Tag: King County

King County, labor

Facing Rising Costs and Dwindling Reserves, King County Audits Employees’ Health Care Coverage
King County’s Chinook Building in downtown Seattle, via kingcounty.gov

By Erica C. Barnett

King County employees received notice earlier this month that the county is conducting a formal audit to make sure people aren’t receiving health care benefits for “dependents” who aren’t really dependents—exes, kids who no longer qualify as dependents, or co-habitants who don’t qualify as family members, for example.

According to notices that went out to county workers last month, anyone who fails to provide valid proof that their dependents are eligible for health care by July 29 will lose those benefits, effective immediately, and may have to pay back previous benefits for which their dependents were ineligible.

The audit came as an surprise to many county employees, forcing some to scramble to find old domestic partner registrations, marriage licenses, and proof that that their children still qualified for their health insurance.

“Conducting a dependent eligibility review is an employer best practice to ensure that everyone who is covered on an employer’s benefits are eligible to receive those benefits,” Amy Enbysk, a spokesperson for King County Executive Dow Constantine’s office, said.

But the audit, which will cost the county nearly $165,000, is just a partial response to a much larger issue: King County’s medical costs have ballooned in recent years, and the county says its workers need to step up by paying more of their health-care costs.

Historically, the county has fully funded employee premiums at a rate that increases 4 percent every year (a number that was recently increased, for next year only, to 9 percent). If the annual increase in health care costs is less than that amount, the excess goes into a fund called the protected reserve fund, which was seeded with an initial $25 million back in 2014. If that fund drops below $15 million, as it did this year, the county and its unions go into a dispute resolution, or arbitration, process to ensure the fund doesn’t run dry.

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During the COVID lockdowns of 2020 and 2021, the reserve fund grew dramatically, rising to more than $90 million. After lockdown ended, workers started scheduling medical appointments they delayed at the height of the pandemic, causing the fund to dip, a trend that has continued for several years. (Currently, according to the county, the fund contains $20.6 million).

To avoid arbitration, the county and its unions agreed to a one-year contract extension that will require many employees to start paying monthly premiums, ranging from $50 to $75. (Workers who opt in to a Kaiser HMO plan will be exempt.) While many employees of private companies are accustomed to paying premiums, the change is significant for county workers, whose health care has historically been premium-free.

Embysk said the new premiums reflect the reality of rising health care costs.”The $50-$75 contribution is modest compared to premiums charged by other employers.”

Teamsters Local 174 political director Michael Gonzales said the lockdown rebound is just one part of the explanation for ballooning county health care costs. A related issue, he said, is that after avoiding visits that might have caught problems early, people needed more expensive care.

“You have a cancer screening that might have caught [cancer] at Stage 1, but now you aren’t catching it until Stage 3 or 4,” Gonzales said. As a result, there have been “a large number of large claims over $50,000,” and “that, plus the increase in the cost of drugs” has accounted for most of the spike in costs, he said.

The changes the county and its unions agreed to only apply through 2025; after that, the two sides will have to come up with an agreement that keeps the reserve fund healthy long-term—and that could involve shifting more costs to employees.

“It is incumbent on King County and its unions to be good stewards of the County’s benefit plans,” Embysk said. “While employees have requested higher wages amid rising healthcare costs, the County cannot support 4 percent to 5 percent wage increases alongside increased benefit contributions without some employee input.”

King County, Mental Health

The Crisis Care Centers Levy, One Year Later: Where Will the Kids Go?

By Brittany Miles

Last April, King County voters overwhelmingly approved the Crisis Care Centers Levy, which funds behavioral urgent care. I have followed the measure closely as the parent of a teen with early-onset schizophrenia, because one of the five centers is designated for children and youth. I, along with other parents of children with severe mental illness, hope the centers support kids who desperately need help.

But since declaring victory, the Metropolitan King County Council has not been transparent about the next steps. After hearing no updates for several months, I published an op-ed asking county leaders: “Now what?” It was not until late summer that the planning team began engaging with the community. Kate Baber, the county’s Crisis Care Centers planning director, started monthly community meetings, and interviewed key informants, including me, to learn more about the crisis. By late December, King County Executive Dow Constantine sent the plan to the King County Council. Now, we are in the legislative process, with early investments starting midyear.

Sounds good, right? Well—maybe. During the run-up to the election, the council had a solid communication plan to inform voters about the cost and benefits of the levy. The core message: The Crisis Care Centers are the missing piece in our behavioral crisis response, and the cost of $1.2 billion over nine years is worth it to save lives.

