Tag: Navigation Center

City Council, homelessness, Morning Crank, Police

Still No Street Sinks, Pedersen Tone-Polices Council Colleague, No Discipline for Cop who Retaliated Against Whistleblower

1. The nearly year-old debate over street sinks for people without access to indoor plumbing boiled over at last week’s meeting of the city council’s homelessness committee, as Seattle Public Utilities director Mami Hara outlined some of the Durkan Administration’s many objections to providing cheap, accessible places for people experiencing homelessness to wash their hands.

As PubliCola has reported, the city council funded street sinks last November, with a goal of quickly installing more than 60 simple sinks at key locations around the city. Access to clean running water and soap—not just hand sanitizer, which the city is currently considering as an alternative to sinks—is essential to preventing the spread of communicable diseases such as shigella, hepatitis, and cryptosporidiosis, which have spread among Seattle’s homeless population since the COVID-19 pandemic led to the closure of most publicly accessible sinks last spring.

Six months later, there are still no sinks on Seattle’s streets. Instead, the mayor’s office, SPU, and the Department of Neighborhoods have expanded the scope of the funding to include food waste disposal, “options for accessing safe drinking water,” and new ways to “reduce illegal dumping and litter.” Last month, the city put out a request for proposals for a new “Seattle Water & Waste Innovation Pilot” with the goal of picking two or more contractors later this month.

Council member Teresa Mosqueda, who chairs the council’s budget committee, said the council’s budget directive wasn’t “to evaluate what kind of additional programs or services should be investigated … it was, how fast can we get these dollars out the door for very low-cost, already proven handwashing strategies. So I would like to ask…. where are the handwashing facilities and why is it taking so long?”

The city also needed to ensure that the sinks are “really durable and resilient against lots and lots of things that can happen to them,” SPU director Mami Hara said, and to make sure they don’t present “a tripping hazard or another hazard.”

Andres Mantilla, Durkan’s DON director, responded the city had expedited the grant application process to move more quickly than usual. Hara added that although the council might find it “counterintuitive when your’e trying to get things out quickly to consider public health requirements,” the utility has an obligation to think about people’s safety. For example, she said, people could “cross-contaminate” sinks with germs if the water isn’t “continuous, reliable, and adequate.” The city also needed to ensure that the sinks are “really durable and resilient against lots and lots of things that can happen to them,” Hara said, and to make sure they don’t present “a tripping hazard or another hazard.”

“The point isn’t to build super sinks and only be able to afford five of them; the point is to be able to get sinks out throughout the city so that folks [can] have access to running water.”—Councilmember Tammy Morales

“I understand the frustration—it’s like, ‘Let’s just put a sink out there,’ versus making sure that it’s done in a way that does not cause injury or harm to folks as well,” Hara said.

In response, Mosqueda pointed out that the city expedited temporary permits for restaurant owners to put tables on sidewalks in response to COVID, and council member Tammy Morales noted that while she was glad to hear that the executive branch now wants to open up the application process to small groups besides the Clean Hands Collective, such as mutual aid groups, “this work was intended to be out the door months ago and we are entering the fourth wave now of COVID.”

“The point isn’t to build super sinks and only be able to afford five of them; the point is to be able to get sinks out throughout the city so that folks [can] have access to running water,” Morales said.

2. Later in the same meeting, Morales addressed public commenters, saying they should direct their anger about ongoing sweeps of homeless encampments at the mayor’s office (which oversees encampment removals) rather than the council (which has adopted legislation opposing them). After following that comment with a number of calm but pointed policy questions, Morales got a dressing-down from Durkan ally Alex Pedersen, who suggested she was being rude to executive department staff.

“I just want to implore my colleagues to strive to treat our city government colleagues with respect and to not question their intentions,” Pedersen said, admonishing Morales to “take the temperature down and treat our colleagues with respect.” 

