Tag: JustCARE

Affordability, City Council, homelessness, housing, legislature, Mayor Harrell, Morning Fizz, State of Washington

Harrell Veto of Rent Transparency Bill Stands, JustCare Will Transition to Focus on Highway Encampments

1. The Seattle City Council voted not to overturn Mayor Bruce Harrell’s veto of legislation that would have directed a research university, such as the University of Washington, to collect information from landlords about the size of their units and how much they charge. City Councilmember Alex Pedersen sponsored the proposal because, he said at Tuesday’s meeting, it would help the city “validate [the] affordable benefits of smaller mom and pop landlords,” informing the city’s upcoming Comprehensive Plan rewrite; Councilmember Tammy Morales (District 2) co-sponsored it because she said it would give renters better information to make housing decisions and could ultimately bolster support for rent control.

“This could mean, for tenants, that they finally have the ability to make an informed decision and to make a choice between units when they’re searching for a new home—something that landlords have been able to do with background checks on tenants for decades,” Morales said. “We would finally have concrete data that dispels the illusion that private-market, trickle-down economics is the solution to our affordability crisis.”

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Renters, unlike homeowners, lack access to crucial information to help them make informed housing decision. While home buyers can easily access public information about what a house sold for most recently, the assessed value of adjacent and nearby houses, and (through data maintained and published by the Multiple Listing Service) the average prices of houses in a particular area, renters have to rely on sites like Apartment Finder and Craigslist to get a general idea of local rents. Searches for the “median rent” in Seattle yield numbers that vary by hundreds of dollars, making it impossible to know whether the rent a landlord is charging is reasonable. 

In vetoing the legislation, Harrell argued that the bill would violate landlords’ rights by revealing “proprietary” information.

Overturning a mayoral veto requires a minimum of six council votes; as in the original vote, just five councilmembers supported the legislation this time.

2. JustCare, the COVID-era program that engaged with people living in encampments and moved them into hotel-based shelter, will no longer continue in its previous form. The program, run by the Public Defender Association, ran out of city funding at the end of June. Its new iteration, which will focus exclusively on encampments in state-owned rights-of-way, will be funded using state dollars allocated in a supplemental state budget for shelter and services tied to encampment removals on state-owned property.

“In the sense of a response to the conditions in the specific neighborhoods we served, there is no more JustCare. That era is over – it’s been superseded. The City of Seattle and KCRHA are now in charge of that response.”—Lisa Daugaard, Public Defender Association

The funding is only available to groups that focus on encampments in sites “identified by the department of transportation as a location where individuals residing on the public right-of-way are in specific circumstances or physical locations that expose them to especially or imminently unsafe conditions, including but not limited to active construction zones and risks of landslides.”

By moving its focus to encampments in state rights-of-way, such as highway overpasses, JustCare will lose its geographic, neighborhood-based focus, PDA co-director Daugaard acknowledges. 

“In the sense of a response to the conditions in the specific neighborhoods we served, there is no more JustCare,” Daugaard said. “That era is over – it’s been superseded. The City of Seattle and KCRHA are now in charge of that response.” Continue reading “Harrell Veto of Rent Transparency Bill Stands, JustCare Will Transition to Focus on Highway Encampments” →

homelessness

Homeless Authority Funds Pallet Shelter, JustCARE, and Just One of Three Proposed Tiny House Villages

By Erica C. Barnett

The King County Regional Homelessness Authority will fund 50 new tiny house and Pallet shelter units and partially extend the JustCARE hotel-based shelter program, using federal and city of Seattle funds. The awards, announced last week, will go to three projects: A new 25-unit tiny house village operated by Chief Seattle Club and the Low-Income Housing Institute; a 25-unit expansion of Catholic Community Services’ existing Pallet shelter village on Elliott Ave. W, and partial funding for Public Defender Association-led JustCARE hotel-based shelter program, which will receive ongoing operating funds for its 90-room Equity JustCARE program.

The authority rejected three applications, including two for new LIHI tiny house villages—one at a Seattle City Light-owned property in South Lake Union (where Therapeutic Health Services had committed to provide on-site behavioral health care), and one just north of Rainier Beach, where the Refugee Women’s Alliance (ReWA) planned to provide case management. 

Last year, advocates for tiny house villages pushed the mayor’s office to move quickly to use $2.4 million in existing city dollars to fund three new villages before the authority—whose director, Marc Dones, has been critical of the tiny-house model—took control of the regional homelessness system. When that didn’t happen, the money moved over to the authority, which issued an open request for proposals for the money, along with funds from the federal government totaling another $2.4 million.

“We wanted to be kind of the opposite of NIMBY. We said, ‘We’ll give you the money if you put the [village] next to us.'”—John Pehrson, Mirabella Civic Engagement Project

In a meeting of the KCRHA’s governing board last week, KCRHA chief programming officer Peter Lynn said the authority picked the three projects “in rank order,” adding that three proposals “did not receive funding based on running out of funds, as happens.” The RFP itself, which was extended and amended to allow Pallet (a for-profit company) to apply for funds, includes the criteria the authority used to evaluate the applications.

The three programs the KCRHA will fund, however, did not use up all the funding that was available; according to KCRHA spokeswoman Anne Martens, the Public Defender Association “did not request development funding, so there is a total of $919,812 of unallocated funding ($696,515 of [Department of Commerce capital] funds, and $223,297 of HSD services & operations funds). The raters did not want to partially fund an organization and suggested allocating additional funds during contract negotiations.”

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PDA co-director Lisa Daugaard said her organization expects to work with the KCRHA to come up with a site or sites to replace the downtown Seattle hotel where Equity JustCARE has been providing shelter and services to clients with high-acuity behavioral health needs since last year. “We don’t have a site, and understand RHA will be matching the team to a site that is appropriate for participants with complex behavioral health needs,” Daugaard said.