Voters agreed, but they may have missed the fine print. The first center is not scheduled to open until 2026, with one center opening each year until 2030, and that is only if the county does not encounter the kind of delays that are common in major procurement and real estate transactions. I learned about this timeline last May, when King County Councilmember Girmay Zahilay posted about the schedule on Twitter. It felt like a bait and switch—business as usual by King County political leaders, who focused on selling voters on the levy’s long-term value instead of being up-front about the lengthy process it will take to site and build the crisis centers.

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Even the 2026-2030 timeline seems optimistic. The centers will attract a diverse population to suburban neighborhoods, which may make residents uneasy, so we should expect the siting process to go through a NIMBY stage. It will take a lot of time for the cities that are open to the centers to convince their residents of the good they will do for the local community.

Kenmore, for example, expressed an interest in being home to one of the crisis centers, but its city council just voted down an affordable housing development that had been in the works for years.  How likely is it that a crisis center will work in a community that rejects low-income housing in response to a backlash from residents? Hopefully, other cities, like Bothell, Lake Forest Park, Burien, Kirkland, Kent, Renton, Auburn, Redmond, Bellevue, and Seattle, are devising plans to effectively manage residents’ criticism and opinions on the proposed change to their community.

What do we do until the centers are open? Baber’s Initiative Planning Team, which leads the implementation process and planning for the levy, wisely recommends increasing mobile crisis response. There are multiple community agencies and partners that do the work of crisis de-escalation with local law enforcement. If a loved one is in danger or needs immediate support, they will receive connection to care and avoid arrest or worse consequences.

There is a gap for kids with severe mental illnesses who need higher-level care. I sought outpatient providers during a recent crisis, but they turned us away because they couldn’t provide the necessary level of care. While kids like mine may be a smaller population, there are few options when these kids are in crisis and parents are flummoxed about what to do. The emergency room at Seattle Children’s Hospital is overburdened and cannot always admit kids who need their stabilization services most. Late last year, it took multiple to Children’s ER to get my child admitted for a 10-day stay. They required higher-level care to stabilize, and this helped immeasurably. If we did not get them admitted, I have no idea where we would be today.

I applaud the work Crisis Care Center Initiative Planning Team has done so far done so far to plan for the Crisis Care Centers. In the meantime, though, the team the needs to address the gap in services for kids with severe mental illness. While there are programs available, they are not equal to the needs of the diverse pediatric population. My most ardent wish is that the first center in 2026 will be for kids, because no one has a satisfactory answer to where they are supposed to go  in times of their greatest need.

Editor’s note: This post has been edited to remove a paragraph that said families with private insurance are unable to access mobile outreach and response services. In fact, they are eligible for these services. PubliCola regrets the error.

Brittany Miles is the single parent of a 15-year-old with early onset schizophrenia and a member of the Kirkland Regional Crisis Response Community Advisory Board. 

Density, Development, homelessness, housing, King County, land use

Use $1 Million in Shelter Funding We Offered or Lose It, County Tells Burien

 

Burien City Manager Adolfo Bailon and City Attorney Garmon Newsom II

By Erica C. Barnett

Editor’s note: This post has been updated and re-published as an individual post due to length.

UPDATE: Although Burien City Manager Adolfo Bailon told City Council members that it took him a week to notice an email from King County imposing a November 27 deadline for $1 million in homelessness funding, emails provided by King County reveal that this claim was not true.

As we reported Friday, Bailon claimed that he failed to notice an email from Deputy County Executive Shannon Braddock sent at 11:56 am on Friday, October 27, because of 150 subsequent emails about a church-based sanctioned encampment proposed the following Sunday. The nonprofit that proposed the encampment is associated with Councilmember Cydney Moore, who has opposed encampment sweeps and voted against the city’s recently-passed “camping ban.”

The email exchange shows that Bailon responded to Braddock shortly after receiving the email last month, confirming receipt of her letter about the new November 27 deadline and saying he would speak to Mayor Sofia Aragon and council members “about the timeline set for selecting a location, and deadlines established by the federal government regarding the commitment and use of ARPA funds,” and “hope[d] to have more news to share with you soon.”

Aragon (a city council member serving as mayor) was included on the email, so was presumably aware of Bailon’s response by last week. It’s unclear whether Bailon let other allies on the council know about the $1 million deadline before claiming the email was “unopened” and “lost” one week after he opened and responded to it.

This email chain directly contradicts Bailon’s claim, made in an email to the entire council and Burien’s city attorney on November 3, that “the email from Shannon Braddock went unopened and became lost until today due to the more than 150 email messages that I have received since Sunday regarding the proposed encampment at Oasis Church. I have since reviewed all unopened email message.”

