Tag: Operation Nightwatch

City Council, Election 2017, gender, hate speech, Mayor Murray, Morning Crank, Women

Morning Crank: The Political Rumorscape

1. Samantha Bee has invited the “Seattle Seawards”—the five women of the city council whose vote against vacating Occidental Street to enable billionaire Chris Hansen’s basketball arena inspired sportsbros across the city to flood them with a torrent of rape threats and sexist hate speech—to her Not the White House Correspondents Dinner on April 29.

The five women voted against handing over a portion of Occidental Avenue S. to Hansen because of concerns that a new arena in SoDo would exacerbate traffic problems in the area and make it harder for the Port to do business. Bee featured them on her show, “Full Frontal With Samantha Bee,” after the backlash, which featured grown men telling women to kill themselves and “get back in the kitchen,” among many more vulgar taunts and threats. Three of the five—Sally Bagshaw, Lisa Herbold, and Debora Juarez—have reportedly accepted Bee’s invitation to the shadow correspondents’ dinner,  a black-tie daytime affair that will raise money for journalism scholarships.

2. UPDATE: Well, at least one of the people on the list of perennial candidates, former mayor Mike McGinn, plans to run; this morning at 10:30, he will formally announce his candidacy. McGinn had one term as mayor before losing to Murray in 2013.

Although there have been many reports about “long lists” of credible candidates lining up to challenge besieged Mayor Ed Murray, most of those lists include people who have already said emphatically that they aren’t running for mayor, like Kshama Sawant, Mike O’Brien, and Tim Burgess. Others include people who haven’t said they aren’t running, but who also tend to show up on lists of potential contenders for council or mayor every two years, then disappear from the political rumorscape until the next campaign cycle—former US attorney Jenny Durkan, Seattle Chamber of Commerce CEO Maud Daudon, ex-mayor Mike McGinn.

But here’s one we haven’t heard before: Downtown tunnel opponent, affordable housing advocate, and anti-neoliberalism writer Cary Moon, who Crank hears may be the “well-resourced” female candidate consulting firm Moxie Media has been working with. No confirmation from either Moon or Moxie yet,  but we’ll let you know as soon as we hear yea or nay from either.

3. Operation Nightwatch, the overnight men’s shelter that had to vacate its old digs at the Pearl Warren building in the Little Saigon neighborhood when the city announced it was opening a 24/7 Navigation Center there, has to move again. Earlier this month, the city announced it had found a temporary space for the shelter at the Next 50 Pavilion at Seattle Center, but their time runs out today. Operation Nightwatch Executive Director Rick Reynolds said last week that the group has found a short-term space that will be ready in May, and a longer-term solution beginning in August, but that still leaves a “wretched gap for the next few weeks.” Seattle Human Services Department spokeswoman Meg Olberding said Friday that the city has figured out a way to fill the gap, but did not provide any details about what that solution looks like or when the shelter will relocate.

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.

anti-keystone-council
City Council, Elections, homelessness, Morning Crank, Trump

Morning Crank: Trump Didn’t Give Me Enough Notice

anti-keystone-council1. An anti-Keystone XL Pipeline resolution proposed by council member Kshama Sawant’s resolution would direct the city’s Department of Finance and Administrative Services to come up with a plan to avoid doing business with the 17 banks that have invested in the pipeline. On Monday,  council members said they needed more time to look at the proposal, which Sawant sent out at 9:00 Monday morning hoping for a 9:30 discussion and a 2:00 full council vote.

Sawant’s resolution directs FAS “to investigate ways to establish contracting criteria to prioritize the City’s goals to avoid contracting for banking services to The City of Seattle with financial institutions that provide credit-level facilities or project-level loans to TransCanada.” At the council’s Monday briefings meeting, council member Sally Bagshaw said she felt “steamrolled” by Sawant’s last-minute proposal. “I appreciate the political stripes that we’re trying to show here. That said, I want  to make sure that we’re not making a political decision that’s going to have an negative impact on the fiscal health of the city,” Bagshaw said. To Bagshaw and other council members who said Sawant didn’t give them enough notice before introducing her resolution, Sawant responded, “Well, Trump didn’t give me enough notice” that he was approving Keystone construction.

