Tag: Trump

City Council, homelessness, Trump, Uncategorized

Grim Outlook for Local Homelessness Programs Under Trump’s Slash-and-Burn Cuts
KCRHA deputy CEO Simon Foster

By Erica C. Barnett

During the second meeting of the City Council’s special committee on the impact of federal funding cuts last week, housing and homeless service providers laid out in stark terms what will happen when, not if, cuts to federal funding for housing development and services for people experiencing homelessness or housing insecurity kick in.

The housing impacts alone will be broad and widespread across every kind of affordable housing, from buildings financed privately through federal tax credits to permanent supportive housing that relies heavily on federal support.

Services that help keep people housed, such as health care, will also become harder to access, as the Trump administration targets Medicaid recipients—cutting funds and imposing work requirements on the state’s poorest residents, including many with disabilities that make it impossible to work.

Meanwhile, the region’s homelessness agency stands to lose the federal funding that is the agency’s third-largest funding source, and is now facing a choice about whether to comply with the administration’s new mandate to verify their clients’ immigration status and provide that information to ICE.

“We know that immigration verification requirements have a chilling effect that extends throughout the community, and that even documented individuals are less likely to seek help,” King County Regional Homelessness Authority deputy CEO Simon Foster said, because “they are afraid of the repercussions to themselves, their friends and their families.”

The meeting offered a first look at the impacts federal cuts will have on the housing and homelessness system locally. The speakers—who, in addition to Foster, included Naomi See from Hunt Capital Partners, Jess Blanch from Enterprise Community Partners, interim Chief Seattle Club director James Lovell, and Downtown Emergency Service Center director Daniel Malone—described a bleak cascade of consequences.

– KCRHA, which received $66 million directly and indirectly, through King County, from HUD’s Continuum of Care program last year, is bracing for cuts that could impact ongoing contracts with housing providers and direct subsidies to help people stay in their housing. Overall, nearly 2,200 formerly homeless people could be at risk of losing their housing from federal cuts, along with another 2,300 in transitional housing and other programs. More than 240 people in programs funded through KCRHA could lose their jobs if the programs they operate are eliminated.

PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you.
CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.

Support PubliCola

– The federal Low Income Housing Tax Credit program, which helps fund most affordable housing projects, could drop in value dramatically, limiting its effectiveness. LIHTC is complicated to explain, but basically, states award federal tax credits to developers who sell them to investors at a discounted rate—say, 90 cents on the dollar. If that rate gets too low for the developers to build their projects, they have to seek funding from “gap funders,” like the city and county, or forego building.

The reasons this is happening, See said, are at least twofold: Corporate tax rates are likely to increase soon, which makes investors place a lower value on housing tax credits, and tariffs on Canada and Mexico are likely to increase the cost of materials used in construction, including drywall and lumber, making it harder for new housing to pencil out.

– The state’s Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), which helps low-income people pay their utility bills and weatherize their homes, could be cut. Earlier this month, the Trump administration eliminated the entire federal LIHEAP program as part of the mass firings at the Department of Health and Human Services, throwing the future of state-level programs in question.

According to Jess Blanch, from the affordable housing funder Enterprise Community Partners, Washington received $66 million from the federal government for LIHEAP last year, providing utility assistance to households with an average income of 150 percent of the federal poverty rate— $22,590 for a one-person household or $46,800 for a household of four.

– Cuts to two federal programs that help house people and keep them housed, Section 8 and the less-known Section 4, which helps community-based housing providers build capacity to increase their effectiveness, could dramatically increase homelessness, Blanch said. Enterprise and one of its partners recently received notice from DOGE that “due to our supposed non compliance with the DEI executive order,” HUD is freezing their funds, impacting providers like DESC that were set to receive grants.

– Individual organizations that rely on federal funding, including DESC, stand to lose huge chunks of their operating budgets thanks to slash-and-burn cuts at HUD, HHD, and Medicaid. Malone noted that DESC gets about a quarter of its funding from federal sources. In late March, DESC learned that a federal grant that funds outreach and engagement with opioid users had been eliminated (along with the entire federal agency that oversees substance use and mental health treatment across the country), forcing DESC to “scramble to figure out what to do about how to manage the loss of those funds,” Malone said.