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Pedersen’s tone-policing comments prompted Mosqueda to jump in. Morales, she said, had been “respectful and in order,” and her questions were “very much appropriate for the situation that we’re in—a year into the pandemic, when the CDC has continued to say that we should not be sweeping people if we had no alternative non-congregate options available.” We’ll have more on the state of outreach and encampment removals this afternoon.

3. Two officers who filed a complaint against Navigation Team director (and former SPD lieutenant) Sina Ebinger subsequently complained that a friend of Ebinger’s followed them in her police cruiser, cut them off, and threatened them with professional retaliation after Ebinger lost her assignment on the team, a newly released Office of Police Accountability case file reveals. Continue reading “Still No Street Sinks, Pedersen Tone-Polices Council Colleague, No Discipline for Cop who Retaliated Against Whistleblower” →

Addiction, Drugs, King County

After Two-Year Gap, Detox Center Will Open on Beacon Hill
King County Executive Dow Constantine stands next to a detox bed at the soon-to-open Recovery Place.

The new detox and inpatient treatment center that will open later this year on Beacon Hill doesn’t look like much from the outside. A low-slung institutional building surrounded by a black iron fence and fronted by a small parking lot, it looks somewhat out of place in a residential neighborhood where brightly colored townhouses have sprouted like dandelions in recent years.

Even from the inside, you have to squint to imagine the transformation—from what Valley Cities Behavioral Health Care CEO Ken Taylor called a “ghastly” institution, run by Recovery Centers of King County, into a modern, brightly lit facility with fitness rooms, two large kitchens, and rooms for group meetings and private counseling.

The opening of the new facility, called Recovery Place, marks a significant milestone for detox and treatment in King County—the restoration of 32 beds for people needing medical detoxification from alcohol, heroin, and other drugs, and the first residential detox center in King County where people can access treatment for addiction and mental health issues simultaneously. (Most treatment centers do not deal with dual diagnoses).

The city’s Navigation Center, a new low-barrier shelter less than a mile away, will direct clients to Recovery Place, which will also take patients directly from emergency rooms and (eventually) on a walk-in basis. In addition to detox and a traditional two-to-four-week inpatient treatment program, the center will offer medication-assisted treatment with drugs like buprenorphine to heroin and opiate addicts. “We’re embracing a harm-reduction approach as much as an abstinence-based approach,” Milena Stott, Valley Cities’ director of inpatient services, said.

Valley Cities CEO Ken Taylor in the detox wing of Recovery Place

The last tenant to occupy the building, Recovery Centers of King County, went bankrupt and shut down abruptly in 2015, and since then, the 27 detox beds they provided have been distributed all over King County through contracts with institutions like Fairfax Hospital in Kirkland and the Seadrunar long-term treatment center in Georgetown.  Before RCKC closed down, Taylor said, the building “was dark and damp, and all throughout the central corridors there was plumbing and electrical running literally right down the middle of the corridor.” Outreach workers told me last year that RCKC was known for treating clients rudely and asking “inappropriate” personal questions in earshot of other patients; the new facility, in contrast, will have private consultation rooms. After RCKC closed, the building itself was taken over by squatters and stripped bare, with everything from the toilets to the copper wiring stolen and carted away.  Morgan Irwin, a Republican state representative (R-31) and Seattle Police Department officer who was on hand for yesterday’s tour, said that the last time he was inside the building, which is on his beat, “It was literally flashlight and gun out.”

The building cost $4 million to buy, plus $9 million to renovate. A million dollars of the budget to buy and fix up the building came from King County; the rest came from a combination of state and grant money and a $4.5 million loan that Valley Cities took out from Bank of America to cover the remaining costs. The state’s capital budget, which remains in limbo, is supposed to provide about $2 million toward the cost of repaying the loan, but Taylor said Valley Cities “is going to be able to repay the loan” ion its own if state funding doesn’t come through. “We’re very fortunate. Not every agency can do that.” Ongoing operations will cost about $5 million a year; that funding will come from the state and federal governments as well as from patients’ insurance payments. RCKC went bankrupt, King County Human Services Department director Adrienne Quinn told me, in part because of unfavorable state reimbursement rates, which she was quick to add have been addressed.