The PDA is still working with the city to come up with a plan for another 150 JustCARE clients currently living in five different hotels; without additional funding, the PDA will have to find other placements for those clients or discharge them back onto the street at the end of June.

Among the proposals the KCRHA’s raters rejected was a tiny house village in South Lake Union that had support, and funding, from the residents of the Mirabella apartments, a retirement community near the proposed village site. John Pehrson, a leader of the Mirabella Civic Engagement Project, said “it was very disappointing to us” that the KCRHA rejected the proposal, for which Mirabella residents and the Mirabella Seattle Foundation raised about $143,000. Continue reading “Homeless Authority Funds Pallet Shelter, JustCARE, and Just One of Three Proposed Tiny House Villages” →

City Council, Crime, homelessness

Councilmember Touts Shelters as Solution to Encampment Shootings
City Hall Park, fenced and closed
JustCARE worked to shelter people living in City Hall Park last year. Proponents argue the program helps reduce gun violence in encampments.

By Paul Kiefer

In the two years since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, gun violence in Seattle has both surged and transformed. While the number of gun homicides fell from 2020 to 2021, both the number of people shot and the number of shots fired rose by roughly 40 percent. One of the key drivers of that increase, Interim Seattle Police Chief Adrian Diaz told the city council’s public safety committee last week, was an uptick in shootings at encampments.

Over the past two years, gun violence at encampments across the city escalated dramatically. In January 2020, only 6.5 percent of the city’s shootings took place in encampments; by December 2021, at least a quarter of Seattle’s shootings were in encampments. Police reports about encampment shootings cite drug deals gone wrong, personal disputes or unpaid debts as inciting incidents, but Diaz did not identify any broader reason why violence in encampments is on the rise.

While Seattle’s efforts to reduce gun violence have historically relied on outreach to young people in gangs, City Councilmember Andrew Lewis, who chairs the council’s committee on housing and homelessness, now argues that the city should think of moving people from encampments to shelters as an essential part of reducing gun violence. “There’s something about unsanctioned encampments—they attract gun violence,” he said. People living in encampments may carry guns to protect themselves, Lewis noted, and people involved in low-level survival crimes often can’t turn to police or courts to resolve disputes.

 “When people are inside and having their needs met, we just don’t see the kinds of violence we see when they are dealing with the insecurities of living in an encampment.” —Seattle City Councilmember Andrew Lewis

In an email to PubliCola on Wednesday, Diaz added that he has no plans to redirect his department’s gun violence prevention resources to focus on encampments.

In Lewis’ view, while shelters are not the only solution to rising gun violence, they seem to have helped curtail it. As examples, he pointed to the city’s tiny house villages, run by the Low-Income Housing Institute, and the hotel-based shelters run by JustCARE, a collaboration between counseling, outreach and diversion providers that serves people with serious behavioral health challenges. So far, he said, there have been no shootings at any JustCARE shelter or tiny house villages.

 “When people are inside and having their needs met,” Lewis said, “we just don’t see the kinds of violence we see when they are dealing with the insecurities of living in an encampment.”

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Although Lewis has championed both tiny houses and JustCARE, he says preserving JustCARE’s funding is more likely to reduce gun violence because the program exclusively serves people who’ve been involved in the criminal justice system.  “Generally speaking, JustCARE clients have had opportunities to be a victim and, in some cases, a perpetrator of gun violence,” he said, “and the fact that they have developed a sheltering strategy that can mitigate that is incredibly valuable.”

In Lewis’ view, the council should start viewing JustCARE “more as a jail and violence mitigation program than as a shelter program. We can find a way to remove people who are vulnerable to being victims or perpetrators of violence from the street in a more sustainable way than putting them in jail.” JustCARE’s funding, which includes federal COVID relief dollars, is set to expire in June.

While Diaz agreed that shelters have been relatively safe, he told the council last week that SPD has responded to more calls from social workers who say they have been threatened with guns in the past year. Diaz framed his comments as a response to questions about safety in shelters, but he did not offer any examples of people being threatened inside either shelters or low-income housing. Instead, he pointed to a February 2021 incident in which a man shot at a staff member inside a Catholic Community Services administrative building in the Central District before fatally shooting himself. Continue reading “Councilmember Touts Shelters as Solution to Encampment Shootings” →

homelessness, human services, King County, Mayor Harrell

Council Member’s Homelessness Plan Could Include 10 New Mass Encampments for Up to 600 People
Anti-sweeps signs near a tent encampment in downtown Seattle.
Anti-sweeps signs near a tent encampment in downtown Seattle.

By Erica C. Barnett

As part of an effort to substantially reduce the number of unsheltered people living in downtown Seattle before summer, Seattle City Councilmember Andrew Lewis is working on a plan to relocate as many as 600 people into sanctioned encampments around the city.

In an email sent last week to Mayor Bruce Harrell’s director of strategic initiatives Tim Burgess, deputy mayor Tiffany Washington, lobbyist Ryan Bayne, and former city council member Sally Bagshaw, plus aides for Lewis and Harrell, Lewis laid out “a short-term displacement plan for visible pre-Memorial Day progress” that would involve removing and relocating unsheltered people from downtown Seattle into as many as 10 fenced-off encampments elsewhere in the city.

These encampments, which might be located on property owned by the city, Sound Transit, local churches, and the Port, would include case management (along with toilets, food, and showers), and could be up and running in as little as four weeks, Lewis said in his email. After people are relocated, Lewis continued, the tents could gradually be replaced by pallet shelters or tiny houses, with the goal of moving everyone rapidly from encampments to housing, such as the Health Through Housing hotels King County is working to open, within a year to 18 months.

