Tag: Jason Johnson

City Hall, homelessness, human services, Mayor Durkan

Survey Says: City’s Homelessness Staff Feel Unrecognized, Out of the Loop

A new survey of Seattle Human Services Department staff reveals widespread dissatisfaction with HSD management among staff, who report feeling left out of the loop when it comes to decisions in the department that impact them directly, including staffing changes.

The survey, which had a response rate of 64 percent, shows the highest level of dissatisfaction in HSD’s Homeless Strategy and Investments division, which leads the city’s response to homelessness.

That division has been under scrutiny throughout the homelessness crisis, most recently after the revelation—first reported at The C Is for Crank and picked up by KUOW and the Seattle Times—that the city does not know precisely how many people the programs it funds are moving from homelessness into permanent housing.

The mayor has also sparked uncertainty in the department in recent weeks with her proposal to move to a regional approach to homelessness, which would involve the creation of a new joint King County-Seattle agency to oversee the region’s homelessness response. The idea was first floated in December, but it seems to have become a more frequent Durkan-HSD talking point in recent weeks; last week, for example, HSD staffers said that regional governance would help address both the data issue and the effectiveness of the Navigation Team, which was recently the subject of a critical audit.

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If you like the work I’m doing here, and would like to support this page financially, please support me by becoming a monthly donor on Patreon or PayPal.  For just $5, $10, or $20 a month (or whatever you can give), you can help keep this site going, and help me continue to dedicate the many hours it takes to bring you stories like this one every week. This site is funded entirely by contributions from readers, which pay for the time I put into reporting and writing for this blog and on social media, as well as reporting-related and office expenses.  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 reading, and I’m truly grateful for your support.

In an email transmitting the results of the survey to HSD employees, interim director Jason Johnson acknowledged that the impending switch to a completely different governance structure—one that might involve absorbing some of HSD’s responsibilities into a new regional agency—has caused “anxiety.”

“I want to acknowledge over the past year there has been a shift in both mayoral and departmental leadership and a major initiative moving forward with the City of Seattle and King County to change the governance structure promoting a deeper collaboration to address homelessness,” Johnson wrote. “Like the leadership changes we had in 2014, this new significant major initiative could change the structure of our organization; this creates anxiety within the organization and could be reflected in the survey. This need to create stability as a department and ensure employees with community are at the forefront of our processes as we move forward.”

Mayor Jenny Durkan has nominated Johnson—who has been interim director for a year—as permanent HSD director. City council member Kshama Sawant, as well as some human services groups and HSD staff, have opposed the nomination, arguing that Durkan did not go through a “transparent and inclusive” process to find a new director. Sawant failed this week to pass a resolution that would stop Johnson’s appointment and start a new process led by human service providers, people experiencing homelessness, and HSD staff, but the appointment itself remains in limbo, largely because her committee is the one that is supposed to take it up.

Acronym Key: ADS: Aging and Disability Services; HSI: Homelessness Strategy and Investment; LAD: Leadership and Administration; YFE: Youth and Family Empowerment; SMT: Seattle Municipal Tower

Overall, the statements with the highest negative responses (that is, the percentage of people who disagreed with a statement) were:

• Recognition is distributed equitably at HSD.

• Changes with staffing, including temporary and out of class changes are successfully communicated out to staff

• Communication at the Human Services Department is a two-way street; management talks and listens

• The Executive Team keeps employees informed about matters effecting [sic] us.

• HSD values people as its most important resource.

The last three statements on that list, the survey found, were also among the lowest-scoring statements on similar surveys in 2014 and 2016.

Employees were most likely to agree with statements about race and social justice training and implementation of the city’s Race and Social Justice Initiative; three of the five statements with the highest level of “yes” responses involved RSJI:

• I am supported / encouraged in taking RSJI trainings

• My Supervisor keeps me informed about matters affecting me.

• I am able to effectively apply RSJI within my current position.