Contrary to common belief, not every person with addiction needs detox, although medication can ease the suffering and make it less likely that people withdrawing from opiates, for example, abandon treatment. (Severe alcoholism does require detox because going cold turkey can cause seizures, DTs, and fatal heart conditions.) Buprenorphine, and other opiate substitution medications, can help short-circuit the withdrawal process and get opiate addicts on a path to stability. “I hope that everyone for whom buprenorphine is appropriate will elect to do that,” Taylor said, “but sometimes it takes them time to get to that point.”

If you enjoy the work I do here at The C Is for Crank, please consider becoming a sustaining supporter of the site! For just $5, $10, or $20 a month (or whatever you can give), you can help keep this site going, and help me continue to dedicate the many hours it takes to bring you stories like this one every week. This site is funded entirely by contributions from readers, which pay for the substantial time I put into reporting and writing for this blog and on social media, as well as costs like transportation, equipment, travel costs, website maintenance, and other expenses associated with my reporting. Thank you for reading, and I’m truly grateful for your support.

Addiction, homelessness, housing, Seattle magazine

Navigation Center Has Housed Just Two People Since Opening in July

This story first appeared at Seattle Magazine. 

Late last month, the city’s Human Services Department released its first annual report on Pathways Home, a new framework for serving homeless residents that emphasizes “rapid rehousing” and submits service providers to new performance standards. Among other conclusions, the report found that the Navigation Center, a 75-bed shelter that serves people who don’t do well in traditional shelters, has struggled to place people into permanent housing within the 60-day time limit set by the city.

“People coming inside from being unsheltered have a big adjustment to make and multiple issues to address and many barriers to housing stability; the Navigation Center is finding that mapping out a strategy to get them housed could take more than 60 days,” the report says.

In fact, as of October, the Navigation Center had placed just two people into housing, according to the Downtown Emergency Service Center (DESC), which runs the Center. DESC’s director of administrative services, Greg Jenson, says that one of those clients is now in transitional housing and one went to live with family. According to the Pathways Home report, of the 105 clients who came through the center in its first six weeks, 32 have left, and “nearly half” of those “have refused to disclose or didn’t know where they were exiting to.”

DESC director Daniel Malone says the “biggest challenge” to placing clients in permanent housing isn’t just that the people the Navigation Center serves are hard to house; it’s that there simply aren’t enough places for Navigation Center clients to go.

 

The Navigation Center is designed to serve clients who are the “hardest to house”—people experiencing chronic homelessness who often face multiple barriers to finding a place to live, such as ongoing substance abuse and mental-health issues. It “was not designed to serve the needs of the higher-functioning individuals who are more likely to thrive in traditional shelter settings which have strict rule requirements,” Jackie St. Louis, the coordinator for the Navigation Team, says.

However, DESC director Daniel Malone says the “biggest challenge” to placing clients in permanent housing isn’t just that the people the Navigation Center serves are hard to house; it’s that there simply aren’t enough places for Navigation Center clients to go. “One thing that has been good is being able to identify people who have a natural priority for the limited housing that is available in the community,” by giving them an assessment that scores them on the number of barriers to housing they face, Malone says. But, he adds, “If we aren’t producing new housing, they’ll just be getting it instead of someone else.”

Seattle’s Navigation Center isn’t the first of its kind; that distinction goes to a low-barrier shelter by the same name in San Francisco, which also serves a hard-to-house clientele. In San Francisco, clients seeking permanent housing stay an average of 90 days, and that figure would likely be larger if the city didn’t set aside some low-income housing units specifically for Navigation Center clients, something Seattle does not do. Although Seattle officials were familiar with the challenges San Francisco faced in housing people through its Navigation Center, the city adopted a 60-day cap, predicting that Seattle’s Navigation Center would be able not only mimic but surpass San Francisco’s success.