“The strategy I am proposing here is to make a practical acceptance that more permanent housing and sheltering options likely won’t be available until the fall,” Lewis wrote. (Emphasis in original.) “THE WAITING ROOM WILL EITHER BE UNSANCTIONED ENCAMPMENTS OR SOME INTERIM STRATEGY LIKE THIS. That is the choice we face.”

Why Memorial Day? According to Lewis’ email, visible homelessness always spikes during the summer; “If we still don’t have a policy to prevent unsanctioned encampments from putting down roots before Memorial Day, they will grow and make the problem even more difficult to mitigate.”

“The summer has to encourage more firms to not only return to work but new ones to come in and set up shop. It has to demonstrate that we are the one West Coast major city capable of figuring out how to make visible progress on homelessness.”—Seattle City Councilmember Andrew Lewis

The proposal to move most of the homeless people downtown into sanctioned encampments in the span of a little more than three months comes in the context of an announcement last week that a group of private foundations and local corporations will donate $10 million to help kickstart a plan to move about 1,000 people living unsheltered downtown into shelter or housing elsewhere. That plan has five phases, culminating in a “hold steady” phase once most encampments are removed from downtown streets. The proposal to relocate unsheltered people from tents on the sidewalk to tents in sanctioned camps suggests one way the city might achieve its goal of an encampment-free downtown.

“It’s clear the [Harrell] administration has a policy where they do not want to have encampments in the downtown business district,” Lewis told PubliCola Monday. “It’s the prerogative of the executive to do those removals, and we need something to fill that gap.”

Marc Dones, the head of the regional homelessness authority, said Tuesday that the authority had nothing to do with the encampment proposal and that they had only heard about it through a forwarded email last week. Dones said they had asked Harrell’s office for more information about the proposal.

In his email, Lewis said removing encampments would be a necessary part of downtown recovery after two years of COVID. “The summer has to be the summer of recovery,” Lewis wrote. “It has to show people returning to work, tourists, and the local media that Seattle is capable of swiftly and compassionately managing our homelessness crisis. It has to encourage more firms to not only return to work but new ones to come in and set up shop. It has to demonstrate that we are the one West Coast major city capable of figuring out how to make visible progress on homelessness.”

Lewis told PubliCola he doesn’t consider the encampment idea a “perfect” or even a permanent solution to unsheltered homelessness downtown.  “One of the things [outreach provider] REACH says all the time is, ‘Give us something better” [to offer unsheltered people],  and this would be something better. Not something perfect and not something great, but something we could work with and improve over time.” REACH director Chloe Gale said she was unaware of the proposal on Monday.

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“If it were up to me and I could wave a magic wand, we’d do a bunch of tiny house villages,” Lewis added, and pointed to Nickelsville as an example of an encampment that eventually evolved into a tiny house village. “All of our tiny house villages started out as sanctioned encampments,” Lewis said.

Bagshaw, who recently returned to Seattle after a fellowship at at Harvard’s Advanced Leadership Institute, pointed to the recent removal of a longstanding encampment in Boston as an example Seattle should try to emulate. People living in the encampment, known as “Mass. and Cass,” were offered shelter, including some rooms in a local hotel, reunited with family, or simply told to leave, according to local media reports.

“They offered them two or three options and said ‘We’re going to give you a supported hotel room or a supported apartment, but “no” is not an option,'” said Bagshaw, who lives downtown and has no formal position at the city. “They said, ‘We’re trying to live in a civilized space for everybody, and it’s not okay for you to pitch a tent wherever you want and however you want and to steal to support your habit. You’re not going to be able to stay here, and we’re going to give you 72 hours to figure it out.”

Both Lewis and Bagshaw pointed to JustCARE—a service-rich program that provides temporary housing and case management for people involved in the criminal legal system—as an example of the kind of approach that works for people who have many barriers to housing, including substance use, outstanding warrants, and long-term homelessness. “JustCARE is what we need, but we can’t wait until JustCARE has 600 units,” Bagshaw said.

“Most of the folks out on the streets of downtown right now have extensive barriers that would normally result in them being screened out of group living situations. It won’t help much to invest in large scale accommodations that don’t match the situation of most of those who are actually on the street.”—Public Defender Association co-director Lisa Daugaard

In theory, people who need extensive services could be channeled into JustCARE over time. In practice, funding for JustCARE expires at the end of June, and the program is no longer taking new clients beyond the 230 it currently serves.

In his email, Lewis estimated that the encampments would cost between $800,000 and $1.2 million a year to operate, for a total of $8 million to $12 million a year, not counting capital costs. “The hardest part will be case management and services. But even there, I don’t know how daunting the numbers truly are,” Lewis wrote.” If we assume a ratio of one case manager to every 20 campers, and a maximum capacity of 600 people, the whole operation requires 30 case managers organized across our entire spectrum of providers. We should be able to manage it with a ramp up of several weeks.” Continue reading “Council Member’s Homelessness Plan Could Include 10 New Mass Encampments for Up to 600 People” →

City Council, homelessness, Morning Fizz

Just One Group Applies to Lead Participatory Budgeting; Funding for Hotel-Based JustCARE Program Ends this Spring

1. Only one nonprofit applied to run Seattle’s public safety-oriented participatory program this year: the Oakland-based Participatory Budgeting Project, which had a hand in convincing Seattle’s city council to set aside money for the project in 2020.

