Tag: mike o’brien

Business, City Council, City Hall, Featured, homelessness, Media, Morning Crank, Transit, Transportation

Sound Transit CEO Takes Election Vacation, Amazon’s Revisionist History, Stranger May Lease from ICE Landlord, and More

1. Tuesday night’s election was a major blow to cities like Seattle and transit agencies like King County Metro and Sound Transit, which will have to drastically cut back on long-planned capital projects and eliminate bus service if the statewide Initiative 976, which eliminated funding for transportation projects across the state, hold up in court.

The Puget Sound’s regional transit agency, Sound Transit, stands to lose up to $20 billion in future funding for light rail and other projects through 2041, forcing the agency to dramatically scale back its plans to extend light rail to West Seattle, Ballard, Tacoma and Everett.

So where was Sound Transit’s director, Peter Rogoff, as the election results rolled in?

On vacation in Provence, then at a conference on global health in Rwanda, which his wife, Washington Global Health Alliance CEO Dena Morris, is attending.

Rogoff posted on social media about his trip, which began while votes were being cast in late October and is still ongoing (Rogoff will return to work on Monday).

Screen shots from Rogoff’s Facebook page. On the right: The Sound Transit CEO displays Washington Nationals regalia in Provence.

 

Geoff Patrick, a spokesman for Sound Transit, said Rogoff took the trip to France because “he has not vacationed for a while,” and said the agency was in the “very capable” hands of deputy CEO Kimberly Farley. As for the women in health conference in Rwanda, Patrick said, “this is a conference that he wanted to attend with his wife and it’s an important conference,” adding that Rogoff was “attending the conference with every confidence that the agency is being well run” in his absence.

Asked what Farley, the deputy CEO, has done to reassure Sound Transit employees about the future of the agency in light of an election that could gut its funding, eliminating many jobs, Patrick said Farley emailed everyone on staff and told them to keep focusing on their work. “There’s no impact whatsoever [from Rogoff’s absence] to the agency’s operations,” Patrick said.

Rob Gannon, the general manager of King County Metro, reportedly visited all of Metro’s work sites in person to answer employee questions; I have a call out to Metro to confirm this.

Support The C Is for Crank
The C Is for Crank is supported entirely by generous contributions from readers like you. If you enjoy the breaking news, commentary, and deep dives on issues that matter to you, please support this work by donating a few bucks a month to keep this reader-supported, ad-free site going. Your $5, $10, and $20 monthly donations allow me to do this work as my full-time job, so please become a sustaining supporter now. 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 keeping The C Is for Crank going and growing. I’m truly grateful for your support.

2. Amazon, the company that either did or did not buy Tuesday night’s election (or tried, only to have it backfire), has a sponsored article in the Seattle Times extolling the “revitalization” of South Lake Union. It began as follows:

In the late 19th century, Washington state was still largely untapped wilderness and the area surrounding Lake Union was modest and sparsely populated. Immigrants from Scandinavia, Greece and Russia, as well as East Coast Americans, traveled west to live in humble workers cottages as they sought their fortunes in coal, the new railway system, and a mill.

Amazon’s characterization of Washington as “largely untapped wilderness” waiting to be civilized by immigrants from Europe is jarring in 2019, when tribal-land acknowledgements are customary at public meetings and when most people living in Seattle are at least dimly aware that the West wasn’t actually vacant when “settlers” moved in.

I have reached out to Amazon and the Seattle Times and will update this post if I get more information about who wrote the sponsored piece.

For those who want to learn more about the past and present of the tribes that existed in what is now Washington state when Europeans arrived in the mid-19th century and are still here, here are a couple of helpful articles. One is from HistoryLink. The other is from the Seattle Times.

3. Council member Mike O’Brien, who raised his hand to co-sponsor council president Bruce Harrell’s proposal to fund an app-based homeless donation system created by a for-profit company called Samaritan, now says he’s “almost certain that [a $75,000 add to fund the company] will not be in the final budget.”

