Tag: Lorena Gonzalez

Arts, City Council, City Hall, Mayor Durkan

Arts Commission Chairs Resign Amid Furor Over Durkan’s “Surprise” Arts Director Appointment

By Erica C. Barnett

On Tuesday, the two co-chairs of the Seattle Arts Commission abruptly resigned, citing “grave concern surrounding Mayor Durkan’s lack of process in the recent appointment of the Acting Director for the Office of Arts and Culture, superseding both community and Council.”

“After meeting with the Mayor’s Office this past Friday and in their subsequent decisions, it was very apparent to us that they had an ulterior motive that did not include any input or involvement  from the Arts Commission or arts and cultural community members,” the co-chairs’ resignation letter continued.

Office of Arts and Culture logoEarlier this month, Durkan appointed former Center on Contemporary Arts (CoCA) director Royal Alley-Barnes to serve as interim director for the office, which has lacked a permanent leader since December 2020, when longtime director Randy Engstrom resigned. She’ll replace Calandra Childers, whom Durkan appointed to serve as interim director when Engstrom left.

Alley-Barnes is the former head of the then-city-funded Langston Hughes Performing Arts Institute, which is now an independent nonprofit known as LANGSTON.

LANGSTON’s current director, Tim Lennon, wrote a letter to council members expressing his opposition “not to the candidate selected but rather to the total apparent lack of consultation with our sector [and] the utter lack of an articulated strategy for ARTS which necessitates this leadership change 4 months before the end of this administration.”

Members of the ARTS Director Search Committee, including artists, curators, and academics, also wrote a letter to the Arts Commission expressing their disappointment in the process and the “surprise appointment” of Alley-Barnes. The committee convened in early 2021 to begin the process of appointing a permanent, not interim, director, according to the letter.

“The work of this Committee was initiated and overseen by Deputy Director Calandra Childers who was serving as acting Director of ARTS since February,” the letter says. “Her deep commitment and wide-ranging expertise in directing the ARTS office throughout this challenging time, while also guiding the work of this committee, is to be respected, protected, supported, and even modeled—not discarded without a conversation or any thoughtful process.”

Currently, at least eight city departments are headed by interim or acting directors.

The mayor’s office also provided a number of letters supporting the appointment. Unlike the letters of opposition, most of these focused on Alley-Barnes and her record leading arts organizations, including CoCA, over many years. Supporters of her appointment included former King County Councilmember Larry Gossett, Community Police Commission member Harriett Walden, HistoryLink director Marie McCaffrey, and CoCA board member Dr. Judith Rayl, who wrote that she “has embraced a lifetime devoted to community flourishing. Her influence is evident at all levels: regionally, locally, organizationally, and interpersonally through her excellence in leadership and mentorship.”

When a mayor appoints a new permanent department head, the city council has to vote on whether to approve the nomination. An interim appointment, in contrast, requires only the “concurrence” of the budget committee chair (currently Teresa Mosqueda) and the council president (currently Lorena González.) Both signed off on the appointment, although González said she did so only after Durkan called the question by formally announcing Alley-Barnes as the new interim director.

“It would have been my hope that the Mayor would have fulfilled the commitments made to the commission and broader arts community,”  González said in a statement. “With an interim director in place, the City will be able to search for a permanent director via a process that includes and honors input from commissioners and community members, whose role it is to advise elected officials in decisions such as these.” (Emphasis González’).

Durkan’s office disputes González’s timeline and denies that the process for appointing Alley-Barnes as interim director was in any way unusual. Durkan spokeswoman Kamaria Hightower said the mayor’s office “reached out on September 8 regarding this appointment to which both offices confirmed receipt and expressed no concerns about the imminent announcement,” adding, “the Mayor’s Office has not run a stakeholder process when appointing the Interim or Acting Directors, understanding a longer stakeholder process is needed for permanent appointments.” Continue reading “Arts Commission Chairs Resign Amid Furor Over Durkan’s “Surprise” Arts Director Appointment” →

Courts, Elections, homelessness, housing, human services, Mayor Durkan, Morning Fizz, Schools

City Finally Sends Team to Bitter Lake Encampment, City Attorney Candidate Has Scant Court Record, 37th LD Endorses
Anything Helps' Mike Mathias takes questions at a recent public meeting at Broadview Thomson K-8 School.
Anything Helps’ Mike Mathias takes questions at a recent public meeting at Broadview Thomson K-8 School.

1. The Human Services Department’s HOPE Team, a group that coordinates outreach by social-services groups like REACH, has begun showing up at a controversial encampment near Broadview Thomson K-8 School after months of deliberate inaction from the city—a sign, advocates and encampment residents fear, that the city is preparing to sweep the area.

For months, Mayor Jenny Durkan has maintained that the city bears no responsibility for helping the dozens of people living at the encampment, which is on school district-owned property along the shore of Bitter Lake in North Seattle. Earlier this year, Durkan said the school district should establish its own human services system to provide services and housing for the people living there, using district “reserves” to pay for it.