Participatory budgeting is a form of direct democracy in which residents generate and vote on city spending proposals. Seattle’s Department of Parks and Recreation has used participatory budgeting to fund some of its capital improvements since 2017. In the fall of 2020, the council set aside $30 million to pay for a new participatory budgeting program, ostensibly as part of an effort to direct city dollars toward alternatives to policing. Though the council originally intended to launch the program in 2021, the consultants hired to lay the groundwork didn’t deliver a workable plan for collecting community proposals and holding a vote.

Instead, the council delayed the program until 2022 and handed the reins to the city’s Office of Civil Rights (SOCR), which set about searching for a nonprofit partner to finally put the $30 million set aside for participatory budgeting to use. Only the Participatory Budgeting Project submitted an application, offering to get the program off the ground with $2.4 million in overhead costs—a far cry from the $8 million overhead cost estimated by last year’s consultants. However, the Participatory Budgeting Project’s proposed timeline for launching the program would delay voting until January of 2023, delaying the council’s goals by another year.

Although SOCR plans to wait until March to debut its plans for running participatory budgeting, including the identity of its nonprofit partner, the office’s options are limited. If the Participatory Budgeting Project wins the contract, it plans to hire five Seattle-based staff to help run the program; the nonprofit does not currently have any staffers in the Seattle area. According to the nonprofit’s application, they also plan to rely on a network of “workgroups” made up of as many as 25 paid community members from marginalized backgrounds—a plan originally pitched by last year’s consultants—in addition to SOCR staff.

2. JustCARE, a program that provides hotel rooms, medical care, case management, and other services to unhoused people, has been widely credited with helping to alleviate the impact of encampments in several neighborhoods while providing a path to stability for people with substance use disorders, behavioral disabilities, and criminal records.

But funding for the program, which comes from both local (city of Seattle and King County) and federal (American Rescue Plan Act) sources, runs out at the end of June. (The lease for Equity JustCARE, a specialized program serving people with acute mental-health needs, ends one month earlier). And that means that, in the absence of additional funding, about 230 JustCARE clients—the number currently living in the five hotels where the program leases rooms—will join the tens of thousands of unhoused people looking for permanent or temporary housing across King County.

JustCARE is a joint program that currently includes the Public Defender Association, Urban League, REACH, and the WDC Safety Team, a group affiliated with the nonprofit Community Passageways. The program has worked to assist and relocate people living in high-profile encampments, including encampments under I-5 in the Chinatown-International District, at City Hall Park, and under the historic pergola in Pioneer Square.

A spokesman for Mayor Bruce Harrell said the mayor has not decided whether to extend funding for JustCARE, and King County, which funds the program through its Department of Community and Human Services, has not responded to questions about a possible JustCARE extension.

Meanwhile, JustCARE is trying to place some clients in housing using 80 federal Emergency Housing Vouchers (EHVs)—housing subsidies that cover a portion of a tenant’s rent for apartments in the private market. Criminal records, low credit scores, and high credit-to-debt ratios can pose significant barriers to finding an apartment, and JustCARE clients often need ongoing, intensive case management, not just a place to live.

As of last week, according to PDA co-director Lisa Daugaard, JustCARE had submitted voucher applications for 67 clients, but fewer than five had actually secured apartments (none of them in the high-acuity Equity program). “Quite a few of the applicants still need to gather documents and be approved” for their vouchers, Daugaard said. “Those who have been approved are, as one might predict, requiring a lot of support to even have a possibility of securing a unit.”

The city council’s homelessness committee will get an update on the status of JustCare at its meeting on March 16.

—Paul Kiefer, Erica C. Barnett

Democratic Party, homelessness, human services, Mayor Durkan, Morning Fizz, Parks, Police

Another Sweep in Ballard, JustCARE Disputes Mayor’s Cost Claims, and Former County Dems Leader Resigns

1. On Friday, the city will remove any tents that remain at Gilman Playfield in Ballard, part of a wider strategy of removing encampments that are near schools, playgrounds and sports fields. The Gilman sweep comes after similar encampment removals at Rainier Playfield and Miller Park on Capitol Hill, which the mayor’s office said were necessary to make the parks “safe and accessible” to students and children playing sports.

Mayoral spokeswoman Rachel Schulkin said the Seattle Police Department responded 61 times in the past six months to “calls including disturbances, domestic violence, and other suspicious or potentially dangerous activity at the playground,” and that the fire department had responded to another 11 calls. Additionally, “Youth sports team coaches, parents, and neighbors have been reaching out to the City over the past few months with various safety concerns and to express their frustrations over not being able to use the field for youth sports,” Schulkin said.

On the day a jury found Derek Chauvin guilty of murdering George Floyd, the account retweeted a post from the Kent Police Department that read, “If you’re celebrating 420 today, DON’T DRIVE. Pop a squat on your 70s basement couch, play some Boston in the background, binge watch Fast Times and eat Doritos.” When a reader called the tweet “tone deaf,” the Kent account responded, “Just want to encourage people to be safe if they’re celebrating today 😊.”

The encampment was quiet on Wednesday morning, as outreach workers went from tent to tent to discuss options with the people living in the park. None of the tents were on the playground or the nearby playfield; the biggest concentration was in a shaded area near the restrooms and on the sidewalk outside the playfield fence.

According to an outreach worker on site, most of the residents would be offered rooms at the Executive Pacific Hotel downtown; if the majority of the dozens of people living in the park accept placements, the hotel would be essentially full, although some people who moved into the hotel have reportedly left without receiving permanent housing placements.

Encampment removals slowed down dramatically during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic but have been ramping back up this spring, including the removal of tents and encampment residents from University Playfield near I-5 last weekend.