Amazon’s characterization of Washington as “largely untapped wilderness” waiting to be civilized by immigrants from Europe is jarring in 2019, when tribal-land acknowledgements are customary at public meetings and when most people living in Seattle are at least dimly aware that the West wasn’t actually vacant when “settlers” moved in.

The app equips people experiencing homelessness with Bluetooth-equipped “beacons” that send out a signal notifying people with the app where the person is. An app user can then read the person’s story—along with details of their mandatory visits with caseworkers, which may include medical and other personal information—and decide whether to “invest in” the person by adding funds to an account that can be used at a list of approved businesses. People can get “needed nutrition and goods” (tech-speak for groceries, apparently) at Grocery Outlet, for example, or “coffee and treats”  at the Chocolati Cafe in the downtown library. Continue reading “Sound Transit CEO Takes Election Vacation, Amazon’s Revisionist History, Stranger May Lease from ICE Landlord, and More” →

Bikes, City Council, criminal justice, Featured, human services, Transportation

As Council Seeks Funding for Successful Arrest Diversion Program, Mayor Proposes “Doubling Down on Probation”
Mayor Jenny Durkan began rolling out her public-safety budget in mid-September.

Several council members expressed skepticism at Mayor Jenny Durkan’s plan to deal with so-called “prolific offenders” Monday, wondering aloud why the proposals were still so ill-defined and expressing concern that they contradicted an earlier work group’s recommendations to focus spending on things like prevention and restorative justice rather than traditional criminal-justice responses like probation.

As I reported last month, Durkan’s plan—which came out of a work group that was made up almost entirely of elected officials, judges, prosecutors, and government staffers—would create a number of new programs inside the criminal justice system, including expanded probation and a new “rapid-reentry connector” who would refer people leaving jail after short periods to shelter and services. The work group that came up with last year’s recommendations, in contrast, was led by the Office for Civil Rights and “centered the voices and leadership of those who have lived experience of incarceration.”

Council member Lorena Gonzalez, who chairs the council’s public safety committee, said she had “concerns about the mayor’s proposal to continue to double down on probation, particularly for this population. I continue to believe that [probation] is not the best use of our dollars, nor that it will actually address the needs of individuals who have many complex co-morbidities”—issues like addiction and mental illness. Council members Bruce Harrell and Sally Bagshaw defended Durkan’s plan, particularly the “enhanced probation” proposal, noting that several municipal court judges had endorsed the proposal. “I’m hearing from judges that it’s in alignment with restorative justice, not a very penalizing probation system,” Harrell said. Bagshaw invited Seattle Municipal Court Judge Damon Shadid to the microphone to defend the current probation system—he called Gonzalez’s description of probation “simply not accurate—prompting Kshama Sawant to complain that advocates for alternatives to probation weren’t given any time to speak.

Part of the problem is that it’s unclear what, exactly, the $532,000 Durkan has proposed spending on three new programs—expanded probation, the jail referral staffer, and a new case conferencing pilot that would bring law enforcement officials together to discuss “high-barrier” clients’ cases—will buy. All three programs are still in the planning phase, and have not been analyzed for race and social justice impacts or for effectiveness. For example, Gonzalez asked, what it saved more money and produced better outcomes to simply not jail people for very short periods instead of providing them “reentry” services when they get out?

“I have concerns about the mayor’s proposal to continue to double down on probation, particularly for this population”—Council public safety chair Lorena Gonzalez

As for the probation program, Gonzalez said, “We have no idea what this is other than the adjective that it will be ‘enhanced.’ I don’t know what that means. It has not been clearly defined. We have no performance metrics.”

All of the mayor’s proposals are pilot programs, which means they won’t cost much money (the biggest-ticket item in Durkan’s “high-barrier individuals” bucket, funding for a new enhanced shelter in the decommissioned west wing of the county jail, is uncontroversial) and are unlikely have a major impact if the council does decide to fund them. (The council could also place the proposals under a budget proviso—essentially, a funding hold—until the mayor provides more information about the programs.)