• I have taken advantage of career and/or personal growth opportunities within HSD

• RSJI is part of HSD’s culture.

Not surprisingly, people in management and executive-level positions were more likely to agree with statements like, “The Executive Team keeps employees informed about matters effecting [sic] us” and “Communication at the Human Services Department is a two-way street; management talks and listens.” In fact, managers and executive-level staffers responded more positively to every question in the survey, with executive staffers scoring some questions at 100% (meaning that every executive-level staffer surveyed strongly agreed with the statement).

Overall, people in the homelessness division were less likely than other HSD employees to agree with the statement that “management talks and listens” and with the statement that staffing changes “are successfully communicated to staff.” Homelessness staffers were also the least likely of all HSD divisions to agree with the statement, “Recognition is distributed equitably at HSD.”  The survey results don’t indicate what specific concerns homelessness division staffers raised in their responses.

Although responses to some of the survey questions were more positive than they were in 2014, the survey showed a drop (that is, more negative responses) in nearly every category of question between 2016 and last year.

“Since my time here in the department, the leadership of HSD has intentionally created opportunities to engage with all staff,” Johnson wrote in his email to staff. “I am firmly committed to continuing this engagement and will look to find new ways for continuous improvements on how I do better as a leader and as a department.”

City Council, Density, Elections, homelessness

Evening Crank: “There Is No Plan to Close SHARE Shelters.”
Image via Seattle City Council on Flickr

1. City council member Rob Johnson, who has already accepted a post-council position as a transportation advisor to Seattle NHL, has carefully dodged rumors that he will be leaving the council much sooner than the end of his term. But here are the facts: Johnson’s signature legislation, the Mandatory Housing Affordability plan, will pass on March 18. Another major milestone—the final meeting of Sound Transit’s Elected Leadership Group, which will issue recommendations on route and station locations for light rail to Ballard and West Seattle—takes place April 26. After that, Johnson has nothing scheduled.  (He’s actually the one who pointed this out to me, while refusing to officially confirm he’s leaving early.) Meanwhile, council members are quietly discussing who might replace him. All of which leads to the conclusion that Johnson will probably leave in May, sparking a potentially contentious process for appointing someone to fill his seat for the remaining seven or so months of his term.

If Johnson left the council after the filing deadline for the November election, which is May 17, the appointee would serve as a placeholder—filling the position until the next elected council member could be sworn in, most likely in November rather than January 2020, when other elected council members will take office. This happened, most recently, in October 2017, when Kirsten Harris-Talley was appointed to replace at-large council member Tim Burgess, who became mayor after incumbent Ed Murray resigned and was not running for reelection. Teresa Mosqueda won the seat formerly held by Burgess and was sworn in on November 28.

If Johnson decides to leave earlier, whoever gets the appointment could theoretically enter the race for his position, although they would probably face pressure to agree not to run.

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If you like the work I’m doing here, and would like to support this page financially, please support me by becoming a monthly donor on Patreon or PayPal.  For just $5, $10, or $20 a month (or whatever you can give), you can help keep this site going, and help me continue to dedicate the many hours it takes to bring you stories like this one every week. This site is funded entirely by contributions from readers, which pay for the time I put into reporting and writing for this blog and on social media, as well as reporting-related and office expenses.  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 reading, and I’m truly grateful for your support.

2. A fight over funding for the controversial shelter and housing provider SHARE/WHEEL continued to play out in council chambers this morning, with council member Lisa Herbold curtly correcting council member Kshama Sawant’s assertion that Mayor Jenny Durkan had “threaten[ed] the closure of the SHARE/WHEEL shelters at the end of June.”

Last week, Sawant accused Durkan of retaliating against SHARE for opposing the nomination of Jason Johnson as director of the Human Services Department by ending the organization’s city contract early, in June, with further funding contingent on improved performance. (This is what Sawant was characterizing as a “threaten[ed] closure.”) Specifically, SHARE supported a Sawant resolution (which failed today) that would have blocked Johnson’s nomination and established a new process, led by a committee including HSD employees and service providers who receive HSD contracts, to find a director.