– Funding for opioid addiction treatment through Medicaid could also be at risk, since Trump seems determined to go after states that expanded Medicaid. “Reductions in federal cost share of Medicaid expansion would result in a huge hit to the state, and the state would have to figure out how they were going to continue people on health insurance if that were to happen,” Malone said.

These are state and federal issues, not merely local ones, but the city could make funding decisions that help offset the current and future cuts. Revenue is one option, although the council has not shown much appetite for new taxes—a modest capital gains tax, proposed by Rinck and her colleague Cathy Moore during last year’s budget, could provide some funding, but the council majority rejected this option, arguing that there wasn’t enough data about the need for funding rent and food assistance.

Lovell, from the Chief Seattle Club, noted that “no matter what we do, that level of federal funding that’s at risk cannot simply just be absorbed without something having to go away. And the only way to prevent that, I think, is with a different revenue source” from the state, King County, or the city. Lovell said the council would “probably have to have a special budget session just to kind of brush up on what the federal impacts have been and how they’ve passed through to the city.”

So far, the committee has focused on surfacing problems, rather than identifying solutions that the council can advocate and implement. That has value in itself—but only if the rest of the council chooses to listen and take action based on the flood of, yes, data they’re receiving about people who will be directly impacted by the cuts.

podcasts

Seattle Nice: IS Elon a “Smart Innovator”? And: More About that Tree Story

By Erica C. Barnett

We managed to dig in to three (!) hot topics on this week’s episode of Seattle Nice: Mayor Bruce Harrell’s comment that Trump “surrounds himself by some of the smartest innovators around”—Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, David Sacks, and Marc Andreessen; a Seattle Times story about the ongoing closure of Victor Steinbrueck Park on the waterfront due to a dispute over two controversial totem poles; and the story I wrote about two women who sold a house that had been in their family for more than 70 years and walked into a buzzsaw of anger when activists learned the buyer planned to cut down a large tree on the property.

That tree story continues to get more comments than just about anything I’ve ever written, most of them calling me angry and biased and saying I have a vendetta against trees. If you haven’t read it, don’t get too excited—it’s a reported piece about what happened with one tree when the family that owned the property decided to sell it after their mother died at 101.

Tree Action Seattle created an action page for “Grandma Brooks’ Cedar” and led protests against the removal of the tree, claiming that the former owner, Barbara Brooks, cherished the cedar and told various people verbally that she wanted it saved after she died. Her daughters, including one who lived with her during the last years of her life, said nothing could be further from the truth: “Mom hated that tree,” they both told me independently—and no one called her “Grandma Brooks.”

Both women were quite upset at the way Tree Action and some neighbors have characterized their mother and her wishes after her death, and said they no longer feel comfortable in their old neighborhood. Tree Action, meanwhile, has doubled down, saying the sisters previously said that they planned to save the tree, reneged, and are now lying.

Activists from outside the neighborhood, as well as some neighbors, have argued that I should have discounted the Brooks’ story about their own experience and reported that their stories were false—or, at the very least, presented the Brooks’ version as dubious compared to the narrative on Tree Action’s “Grandma Brooks’ Cedar” page. Ultimately, reporting usually involves speaking to human beings and reporting their version of events; in this case, I found the Brooks sisters to be very credible when describing their own family’s story.

PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you.
CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.

Support PubliCola

 

Both sisters’ stories were remarkably consistent: They told me their mother “hated that tree” because it required so much maintenance, and recalled that neighbors did not pitch in to help when their mother was alive and taking care of the tree on her own. They laughed bitterly at the image of their mother lovingly carrying buckets of water out to the tree in the summer; she did water her flowers with a bucket when it was hot, they said, but not the tree—which, both mentioned, prevented their mother from gardening in a large portion of her yard.

Both sisters also mentioned that neighbors often pestered their mother to put a covenant on the property to save the tree, but she refused. “My neighbor across the street— for years he would tell my mom, ‘When you sell this house, put it in writing that this tree has to stay,’ and she said, ‘No—don’t tell me what to do,'” one of her daughters, Beverly, told me.

In the end, like most families who sell their houses, the Brooks sold for the best price they could get and moved on—thinking, they said, that this would be the end of the story. “Don’t homeowners, after they pay taxes for 75 years, have the right to sell the place?” daughter Barbara said.