The discussion of the mayor’s proposal came directly before a separate, but related, conversation about funding for a program that approaches low-level crimes from a completely different perspective ]—Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion, a pre-arrest diversion program that provides case management and services to people caught committing misdemeanor crimes in certain parts of the city. Continue reading “As Council Seeks Funding for Successful Arrest Diversion Program, Mayor Proposes “Doubling Down on Probation”” →

Addiction, Affordability, City Council, criminal justice, Featured, housing, human services, Mayor Durkan, Police, Transportation

Council Takes First Bites at Durkan’s 2020 Budget

I reported last week on some highlights from Mayor Jenny Durkan’s proposed 2020 budget, which includes tens of millions of dollars from one-time revenues from the sale of the Mercer Megablock project, plus a tax on Uber and Lyft rides that the council would have to pass in a separate action. Today, I’m taking a look at how the council has responded to Durkan’s budget so far, starting with a proposal to expand parole and create a jail-to-treatment pipeline as a way of addressing “prolific offenders” who were at the center of KOMO’s “Seattle Is Dying” report.

Parole and “Prolific Offenders”

Robert Feldstein, a former advisor to ex-mayor Ed Murray who now consults for the Durkan Administration, clarified some details of the overall “prolific offender” package, including the fact that (as I first reported) an expanded shelter inside the King County jail is not, as Durkan claimed and the Seattle Times repeated, a “comprehensive place-based treatment center”; it’s a shelter. The expanded shelter, like the existing one in the same building, will be run by the Downtown Emergency Service Center, which provides counseling and opportunities for residents to access treatment and, for people with opiate use disorders, get prescriptions for buprenorphine. None of that is treatment, and DESC has said it does not plan to get into the treatment business.

Shelter beds in the west wing of the King County Jail, pre-opening earlier this year

Durkan’s budget also sets aside funding for a new program that would keep offenders with substance use disorders in jail until a bed in a 28-day treatment facility opens up, then transfer them directly to that facility. Once an offender “graduates” from the 28-day program, a parole officer would closely monitor their attendance at mandatory outpatient treatment, a process that includes random drug and alcohol tests, to make sure they’re complying. Research has shown that mandatory 28-day inpatient treatment is the least effective intervention for the kind of severely addicted, chronically homeless people Durkan’s jail-to-treatment proposal is supposed to address.

Last week, council members pressed Feldstein to explain why Durkan was proposing untested new programs inside the criminal justice system instead of expanding programs like Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (LEAD), which has been proven to reduce recidivism among people who are least likely to show up to court appointments or stick to the terms of their parole. “I think it’ s a reasonable policy question for us as a council to ask, when we’re talking about this number of dollars for new strategies and programs focused on high-barrier individuals, whether or not it makes sense to invest in unproven ideas rather than invest in proven interventions that are evidence-based and where we know what the outcomes are for this same population,” council member Lisa Herbold said.

“As I look at criminal justice reform work across the country, many jurisdictions are moving away from supervision and away from probation, period,” council member Lorena Gonzalez added. “It seems contradictory for us at the city of Seattle to actually be doubling down on probation and supervisions as a solution to address the needs of this population.”

Feldstein said the new programs, which also include a coordinator at the jail to direct short-term stayers to shelter and services and a proposal to add “case conferencing” between police and case workers (something LEAD already does), are meant as additions, not replacements, for existing programs. “There was a sense that they needed some additional tools [and] that there was not overlap between those programs,” Feldstein said. Under questioning from Teresa Mosqueda, Feldstein confirmed that the city had not done any race and social justice analysis of the proposal, nor included any community advocates or people who had actually been through the criminal justice system in the group that came up with the recommendations.

Support The C Is for Crank
Sorry to interrupt your reading, but THIS IS IMPORTANT. The C Is for Crank is a one-person operation, supported entirely—and I mean entirely— by generous contributions from readers like you. If you enjoy the breaking news, commentary, and deep dives on issues that matter to you, please support this work by donating a few bucks a month to keep this reader-supported site going. I can’t do this work without support from readers like you. Your $5, $10, and $20 monthly subscriptions allow me to do this work as my full-time job, so please become a sustaining supporter now. 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 keeping The C Is for Crank going and growing. I’m truly grateful for your support.