God forbid we talk to each other and try to make something good, something better, something that doesn’t violate our charter or our responsibilities.

Herbold, a longtime SHARE supporter, said, “There is no planned closure of SHARE shelters in June,. It is true that they have been given only a half-year contract and [HSD has] identified specific  areas of desired improvement.” But, she reiterated, “There is no proposal for SHARE shelters to close in June.”

SHARE’s basic shelters, which provide high-barrier, nighttime-only shelter to about 200 people every night, failed to qualify for any funding last year under the city’s new performance standards, which require programs to demonstrate progress toward moving people in to permanent housing. Nonetheless, the council and mayor agreed to fund its shelters on a temporary basis through this year.

Last week, the city’s Human Services Department announced in a memo that funding for SHARE’s shelters after June would depend on whether the organization continued to improve its data collection practices, which “directly impact the ability of the SHARE/WHEEL shelters to serve the most vulnerable population.” Herbold called the memo “a sincere statement on behalf of HSD, not that they are intending to end provision of this service in June, but rather that they are trying to work… to improve the number of people who are participating in the HMIS system.”

Sawant is holding a special meeting of the city’s special committee on homelessness to discuss SHARE funding next Tuesday, in lieu of her regularly canceled human services committee meeting. Sawant has not held a regular committee meeting since last September. She does have another “community speak-out”/”special committee meeting” scheduled for Saturday, March 16, to rally supporters against the demolition of the Chateau Apartments, a 21-unit Section 8 apartment complex in the Central District.

3. Sawant’s resolution to reject Johnson and start a new process may have failed (council member Lisa Herbold said she might have felt “differently” if “council member Sawant had made her expectations known [to Mayor Durkan] prior to the nomination process”), but council member Teresa Mosqueda, who voted with Sawant, has proposed a kind of alternative: A resolution outlining the steps that mayors must follow for department director nominations in the future.

The resolution requires the mayor to describe the process she wants to use to make an appointment in advance, including any advisory groups she wants to appoint; gives the council authority to review the appointment process prior to any nomination, using on a list of criteria that focuses on inclusion and race and social justice; and lays out evaluation criteria for the council to use in the future.

The contents of Mosqueda’s resolution, as council member Lorena Gonzalez pointed out, are not “earth-shaking”; in fact, they’re “pretty run-of-the-mill, ordinary pieces of information that are traditionally transmitted from the mayor to whoever the committee chair responsible for the confirmation process is.” Her comment, which Gonzalez suggested was aimed at the mayor, also read as a subtle dig at Sawant, who has claimed repeatedly that she reached out to the mayor prior to Johnson’s nomination and never heard back. (The mayor’s office maintains that Sawant has not shown up for any of their scheduled monthly check-ins since Durkan took office in 2017).

Debora Juarez, no fan of Sawant’s efforts to derail Johnson’s appointment by forcing Durkan to launch an entirely new appointment process, was less circumspect. Thanking Mosqueda for distributing the legislation in advance and asking her council colleagues for feedback, she said, “I think it’s the height of good government when you give your colleagues an opportunity, notice, an opportunity to question, to discuss. God forbid we talk to each other and try to make something good, something better, something that doesn’t violate our charter or our responsibilities, and is also very clear about our role in the legislative branch.”