Bailon, in short, opened Braddock’s message and responded to it but did not inform the full council until a full week later, then claimed he hadn’t seen the email because his inbox was jammed with messages about a proposal from a council member with whom he has frequently clashed.

We have contacted the city’s spokesperson for a response to the new information.

ORIGINAL POST:

King County has given the city of Burien a deadline of November 27 to use or lose the $1 million the county offered to build a shelter in the city back in early June.

The initial offer included 35 Pallet shelters, which can accommodate up to two people each, along with a land swap in which the county would provide garage space to a Toyota dealer who is currently renting a city-owned parking lot to store his excess inventory, and in exchange Burien would host the shelter at that site. The Burien City Council voted down that offer in July, and since then has proposed and rejected several other sites, including a spot at the end of a SeaTac airport runway that the Port of Seattle said was “not an option for any sort of residential or housing use.”

In an email to Burien councilmembers on Friday, Burien City Manager Adolfo Bailon blamed his failure to open the Deputy County Executive’s message about the $1 million until today—a full week after he received it last Friday—on “the more than 150 emails I have received since Sunday regarding the proposed encampment at Oasis Church.” It’s unclear why constituent emails that started coming in on Sunday would make it impossible to open an email sent the previous Friday.

In a letter dated October 27, Deputy King County Executive Shannon Braddock told City Manager Adolfo Bailon and Mayor Sofia Aragon that while the county “appreciate[s] the City’s work to find a suitable location,” the source of the $1 million is time-limited federal American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds that need to be used before they expires. “[I]f the City of Burien has not identified a suitable location by November 27, 2023, we will choose to allocate this money to support homelessness response through a different process and withdraw the current offer. The new process will still allow Burien to potentially receive the funding, but is not a guarantee of funding.”

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In an email to Burien councilmembers on Friday, Bailon characterized the letter as “a 30-day notice of intent to withdraw its offer.”

He also blamed his failure to open the Deputy County Executive’s message about the $1 million until today—a full week after he received it last Friday—on “the more than 150 emails I have received since Sunday regarding the proposed encampment at Oasis Church.” It’s unclear why constituent emails sent over the course of a week beginning last Sunday would make it impossible to open an email about a $1 million contribution from the county since the previous Friday.

As we reported yesterday, a nonprofit run by Burien City Councilmember Cydney Moore reached an agreement with the church to open a temporary clean and sober encampment at the church.

The city has shown that it will fast-track funding for projects that have the support of the council majority and the city manager. On Monday, as I reported this morning, Bailon signed a no-bid, contract with Discover Burien, a business group that is expected to subcontract with The More We Love—a controversial nonprofit run by a Kirkland real estate broker named Kristine Moreland—to respond to encampments in the city and “serve as [the Burien Police Department’s] primary de-escalation effort.”

criminal justice, Elections, King County, labor, public safety, Uncategorized

Next Month, King County Voters Will Decide On the Future of the Sheriff’s Office. Here’s What’s at Stake

by Paul Kiefer

A pair of amendments to the King County charter on the ballot next month open a door for significant reshaping of the King County Sheriff’s Office (KCSO). The measures have sparked two opposition campaigns — one closely tied to the King County Police Officers’ Guild (KCPOG), which represents sheriff’s officers — that have cast the amendments as radical attacks on law enforcement, while the measures have received limited vocal support from the most prominent local police accountability advocates.

The first amendment, Charter Amendment 5, would make the King County Sheriff an appointed, rather than elected, position. The second, Charter Amendment 6, would grant the King County Council the ability to set the structure and duties of the sheriff rather than relying on the duties specified in the state code. While the amendments’ sponsors, including council members Rod Dembowski and Girmay Zahilay (who wrote a PubliCola op ed supporting it), crafted the ballot measures to stand independently of one another, their practical implications and political significance have bonded the two measures together. In fact, in a July 14th council meeting, council member Claudia Balducci called them the legislative equivalent of a “Reese’s peanut butter cup”: a natural pair.

For their most vocal proponents, namely Dembowski and Zahilay, the amendments are vital steps towards an accountable sheriff’s office with a more appropriate scope of duties and a sheriff that better represents the needs of the King County residents they serve. The opponents of the amendments, including the sheriff’s guild, cast the measures as part of the broader “defund” movement to undermine law enforcement and as a power grab by the executive and the council.

As contemporary as those arguments may seem, they’re part of a longstanding debate in King County. In November, voters will face a choice between two paths for KCSO; both have been tested in the county before, and neither has transformed the department in the ways the amendments’ opponents fear or the ways their champions hope.