Once the district missed its self-imposed deadline of September 1 to move people off the property, however, the city changed its tune, sending HOPE Team members into the encampment to “do an assessment of the needs of the current residents of the encampment and identify the resources needed to permanently address the encampment,” according to HSD spokesman Kevin Mundt.

Mike Mathias, an outreach worker who has been on site at the encampment with his organization, Anything Helps, for months, says the sudden presence of city outreach workers has “freaked out” a lot of people at the encampment, leading to more disruptive behavior and residents giving out false information to the new, unfamiliar outreach staff. “Our whole goal was to be on site so that if outreach teams wanted to collaborate, they could come up or call us and we could give them warm introductions to people,” Mathias said. “Instead, the city keeps sending people without any notice, and it’s frightening for people.”

The city is reportedly about to stop referring new clients to the two hotels it has leased through next year, leaving rooms vacant as people leave, so the only options available to encampment residents are existing shelters and tiny house villages, which fill up quickly.

Mathias says the city has told him flatly that encampment residents will have to move into congregate shelters, rather than hotel rooms, while they wait for housing resources to come through. (Mathias is trying to sign most of the residents up for the Housing and Essential Needs program, subsidized housing for low-income people with disabilities, but it’s a slow process.) “Our priority [now] is ensuring that people can stay together and that they don’t go to congregate settings,” Mathias said. “That’s just not going to happen not here.”

Ideally, Mathias said, the city would open rooms in the two hotels it has reserved for people referred by the HOPE Team for residents of the Bitter Lake encampment. Originally, the hotels were supposed to serve as temporary housing for unsheltered people who would be moved quickly into permanent spots using “rapid rehousing” subsidies, so that each room could shelter multiple people over the life of the hotel contracts, which are supposed to start ramping down early next year.

However, not only did that optimistic scenario fall flat, the city currently plans to stop referring new clients to the hotels as soon as mid-October, PubliCola has learned, leaving rooms vacant as people leave. (HSD spokesman Kevin Mundt told PubliCola after this article was posted that the city has not picked a specific date to stop taking new referrals to the hotels.) This would mean that the only options available to encampment residents are existing shelters, which many people experiencing homelessness avoid, and tiny house villages, which fill up quickly. The contracts the city has signed with hotel service providers say that they will begin decommissioning the hotels at the end of this year.

Mundt, from HSD, says it is not true that the city has decided to stop referring people to its two hotels sooner than stipulated in the contract. If such a decision was made informally, the city could change its mind without requiring changes to the contract itself.

According to Mundt, the city now plans to offer encampment residents “resources” including “diversion, rental assistance, new and existing shelter, and permanent housing from combined resources of [Seattle Public Schools], City, and County.” In an internal presentation about the encampment, the city said it hopes to have everyone off the site by October 14.

2. Ann Davison, who ran for lieutenant governor last year on the Republican ticket (her platform: Abolish the office of the lieutenant governor), has touted her experience as an attorney and arbitrator working on “civil litigation, immigration, sports, contracts and business transactions,” according to her campaign website. But a review of court records in King and Snohomish Counties suggests Davison has represented clients in the Puget Sound region in just a handful of court cases, none of them after 2010.

Specifically, Davison (also known as Ann Sattler) has represented clients in five King County cases—four cases involving people’s wills, one business dispute that ended in a settlement, and one case involving unpaid commercial rent. Sattler’s most recent case in King County was in 2010.

The city attorney’s office does not primarily prosecute crimes (the sort of major and violent crimes Davison has talked about in her campaign literature are the province of the King County Prosecutor, not the city attorney), but it is constantly involved in litigation—defending legislation the city has passed, defending the city and city officials against lawsuits by outside parties, and enforcing civil laws like environmental regulations. Although the only strict requirement to run as city attorney is being an attorney, a lack of courtroom experience could be a serious impediment for doing the day-to-day work of running the office’s civil and criminal divisions.

3. At the end of a nearly five-hour online meeting Monday night, the 37th District Democrats narrowly failed to reach consensus on an endorsement for mayor, with 59 percent supporting City Councilmember Lorena González in two rounds of voting, just shy of the required 60 percent. The group ultimately voted for a “no endorsement” position. Notably, Bruce Harrell—who lives in the 37th and represented Southeast Seattle on the council—failed to top 40 percent in either endorsement vote, despite previous endorsements by the group. Continue reading “City Finally Sends Team to Bitter Lake Encampment, City Attorney Candidate Has Scant Court Record, 37th LD Endorses” →

Elections, homelessness, human services

“Compassion Seattle” Charter Amendment Won’t Appear On November Ballot

By Erica C. Barnett

The Washington State Court of Appeals denied the Compassion Seattle campaign’s appeal of a lower-court ruling striking down their proposed Seattle charter amendment on homelessness this morning, and the measure will not appear on the November ballot.