City Council, City Hall, homelessness, housing, human services, Mayor Durkan, Morning Crank, Poverty

Evening Crank: “No Matter How You Look at It, It’s Getting Better”

City Confirms: No Idea Exactly How Many Are Housed Through Programs

On Monday, during a briefing to highlight the progress the city made on homelessness last year, Mayor Jenny Durkan and representatives from the city’s Department of Human Services publicly confirmed what I reported last Friday: The city has no idea exactly how many individual people have moved from homelessness into permanent housing last year. Although Durkan, in her state of the city speech, said that the city had moved “helped more than 7,400 households move out of homelessness and into permanent housing,” the reality is that that number includes about 1,800 households who aren’t actually homeless; they live in permanent supportive housing and maintained that housing last year. Moreover, the remainder of that number—about 5,600—reflects exits from programs rather than actual households leaving homelessness; since most households use multiple programs before exiting the homelessness system, the 7,400 number includes many duplications.

Durkan, and interim HSD director Jason Johnson, were quick to point out that “duplication” also worked in the opposite direction: Households, or families, can have more than one member. “There’s many more people that are associated with these households,” Johnson said. “It could be one person or four people, or it could be the same person who comes back and cycles repeatedly through the system, and we can’t measure that.” According to All Home King County’s 2018 point-in-time count of the county’ homeless population, about 77 percent of all homeless households have just one or two members, which would suggest that one person sleeping in a shelter is more typical than an intact family of four.

More importantly, the fact that the county knows the size of the households it counts means that the city could theoretically use that information to eliminate the problem of having no idea whether a household is one person or four. The county, through the federally mandated Homeless Management Information System (HMIS) also has a pretty good idea of how many programs each household in the system uses before they exit from homelessness, and whether they cycle back through the system after finding housing for a while. (“Pretty good” because Washington State allows people to receive services anonymously if they don’t want to provide their personal information.) Surely the city could use the county’s data, plus its own information about “exits” (that 5,600 figure) to get a fairly good idea of how many people are being housed. Right?

Asked whether the city could at least triangulate its way toward a more accurate number, HSD division director Tiffany Washington said, “There is a way to do all of that. The reason we don’t provide that information here is because it would be a 700-page PowerPoint. After the briefing,  HSD spokeswoman Meg Olberding  followed up: “In collaboration with King County, we can look at unduplicated interaction with the homeless service system across the entire county. The only way to do that is through regional governance.” The information, she said, “exists, but we don’t have it in one place.”

Durkan and HSD emphasized repeatedly that the real number they wanted to focus on was the comparison between 2017 and 2018, which shows the number of exits from homelessness—regardless of how many people that actually represents—going up. “Regardless of what you call it, we know from the data we have … that we’re performing better than in previous years,” Durkan said. “Exits to housing means that those people do become housed.” After the briefing, Washington added: “You have to remember that we’re comparing this year to last year, so no matter how you look at it it’s getting better.”

If you like the work I’m doing here, and would like to support this page financially, please support me by becoming a monthly donor on Patreon or PayPal. For just $5, $10, or $20 a month (or whatever you can give), you can help keep this site going, and help me continue to dedicate the many hours it takes to bring you stories like this one every week. This site is funded entirely by contributions from readers, which pay for the time I put into reporting and writing for this blog and on social media, as well as reporting-related and office expenses. 

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 reading, and I’m truly grateful for your support.

Performance Measures Kick In, $2 Million Housing Voucher Program Helps 28 Into Permanent Housing So Far

In addition to the success of enhanced shelter at getting people into permanent housing, which I wrote about on Friday, a couple of items jumped out from the report. The first is that since the city instituted (somewhat controversial) new performance measures last year, 20 of the 46 city-funded programs that were required to meet new performance standards to get the full amount of their contracts failed, at least initially, do so. Of those 20, 16 completed a “performance improvement plan” and will get the rest of their funding, which HSD calls “performance pay,” this year. I have asked HSD for a list of the 20 organizations that initially failed the city’s standards, more information about where they fell short, and which four programs were unable to meet HSD’s requirements.