Also Wednesday, the JustCARE program moved a number of people living in Pioneer Square near the historic First Avenue pergola to its own hotel-based shelters, the Navigation Center, and the Executive Pacific Hotel, most likely making a planned sweep of that encampment unnecessary; the city is reportedly planning additional encampment removals in Pioneer Square and the International District in the coming weeks.

2. Mayor Jenny Durkan has repeatedly claimed that JustCARE costs more than $100,000 a person, a claim that has so frustrated the organizations supporting the program that they produced a flyer outlining what they say the program costs “at scale”: Just under $50,000 a client, half of which is the cost of hotel rooms themselves.

Durkan’s office has shown little interest in expanding JustCARE, which is a joint project of the Public Defender Association, Asian Counseling and Referral Service, REACH, and other groups, arguing that there are cheaper options that do the same thing.

A spokeswoman for the mayor’s office provided a chart outlining the budget for King County’s extension of JustCARE, which comes in at an average of $104,000 a month per room. The mayor’s office says that they have always calculated and compared costs on a “per room” basis than a “per person” basis, a claim the PDA disputes. The PDA says that its cost estimate of around $49,000 per client is based on a longer-term model that would bring the program to “scale,” renting “more than twice as many rooms in the same hotels, and [serving] more than twice as many participants,” according to PDA director Lisa Daugaard.

In February, the city rejected a proposal that would have effectively expanded JustCARE by moving clients into the Executive Pacific Hotel downtown, insisting that they could not spend a penny more than $17,000 per client plus the cost of the rooms themselves.

Ultimately, the city signed two contracts for hotel-based shelters, with the Low-Income Housing Institute and Chief Seattle Club, that came in significantly above the $17,000 cap.

Mayoral spokeswoman Kamaria Hightower told PubliCola, “We absolutely agree that a provider contract should be a longer-term commitment both for clients and efficiency and understand the county is seeking that approach. That’s why we created our hotel programs that are a year long and include rapid rehousing resources (and some [permanent supportive housing] resources).

3. Bailey Stober, the former director of the King County Democrats who lost his job after an investigation found him guilty of sexual harassment and workplace misconduct, is leaving his latest job as communications manager for Kent Mayor Dana Ralph under circumstances that remain unclear. Ralph would not provide details about why Stober is leaving, but confirmed that he has “resigned his position effective June 1.”

Contacted by email, Stober said, “When I took the job, I came to Kent from Texas and told the Mayor I would give her 18 months to two years and then my plan was to return to Texas. I took a great job offer in Texas and as I enter my 18/19th month with the city I’ve finished the projects I wanted to finish and am happily going back to Texas.”

Stober is the anonymous voice behind the city of Kent’s Twitter account, which gained thousands of followers for its puerile tweets mocking other cities and making jokes about “nuggs.” (Here are some lyrics the account  posted at 9:00 on a Friday night.)

On the day a jury found Derek Chauvin guilty of murdering George Floyd, the city of Kent account retweeted a post from the Kent Police Department that read, “If you’re celebrating 420 today, DON’T DRIVE. Pop a squat on your 70s basement couch, play some Boston in the background, binge watch Fast Times and eat Doritos. Be chill and stay off the roads.” When a reader called the tweet “tone deaf,” the Kent account responded, “Just want to encourage people to be safe if they’re celebrating today 😊.” Unlike many other local jurisdictions, the city did not acknowledge the Chauvin verdict on its Twitter account.

Earlier this year, Ralph stood by Stober when he got kicked out of a local bar after allegedly inciting a massive brawl and calling both Ralph and the chief of police and threatening to have the bar’s liquor license revoked.

City Council, Health, homelessness, housing, human services, King County, Mayor Durkan

“Every Community Should be Using FEMA Dollars” for Hotel-Based Shelter. So Why Isn’t Seattle?
Andreanecia Morris, executive director, HousingNOLA

By Erica C. Barnett

JustCARE, the pioneering program that has moved about 130 high-needs people off the streets in Pioneer Square and the Chinatown/International District and into hotels, got a reprieve from King County this week that will allow it to continue operating through June. According to King County Department of Community and Human Services (DCHS) spokeswoman Sherry Hamilton, the county will provide $5 million for JustCARE and a smaller program run by the Public Defender Association, Co-LEAD Burien.

PDA director Lisa Daugaard says the “survival funding” from the county will allow JustCARE to “retain some of our existing rooms, and [let] us use a hotel the County has leased to replace some others.” But, she said, “the real impact of the JustCARE model is that we keep making new hotel placements for people still on the streets” in Pioneer Square and the CID. “Our ability to make new hotel placements has been paused for two months, and the current County rescue package will provide very little room to place new people.”

As one panelist from California noted, “to my knowledge, we have not seen any FEMA reimbursement requests [for hotel shelter costs] denied.”

Local advocates and city council members have asked the mayor to open hotels to unsheltered people who are at risk to COVID infection due to age or underlying health conditions, such as addiction, using federal FEMA dollars that are set aside for this purpose. Durkan and her budget office have responded by providing long lists of objections to the idea, and by arguing that FEMA does not pay for any kind of “services” at the hotels it does fund—only the cost of basic room and board.

As PubliCola has reported, this is not the experience of other cities that have used FEMA funding for hotel-based shelters and services; FEMA does not fund non-shelter services such as individual case management or counseling, but it does fund the costs of running a shelter, such as shelter staff. Cities across California, an early adopter of the hotel-based shelter model, have received reimbursement for the vast majority of services they provide to the thousands of formerly unsheltered people who have been staying in hotels since the pandemic began.