The city’s Navigation Teams—groups of police and outreach workers who facilitate encampment removals—frequently refer encampment residents to the Navigation Center. According to a report issued by the Navigation Team itself earlier this month, the teams have sent about 75 people to the center this year.

Meg Olberding, a spokeswoman for the Human Services Department, says she’s confident that the city is sending people who want and will benefit from the services that the center provides. “HSD and DESC are satisfied that the right clients are being referred to the Navigation Center,” she says.

But Malone notes that DESC has “definitely heard from some people that they only came there because they were having to leave where they were staying out, and they hadn’t really decided for themselves that was something that they wanted yet.”

Malone cautions against reading too much into what happens at the Navigation Center in the first few months. “Has it changed the face of homelessness in less than three months? No,” he says. “There have definitely been some start-up issues, and we need to try different things out.”

In San Francisco, Navigation Centers have been successful at getting some homeless people off the street, but they’re hardly a panacea. The success or failure of Seattle’s Navigation Center will be measured not by how many hundreds of people it moves on to permanent housing, but by how many dozens.

Affordability, Density, Development, Drugs, homelessness, housing, human services, Morning Crank, neighborhoods

Morning Crank: Why They Didn’t Apply the Racial Equity Toolkit

1. King County Council member Joe McDermott and Jeanne Kohl-Welles have proposed legislation, sponsored by five of the council’s Democrats (Dave Upthegrove’s name is not on the legislation), that would remove Initiative 27—the ballot measure that ban supervised drug consumption sites throughout King County—from the ballot. In its place would be a two-part question that would give voters the ability to say “yes” to safe consumption sites, along with the other seven recommendations that were unanimously adopted by the county’s Heroin and Prescription Opiate Addiction Task Force a little over a year ago. The task force included public health experts, elected officials, cops, and representatives from the King County Sheriff’s Department and Prosecuting Attorney’s Office.

The legislation essentially asks voters to decide whether either  measure—I-27 or the task force recommendations—should be adopted; then, if a voter says “yes” to the first question, which option they prefer.

“If the people are going to have a chance to vote on safe injection sites, I want them to have all the alternatives,” McDermott says. “This is an effort to have a positive alternative on the ballot to address the public health crisis on our streets.”

A group of advocates is suing to prevent I-27 from going on the February 2018 ballot, arguing that state law does not allow voters to veto adopted public health policies. The case will be heard in King County Superior Court on Friday.

2. The committee charged with reviewing the city’s policies around encampment sweeps met last night for the first time in a month to hear from the city’s Office for Civil Rights (which monitors the sweeps to see if rules like a 72-hour notice requirement are being followed), the Department of Finance and Administrative Services, and the Navigation Team itself about how things are going.

Questions that came up during the meandering meeting: Whether SOCR should be in the position of monitoring encampment removals at all, given that they are themselves a city department (the committee is far from the first to raise this issue); whether the committee should have its own encampment removal monitor that answers only to the committee; and why the city did not initially apply its racial equity toolkit to its sweeps policies (Finance and Administrative Services Department director Chris Potter said it was because the city declared homelessness an “emergency.”)

One question I hoped the city might answer (they didn’t) is why FAS, SOCR, the city’s Human Services Department, and the navigation teams don’t share data in a way that enables them to know exactly what happened to each individual person who received “outreach” during an encampment sweep. HSD and the mayor’s office often tout high numbers of “contacts” and “referrals” to services and safer alternative sleeping arrangements as proof that the Navigation Teams are working, but it’s virtually impossible to find out what happened to the people who received these referrals over the long- or even medium term. No single agency or organization tracks people’s progress after the initial contact by the navigation teams, and people count as success stories for the city’s purposes even if they stay in a shelter for one night and move on.