Second, a pilot program to provide temporary rental assistance to help about 150 of the families that are currently on the Seattle Housing Authority’s waiting list for permanent Section 8 housing vouchers, has provided rent vouchers to about 142 families, of which 28 “have been housed in affordable, stable housing in Seattle,” according to the presentation. Given that the pilot program, which continues this year, will cost a total of $2 million, it’s unclear how cost-effective or successful HSD will decide it has been compared to other “prevention” programs aimed at keeping people from becoming homeless. I have a call out to HSD for more information about this program and whether the department considers it a success so far; on Monday, Johnson said only that “We are going to continue to watch this pilot and see if it’s something that we want to invest in further.”

Durkan: HSD Director Nomination Has Been “A Continued Circus”

Durkan was getting up to leave when I asked her how she thought the council has handled her nomination of Johnson, who has served as interim HSD director for ten months, but she sat back down. As it turned out, she had a lot to say. “I’m feeling very positive about the prospects for confirmation for Jason Johnson, once we get a vote,” Durkan said. “I admit that I am frustrated that the council has not scheduled a vote. Their own procedures and guidelines require vote by March 11. It hasn’t happened.” (In the council’s defense, Durkan just sent Johnson’s nomination down in December, after he had already served in the position, without a formal nomination, for nine months.)

Durkan added: “It does a disservice to the department and to the really important mission that this department serves to have a continued circus instead of a substantive discussion on what we need to do as a city. And I am disappointed that the current chair of the committee”—Sawant—”basically was AWOL month after month after month  and had no hearings whatsoever on [homelessness], to the point that the city council felt the need to create a select committee on homelessness.”

Council member Kshama Sawant, whose committee would ordinarily oversee Johnson’s nomination, has held a series of nighttime public hearings/”Pack City Hall!” rallies to denounce the process that led to Johnson’s nomination and, sometimes, Johnson himself.  Since last July, Sawant has canceled all but one of her regularly scheduled human services committee meetings, which are supposed to happen every other Tuesday at 2pm.

“For those people who say that there wasn’t a process,” Durkan concluded, “I would say that is nonsense. I would challenge anybody to go through a [hiring] process where your process was you had to do the job for 10 months. … It has been both the most exhausting and exhaustive process that a person could have to try to get this job.”

Some service providers, HSD employees, and community members have argued that the city should do a national search for an HSD director rather than just appointing Johnson to the position. Sawant, for her part, has said she wants to appoint a search committee made up of human service providers, people experiencing homelessness, and HSD employees.

City Council, Development, Elections, human services, Mayor Durkan, Morning Crank, Politics

Morning Crank: “Madame Chair, I Agree With You Completely.”

1. After a two-and-a-half hour meeting Wednesday night, city council member Kshama Sawant cast the lone vote for her own resolution to send interim Human Services Department Jason Johnson’s nomination as HSD director back to the mayor’s office. However, since no one on the human services committee, which Sawant chairs, voted “no,” the resolution will move forward to the full council.

Sawant’s resolution calls for a formal search process by a search committee that includes nonprofit human service providers, people experiencing homelessness, and HSD employees. The resolution does not explicitly express opposition to Johnson or make the case that he is unqualified for the job. However, Sawant—who is up for reelection this year—has made little effort to hide the fact that she is not a fan of the interim director, who took over after former director Catherine Lester resigned almost a year ago, and many of the people who showed up to testify last night expressed their explicit opposition to his appointment.

Prior to last night’s meeting, as she did prior to a last-minute public hearing on Johnson’s appointment in January, Sawant sent out a “Pack City Hall!” rally notice, urging her supporters to show up and “Hold Mayor Durkan accountable to the community and Human Services workers!” Perhaps as a result, the overwhelming majority of the testimony was in favor of Sawant’s resolution.

(In a somewhat novel twist, a few of the speakers opposing Johnson did so because they felt he was too supportive of groups like the Low-Income Housing Institute and SHARE, whose members also showed up to oppose Johnson’s appointment, but for completely different reasons; one of these speakers called Johnson “incompetent,” and another blamed the city for “an extremely drunk woman” he said had been “terrorizing Magnolia.”)