Housing

Gonzalez also raised questions, in a separate meeting last week, about Durkan’s proposal to use $6 million of the Mercer Megablock proceeds to help middle-class homeowners making up to 120 percent of the Seattle median income, or about $130,000 for a family of four, finance the construction of small accessory dwelling units (ADUs) in their backyards or basements. Any homeowner who took advantage of the loan program would be required to keep the new unit affordable to someone making 80% of median income (about $61,000 for a single) for 10 years.

(The rest of the proposals for the Megablock proceeds, which include new homeownership opportunities near transit, affordable rental housing, and a revolving loan fund for the city’s Equitable Development Initiative, have been less controversial.)

When Durkan rolled out the ADU proposal in July, Gonzalez requested, and “was assured” that the city would undertake, a race and social justice analysis of the plan, which she suspected would mostly benefit wealthier white homeowners. That analysis, newly appointed Office of Housing director Emily Alvarado confirmed, was never done. “I still have questions about whether this is reaching deeply into low-income communities that are likely to be displaced,” Gonzalez said. Continue reading “Council Takes First Bites at Durkan’s 2020 Budget” →

City Hall, Featured, homelessness, labor, Morning Crank

More City Hall Churn, Council Staffers Organize, Farewell to a “Feisty” Neighborhood Activist, and More

Seattle City Hall

Image via OZinOH on Flickr.

In keeping with how quickly news piles up the moment after Labor Day ends, here are a few quick-hit items—in two parts!—from City Hall and beyond.

Round 1, City Hall edition:

1. This week, the city’s Human Services Department posted an announcement for a new deputy director overseeing homelessness, HSD spokeswoman Meg Olberding confirmed. The position is separate from the job of homelessness division director, a job filled by Diana Salazar last month after the former director, Tiffany Washington, left for a job in the city’s Department of Education and Early Learning. Asked why HSD needed to hire two new high-level employees to oversee homelessness at a time when the city plans to hand most of its homelessness programs over to a new regional agency, Olberding said that the city will continue to oversee homelessness until at least 2021 and that the position would be temporary.

2. Barb Graff, the longtime director of the city’s Office of Emergency Management, is retiring at the beginning of next year after 15 years in that position. OEM oversees disaster and emergency preparedness for the city, including physical disasters such as earthquakes and declared emergencies like the homelessness crisis, which prompted a nine-month activation of the city’s Emergency Operations Center. The city posted the job publicly yesterday.

Support The C Is for Crank
Sorry to interrupt your reading, but THIS IS IMPORTANT. The C Is for Crank is a one-person operation, supported entirely—and I mean entirely— by generous contributions from readers like you. If you enjoy the breaking news, commentary, and deep dives on issues that matter to you, please support this work by donating a few bucks a month to keep this reader-supported site going. I can’t do this work without support from readers like you. Your $5, $10, and $20 monthly donations allow me to do this work as my full-time job, so please become a sustaining supporter now. 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 keeping The C Is for Crank going and growing. I’m truly grateful for your support.

3. The Seattle City Council’s central staff—the policy shop for all nine council members—is trying to unionize. Protec17, which represents other city employees, filed a petition to represent the staffers to the Public Employee Relations Commission this week after central staffers submitted enough signatures to form a bargaining unit. The staffers’ exact grievance is unclear, but it reportedly relates to concerns that their work—providing unbiased and apolitical advice and analysis to all nine council members, regardless of what they want to hear—has been politicized. Central staffers make between about $58 and $64 an hour, putting them among the highest-paid workers at the city.

In response to questions about central staffers’ organizing efforts, council spokeswoman Dana Robinson Slote provided this statement: “Council recognizes employees’ right to seek representation and is aware of the petition to represent Central Staff Legislative analysts in the Council Central Staff division. A Labor Relations negotiator has been assigned the matter.  Out of respect for the process, Council has been advised against making any public statements at this time.”

4. Faye Garneau, the North Seattle businesswoman, Aurora Avenue Merchants Association leader, transit funding opponent, district elections advocate, antagonist to urbanists, and “feisty” neighborhood fixture for many decades, has died. Garneau—a garrulous, strong-willed, and committed advocate to the causes she believed in—was 85.