Navigation Team coordinator Jackie St. Louis did provide some information about where the teams were providing referrals to (not everyone who received a referral followed through by showing up at the shelter or other location to which they were referred). The most common locations for referrals were: The new low-barrier shelter run by Compass Housing on First Hill (capacity: 100); the sanctioned encampment in Georgetown (capacity: 70), which does not allow drugs or alcohol; the sanctioned low-barrier encampment at Licton Springs (capacity: 70), which does not require sobriety; and the Navigation Center (capacity: 75), a city-run low-barrier shelter.

That means that most people the Navigation Teams encounter are being referred to either other encampments or low-barrier shelters, not traditional shelters, transitional housing, or behavioral health or addiction treatment centers. The large influx of referrals from encampments could be one reason the Navigation Center is taking longer than that to move people along to the next thing; last month, HSD reported that the city-run center was “finding that mapping out a strategy to get [clients] housed could take more than 60 days.”

3. At an AARP-KOMO TV-sponsored debate last night, mayoral candidates Cary Moon and Jenny Durkan offered their responses to a question about whether the two-thirds of Seattle’s land zoned exclusively for detached single-family houses should be opened up to allow other types of housing. (Former mayor Ed Murray initially proposed allowing duplexes, row houses, and other types of low-density housing in single-family areas as part of the Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda but backed off after homeowners complained that other types of housing would drive down their property values, make it impossible to park their cars, and destroy their neighborhood character). Moon said she wanted to restart the process so that neighborhoods could be involved in determining how to accommodate density while preserving neighborhood “character”; Durkan seemed to suggest that if the city simply made it easier to add mother-in-law and backyard apartments to existing single-family houses, there would be enough density to provide all the “missing middle” housing Seattle needs.

Moon: “I would restart that conversation with communities to say, ‘This is how many folks are moving here. Here are all the tools we could be using, including backyard cottages, mother-in-law apartments, clustered housing, row housing, stacked flats,’ and show folks all the different models for how do we add infill development in neighborhoods, and invite them to be a part of picking what works for their neighborhood. Because if you impose it from on high in Seattle, that doesn’t work. We all feel this right to shape our city, the right to be at the table and help determine what’s the right way to grow with grace. … We’ve got to involve neighborhoods in doing it together in a way that works for their character that they’re trying to protect, for how they live their high quality of life in their neighborhood.”

Durkan: “I’ve got some friends who, for 18 months, have been trying to get a permit for a mother-in-law apartment. If we made it easier for folks to get mother-in-law apartments and real backyard cottages—not these monstrosity[ies] that everyone’s afraid of—we could make almost every single-family lot into a triplex overnight. But we are having impediments, so we need to make it a priority, and the mayor needs to say to the housing and zoning people, ‘We’re going to speed up affordable housing. We’re going to give people the ability to have density,’ and then we’ll move forward.”

If you enjoy the work I do here at The C Is for Crank, please considerbecoming a sustaining supporter of the site! For just $5, $10, or $20 a month (or whatever you can give), you can help keep this site going, and help me continue to dedicate the many hours it takes to bring you stories like this one every week. This site is funded entirely by contributions from readers, which pay for the substantial time I put into reporting and writing for this blog and on social media, as well as costs like transportation, equipment, travel costs, website maintenance, and other expenses associated with my reporting. Thank you for reading, and I’m truly grateful for your support.

City Council, City Hall, gender, homelessness, housing, Media, Morning Crank

Morning Crank: “Meets All Necessary Privacy Requirements”
Image via Hope to the End.

1.  Some little-picture observations about the proposed city budget, which interim mayor Tim Burgess released on Monday:

• The budget includes extremely sunny ridership projections for the South Lake Union and First Hill streetcars, assuming that farebox revenues from the two streetcars combined will be 25 percent higher than actual 2016 revenues, and 21 percent higher than the assumption that was used for the 2017 budget.