In addition to inviting her supporters to show up and testify, Sawant took the highly unusual step of inviting eight people who supported her resolution  to sit with the council at the committee table as they deliberated and took a vote. This setup gave the advocates an opportunity to echo Sawant’s statements and respond whenever council members Bruce Harrell or Lisa Herbold said anything contrary to Sawant’s position. (A quote from one advocate that paraphrases many others made around the table over the course of the meeting: “Madame Chair, I agree with you completely.”)  The result was an atmosphere in council chambers even more circus-like than most Sawant rally/hearings, with Harrell, in particular, barely able to disguise his frustration when advocates at the table talked over him (“I feel like I have to raise my hand here,” he said) or accused him of being “afraid” of doing a national search.

The advocates, including representatives from the homeless advocacy group SHARE, the Human Services Department,  the Seattle Indian Center, and the Seattle Human Services Coalition, argued that the council should open up the nomination process and, in the words of Tia Jones with the Seattle Silence Breakers, “just make [Johnson] apply—post it on the site and make him apply like everybody else.”

Herbold and Harrell responded that if the process for appointing Johnson was inadequate, the appropriate thing to do would be to revisit the process after Johnson’s nomination moves forward, given that the nomination took place legitimately under rules the council established in 2007. “Those are the rules that we all agreed to,” Herbold said. “I’m appreciative of the idea that the status quo isn’t acceptable.” But, she added, “I’m inclined to consider the individual when we have an individual before us,” and to make that process transparent and accountable, rather than rejecting Johnson’s nomination out of hand. “I feel like sending [the nomination] back is making it about the person,” Herbold said.

Sawant countered that the rules delineating the council’s role in considering mayoral appointments have to be a “living body, meaning, when we hear from hundreds of people, we can’t tell them, ‘These are the rules, so we can’t do what you’re asking us to do.’ … Clearly, we’re hearing loud and clear from people that they want to do something different. How can we ignore that?”

In a final bit of political theater, Sawant opened up the question of whether she should call for a vote on her own resolution to the audience, most of whom had already spoken in favor of the resolution. “All here who are not on council or staff, do you think we should vote for this resolution?” Sawant said. Herbold pointed out that she had received many letters from people who support Johnson and want to move the process forward. “Where are they?” shouted someone in the crowd—suggesting, it seemed, that either Herbold was making up the emails or that the people who showed up in person should count more than the people who wrote emails or called their council members on the phone.

Sawant addressed her supporters again: “Should I call this for a vote? I’m asking members of the public because that’s who I’m accountable to.” After a chorus of “Ayes” from the audience, Sawant called the vote. It passed by a vote of 1, with both Harrell and Herbold abstaining.

The resolution now moves on to the full council, where it faces long odds.

2. Steve Daschle, with the Human Services Coalition, said that the thing he found most “irksome” about Durkan’s human services approach was that she still has not met with the coalition after more than a year in office. “In the 30 years I’ve been involved in the Human Services Coalition, this is the first mayor who has not met with the coalition in a full year and two months of her term, and we think it’s imperative that the chief executive of the city take the time to come and talk to one of the key constituencies that would help shape that decision, and it wasn’t done,” Daschle said.

3. In City Council news, two more candidates entered the race for District 4, the seat currently held by Rob Johnson: Abel Pacheco, a STEM education advocate who sought the same seat in 2015 and received 8.4 percent of the vote, and Cathy Tuttle, the founder of Seattle Neighborhood Greenways. Pacheco sent out an announcement that he was running Tuesday; Tuttle confirmed that she was running to The C Is for Crank yesterday afternoon.

Also, as I noted on Twitter Monday, nonprofit director Beto Yarce, who was one of the first candidates to challenge Sawant in District 3 (Capitol Hill, the Central District, Montlake), has dropped out of the race. Yarce drew criticism early on for the fact that he and his partner live in Mill Creek, not Seattle. Yarce said he and his partner, who owns a house in the Snohomish County suburb, were planning to move to Capitol Hill; during his campaign, Yarce was renting a space in the neighborhood from a friend on a short-term basis, his campaign consultant confirmed.