On Tuesday, the National Low-Income Housing Coalition held a panel discussion that provided important national perspective on Seattle’s reluctance to fund any hotels using FEMA-reimbursable dollars. From New Orleans to California, the common theme was that the process of seeking FEMA reimbursement (which was at the heart of many of Durkan’s objections) was well worth the lives that were undoubtedly saved by bringing people indoors. And, as one panelist from California noted, “to my knowledge, we have not seen any FEMA reimbursement requests [for hotel shelter costs] denied.”

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Ann Oliva, a former HUD staffer who is now a fellow at the Center on Budget and Police Priorities, said that “every community should be using their FEMA dollars to support … a non-congregate sheltering approach”—and seeking additional federal money to pay for the small percentage of services that FEMA won’t pay for. “What’s important for you all to think about,” she told the local leaders and service providers on the call, “is how you can us either CARES Act [dollars] or these new resources coming thru the [American Rescue Plan Act that was announced last week to ensure that you have the money you need” to fund supportive services such as case management. Continue reading ““Every Community Should be Using FEMA Dollars” for Hotel-Based Shelter. So Why Isn’t Seattle?” →

City Council, City Hall, Elections, homelessness, labor, Mayor Durkan, Morning Fizz

Fizz: Hotel Shelter Debate Continues, City Labor Negotiator Resigns, Poll Tests Mayoral Messages

1. City council member Andrew Lewis, who chairs the council’s homelessness committee, told PubliCola Monday that he’s working on legislation that would authorize funding for new non-congregate shelters, such as hotels, that could be reimbursed by FEMA—which, as we’ve reported, is now paying for all reimbursable expenses, including most shelter services, at 100 percent.

The legislation, which Lewis said won’t be baked until late this week at the earliest, would respond to some of the objections Mayor Jenny Durkan’s office has raised about seeking FEMA reimbursement, which include “onerous” paperwork requirements, a competitive procurement process, and pre-approval from the federal agency.

In addition to those issues, Durkan’s office has said that FEMA will not pay for shelter services of any kind, a claim that is not borne out through the experience of cities like San Francisco, which has received full reimbursement for about 85 percent of the cost of hotel-based shelters and recently announced it was opening 500 new hotel-based shelter rooms using FEMA money.

“We are in a crisis that is exacerbated because of COVID,” Lewis said. “It is totally legitimate for us to seek FEMA reimbursement.”

“We are in a crisis that is exacerbated because of COVID. It is totally legitimate for us to seek FEMA reimbursement.”—City Councilmember Andrew Lewis

Lewis noted that the issue of FEMA reimbursement has been somewhat conflated with funding for JustCARE, a hotel-based shelter program for high-needs individuals with a high impact on the neighborhoods where they live. Among other issues, the mayor’s office has said that JustCARE wouldn’t qualify for FEMA funding because reimbursement requires a competitive contracting process.

“The goal with this legislation is going to be to take a step back and assume that we’re making something new from whole cloth that is defined around the fact of what we need to do for FEMA reimbursement,” Lewis said. “If hotel rooms are a problem for some actors in city government, there are other types of non-congregate shelter we can seek FEMA reimbursement for.”

Durkan has strongly resisted proposals to shelter unhoused people in hotels since the beginning of the pandemic, long before the current FEMA reimbursement debate. Last year, for example, her office consistently responded to questions about why the city wasn’t opening hotel-based shelters by deflecting, noting that the city did contribute funding to the Downtown Emergency Service Center’s hotel-based shelter in Renton.

Support PubliCola

If you’re reading this, we know you’re someone who appreciates deeply sourced breaking news, features, and analysis—along with guest columns from local opinion leaders, ongoing coverage of the kind of stories that get short shrift in mainstream media, and informed, incisive opinion writing about issues that matter.

We know there are a lot of publications competing for your dollars and attention, but PubliCola truly is different. We cover Seattle and King County on a budget that is funded entirely by reader contributions—no ads, no paywalls, ever.

Being fully independent means that we cover the stories we consider most interesting and newsworthy, based on our own news judgment and feedback from readers about what matters to them, not what advertisers or corporate funders want us to write about. It also means that we need your support. So if you get something out of this site, consider giving something back by kicking in a few dollars a month, or making a one-time contribution, to help us keep doing this work. If you prefer to Venmo or write a check, our Support page includes information about those options. Thank you for your ongoing readership and support.

The mayor has been more open to funding tiny house villages—encampments made up of small wooden structures about the size of garden sheds— during the pandemic, and Lewis has separately proposed opening eight new villages around the city. Unsheltered people consistently prefer a tiny house to a conventional shelter bed, but hotels offer a number of stabilizing amenities that tiny houses do not, including television, private kitchenettes, beds, and a private place to bathe and relax. Hotel-based shelters also provide revenue for an industry that has been hard hit by the pandemic.

As for JustCARE: County funding for the program is scheduled to run out on March 15, but the county is reportedly working on another stopgap solution to keep the program running in the absence of any city support. Durkan’s office considers JustCARE, which is run by Seattle-based service providers and focused on encampments in Seattle’s Pioneer Square, “a county program.”

2. Jana Sangy, the city’s director of labor relations, announced last week that she’s leaving her position in early June.

Although Sangy’s announcement didn’t include much information about why she’s leaving, staff from Mayor Jenny Durkan’s office had reportedly intervened at a micro, line-item level in individual city contracts in a way that previous mayors have not—which could certainly make the job of a labor relations director more challenging. Labor Relations, which is part of the city’s Department of Human Resources (SDHR), ultimately answers to the mayor and represents the executive’s perspective in labor negotiations.

Sangy’s resignation comes as the city prepares for contract negotiations with the Seattle Police Officers’ Guild (SPOG), the city’s largest police union and one of the key challenges for the labor relations unit.

“There is not a very deep well of stability to fall back on during this transition to yet another interim director. It begs the question why this mayor has had such difficulty retaining solid talent in such a critical role.”