• The budget includes $343,000 to expand the city’s Our Best program, which is aimed at increasing mentors for young African American men and improving black male outcomes. As I’ve reported, this fix-boys-first focus can black girls, who face very different challenges than black boys, behind; programs like Our Best also tend to emphasize traditional gender roles, including a heteronormative family structure in which the man is the breadwinner and the wife stays at home.

• The phrase “African American/Black” occurs 10 times in the city budget itself. Nine of those 10 times, it precedes either “male” or “boys.”

• In addition to increasing funding for homelessness-related programs and services by $2 million, the budget for the city’s Human Services Department includes funding for new Homeless Management Information scan cards, which are just what they sound like—bar-coded scan cards identifying and tracking homeless people who use the city’s shelter system. According to the budget book, the cards will, “for a small investment, significantly decrease the burden on people using homeless services to provide information and decrease the burden on agencies to enter duplicative data while significantly increasing efficiencies in the homeless service delivery system by ensuring data quality.” The proposed new homeless scanning system, HSD assures readers, “meets all necessary privacy requirements and is used in homeless response systems around the

• In another nod to HSD’s renewed emphasis on “performance-based contracting” and “measurable outcomes,” the department’s budget also includes two new data analysis staffers.

• And in a nod to the fact that addressing homelessness was never going to be a short-term problem, the budget takes two positions that were created in 2017 to execute the city’s interim response to homelessness and makes them permanent.

 

“The Navigation Center is finding that mapping out a strategy to get them housed could take more than 60 days.”

 

2. Speaking of homelessness as a long-term problem: The first annual report on Pathways Home, the new city homelessness framework that emphasizes “rapid rehousing” and “performance-based contracting,” is out. Overall, the city gives itself high marks for moving people from unsanctioned to sanctioned encampments and for getting people into safer (if still precarious) living situations. HSD praises itself, in particular, for the work of its new Navigation Teams—groups of police and outreach workers who offer services and safer shelter or housing to people living in unsanctioned encampments that are about to be swept by the city—and for two new low-barrier shelters, the city-run Navigation Center and a new low-barrier shelter run by Compass Housing, which together provide 175 new shelter beds.

However, the number of people served by the city-run Navigation Center remains low. (The Compass facility just opened last month). Between July and September, according to the report, the center has seen just 105 people—and 30 percent of those left the program in the first 45 days it was open. The goal of the Navigation Center is to get hard-to-house and chronically homeless clients with complicated problems, including addiction, into long-term shelter, permanent housing, or treatment. When the center opened, HSD said it would aim to get people through the shelter and on to their next living situation within 60 days; the progress report released Monday, however, concedes that “[p]eople coming inside from being unsheltered have a big adjustment to make and multiple issues to address and many barriers to housing stability; the Navigation Center is finding that mapping out a strategy to get them housed could take more than 60 days.” Next year, the city will switch to a system that awards contracts to shelter providers based in part on how many of their shelter clients “exit shelter to permanent housing,” which could weigh against shelters like the Navigation Center that serve clients that are among the most challenging to house.

“There is an urgent need to provide unsheltered people with real time referrals to shelter and housing by using scan card technology in the field to link outreach workers and housing resources.”

 

The report also touts the Navigation Teams, praising the groups for getting people living in unsafe encampments into “safer alternative living spaces.” Overall ,64 percent of the people the Navigation Teams “engaged” accepted some kind of services (down from the 69 percent an SPD lieutenant described as “staggeringly high” back in May). Thirty-nine percent accepted alternative living arrangements (up from 32 percent), which include other (sanctioned) encampments; although the city tracks this number closely, HSD has told me it does not know how many people in that group actually got permanent housing, as opposed to a shelter bed or reassignment to another outdoor encampment.

In a nod to the budget line item adding funding for homeless scan cards, the Pathways Home report says “there is an urgent need to provide unsheltered people with real time referrals to shelter and housing by using scan card technology in the field to link outreach workers and housing resources.”