Tim Burgess, chair of the council’s budget committee, pointed out that when the city decided to divest from Wells Fargo, which is financing the Dakota Access Pipeline, they took their time and “got over 10 legal opinions,” as opposed to passing the resolution the day it was introduced. Another difference between the two resolutions is intent: Originally, the reason the city moved to divest from Wells Fargo was because it committed fraud against its customers; the pipeline issue was tacked on later. That resolution committed the city to partnering with businesses that are “committed to and consistently demonstrate engaging in fair and responsible business practices and avoid conducting City business with partners that engage in criminal or systematic deceptive, fraudulent, or abusive business practices.” It was silent on the issue of banks that aren’t breaking the law, but merely do business with companies, like TransCanada, that the city opposes for political reasons.

It would be one thing if the city had a lot of banking options, and only some banks were “bad.” The problem, according to sources familiar with the proposal, is that insisting on ideological purity could leave the city without a viable banking option. If the city won’t do business with banks that lend to polluters, what justification will it have for turning around and working with banks that finance union-busting corporations, or companies that deny women birth control? The city is reportedly looking into options that would allow it to put some of its money in smaller banks, but state law mandates that the bulk of the city’s money be in large institutions that are stable enough to weather financial storms, to avoid putting city employees’ paychecks and pensions—not to mention many progressive city programs aimed at counteracting Trump Administration policies—at risk.

The council will take up Sawant’s resolution sometime in the next two weeks.

2. When voters passed Initiative 122  last year, creating a public financing system that gives every voter $100 in “democracy vouchers” to spend on the city council candidates of their choice, opponents predicted that businesses and labor would take advantage of the early money, holding “voucher parties” to encourage their members to donate en masse. (The initiative encourages early spending in two ways: It requires the city to mail vouchers out in January, when only the most organized candidates have declared they’re running, and actually funds only a fraction of the vouchers in circulation, creating an incentive for business and labor to anoint and fund their candidates early).

Labor and business groups haven’t thrown their weight behind any candidates yet, but voucher parties have come to pass. The first one is happening this Thursday, when a group of urbanist techies calling themselves “Sea Tech 4 Housing” meet at Optimism Brewing Company on Capitol Hill to support Teresa Mosqueda, one of 10 candidates running for citywide Position 8. The suggested donation: $100—or four $25 democracy vouchers.

3. While some local news stations are wringing their hands over the safety of children playing during the day near a temporary men’s shelter that doesn’t open until 9:30 at night, Operation Nightwatch is worried about where it will go next. The 75-bed men’s shelter was recently displaced from its longtime home in the International District’s Pearl Warren Building, after the city announced it was opening a new 24-7 low-barrier Navigation Center shelter at the site. Last week, the city told the Compass Housing-run shelter it could set up in the Next 50 Pavilion at Seattle Center until April 17, but it’s unclear what will happen after that; Human Services Department spokeswoman Meg Olberding says “We are calling on community members who might have space we can use to let us know, and we are combing our networks to try and find space.”

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.

Diversity, Elections, Equity, homelessness, legislature, Morning Crank, race, State of Washington

Morning Crank: How Many of You Guys Are Catholics?
http://markmiloscia.src.wastateleg.org

1. Earlier this week, I talked to state Sen. Mark Miloscia about a heated conversation he had with a group of student lobbyists from OneAmerica. (A source in Olympia had told me Miloscia grilled the students about their religious affiliations and belittled their views). In Miloscia’s version, he asked the students whether they were “Catholic or Christian” to illustrate a point: Representatives don’t have to have the same skin color or background as constituents in order to represent them. ” I said, ‘You can be represented based on religion, not just skin color,'” Miloscia said. Awkwardly, the group included multiple young women wearing headscarves who were obviously Muslim.