In its ruling, the appeals court did not give any specific reason for denying the campaign’s appeal, which it filed on Tuesday after strongly suggesting it would not do so after last week’s King County Superior Court ruling. Knoll Lowney, an attorney for a coalition of groups opposing the measure, told PubliCola this week that he expected to prevail, in part, because Compassion Seattle “appealed without coming up with any appellate arguments.” Instead, the campaign’s appeal relied on the same arguments it made in its initial response to the lawsuit against the initiative.

Compassion Seattle said in a statement that the appeals court ruling “means that Seattle voters must change who is in charge if they want a change to the city’s failed approach to addressing the homelessness crisis. While we are deeply disappointed, we will continue to share evidence that our amendment’s approach can make a necessary and noticeable difference for those living unsheltered in our parks and other public spaces.”

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As we reported this morning, mayoral candidate Bruce Harrell has said that if he’s elected, he will implement all the major policies the charter amendment would have mandated. Those include mandating that the city spend 12 percent of its budget on homelessness, requiring the city to fund 2,000 new “permanent or emergency housing” (realistically, shelter) units in one year, and keeping streets, sidewalks, parks and other public spaces “open and clear of encampments.”

So what does this ruling mean for the mayoral campaign going forward? Compassion Seattle —and its founder, former council member Tim Burgess, whose “People for Seattle” PAC bombarded voters with negative ads targeting council candidates and incumbents in 2017—clearly hoped that the charter amendment would frame the entire election.

Now that it’s dead, Harrell will have to push for its provisions in isolation, and hope that voters don’t realize that the city council, not the mayor, funds projects through the annual budget process. (Honestly, not the worst assumption.) His opponent, current council president Lorena González, will no longer have to respond to the question “Why don’t you support Compassion Seattle?” at every turn, but will also need to present an alternative to Harrell’s spend-then-sweep proposal that does more than respond to the charter amendment’s proposed spending mandates.

The Compassion Seattle campaign cost more than a million dollars, funded mostly by dozens of large donations from a who’s-who of downtown real estate interests, as well as consultant Tim Ceis, who helped draft the measure. Burgess gave just over $1,000 to the campaign.

Elections, endorsements, Uncategorized

PubliCola Picks: Lorena González for Mayor

In this critical, post-COVID election year, Seattle needs a mayor who understands the job, has a plan to translate their progressive values into policy, and can jump into the job with both feet on day 1. City Council president Lorena González will come to the mayor’s office with a well-defined agenda, a solid track record, and a set of achievable plans for addressing the city’s thorniest issues..

González has set a standard for not just talking a good game—but getting things done. In her two terms as a council member, she has pushed for—and passed—protections for hourly workers, such as the secure scheduling bill; established a permanent legal defense fund for immigrants facing deportation; and passed a number of underreported but important election reforms, including a ban on some corporate contributions, new transparency requirements, and restrictions on indirect lobbying, in which lobbyists seek to influence the public without revealing who’s paying them. She has also been a pragmatic and savvy advocate for police accountability, spearheading a police accountability ordinance in 2017 that advocates hailed as a groundbreaking step for reform.

And, in a lone dissent that got little coverage at the time but telegraphed her understanding of the challenges inherent to a “regional approach to homelessness,” she voted against a plan for the new regional homelessness authority that handed significant power over to suburban jurisdictions that pay nothing to support the authority, but wield outsize influence over its policies.

A lot has happened since 2018, including a nationwide movement to hold bad cops accountable and demilitarize and defund police departments across the country. González recently told PubliCola that if she was voting on the same contract today, “I’d vote very different[ly].”

González noted before her prescient vote that “politics have already taken hold in this structure.” She was right. We’re already seeing the ramifications today, with suburban cities adopting anti-homeless policies and insisting on their own, locally unique “sub-regional” plans. The former co-chair of the city’s Progressive Revenue Task Force is also right about how to tackle homelessness in the future; she’s committed to adopting new progressive revenues to fund the billions of dollars the city will need to truly address homelessness instead of passing a ballot initiative that she has called an “unfunded mandate” designed to cement the “status quo.”

González has caught some flak from the left for voting, along with seven of her eight council colleagues, to approve a 2018 police contract that nullified some elements a historic 2017 police accountability ordinance. But activists who want to castigate her for this vote should consider a bit of context. At the time, the police union had been without a new contract since 2014, after members rejected a negotiated contract in 2016. Meanwhile, Mayor Jenny Durkan was working overtime to convince the public and the council that police would quit en masse if they didn’t get the raises promised in the contract. Most council members, including dogged police accountability advocate, council member Lisa Herbold, agreed that the new contract, though inadequate, was an improvement on the existing 2014 contract, keeping parts of the accountability law intact and preserving a law requiring cops to wear body cameras on duty.