4. The city has finally hired a consultant to conduct outreach on a proposal to make the building that houses the Showbox nightclub a permanent part of the Pike Place Market Historical District. (The city council adopted “emergency” legislation making the Showbox a temporary part of the market last year, in order to prevent the property, which was recently upzoned to allow very dense housing, from being developed as apartments. In response, the owner of the building sued the city). The consultant, Stepherson and Associates, has also done outreach work for the city on the First Hill Streetcar, the downtown seawall replacement project, and the Move Seattle levy. Because the contract is for less than $305,000 and Stepherson and Associates is on the city’s consultant roster, the contract did not have to be bid through an open process.

The city’s schedule calls for all of the outreach work on the Showbox proposal, as well as a full environmental review under the State Environmental Policy Act, to be done by March, with a council vote this June. As I noted when I reported on the search for a contractor in January, that’s a remarkably quick timeline for an expansion of the Market, at least by historical standards:

To put this timeline in historical context, the Market Historical District has been expanded twice before: Once, in 1986, to include Victor Steinbrueck Park, and again in 1989, to add a parking garage and senior housing. Seattle Times archives show that the debate over the latter addition lasted more than three years, and archival records at the city clerk’s office show that the council was receiving letters on the draft legislation fully nine months before they adopted the expansion.

AEG Live, which owns the Showbox, is free to close or relocate the venue when its current lease runs out in 2021; the question at hand is whether the building itself is historic, and whether the city can require that it remain a live-music venue in perpetuity.

If you like the work I’m doing here, and would like to support this page financially, please support me by becoming a monthly donor on Patreon or PayPal! For just $5, $10, or $20 a month (or whatever you can give), you can help keep this site going, and help me continue to dedicate the many hours it takes to bring you stories like this one every week. This site is funded entirely by contributions from readers, which pay for the time I put into reporting and writing for this blog and on social media, as well as reporting-related and office expenses. 

If you don’t wish to become a monthly contributor, you can always make a one-time donation via PayPal, Venmo me at Erica-Barnett-7, or mail me an old-fashioned check (or fan letter) at P.O. Box 14328, Seattle, WA 98104.

Thank you for reading, and supporting, The C Is for Crank!

City Council, City Hall, human services, Mayor Durkan

Tempers Fray Over Human Services Director Nomination

City council member Kshama Sawant has proposed delaying the appointment of a permanent director for the city’s Human Services Department until “a formal search process can be completed,” according to the text of a resolution Sawant plans to introduce next week. HSD has been operating without a permanent director for nearly a year, since Catherine Lester, the director under former mayor Ed Murray, left in March. Last month, Durkan formally nominated interim director Jason Johnson, who previously served as deputy director, for the permanent position. Sawant has not scheduled a hearing on the nomination, which is supposed to go through her Human Services, Equitable Development, and Renters’ Rights committee.* Sawant has only held one regular meeting of her committee, which is supposed to meet on the second and fourth Tuesdays of every month, since last July,

Several groups, and at least three council members, have formally expressed misgivings about the process that led to Johnson’s nomination. On January 15,  the Seattle Human Services Coalition—a group that includes the Seattle King County Coalition on Homelessness as well as groups that advocate for seniors, people of color, domestic-violence survivors, and people with disabilities—sent a letter to council members urging them “to return the nomination to Mayor Durkan and request a full search process that includes integral participation of human service providers, program participants, HSD employees, and other public partners.” One week later, city council members Teresa Mosqueda and Lorena Gonzalez sent their own letter to Durkan, suggesting that the HSD appointment should go through to the same kind of public process as the nominations of Seattle City Light director Debra Smith and Police Chief Carmen Best. And one day after that, members of the Human Services Department’s Change Team, which oversees HSD’s implementation of the city’s Race and Social Justice Initiative, wrote an email to council members saying that Seattle deputy mayor Shefali Ranganathan had told HSD staff that “there would be an inclusive process for the selection of the permanent director. … Instead, staff learned Mayor Durkan made the decision to directly appoint our interim director into a permanent position—foregoing an inclusive process that many believed would take place.”