Continue reading “Next Month, King County Voters Will Decide On the Future of the Sheriff’s Office. Here’s What’s at Stake” →

Health, homelessness, human services, King County, Mayor Durkan

City Expands Access to Downtown Hotel, Adding About Five Previously Ineligible Guests and Raising Questions About Eligibility

Back in March, the city of Seattle rented out every room at the Executive Pacific Hotel in downtown Seattle for three months at a cost of around $3 million. (The total cost will be higher if more people actually stay there, which is why the city’s original figures were higher.) Initially, the hotel’s 155 rooms were reserved for first responders such as police and firefighters responding to the COVID crisis; when only a handful of first responders ended up using the rooms, the city opened 100 of them up to nurses and other medical personnel, which increased the total number of people who had stayed at the hotel to 17 by April 18. Those 17 people stayed at the hotel an average of nine days, according to the city, for a total of about 153 room nights over the first three weeks the hotel was in use—the equivalent of one night with a completely full hotel.

“If any of our members call and say, ‘I need a hotel tonight,’ or this week, or whatever, we check and verify their membership and then route them to either Seattle or Bellevue,” where King County has reserved rooms in another hotel. —Amy Clark, Communications Director, SEIU 1199NW

As of last week, according the city, the hotel had taken on an additional 35 guests—most of them health care workers—for a total of 52 guests in the first seven weeks of operation. According to the city, these 52 people stayed an average of 10 nights, for a total of 520 room nights over seven weeks—a period when the city actually paid for nearly 7,600 room nights.

Homeless advocates, including the Seattle/King County Coalition on Homelessness, have urged the city to allow direct service workers, such as people working at shelters, to access some of the rooms that are sitting empty. A spokeswoman for Mayor Jenny Durkan’s office says that the city has since “made the Executive Pacific Hotel available to shelter service providers,” by “working with SEIU 1199NW and other union partners.

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SEIU Healthcare 1199NW represents workers at the Downtown Emergency Service Center, and SEIU 925 represents education and child care workers. So far, according 1199 communications director Amy Clark, 1199NW has placed “four or five” DESC employees in rooms at the hotel.

Most front-line homeless service workers are not unionized, raising questions about why the city has decided to provide hotel rooms only through the health-care unions instead of allowing service providers with non-unionized workers to ask for them directly—especially with a large hotel fully paid for and sitting mostly empty.

“If any of our members call and say, ‘I need a hotel tonight,’ or this week, or whatever, we check and verify their membership and then route them to either Seattle or Bellevue,” Clark says. King County has reserved a block of 80 rooms for health care workers at a 176-room hotel in Bellevue for 12 weeks, for which they are paying $89 a night—less than half of what the city is paying per room at the Executive Pacific, and (at around $600,000 total) about one-fifth of what the city has committed to spend on the Seattle hotel over an equivalent period.

Most front-line homeless service workers are not unionized, raising questions about why the city has decided to provide hotel rooms only through the health-care unions instead of allowing service providers with non-unionized workers to ask for them directly—especially with a large hotel fully paid for and sitting mostly empty.

Alison Eisinger, the executive director of the King County Coalition on Homelessness, says the city seems to be needlessly excluding essential workers from hotel rooms it has paid for. “It can only be a matter of race, class, and bureaucratic insensitivity or incompetence that explains why public dollars are being used to pay for empty rooms when [human service providers] need to use them” and are unable to access them easily.

King County’s process for routing people to its Bellevue hotel rooms does not require unions to coordinate or approve stays. Instead, service providers designate a person to submit requests for hotel rooms, and that person emails a single person at the county when one of their employees (unionized or not) needs a room.

Health, homelessness, housing, King County, Mayor Durkan

As County Opens More Non-Congregate Shelter to Prevent Spread of COVID, City Plans to Remove Two More Encampments

Nearly two years after King County first announced that it planned to open a modular shelter for people experiencing homelessness on county-owned property in Interbay, the project is almost ready to open for a new purpose: Providing non-congregate shelter for between 45 and 50 homeless men over 55 from the St. Martin de Porres shelter, run by Catholic Community Services. The modular buildings, which are essentially trailers with windows, fans, and high-walled cubicles to provide privacy and protection from disease transmission between the four men who will share each unit, were originally supposed to be dorm-style shelters housing up to eight people on beds or cots.

The project, which will include eight individual showers, 10 single-stall restrooms, laundry facilities, a dog run, and a community room with a meal delivery area, cost $7 million, up from a 2018 projection of $4.5 million. Operating the site will cost around $2 million a year.