Finally, a lot has happened since 2018, including a nationwide movement to hold bad cops accountable and demilitarize and defund police departments across the country. González—a former civil rights attorney who secured a $150,000 settlement for a Latino man who sued the city after a Seattle police officer threatened to “beat the fucking Mexican piss out of” him—has expressed support for this core agenda. She recently told PubliCola that if she was voting on the same contract today, “I’d vote very different[ly].”

González has a real vision for Seattle’s recovery—one that doesn’t rely on clichés or empty promises (how exactly will philanthropic giving fund the $450 million to $1 billion the region needs to spend every year to address homelessness, Bruce?) For starters, she wants to make it easier for renters to stay in their homes, providing rental assistance as well as caps on move-in costs that can add thousands of dollars to the price of an apartment. Continue reading “PubliCola Picks: Lorena González for Mayor” →

Elections

PubliCola Questions: Lorena González
Lorena González
Image via Lorena González campaign.

As PubliCola prepares to endorse candidates in the August 3 mayoral and council primary elections, we reached out to the leading candidates for mayor and City Council Position 9 with questions about homelessness, housing, police accountability, and economic recovery.

Their answers to these questions, which we’ll be sharing over the next several days, will help inform our endorsements, coming out next week. Endorsements will be based on each candidate’s record of action, public statements, interviews with PubliCola and other media outlets, and responses at the many candidate forums that have taken place over the summer.

Lorena González, the second candidate in our series, is a longtime Seattle City Council member and former civil rights attorney who says her experience as a child farmworker in Yakima has informed her impulse to fight for immigrants and workers and victims of police misconduct and discrimination.

As a council member, she led the push for a historic 2017 police accountability ordinance, then voted (along with seven of her fellow council members) for a controversial Seattle Police Officers Guild contract that nullified key aspects of the law. González has also advocated for gender pay equity, access to affordable child care, and election transparency and government accountability. If she’s elected, González says, she would end “racist, exclusionary zoning” laws, purchase or lease additional hotels for people living unsheltered, and push for interest arbitration—a process in which a state-appointed arbitrator listens to both sides and decides the terms of a contract—in negotiating the next police contract.

Here’s what González had to say in response to the eight questions PubliCola posed to every mayoral candidate.

Assuming Charter Amendment 29 becomes law in Seattle, what city programs would you cut or deprioritize in order to dedicate 12 percent of the city’s general-fund budget to human services, and how would you go about adding 2,000 new shelter or housing spots by the end of next year?

I oppose Charter Amendment 29 because it is an unfunded mandate that does not identify a sustainable progressive revenue source. I oppose cuts to essential city services and support progressive revenue measures to build more housing.

Local elected officials and candidates have often emphasized the need to revitalize downtown Seattle as the primary focus of post-COVID recovery. What is one specific action you would take in Seattle’s non-downtown neighborhoods to promote economic recovery and neighborhood vitality?

I recently wrote an op-ed highlighting the problem with of economic recovery being focused too much on downtown corporations: I have laid out a plan “Progress for All” that is focused on promoting economic recovery in all of our neighborhoods. You can read it here.

There is general consensus around the need to replace some functions of the police department with non-policing alternatives, such as civilian crisis responders. What gaps in Seattle’s non-police public safety network can be filled on the shortest timeline, and which are the most pressing priorities?

Transferring mental and behavioral health crisis response to civilian professionals is one of the most urgent needs. Sending armed officers who do not have the training to handle these situations has caused far needless death and trauma for BIPOC communities and for neuro-divergent people. Indeed, we can better address individuals’ and communities’ needs with alternative response models, while reducing the size and scope of our police department.

“I would work to expand access to bathrooms and running water. The city council appropriated $100,000 for street sinks in late 2020. These sinks still have not been built because of bureaucratic roadblocks in the Mayor’s office. This will not happen under my administration.”

Another area to address quickly is sending unarmed responders to crimes that are not in progress: Having non-sworn personnel collecting reports and encouraging more people to file complaints and reports online. This is why, as Mayor, I will look to expand our existing Community Service Officer Program. We should also be continuing to ramp up low acuity response teams like HealthOne and the Mobile Crisis Team; both similar to Eugene, Oregon’s CAHOOTS program.

According to the latest Point in Time Count of the county’s homeless population, about half the unsheltered people in King County live in their vehicles. Yet there are very few programs or resources available to vehicular residents, and little public awareness of the size and circumstances of this population. Name one action you would take to specifically address the needs of vehicular residents in Seattle.

I would work to expand access to bathrooms and running water. The city council appropriated $100,000 for street sinks in late 2020. These sinks still have not been built because of bureaucratic roadblocks in the Mayor’s office. This will not happen under my administration. Continue reading “PubliCola Questions: Lorena González” →

Density, Development, Elections, housing, Maybe Metropolis, Urbanism

What’s a YIMBY To Do? Part 2
Mayoral Candidate Lorena González Photo credit: Steve Dipaola

by Josh Feit

Historically, Seattle mayoral campaigns have been frustrating for voters like me. Pro-city YIMBYs are usually stuck picking between two disappointing choices. There’s the establishment candidate who stands by Seattle’s formula of sequestering development downtown and into select hubs, while obediently keeping density out of exclusionary single-family neighborhoods. Or there’s the populist candidate for whom development is a dirty word that only means one thing—gentrification.