—Peter Nguyen, who represented Labor Relations in SPOG negotiations in 2018

SPOG’s last city contract expired at the beginning of 2021, but the bargaining process won’t begin until the Labor Relations Policy Committee—a group made up of five council members, SDHR Director Bobby Humes, and City Budget Office Director Ben Noble—finishes deliberating on the city’s negotiating priorities and strategy. complete their deliberations. During preparations for bargaining with police unions, representatives from Community Police Commission, Office of Police Accountability and Office of the Inspector General join the LRPC. Once bargaining begins in earnest, a negotiator from the Labor Relations unit will serve as the city’s labor law expert at the bargaining table.

Sangy started in June 2019, becoming the third person to fill that role since 2017; her immediate predecessor, Laurie Brown, was an interim director appointed by Durkan in December of the previous year. According to an email from Humes to city employees last week, Sangy’s interim replacement will beJ eff Clark, who currently serves as one of the unit’s negotiators. Lisa Low, a spokesperson for the city’s HR department, told PubliCola that department leaders “do not anticipate any impacts to the timeline for SPOG bargaining.”

But Peter Nguyen, who represented the Labor Relations unit during the last round of bargaining with SPOG in 2018, thinks that Sangy’s departure ahead of one of her unit’s most crucial performances is a sign of a struggling unit. “The resignation of the city’s Labor Relations Director is troubling,” said Nguyen. “There is not a very deep well of stability to fall back on during this transition to yet another interim director. It begs the question why this mayor has had such difficulty retaining solid talent in such a critical role.”

Sangy did not immediately respond to a request for comment Monday.

3. Seattle residents received two more polls centering on mayoral candidate (and city council president) Lorena González over the last week, both testing positive and negative messages about González, her current and likely opponents, and groups like “the Chamber of Commerce” and “the Black Lives Matter movement.” One poll was an online survey, the other a live poll, but the similarities between them suggest they are versions of the same poll put out by the same campaign or group.

The specific messages the polls were testing were less interesting than what they suggest, cumulatively, about the upcoming election, which will pit González and Chief Seattle Club director Colleen Echohawk—the two current frontrunners—against a long list of other candidates that could include former city council member Bruce Harrell, current deputy mayor Casey Sixkiller, and former state legislator and 2017 mayoral candidate Jessyn Farrell. Continue reading “Fizz: Hotel Shelter Debate Continues, City Labor Negotiator Resigns, Poll Tests Mayoral Messages” →

City Council, Health, homelessness, Mayor Durkan

Mayor’s Office Says Hotel Shelter “Service Costs Are NOT Eligible” for FEMA Funding; Shelter Providers, and FEMA Guidelines, Disagree

By Erica C. Barnett

On Tuesday, the Seattle City Council continued to seek clarity on why Mayor Jenny Durkan’s office has not sought to fund hotel-based shelters with funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which recently announced it will reimburse the cost of such shelters, with exceptions for non-shelter services such as case management, at 100 percent. (Previously, FEMA reimbursed for 75 percent of eligible costs, but President Biden increased that amount to 100 percent and made it retroactive to January 2020).

As PubliCola has reported, the City Budget Office, which answers to the mayor, sent a memo to the council late last month outlining a series of objections to funding hotel shelters using FEMA money. Most of the objections related to administrative headaches and hurdles associated with applying for funds. However, the memo also claimed that FEMA “is not paying for any services,” and that such “services” at shelters typically cost between $18,000 and $25,000 a year.

Deputy mayor Tiffany Washington reiterated this point in an email to members of the city’s volunteer commissions this week that explicitly said PubliCola’s reporting was “inaccurate and misleading.” (We stand by our reporting.) “While facility costs (the actual hotel rooms) and operations costs (like security, cleaning, and meals) are eligible, service costs are NOT eligible,” Washington wrote (emphasis hers), and reiterated the $18,000 to $25,000 figure.

Reimbursable items, according to FEMA’s guidelines, include “shelter management,” “health and safety,” “medical staff” “personal assistance service staff,” and other “support services” needed to operate a shelter. 

In fact, FEMA’s own guidelines for non-congregate shelter options during COVID lay out exactly which “shelter services” the agency covers, and they are not limited to “the actual hotel rooms” and operations costs associated with running a bare-bones hotel. (As a city council staffer put it Tuesday, “just leaving them there without any interactions and just dropping a meal off now and then” does not constitute a shelter).

Accordingly, reimbursable items, according to FEMA’s list, include “shelter management,” “health and safety,” “medical staff” “personal assistance service staff,” and other “support services” needed to operate a shelter.

Low-Income Housing Institute director Sharon Lee tells PubliCola this shouldn’t be news to the city; FEMA has already paid for multiple tiny house villages and one enhanced shelter facility that LIHI opened in response to the pandemic, “and there were only a small number of items that they didn’t cover.” (This was during the period when FEMA only reimbursed 75 percent of costs.) Among the items FEMA covered, Lee said, were “office supplies, education expenses, client assistance… all operating costs, and the rest of the staff” who were not engaged in direct case management.

Case managers and behavioral health counselors also make up only a small minority of the staff that will be working at one of the hotel-based shelters that city plans to open using Emergency Solutions Grant (that is, non-FEMA) funding later this month.

According to Chief Seattle Club operations director Virgil Wade, the shelter CSC will operate at King’s Inn in Belltown will have between 10 and 13 staff, including three case managers, to “monitor and assist the clients” living in “about 60 rooms” at the 66-room facility. Consistent with LIHI’s experience operating shelters for people vulnerable to COVID infection, the majority of staff fall under the categories the FEMA guidelines define as reimbursable, assuming all other conditions are met.