“The work we’ve gone to move people out of congregate settings and into hotels has been remarkably successful in terms of preventing the spread of the virus”—King County Executive Dow Constantine

King County has focused much of its response to homelessness during the COVID emergency on moving people out of mass shelters—where, County Executive Dow Constantine pointed out Thursday, “we’re likely to have runaway infections before you know it”—and into individual hotel and motel rooms or other non-congregate temporary housing.

Centers for Disease Control guidelines say that cities should not remove encampments during the COVID emergency unless they can offer each person “individual housing,” not space in congregate shelter, to prevent the virus from spreading. “Clearing encampments can cause people to disperse throughout the community and break connections with service providers. This increases the potential for infectious disease spread,” the federal guidance says.

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During this unprecedented time of crisis, your support for truly independent journalism is more critical than ever before. The C Is for Crank is a one-person operation supported entirely by contributions from readers like you. Your $5, $10, and $20 monthly donations allow me to do this work as my full-time job.

Every supporter who maintains or increases their contribution during this difficult time helps to ensure that I can keep covering the issues that matter to you, with empathy, relentlessness, and depth.

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 supporting, The C Is for Crank.

“The work we’ve gone to move people out of congregate settings and into hotels has been remarkably successful in terms of preventing the spread of the virus,” Constantine said. “We continue to test [people living in] relocated shelters who are in hotels and would be in facilities like this, and we are finding very little if any transmission of the disease.” At the Red Lion Hotel in Renton, which is serving as temporary housing for people who had been staying in the Downtown Emergency Services Center’s main shelter in downtown Seattle, 177 people have been tested for COVID-19; zero have tested positive.

The city has focused its response to homelessness on adding more congregate shelter spaces so that people living in mass shelters can sleep further apart, and on providing referrals to shelter for people at the encampments it removes, which the city says are limited to those that cause a public health or public safety risk. On Thursday, Mayor Jenny Durkan took issue with the notion that the city and county had adopted different approaches. “There is no ‘or’ here,” she said. “We are taking every approach we can and adding significant additional financial resources from the city to make sure that we are bringing as many people inside as we can.”

“Clearing encampments can cause people to disperse throughout the community and break connections with service providers. This increases the potential for infectious disease spread.” —Centers for Disease Control

The city’s Navigation Team, a group of police officers and Human Services Department staffers, has removed at least two large encampments in recent weeks—one outside the Navigation Center shelter in the International District and one at the Ballard Commons park. In both cases, the city said the encampments posed a public safety and health risk, because people were congregating in violation of state and city orders. In the case of the Commons, the city said that a hepatitis A outbreak that has sickened 17 homeless people in the Ballard area endangered the safety of people living in and around the park.

“The CDC guidance made very clear that our number one priority would be outreach to people experiencing homelessness, to provide them hygiene, to provide them information, and to try to bring them inside,” Durkan said. “But if there are areas where there is a public safety or public health [issue], we will try to mitigate against that threat.”

The city has said that there were beds in enhanced shelters (24/7 shelters with amenities such as case management and the ability to stay with partners or pets) available for every person living at the Commons, although the city’s official count of 40 residents is significantly lower than estimates provided by both people living at the site and by homeless service providers at the Bridge Care Center across the street. “Before we remove people for public safety or public health reasons, we’re working on an ongoing basis to offer people the opportunity to come inside,” Durkan said.

“Before we remove people for public safety or public health reasons, we’re working on an ongoing basis to offer people the opportunity to come inside.” —Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan 

Next week, the Seattle Human Services Department’s Navigation Team will remove two separate encampments in the International District. On two recent visits to both sites, I counted a total of at least 80 tents, the vast majority of them on South Weller Street between 12th Ave. S. and S. Dearborn St. Durkan did not respond directly to a question about whether the city had sufficient enhanced shelter beds for 80 people. “We will continue to do our best, and we will make offers to everybody who we try to relocate. We want to put compassion first but it has to work with the policy of public safety and public health in the middle of a pandemic,” she said.

The Public Defender Association has offered to place people displaced when the city removes encampments in hotel rooms through its new Co-LEAD program, which is aimed at reducing recidivism by providing case management and temporary non-congregate housing during the COVID crisis. The city did not take them up on their offer, although Durkan has signed off on the program in principle and name-checked it during Thursday’s press conference. Given that the International District encampments are scheduled for removal starting next Tuesday, it appears unlikely at this point that the people living in these encampments will be candidates for Co-LEAD either.