Fortunately, with a wide-open field this year, there’s room for an urbanist to defy Seattle’s traditional, binary script and step in with a progressive third way that calls for transit-oriented neighborhoods, where density and mixed-use zoning can remake our city for equity. (The pandemic has certainly provided breathing room to this new vision by letting voters actually experience their neighborhoods as more than just bedroom communities for downtown.)

In March, when the race first got underway, I flagged two potentially promising candidates, Jessyn Farrell and Andrew Grant Houston, who could step in and rally the long-overlooked pro-city constituency—Farrell due to her record of transit advocacy or Houston with his exciting to-do list.

Last week, however, at a mayoral candidate forum co-sponsored by the MASS Coalition and other key urbanist groups (moderated by PubliCola’s own Erica C. Barnett), a different candidate emerged as the unflinching, outspoken leader of the pro-urban cause: Seattle City Council president Lorena González. González is an at-large city council member who was first elected in 2015 as a police accountability activist and attorney.

Here’s what I wrote about González in March, explaining why I chose to highlight Farrell and Houston: “That’s not to say police accountability superstar González hasn’t voted for YIMBY legislation, but it’s far from the focus of her agenda.” However, when Barnett pressed the candidates to articulate their pro-city agenda during last week’s forum, González flew the urbanist flag more unapologetically and forcefully than anyone else in the crowded field. It’s also worth noting that González has already won two citywide races—she was re-elected in 2017—and has a history of supporting progressive legislation at City Hall.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised by González’s righteous edge on urbanism; when the city deigned to modestly increase density on the fringes of Seattle’s single-family zones back in 2019, González was all in, saying let’s do this already, and also saying it wasn’t nearly enough. She used the occasion to school the NIMBYs about the city’s “cloud of exclusionary zoning.” 

The fight to rid the city of exclusionary zoning as a front-and-center-policy choice seems to define González’s agenda. Asked to name the single most important thing she could do as mayor to fight climate change, González, unlike any of the other candidates at the forum, went right after single-family zoning.

Listen to her connect the dots: “We have to build a city that gives people incentive to get out of cars and stay in their neighborhoods. We can build that kind of city across every single neighborhood. I think the most important thing we can do is dismantle exclusionary zoning laws that create the most expensive and the least climate-friendly buildings for living. Those are single-family homes.”

“I think the most important thing we can do is dismantle exclusionary zoning laws.”—City Council President Lorena González

The once-radical belief that single-family zones are exclusionary, and that easing Seattle’s affordable housing crisis will require eliminating them, is finally widely accepted. And as we pointed out earlier this week, most candidates generically support the concept. González, however, goes beyond just checking that box; she connects all her dots to the issue, making equitable and complete neighborhoods the centerpiece of her city planning vision. (Newcomer Houston is adamant about getting rid of single-family zoning too.)

Several of González’s answers to questions during the forum were defined by remaking Seattle’s neighborhoods.

In her opening statement, she rushed right to the comprehensive plan, the city’s governing neighborhood planning document, saying city hall needed to take the pending 2024 Comp Plan update as a chance to “build a 15-minute city”—a guiding urbanist principle that means every household citywide should have 15-minute access, “without relying on a single-occupant vehicle,” to goods and services.

And when asked during the “Yes or No” lightning round whether she supported making SDOT’s COVID-19-era pedestrian-friendly streets permanent, González not only said Yes, duh, but felt compelled to add: “Already working on it. And I would also make sure that they are not mixed modality.” In fact, earlier in the forum, she brought this issue up on her own, segueing into an anti-car tirade: “I love the [pandemic-era pedestrian streets], but they are still mixed modalities. We need to eliminate cars on those streets to make sure they continue to be safe, and will be safe for those of us who are not in a steel machine.”

González’s star turn at the MASS Coalition forum also featured this refreshing bit of impatience with Seattle’s car-centric status quo. Asked if she would take action (where the current mayor has not) to set up an enforcement-camera pilot to protect bus-only lanes and bike lanes, she said: “Yes, and yes. And I would just do it. I don’t think we need a pilot project to know that this is something that is effective.”

Lest you think former police accountability attorney González, with her history of taking on biased policing, has subbed out her racial justice lens for a pro-transit lens—nope. She added: “I will also say, it’s really important to make sure we are not creating any disproportionate or disparate impacts on low income or people of color who might be targeted through the automated enforcement.”

Urbanism and social justice have been inching toward each other for nearly a decade, but the over-simplistic dynamics of Seattle’s mayoral elections have thwarted the smart combo by forcing pro-city voters to choose one or the other. No longer.