According to Low-Income Housing Institute director Sharon Lee, FEMA has already paid for multiple tiny house villages and one enhanced shelter facility that LIHI opened in response to the pandemic, “and there were only a small number of items that they didn’t cover.”

Like other service providers we’ve spoken to, LIHI’s Lee said it’s unclear to her why the city hasn’t gone after more FEMA funding for these services at other kinds of shelter, such as hotels. “We’ve been urging the city and other jurisdictions to make better use of FEMA, but we do know that there’s some hesitancy,” Lee said.

Asked about FEMA”s list of reimbursable services, Durkan chief of staff Stephanie Formas responded by reiterating that the city is seeking reimbursement for “eligible items like meals and security” at other shelters, but not “behavioral health, case management, and mental health.” This does not, unfortunately, answer the question about FEMA’s list of reimbursable services that are not on this concise but ill-defined list.

Formas added that the mayor’s office doubts that every single client being sheltered by the Public Defender Association’s JustCARE program—in the news lately because its funding from King County runs out in less than two weeks—would be considered vulnerable to COVID under FEMA’s standards for reimbursement. That’s a matter of debate on which the mayor’s office and service providers have taken different sides, with the mayor’s office using it as one of many reasons not to try for federal funds and service providers urging them to do so. Continue reading “Mayor’s Office Says Hotel Shelter “Service Costs Are NOT Eligible” for FEMA Funding; Shelter Providers, and FEMA Guidelines, Disagree” →

City Council, homelessness, King County, Mayor Durkan

Seattle Rejects Biden Administration Offer to Pay Full Cost of Hotels Used as Shelter

By Erica C. Barnett

As funding runs out for JustCARE, a program that has moved more than 100 very high-needs people from tent encampments in Pioneer Square and the International District into hotels where they receive case management and services, Mayor Jenny Durkan’s office has made it clear that it considers one source of funding off the table: Money from the Federal Emergency Management Administration, which recently announced it would pay 100 percent of the cost for eligible hotel-based shelters.

“While we appreciate the work of President Biden’s administration,” city budget director Ben Noble and Office of Emergency Management director Curry Mayer wrote in a memo to council members this week, “there continues to be no option to receive 100% reimbursement of the operation and services of non-congregate shelters for individuals experiencing homelessness in King County or Washington.” In other words: The city is grateful that the new administration is offering to pay for hotels; they just don’t consider it a viable option for Seattle.

Advocates for JustCARE, which serves unsheltered people with disabling behavioral health conditions, have been arguing for months that the city should seek FEMA reimbursement for the program, whose funding from King County runs out March 15. Without funding, the program will need to “exit” 124 substance-addicted people, most of them with disabling mental health conditions, onto city streets, at a time when both homeless advocates and business boosters agree that there are an unacceptable number of tents on sidewalks and in parks around the city. 

“Given the state of downtown, regardless of your opinion and how you characterize the root causes or anything else, we cannot have 124 more individuals who are suffering from meth addiction and mental health conditions leaving hotels where they are currently getting their needs met.”—Councilmember Andrew Lewis

The program, which is a partnership between the Public Defender Association, Asian Counseling and Referral Service, REACH, and the Chief Seattle Club, among other groups, provides non-congregate shelter options now that the COVID pandemic has reduced capacity in congregate shelters.

“Given the state of downtown, regardless of your opinion and how you characterize the root causes or anything else, we cannot have 124 more individuals who are suffering from meth addiction and mental health conditions leaving hotels where they are currently getting their needs met” and going back onto downtown streets, Councilmember Andrew Lewis, who represents the center city, said earlier this week.

Support PubliCola

If you’re reading this, we know you’re someone who appreciates deeply sourced breaking news, features, and analysis—along with guest columns from local opinion leaders, ongoing coverage of the kind of stories that get short shrift in mainstream media, and informed, incisive opinion writing about issues that matter.

We know there are a lot of publications competing for your dollars and attention, but PubliCola truly is different. We cover Seattle and King County on a budget that is funded entirely by reader contributions—no ads, no paywalls, ever.

Being fully independent means that we cover the stories we consider most interesting and newsworthy, based on our own news judgment and feedback from readers about what matters to them, not what advertisers or corporate funders want us to write about. It also means that we need your support. So if you get something out of this site, consider giving something back by kicking in a few dollars a month, or making a one-time contribution, to help us keep doing this work. If you prefer to Venmo or write a check, our Support page includes information about those options. Thank you for your ongoing readership and support.

Under the Trump Administration, FEMA reimbursed jurisdictions 75 percent of the cost of COVID-related expenditures, including shelter; once President Biden took office, however, that number increased to 100 percent, retroactive to January 2020, prompting cities across the country to take advantage of the new, more generous reimbursement opportunity. Shelter advocates were urging the city to fund shelter now and seek reimbursement later even when the feds were only funding 75 percent of the cost; It’s critical, they argue, not to leave any resources on the table.

“It seems clear the Biden administration is sending a signal to use FEMA; if we qualify, we just have to do the work and go through the steps,” PDA director Lisa Daugaard said. “We are willing.”

Other cities began renting hotels on the presumption of future reimbursement shortly after the pandemic began. San Francisco and Los Angeles, for example, have used FEMA dollars to pay for thousands of hotel rooms funded through Project Roomkey, California’s effort to bring people experiencing homelessness indoors. When the Biden administration announced the costs for efforts like Project Roomkey would be completely reimbursed by FEMA, local officials in LA called it “manna from heaven.” Continue reading “Seattle Rejects Biden Administration Offer to Pay Full Cost of Hotels Used as Shelter” →