Like, I have to imagine, most people who live in Seattle, I love trees. Seattle’s natural beauty is one of the primary reasons I decided to move here. But I also know that the only way to meaningfully protect the city’s tree canopy long-term is by planting more trees for future generations to enjoy, including trees in public spaces like parks (where a 2023 study found that more than half the tree canopy loss in the city is actually occurring). The new development on the Brooks’ property, for instance, includes six new privately owned trees and one new street tree. No, those new trees won’t immediately replace the shade of the one tree that was removed. But they will eventually.

That’s the thing about trees: They often live longer than we do, long enough for us to forget about the context in which they actually grew. An 80-year-old, or even 100-year-old, cedar is not part of some old-growth forest—it was almost certainly planted, as landscaping, by the people who built the resource-hogging single-family houses that now make up neighborhoods like Ravenna. Go way back, and you’ll find, yes, developers who clear-cut the ancient forest that used to cover this part of the Pacific Northwest, scraping the ground bare so that white colonizers could live here in the manner they preferred.

Should North Seattle homeowners have to think about that every time they look up at a tree on someone’s private lawn and awe at the sweep of its branches? I’m not saying that, but I do think some perspective is in order. Banning private land owners from removing every large but not exceptional tree, which some advocates argue should happen as part of an upcoming review of the city’s tree ordinance, will indeed protect isolated older trees in people’s yards. It will also directly prevent the development of desperately needed housing in Seattle—pushing more and more people into distant exurbs, which can only be built by destroying the healthy forests that are large trees’ natural habitat.

 

Maybe Metropolis

Separated at Birth: “In this House” Seattle Liberals and Project 2025
Photo by Lauri Shaull, via Wikimedia Commons

By Josh Feit

Seattle’s pro-housing activists used to rightly call out the hypocrisy of “In This House” Wallingford liberals whose exclusionary zoning politics seemed too ideologically close for comfort with Donald Trump’s Build the Wall politics.

This was circa 2017, when local progressives were pointing to Seattle’s history of housing-covenant racism as a way to expose the ugliness of Seattle’s single-family zoning paradigm. Still campaigning for universal housing access (sigh), local YIMBYs now have the receipts on the philosophical similarity between Trumpism and Seattle’s angry zoning rules, which make it impossible to build apartments in most neighborhoods. May I point you to page 511 of Project 2025 which says the future Trump “Administration should oppose any efforts to weaken single-family zoning.” There you have it, Alki, Magnolia, Queen Anne, Laurelhurst, and Seward Park: Seattle is a Trumpist safe space. (The housing section of Project 2025 was written by Ben Carson, Trump’s former Department of Housing and Urban Development director.)

As Erica and I have documented here, here, here, and here, the Harrell administration had to be dragged kicking and screaming to minimally comply with new state zoning requirements, proposed by State Rep. Jessica Bateman (D-22, Olympia), that allow more housing in traditional single-family zones. While the Harrell administration’s new 10-year Comprehensive Plan proposal makes a nod to the state mandate for fourplexes—it includes new density bonuses for stacked flats, including larger, family-size units, and no longer completely exempts 15 percent of the city from the new mandates—the mayor’s governing conceit remains bullish on the same old failed 1994 model of “neighborhood planning” that sequesters density onto busy arterial roads.

PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you.
CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.

Support PubliCola

 

Sadly, cordoning off density not only artificially inflates housing prices by putting a cap on development, but it undermines effective transit and saddles lower-income people with the environmental and safety hazards of car-choked streets. In Seattle, it also segregates low-income kids from the best schools and makes it impossible to run out and buy a frozen pizza or laundry detergent after 10:00 pm.

A closer look at Project 2025’s reasoning for opposing more flexible housing rules tracks to Seattle homeowners’ own familiar arguments against adding density. You just have to translate the national context to the local context to hear the “neighborhood character,” local-control pathology in Trump’s go-to document.

Again, quoting Project 2025: “American homeowners and citizens know best what is in the interest of their neighborhoods and communities. Localities rather than the federal government must have the final say in zoning laws and regulations.” Sub in “individual neighborhoods” for “localities” and city government for “the federal government,” and I could be quoting any anti-renter homeowner testifying at city hall or writing on the butcher paper at an Office of Planning and Community Development outreach meeting.

Project 2025 goes on to mirror Seattle’s “lefty” housing opponents, with another classic reactionary canard: That the real answer to the housing crisis is preserving existing houses.