Ultimately, this is the power of González’s urbanism. Just as her call for multifamily housing in Seattle’s exclusive neighborhoods is fueled by her visceral sense of racism (go to the 2:06:18 mark for  her 2019 history lesson about redlining), so are her calls for transit access.

Urbanism and social justice have been inching toward each other for nearly a decade, but the over-simplistic dynamics of Seattle’s mayoral elections have thwarted the smart combo by forcing pro-city voters to choose one or the other. No longer. Judging from her momentum at the MASS Coalition forum, González is the right woman at the right time to press the Jane Jacobs agenda.

Two important footnotes.

1) Houston, who is young,  BIPOC, and queer, also runs urbanism through a smart social justice lens. For example, he stood out during the MASS Coalition forum lightning round by coming out against congestion pricing, saying simply, “No, it’s inequitable.” Everyone—even the unimpressive Bruce Harrell—gets that congestion pricing will hit poorer people harder because housing prices force poor people into far-flung, car-dependent suburban living. I respect Houston’s hard-line stance (as did ECB!), but the ultimate wisdom of charging people to drive downtown (González said yes) can easily be designed to exempt poor people. As mayor, there’s no question Latinx González will craft a just congestion pricing program.

Yeah yeah, they’ve got their spoiled-brat campaign against Sawant (which reads like a Brett Kavanaugh temper tantrum)

And, here’s a thought about the council election:

2) If you believe the Seattle Times, establishment polling firms, and conventional wisdom, Seattle voters are fed up with the City Council—their woke politics, their YIMBY POV, their commitment to organized labor, their “permissive” (harm reduction) approach to homelessness, and the fact that they had the nerve to hold Carmen Best accountable for the SPD.

Reality check: NO LEGIT CANDIDATE CHOSE TO RUN AGAINST THE COUNCIL’S AT-LARGE LEADER OF THESE AWESOME POLITICS, Position 8 Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda.

Probably because the establishment is gaslighting you, and they actually know there’s no way to beat Mosqueda, because people actually agree with her progressive, YIMBY agenda. Meanwhile, the establishment’s former bestie, the mayor, dropped out of her bid for reelection. Hmmm.

Yeah, yeah, they’ve got their spoiled-brat campaign against Sawant (which reads like a Brett Kavanaugh temper tantrum), but that’s a longstanding obsession, and it’s unrelated to Mosqueda’s specific, get-shit done, agenda.

Josh@PubliCola.com

Cops, Elections, homelessness, King County, Mayor Durkan, Morning Fizz, Police, public disclosure

County Invests in Hotel-Based Shelter, SPOG Campaigns for Sawant Recall, Durkan Records Requests Raise Disclosure Questions

1. In his State of the County address Tuesday, King County Executive Dow Constantine announced that the county would purchase the Inn at Queen Anne, which has been serving as a temporary shelter operated by Catholic Community Services since April of last year.

The 80-room hotel, which CCS will continue to operate, will cost the county $16.5 million; the money will come from the new “health through housing” sales tax that the county council passed—with some notable abstentions from suburban cities—late last year. The county plans to purchase “several more properties in several more cities … in the coming weeks,” Constantine said in his address.

Even as the county moves to buy hotels, the city of Seattle is pushing in the opposite direction.

In an interview yesterday, Constantine said he saw the hotels as “stops on the way to permanent supportive housing or independent housing, including affordable housing—places where you could live for a while and stabilize and take advantage of services.” Traditional, congregate shelters, including “enhanced shelters” like Seattle’s Navigation Center, don’t offer the kind of privacy and stability hotel rooms provide; “the difference between being able to come inside for the night and having a place of your own with a lock on the door seems to be everything,” Constantine said.

Even as the county moves to buy hotels, the city of Seattle is pushing in the opposite direction. Between now and June, Seattle plans to close down a temporary shelter at Exhibition Hall and relocate the people living there into shelters whose populations were “redistributed” last year, including the Navigation Center. After resisting calls to move Seattle’s homeless population into hotel-based shelters, the city finally rented about 200 hotel rooms this spring—a temporary solution (the rooms will be occupied for 10 months) and one that represents a fraction of the need. At the same time, Seattle is ramping up homeless encampment sweeps.

Asked about the apparent contrast between the county’s approach and Seattle’s, Constantine said, “first off, we can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. If people need a place to be inside at night, we have to figure out a way to make that happen.” However, he added, “If you’re going to move people out of an encampment, at a bare minimum, you can’t just chase people from one street corner to another or one park to another. That is tremendously unhelpful.”

Constantine is up for reelection this year; his challenger, state Sen. Joe Nguyen, told PubliCola he supports the regional homelessness authority that the county is setting up but thinks the county has failed forge partnerships with the leaders of cities within the county.

The email, which the police union sent to its members last Friday, asked off-duty officers to appear in plain clothes to collect signatures and wave anti-Sawant signs at four Capitol Hill intersections on Saturday and Sunday.