5. Learn to trust the Crank: As I reported last week, city council member Mike O’Brien is proposing legislation to ban new natural gas hookups as of July 1, 2020. O’Brien plans to discuss the legislation in his Sustainability and Transportation Committee this Friday, September 6.

 

City Council, homelessness, housing, human services, Mayor Durkan

Durkan Legislation Would Fine Anyone Who “Allows” Another Person to Live in “Extensively Damaged” Vehicle


Mayor Jenny Durkan just sent legislation down to the city council that would give the city the authority to fine and prosecute anyone who “allow” other people “to occupy any motor vehicle or recreational vehicle… that is extensively damaged.”

Durkan first announced that she would be proposing a crackdown on junk RVs back in June, on the grounds that unethical RV owners are exploiting homeless people by charging them exorbitant rates to live in inoperable and dangerous vehicles. At the time, the mayor’s office also instituted a new policy that makes it easier for the city to confiscate and destroy “derelict” vehicles instead of allowing them to go back on the market. Durkan’s office provided no data suggesting the extent of this practice, known “RV ranching” or “car farming,” and the legislation doesn’t specify how common it actually is, using phrases like “has increased in frequency over time” and words like “many” to suggest that the problem is widespread. (I’ve asked the mayor’s office for any analysis they used in crafting the legislation.)

The bill, which will likely be amended by the council, would impose a fine of $250 a day on anyone who “allows” people to live in a derelict vehicle, a definition that encompasses everything from cracked windows to leaking fluids to inadequate interior waterproofing.

One thing that is certain is that residents and businesses—particularly in the SoDo industrial area, which is one of a limited number of places in Seattle where parking RVs is legal—have complained repeatedly about the proliferation of RVs near their properties.

The bill, which will likely be amended by the council, would impose a fine of $250 a day on anyone who “allows” people to live in a derelict vehicle, a definition that encompasses everything from cracked windows to leaking fluids to inadequate interior waterproofing. That person—presumably, but not explicitly, a “landlord” who actually owns the vehicle—would also be required to pay up to $2,000 in restitution to the person or people living in the vehicle. The second offense would be a misdemeanor, subject to a fine of up to $1,000 and up to 90 days in jail. Continue reading “Durkan Legislation Would Fine Anyone Who “Allows” Another Person to Live in “Extensively Damaged” Vehicle” →

City Council, Equity, featuredslider, human services, Mayor Durkan, Politics

“We Are Intentionally Tying Our Hands”: Council Passes Soda Tax Spending Plan with 7-Vote Majority

 

The simmering tension between the mayor’s office and the city council boiled over this afternoon, as the council passed (and Mayor Jenny Durkan immediately vowed to veto) legislation sponsored by council member Mike O’Brien that creates  a dedicated fund for excess revenues from the sweetened beverage tax, and stipulating that this money can only be used for new or expanded programs benefiting the low-income communities most heavily impacted by the tax. The vote was a veto-proof 7-1, with Debora Juarez (D5) absent and interim District 4 council member Abel Pacheco voting no.

“We are intentionally tying our hands,” O’Brien said Monday afternoon, by “making a clear policy statement that this money should be off limits except for the stated purposes” laid out in the legislation.

This debate has a long history. In 2017,  the council passed the controversial tax with the stipulation that the revenues from the tax would be poured back into programs promoting equitable food access in the communities most impacted by the tax—low-income communities and communities of color that lack access to affordable, healthy food. One year later, with soda tax revenues coming in higher than anticipated, Mayor Jenny Durkan proposed (and the council approved) a budget that used those “extra” dollars to fund food-access and education programs that had previously been funded through the city’s general fund. The budget swap came with a caveat: By 2019, the council said, Durkan needed to come up with a plan to ensure that soda tax revenues were used to fund healthy-food initiatives, not used to free up funding for other mayoral priorities.