3. Eli Sanders, the Stranger writer-turned-speechwriter/deputy communications director for interim Mayor Tim Burgess, has said he plans to use what he sees and hears while embedded at the mayor’s office as material for a piece of “experiential journalism” when he returns to his job at the paper full-time in November. (Sanders will continue to host the Stranger’s political blog, “Blabbermouth,” one day a week.) On Monday, the city provided me with Sanders’ offer letter for the position, which consists primarily of writing Burgess’ speeches and public remarks, not taking media calls or dealing with external communications. Sanders, according to the letter, will make $55.598 per hour, plus a five percent bonus for his first 520 hours; after that point (which Sanders will likely never hit, given the short-term nature of his assignment), he will receive a ten percent bonus.

Doing the math: Sanders started his new job on September 19; the job will conclude on November 28, when a new mayor takes office. At 8 hours a day, and assuming he receives no pay for additional hours or other bonuses, Sanders will make $26,153.30 for his 56 full days of work for Burgess, which (if extrapolated out to the full year) would amount to a salary of $125,762.78. This places Sanders’ starting salary within the top third of mayoral staff salaries; only 16 of the 47 mayoral staffers make more than Burgess’ new hire.

Also Monday, I got a request to remove Sanders’ personal email information from his offer letter, which is a public record available to anyone. The ask was reasonable, and I removed the address, but I couldn’t help but note a certain irony in the request, as I told the staffer who asked for the redaction:

If you enjoy the work I do here at The C Is for Crank, please considerbecoming a sustaining supporter of the site! For just $5, $10, or $20 a month (or whatever you can give), you can help keep this site going, and help me continue to dedicate the many hours it takes to bring you stories like this one every week. This site is funded entirely by contributions from readers, which pay for the substantial time I put into reporting and writing for this blog and on social media, as well as costs like transportation, equipment, travel costs, website maintenance, and other expenses associated with my reporting. Thank you for reading, and I’m truly grateful for your support.

City Council, City Hall, gender, homelessness, housing, labor, Morning Crank, Women

Morning Crank: What Socialist?

If you enjoy the work I do here at The C Is for Crank, please consider becoming a sustaining supporter of the site! For just $5, $10, or $20 a month (or whatever you can give), you can help keep this site going, and help me continue to dedicate the many hours it takes to bring you stories like this one every week. This site is funded entirely by contributions from readers, which pay for the substantial time I put into reporting and writing for this blog and on social media, as well as costs like transportation, equipment, travel costs, website maintenance, and other expenses associated with my reporting. Thank you for reading, and I’m truly grateful for your support!

1. One name that won’t be on the long list of those running for mayor when the window for candidates to file for Seattle offices this year closes at 4:00 this afternoon is city council member Lorena Gonzalez. Although Gonzalez would have been giving up her council seat by running for mayor, since both offices are on the ballot this year, she had decided to take the risk as recently as last Friday—until she failed to secure a key endorsement, sources close to the council member say. On Tuesday, she announced she wasn’t running.

That key endorsement? US Congresswoman (and former state senator) Pramila Jayapal, who was the executive director of immigrant rights group OneAmerica when Gonzalez was its board chair. Jayapal’s decision not to endorse Gonzalez reads like a major snub not just because Jayapal supported Gonzalez when she first ran for city council in 2015, but because Gonzalez reversed her own endorsement of Brady Walkinshaw, who, like Gonzalez, is Latinx, to support Jayapal when she ran for Congress after Jayapal accused Walkinshaw of running ads she said were racist and sexist. After sticking her neck out for her former OneAmerica colleague and longtime political ally, Gonzalez might have understandably expected Jayapal to return the favor. Jayapal has not made any endorsement in the mayor’s race so far.

