiene stations” (temporary restrooms) and mobile shower trailers for people experiencing homelessness, saving a total of $1.3 million.

Harrell’s predecessor, Jenny Durkan, repeatedly refused to fund or implement the street-sink program, which could have helped prevent repeated outbreaks of diseases like shigella and hepatitis A among Seattle’s homeless population.

“We have to simultaneously improve service response to rapidly house people living in shelter, and coordinate strategies to ensure public spaces are open, safe, and can be used for their intended purpose,” Washington said. As we’ve reported, there are far more people living unsheltered in Seattle than there are available shelter beds, which means it is not even theoretically possible to shelter everyone who is living outdoors.

On Wednesday in downtown Seattle, officials formally announced an effort we reported on last month to create a unified “command center” to connect people living unsheltered downtown to housing and shelter.

On a practical level, what this means is that when the city sweeps an encampment, most of the people living there do not end up in shelter, but simply “self-resolve” by moving to another location. Outreach workers, including those employed by the city, may have only one or two shelter beds to offer to the people who remain on site, which may or may not be appropriate for the people who happen to remain in that encampment. Even when people do “accept” an offer of shelter, half or more don’t end up enrolling for even one night, a damning indictment of the shelter referral system the city uses in the overwhelming majority of encampment “resolutions.”

During his presentation Thursday, Harrell name-checked the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, which will receive around $90 million from the city next year—a $10 million bump. On Wednesday, Harrell, KCRHA director Marc Dones, and representatives from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development and King County Executive Dow Constantine’s office officially announced an effort we reported on last month to create a unified “command center” to connect people living unsheltered downtown to housing and shelter.

The center—technically a conference room at the city’s Emergency Operations Center downtown—is part of a public-private effort to reduce the number of unsheltered people downtown to “functional zero” by next year. The goal, KCRHA and HUD officials said, is to break down the “silos” that keep various parts of the homelessness system from working well with each other; for example, cities often require people to go through the shelter system before they “graduate” to housing, an extra step that can act as a barrier for people stuck in the homelessness system.

So far, according to data KCRHA provided this week, the agency’s outreach staff have connected with 665 people living unsheltered downtown and identified about 300 units of existing housing for them; the goal, Dones said Wednesday, is to offer people at least three housing options to choose from, instead of the typical one, and to reduce the barriers to housing faced by people who are homeless or poor.

“What we have built into our housing system for folks experiencing homelessness is this incredibly aggressive set of mechanisms that are all based on the idea that people who are poor are out to commit fraud at every turn,” Dones said. “This morning, we were talking about,  how do we not need any of the things [like ID cards and income checks] that we’re used to needing? And if we just had this piece of paper, with someone’s housing preferences on it, how can we have them housed in 12 hours?”

That concept, however, remains speculative; so far, the effort has not moved anyone into housing, and there is no funding for additional housing or shelter attached to the project.

King County, public disclosure, Transit

Republican Proposes Map of Homeless People’s Tents; We’ve Updated Our City Directory!

1. When Mayor Bruce Harrell announced that he planned to include information about homeless encampments in a public-facing dashboard about the state of homelessness in Seattle, advocates worried that the website would include a map of existing encampments, endangering the privacy of unsheltered people and making them more vulnerable to vigilantes. The dashboard Harrell rolled out this week does not include this information; instead, a map shows encampments that have been removed along with the number of “verified” encampments in each neighborhood.

On Thursday, King County Councilmember (and Republican Congressional candidate) Reagan Dunn proposed legislation asking King County Executive Dow Constantine to direct the Sheriff’s Office, Department of Parks and Natural Resources, and Department of Community and Human Services to identify and map the locations of every encampment in the county, along with the approximate number of people living at each site—a proposal that would put a virtual target on the backs of thousands of homeless people around the county.

The bill also asks Constantine to “develop a comprehensive plan to remove homeless encampments for unincorporated King County” by this October.

During a media briefing on Thursday, King County Regional Homelessness Authority CEO Marc Dones said, “I do not and will not ever support the disclosure of information about where people are living or what the needs of those people are because that is protected information in a number of ways.”

The legislation—which, like Dunn’s vote against a resolution supporting abortion rights, serves largely as a statement of priorities for Dunn’s Congressional campaign, does not come with any cost estimate. The county, like the city of Seattle, is facing down significant budget shortfalls over the next few years. On Wednesday, county budget director Dwight Dively told a council committee that “right now, the [20]25-26 budget is horrendously out of balance.”

2. Earlier this year, responding to the Durkan Administration’s decision to permanently delete the city’s public-facing employee directory offline (a decision that has not been reversed by the Harrell administration), we created our own searchable city directory, with all the same public information that used to be available on the city’s website.

Now, we’ve updated and improved that original directory, adding more detailed contact information and consolidating the whole directory in one searchable database that includes phone and/or email contact information for every city employee. Continue reading “Republican Proposes Map of Homeless People’s Tents; We’ve Updated Our City Directory!” →