2. The Seattle Police Officers’ Guild (SPOG) asked its members to participate in signature-gathering events for the Recall Sawant campaign over the weekend, according to an email from SPOG leadership.

The email, which the police union sent to its members last Friday, asked off-duty officers to appear in plain clothes to collect signatures and wave anti-Sawant signs at four Capitol Hill intersections on Saturday and Sunday.

Recall Sawant campaign manager Henry Bridger II told SPOG members in the email that their presence would help “beef up” an otherwise meager group of volunteers. “Our goal is to have about 40+ people each day and we have about 15 right now and many probably won’t show for fear of retaliation,” he wrote, warning that “Sawant’s people will be there in mass [sic] to interfere.”

“We are just wanting to have plain-clothed volunteers to help hold signs and gather signatures so we look like we have a lot of coverage,” Bridger added. He also asked officers to bring their family and friends to boost turnout.

SPOG’s push for turnout seems to have fizzled: Twitter chatter about campaign volunteers at the intersection of Broadway and Denny suggests that few recall supporters showed up at the campaign event.

3. On Monday, the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission held a brief discussion on a report that prompted outrage from major-media outlets last week because it revealed that Mayor Jenny Durkan’s office had failed to produce many of her text message in response to records requests in 2020.

Specifically, the report—produced by independent public disclosure expert Ramsey Ramerman in response to a whistleblower complaint by two longtime mayoral public disclosure officers—found that 10 months of Durkan’s texts were missing, and that the mayor’s office had routinely excluded Durkan’s texts from requests for text messages from mayoral staff, on the grounds that the requests didn’t explicitly include the mayor.

The report, posted on the city’s website last week, was a bombshell, but it seemed to hit major media outlets somewhat differently than it hit us at PubliCola, for a simple reason: While we have filed dozens of records requests for text messages and other forms of communication, such as messages on internal City messaging systems, during the Durkan administration, we have routinely received only emails in response—a fact that suggests Durkan and her entire staff don’t use text messages, internal communications systems, or any other form of written communication other than email at all.

Since we know this is not the case (in fact, a quick text history search found a number of messages that would have been responsive to some of our requests), the only conclusion we can reach is that the mayor’s office did not provide records that would have been responsive to our requests, despite having the ability to do so and despite apparently filling other media outlets’ requests for text messages and other forms of communication. (A full list of PubliCola’s records requests to the mayor’s office since August 2018 is available here.) Continue reading “County Invests in Hotel-Based Shelter, SPOG Campaigns for Sawant Recall, Durkan Records Requests Raise Disclosure Questions” →

Addiction, City Council, Elections, homelessness, legislature, Mayor Durkan, Morning Fizz

Fizz: Burgess Previews Encampment Initiative, Nguyen Mulls Bid for County Exec, and “Opening the Door” to Hotel Shelter

1. At a meeting of the Queen Anne Initiative on Community Engagement last week, former city council member Tim Burgess outlined the contours of an initiative that will be filed in the coming weeks that would fund new homeless services with existing city dollars and effectively reinstate the city’s Navigation Team, which removed encampments from public spaces until the city council dismantled it as part of the budget process last year.

PublICola reported on a poll about the potential initiative in February.

Sounding very much like a man in campaign mode, Burgess told the group, “The tent encampments that we see in our public spaces have essentially become permanent because the city government has no specific plan to help the people in those encampments or to make certain that our parks and public spaces remain open and available to everyone.” (In fact, one large and obvious reason encampments have become “permanent” is that a global pandemic made it impractical and unsafe for the city to dislocate people living unsheltered, and the city has consistently failed to provide adequate shelter or housing for the thousands of people living outdoors).

“What we need,” Burgess continued, “is a plan —a specific plan that focuses on what I believe is the primary presenting issue for most of the individuals in these encampments, and that is their medical condition,” including addiction and mental health challenges. Those issues are difficult to address while a person is living unsheltered, Burgess said, so the solution is to provide them with shelter or housing and address their health conditions at the same time.

So far, so good: Burgess clearly understands that it’s next to impossible to get healthy, or sober, while living on the street: Housing, or shelter at an absolute minimum, is essential to any kind of recovery from physical or behavioral health conditions. But the next leap he takes is troubling: If shelter is available but a person refuses to take it, he said, the city should have the authority to permanently remove them from a public space in order to make it available to the rest of the public. “We’re governed by the court decision”—Martin v. Boise—”that says we can’t force people… to leave unless we offer accommodation where they can go.”

It’s unclear how the initiative to reinstate sweeps and pay for housing and health cafe would be funded, or how it will get around the requirements imposed by Boise.

2. After PubliCola’s relentless coverage of Mayor Jenny Durkan’s decision not to seek FEMA reimbursement for hotel-based shelters, city council president (and mayoral candidate) Lorena González issued a statement about her recent conversation with FEMA administrators, which she said affirmed for her that even if federal funding isn’t “guaranteed” (which it never is in advance), “we can be confident that non-congregate shelter is FEMA reimbursable in eligible circumstances.”