“While the Mayor has had a thoughtful hiring process for each of her appointments, Councilmember Sawant  is refusing to move forward on confirming a qualified LGBTQ candidate who has a proven record, including over the last year as Interim Director. Jason has gone through the most exhaustive and exhausting process by actually doing his job. It’s time for Councilmember Sawant – who has been absent as chair of her committee – to do hers.”

In the middle of all this back and forth, on January 22, Sawant announced she would hold a special meeting of her committee to take public comment on the nomination  on the night of January 24, at the Miller Community Center on Capitol Hill. About 35 people spoke at the meeting—all but one opposed to either Johnson himself or to the process that led to his nomination.

No one else from the council came to at Sawant’s last-minute “listening session,” prompting Sawant to suggest that her colleagues had different “priorities” than she did. On Monday, she urged her colleagues to watch the video of the testimony, which she called proof that the community wanted a more inclusive nomination process.  Not only did Durkan “not even conduct a nominal process,” Sawant said Monday, she had ignored Sawant’s repeated requests for a meeting to discuss the nomination. “My office has been asking the mayor for [a discussion about the search process] and there was no response,” Sawant said. “Week after week after week there was no response, and then they just sent the nomination.”

The mayor’s office sharply disputes this characterization. Durkan spokesman Mark Prentice says Sawant never requested a meeting with the mayor or her office to discuss the nomination,  and has not attended any of her regularly scheduled monthly one-on-one meetings with the mayor in nearly a year.

“While the Mayor has had a thoughtful hiring process for each of her appointments, Councilmember Sawant, who fires and hires staff at the direction of an outside political committee, is refusing to move forward on confirming a qualified LGBTQ candidate who has a proven record, including over the last year as Interim Director,” Prentice said. “Jason has gone through the most exhaustive and exhausting process by actually doing his job. It’s time for Councilmember Sawant – who has been absent as chair of her committee – to do hers.”

Support

Last week, the mayor’s office sent two letters to council members defending Johnson’s the nomination. The first, addressed to Gonzalez and Mosqueda, thanked the council members for their letter and their “individual commitments to ensure Seattle is centered on equity, justice, and compassion in all our work.” The second, addressed to Sawant, castigated the council member for holding a public hearing on the nomination process “with no meaningful notice” and “without extending an opportunity to have Jason” attend and defend his record. “We look forward to you finally scheduling a meaningful hearing with Jason regarding his appointment as the permanent director of the Human Services Department in the coming weeks,” the letter concluded. In what is hard not to see as a deliberate slight, that letter was signed not by Durkan, but by her legislative liaison, Anthony Auriemma.

Sawant’s resolution, if passed with the blessing of a council majority, would effectively force the mayor to undertake a formal search process, led by a committee that includes HSD employees, for a new director. What’s unclear is how long such a process would take; at what point Sawant would consider the process sufficient to let the nomination move through her committee; and, importantly, whether a public, nationwide search would turn up a robust list of qualified candidates for a job that could be hard to fill. The HSD director implements the mayor’s priorities for funding human-services providers, oversees the controversial Navigation Teams, and is the conduit for public criticism of the city’s response to the homelessness crisis. Since 2014, the department has had four acting or interim directors, two of whom went on to become permanent  The director before Johnson, Catherine Lester, served as acting or interim director twice before her permanent appointment to the position.

* While director nominations typically go through the committee assigned to that subject area, the council has the authority to remove any legislation, including a nomination, from one committee and put it into another, although that would require extraordinary circumstances.