2. Speaking of erstwhile political allies, the King County Labor Council’s secretary/treasurer Nicole Grant sent out a harshly worded statement earlier this week denouncing socialist city council member Kshama Sawant for endorsing former Tenants Union director Jon Grant, and excoriating him for being a “phony” who advocated for low-income people harmed by the foreclosure crisis while living in a foreclosed house purchased for him by his parents. (Jon Grant has said he is paying the mortgage himself). Nicole Grant is a supporter of Teresa Mosqueda, a longtime labor lobbyist in Olympia who is running for the same Position 8 council seat Jon Grant is seeking. The Sawant endorsement is especially painful, Nicole Grant says, because she considered Sawant a strong labor ally; Nicole Grant even helped swear Sawant in after her election in 2013.

Nicole Grant says that as a woman of color, a labor leader, and a renter struggling to make ends meet in an increasingly unaffordable city, Mosqueda “represents what workers see in themselves when they look in the mirror. And all of a sudden, a coalition partner [Sawant’s Socialist Alternative party] that we’ve worked on many different issues with is like, ‘Yeah, we’re going to go with the socialist. And we’re like, ‘What socialist? Who are you talking about?’ And they say, ‘Jon Grant,’  and [my reaction is] just, ‘What?'”

“It’s hard when you support someone with real passion and real consistency, and then you ask them to support you and they don’t. That is not a great feeling,” Nicole Grant says. “When [Sawant ran] and Socialist Alternative needed labor to support her, labor was there. … So when the labor movement has an incredible candidate emerging and it’s not good enough for them that she’s a union member, that she’s a working class leader, that she’s a woman of color, that her record is strong—when they’re just like, ‘Oh, it doesn’t say “socialist” behind her name, sorry’—it’s outrageous. Because it’s not reciprocal.”

Nicole Grant criticizes Jon Grant’s leadership of the Tenants Union—”I feel like we’re spiraling into the abyss and our’e the one with the steering wheel in your hand”—but her major critique is that Jon Grant doesn’t acknowledge the privilege that enabled him to spend years building his resume at low-paying nonprofit and campaign jobs and that allows him to campaign full-time now. “Jon comes from the privilege machine—he is fired in the kiln of privilege,” Nicole Grant says. “Bainbridge Island, all the best private schools—for him to be like, ‘Oh, I’m a socialist’—it’s like, ‘No, dude, you’re slumming.'”

Of the credible candidates in the Position 8 race, Jon Grant is the only white man. Nicole Grant says it shows. “At a forum, he made some comment like, ‘I’m seeing a lot of experience [on Mosqueda’s resume] but I don’t see any ideas here. That is just such a classic. I don’t want to be like, ‘Okay, white man,’ but—okay, white man. I know that narrative. The woman does the work, the man has the ideas.” Nicole Grant points to Mosqueda’s work on public health, paid family leave, and wage equity legislation. “She’s the one that closes the deals,” she says.

Jon Grant and Mosqueda are widely viewed as the frontrunners in the race, which means that we could still be watching these issues play out throughout the summer and fall.

3. In response to a records request by The C Is for Crank, the city’s department of Finance and Administrative Services provided a complete list of expenses associated with the city’s emergency response to homelessness since February 21 of this year, when Mayor Ed Murray announced he was activating the city’s Emergency Operations Center in response to the homelessness crisis. (In practice, this means that representatives from various city departments meet at the EOC facility for two hours every morning to discuss and coordinate the city’s homelessness response.)

The two biggest costs so far have been construction of the Navigation Center, a planned (and delayed) low-barrier, 24/7 shelter for homeless individuals, and garbage pickup at unauthorized encampments. The city has spent $2,244,000 building the Center, and plans to spend another $1.3 million this year to operate the 100-bed shelter.  Garbage pickup has cost the city another $2,165,000, although most of that line item is labor from existing city staff who have been repurposed to administer, plan, and actually pick up the trash. The Navigation Team, an eight-member team that does outreach at encampments and conducts encampment sweeps, has cost the city $759,000 so far, including labor costs and overtime expenses for eight police officers and one sergeant. Three new authorized encampments have cost the city $201,000 to operate so far this year.

See the full list of the city’s homelessness-related expenses between February 21 and April 30, 2017, here.