In other cities, such as Los Angeles and San Francisco, FEMA has paid for hotel-based shelter for people living unsheltered who suffer from conditions that make them vulnerable to COVID—a standard that covers most chronically homeless people.

Durkan has insisted that FEMA will not reimburse the city for any services at hotel-based shelters, and has objected to the federal agency’s “onerous” application requirements. Continue reading “Fizz: Burgess Previews Encampment Initiative, Nguyen Mulls Bid for County Exec, and “Opening the Door” to Hotel Shelter” →

City Council, City Hall, Mayor Durkan, State of Washington

Durkan Administration Asks State to Expand Scope of Audit Into City Council Contract

By Erica C. Barnett

On Monday, the director of the city’s Department of Finance and Administrative Services, Calvin Goings, and the city’s Finance Director, Glen Lee, signed a letter to the State Auditor’s Office (SAO) asking the auditor to expand the scope of its ongoing audit of the contract between the city’s legislative department and the Freedom Project, which served as the “fiscal agent” for a $3 million project to study participatory budgeting and alternatives to policing.

However, PubliCola’s reporting indicates that the letter was written not by Goings and Lee but by Mayor Jenny Durkan’s office—and that Goings and Lee were less than thrilled to sign their names to such a blatantly political series of requests and leading questions.

The letter asks the auditor to look into three new issues: Whether the city auditor should be removed from Seattle’s legislative branch, where (according to the letter) it doesn’t have “adequate independence”; whether it was appropriate for the city council to award a “high-dollar contract … without competition to a non-profit,” the Freedom Project; and whether “laws of the state expressly authorize direct earmarked appropriations for specific entities, and if so, in what circumstances.”

The finance department does not typically get involved in political debates between the legislative and executive branches. In her seven years at the city, council president Lorena González said, “I’ve never seen a letter of this nature to an outside agency.”

In multiple instances, the letter suggests openly that the city council may have broken city and state law by granting the contract in the way it did.

Specifically, the letter suggests that by granting a no-bid contract, the council may have violated the City Charter, and that appropriating funds to a specific entity (in this case, King County Equity Now, via the pass-through contract with the Freedom Project) may have violated prohibitions on earmarks in city law, the charter, and state law.

The first point is a bit ironic, given the mayor’s history of granting noncompetitive contracts, including one to a personal friend who is married to Durkan’s then-deputy mayor.

On the second point, the letter takes a conspiratorial turn, suggesting that the council scrubbed the public record to hide evidence of misdeeds.

“[T]he original legislative documents (since revised and removed from the web), public statements by Councilmember and other records demonstrate that the $3 million dollar appropriation was for the benefit and intended to go to a specific entity,” the letter says.

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.

“Again, the Executive has not been directly involved in the award of [our] implementation of the contract, as it was wholly in Council’s purview. However, Council has regularly appropriated funding for a specific contractor or provider, and in this case the contract is structured as a pass-through for an entity that was not qualified for the non-profit exemption,” the letter concludes.

“It would be helpful to know whether this type of ‘pass-through’ contracting is a proper use of the non-profit exemption and whether the Executive can award contracts based on ‘earmarks’ by Council or whether doing so would run afoul of the Charter, state law or generally accepted best practices.”

City council president Lorena González told PubliCola that she does not believe the state auditor’s mandate and jurisdiction extends to the city charter or municipal code. “We are certainly aware of several contracts in which the mayor’s office has engaged in no-bid contract practices,” she added, “and it’s interesting to me that FAS didn’t highlight those as additional potential issues.”

A spokeswoman for FAS directed all of PubliCola’s questions to the mayor’s office, which did not respond to several emails seeking responses to questions on Tuesday.

The letter is highly unusual in both its tone and content: The finance department, which oversees many city contracts as well as city facilities, HR, and many other internal aspects of city government, does not typically get involved in political debates between the legislative and executive branches. In her seven years at the city, González said, “I’ve never seen a letter of this nature to an outside agency.”

A spokeswoman for FAS directed all of PubliCola’s questions to the mayor’s office, which did not respond to several emails seeking responses to questions on Tuesday.

González, who is running for mayor (Durkan will not seek reelection), called the letter a “distraction” from the issues Durkan could be addressing in the final months of her term. “I’m just confused about why the Durkan administration is spending time, energy, and resources on this letter… instead of on the real problems facing the city in the remainder of her term,” González said. “This audit was already happening, and it’s going to go through its natural course, and I don’t understand how this letter helps advance our city.”

SAO spokeswoman Kathleen Cooper said the office would treat the letter from the city like any other tip or whistleblower complaint. “We consider everything that comes our way, and if there is an issue of large enough significance … that we think it should be considered in our auditing work, even though we hadn’t included it before now, then we would consider it,” Cooper said.

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” →