Durkan expressed her “disappointment in the City Council’s vote to pass legislation that creates a significant hole in the City’s budget and cuts funding for critical low-income programs”

That didn’t happen, which brings us to the latest impasse. Last week, Durkan’s departments of Human Services and Education and Early Learning sent letters to providers warning them that the council planned to “cut” their funding. As I reported, dozens of service providers responded with letters rejecting this framing, condemning the mayor for (as they saw it) holding their funding hostage to a political battle over revenues that shouldn’t have been used to supplant general-fund dollars in the first place. On Monday, representatives from these groups showed up at city hall to support O’Brien’s legislation. For Durkan “to end funding for basic needs and services is the unthinkable and simply cruel,” El Centro de la Raza human services director Denise Perez Lally told the council—an especially blunt, but by no means isolated, assessment of Durkan’s position.

At the same time—and completely unbeknownst to the council—the Senior Action Coalition, a group that represents Chinese American seniors with limited English proficiency, showed up in force to oppose O’Brien’s legislation. It was unclear how many of the dozens of seniors who filled the council chambers were familiar with the details of the proposal. Several spoke generally, in English, in favor of preserving funding for food banks, but there were no translators for the non-English speakers in the crowd. “We weren’t told they were coming,” a surprised-looking council staffer said. Tanika Thompson, a food access organizer with Got Green, addressed the group directly during public comment. “I want you to know that the mayor has the power to fund your programs and is working on her budget right now,” Thompson said. “This is a scare tactic to pit our united organizations against each other.”

Pacheco, who was appointed to serve the remainder of former council member Rob Johnson’s position back in April, tried to introduce an amendment that would push back the effective date of the legislation until 2021, arguing that because the council “endorsed” a tentative 2020 budget last year as part of the normal budget process, any changes now would amount to “cuts.” (This is exactly the argument Durkan has made, arguing that O’Brien’s legislation “directly cuts” programs funded through 2020 in the endorsed version of the budget.) In fact, the mayor proposes a new budget every year; the “endorsed” second-year budget always changes—sometimes dramatically—based on a mayor’s priorities, available funding, and spending obligations created during the intervening year, making this an unusual and arguably tenuous argument that ignores the ordinary push-and-pull of the annual budget process.

“I don’t think that those of us who are sitting here now imagined a world in which we would be put in this unfortunate situation of manufactured division among communities of color and disadvantaged communities.” — Council member Lorena Gonzalez

After his amendments failed, Pacheco apologized to human services providers on behalf of the council for failing (before he was appointed) to secure long-term funding for the programs Durkan moved out of the general fund last year. This prompted a stinging rebuke from council member Lorena Gonzalez, who said, “The only apology that I’m going to give to the community is that we didn’t catch this when we passed it back in 2017, because it has always been our intent to have this be a dedicated revenue source.” Back then, Gonzalez continued, “I don’t think that those of us who are sitting here now imagined a world in which we would be put in this unfortunate situation of manufactured division among communities of color and disadvantaged communities and the pumping out of terribly inaccurate information that has resulted  in creating a tremendous amount of fear in community-based organizations.”

In her statement after the vote, Durkan expressed “disappointment in the City Council’s vote to pass legislation that creates a significant hole in the City’s budget and cuts funding for critical low-income programs” and promised to veto the legislation “in the coming days.” If the council’s seven-vote majority stands, the council will be able to easily override the veto (which requires a six-member council supermajority.)
A bit of trivia for the wonks: In the past ten years, there have only been two mayoral vetoes, both by former mayor Mike McGinn. The first, of former council member Tim Burgess’ ordinance banning “aggressive panhandling,” was successful; the second, of agreements allowing the waterfront tunnel to move forward, was not. The lone vote supporting the mayor on the tunnel veto? Then-freshman city council member Mike O’Brien.
Support The C Is for Crank
Sorry to interrupt your reading, but THIS IS IMPORTANT. The C Is for Crank is a one-person operation, supported entirely—and I mean entirely— by generous contributions from readers like you. If you enjoy the breaking news, commentary, and deep dives on issues that matter to you, please support this work by donating a few bucks a month to keep this reader-supported site going. I can’t do this work without support from readers like you. Your allow me to do this work as my full-time job, so please become a sustaining supporter now. 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 keeping The C Is for Crank going and growing. I’m truly grateful for your support.