Monica Roman, one of the students who confronted Miloscia about his views on voting rights outside the senate chamber, tells a different story. She says this was actually the second time her student club, Fuerte (“strong” in Spanish) had met with Miloscia. Both times, Roman says, the students argued with Miloscia about the Voting Rights Act, a long-delayed bill that would give citizens a path to challenge voting systems that result in unequal representation. (In Yakima, citizens challenged the city’s at-large city council system, which resulted in an all-white city council in a city with a large Latino population, forcing the city to switch to more representative district elections). Both the Democratic and Republican versions of the bill would make it easier for citizens to challenge local election systems in court, but the Republican bill, sponsored by Miloscia, includes fewer protections and gives cities more time to address unrepresentative systems.

“Last year, we asked if he could represent us, and we said ‘No.’ He asked us again this year,” Roman says. The students told him that “as a white, straight male, he views things from a place of privilege, and he can’t really comprehend our experience. I think that really triggered him. He said, ‘I feel like  you guys are attacking me.'” That’s when Miloscia brought religion into the conversation, Roman says.

“He was like, ‘How many of you guys are Catholics?’ when he could clearly see that we had multiple girls wearing hijabs. We were like, ‘You’re completely disregarding these Muslim girls right in front of you.'” When the group pointed out that some members of the group were Muslim, Roman says Miloscia “pointed out one of our hijabi girls and was like, ‘Can you not represent me?'”

Roman says that unlike last year, when she felt too “awkward” in the private conference room where they met with Miloscia to stand up for herself, this year, she “just laughed in his face. … I just didn’t back down. I was kind of proud of myself. I just didn’t let him yell at me.”

2. Operation Nightwatch, the overnight shelter for men that is being displaced from its current location, the Pearl Warren Building in the International District, has found a temporary home in the Next 50 Pavilion at Seattle Center, Crank has learned. Operation Nightwatch had been renting the space in the Pearl Warren which provides beds for about 75 men a night, from Compass Housing Alliance for $3,100 a month. The city previously told Operation Nightwatch it would help the group find a new space; according to Nightwatch director Rick Reynolds, the city initially handed the group a list of commercial spaces in places like Georgetown and the Rainier Valley, which rented for more than twice as much as their current space.

Meg Olberding, spokeswoman for the city’s Human Services Department, says Operation Nightwatch will not have to pay rent for the space, and can stay at Seattle Center until April 17. ”  The City continues to provide resources through FAS, HSD and OEM to locate a new permanent site for this shelter program,” Olberding said in an email. “Compass is also using its relationships to find a new site, and is considering using the dining hall and lobby of its own administrative facilities as a backup in the case a location cannot be identified.”

 3. At this week’s presentation about paid family leave (council member Lorena Gonzalez is proposing up to 26 weeks of paid leave for all employees in Seattle), consultant Maggie Simich presented some data that starkly illustrates the need for paid time off. Based on a survey of 400 Seattle residents who work in Seattle and 400 Seattle companies of all sizes, the survey found:

  • 41 percent of Seattle residents did not have access to paid parental leave;
  • The smaller the company, the less likely it is to offer paid parental leave; 70 percent of those who worked for a company with fewer than 50 employees said they had access to paid parental leave;
  • Zero percent of employees said they had access to 12 weeks or more of paid leave, not counting vacation and sick time;
  • Half of all companies surveyed do not offer any form of paid family leave at all;
  • Companies in the health care, education, restaurant, and hotel industries were the least likely to offer any kind of paid leave;
  • And, somewhat surprisingly, six out of ten employers who offered paid leave said fewer than 10 percent of their workers had taken any kind of paid family leave within the previous year, belying the common assumption that employees (particularly women, who are most likely to take parental leave) will take advantage of paid leave if it’s offered.

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.