“Along the same lines,” the document continues, “Congress can propose tax credits for the renovation or repair of housing stock in rural areas so that more Americans are able to access the American Dream of homeownership.” Not only does that Project 2025 logic echo the Seattle NIMBY argument that there’s no need for new housing, but it’s hard to miss the similarities between Trump’s idealization of “rural areas” and Seattle’s preservationist mentality, which says we don’t need more development in our neighborhoods, we simply need to make do with what we’ve got. Of course, what Seattle NIMBYs are trying to preserve is a idealized mid-20th-century version of the city that excludes renters, low-income people, and new buildings that don’t conform to the current “neighborhood character.”

While blue cities like Chicago and Denver have announced they will not cooperate with the Trump administration’s nativist agenda, Seattle’s leaders have remained largely mum on MAGA’s looming assault. In the immediate wake of Trump’s 2016 win, then-mayor Ed Murray announced that Seattle “would not be bullied by this administration into abandoning our core values” and went on to sue the Trump administration in defense of sanctuary cities. Fast forward: Current Seattle Mayor Harrell is taking the olive branch approach, saying, “I’m not going to D.C. with my fist balled. That’s just not how I lead. I look for opportunities … no matter who’s in the White House.”

Given Harrell’s grumpy response to a state mandate to allow more density in single family zones, the opportunity to partner with the Trump administration on the NIMBY aspirations spelled out in Project 2025 should be popular in Seattle.

Josh@PubliCola.com

Police

SPD Confirms Two Seattle Officers Were in D.C. During Wednesday Riots

By Paul Kiefer

In a Friday night post on the Seattle Police Department Blotter blog, interim Seattle Police Chief Adrian Diaz confirmed that two officers were in Washington, D.C. during the riots at the US Capitol on Wednesday, though he could not confirm whether the officers took part in the attack on the U.S. Capitol Building. Diaz wrote that SPD referred the two officers to the Office of Police Accountability (OPA) for further investigation; the OPA will review whether the officers violated SPD policy and whether their actions could merit criminal charges.

“If any SPD officers were directly involved in the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol,” he added, “I will immediately terminate them.” For the time being, the two officers are on administrative leave.

OPA Director Andrew Myerberg confirmed the news on Friday, adding that the department learned the officers had been in D.C. through posts on a social media account. The two officers already under investigation were not on duty on Wednesday; Myerberg told PubliCola that they were either furloughed or used vacation days; both are patrol officers. He also noted that the OPA is “looking into the identities of other SPD employees who may have attended,” though he did not confirm that more than two officers were present in D.C.

Despite claims from MSNBC contributor and former Seattle city council candidate Naveed Jamali that the officers were a couple, SPD has not confirmed any relationship between the two officers.

The announcement comes only hours after retired SPD Chief Carmen Best, Mayor Jenny Durkan and regular SPD ally Scott Lindsay joined calls for Seattle Police Officers’ Guild president Mike Solan to apologize or resign in response to tweets in which Solan appeared to blame Black Lives Matter activists for the attack on the U.S. Capitol. “As someone who has fought for police reform and defended Seattle Police against defunding,” Lindsay wrote in a tweet on Friday afternoon, “I have a duty to call out when the head of their union spreads misinformation about the Capitol attack.” A subsequent statement from Durkan called Solan’s claims “wrong [and] immoral,” adding that they expect the OPA to investigate Solan for the tweets; the OPA will now treat the mayor’s statement as a complaint to be reviewed.

Both officers under investigation by the OPA are SPOG members.

Addiction, Drugs, Health, homelessness, human services, Morning Crank, Transit, Transportation

Afternoon Crank: Bad News for Sound Transit, a Good Idea From Sound Transit, and Grandstanding on Forced “Treatment”

1. Yesterday afternoon, Sound Transit CEO Peter Rogoff revealed some bad news that could spell trouble up and down the planned Link light rail corridor: The Federal Way station and light rail extension, which was approved as part of the Sound Transit 2 ballot measure in 2008, is now projected to cost $460 million more than anticipated. That increase—the result, Sound Transit staff said yesterday, of escalating land, materials, and labor costs—pushes the price tag for the Federal Way extension up to $2.5 billion. Of that total, $500 million is supposed to come from the federal government—and President Trump has proposed no longer awarding capital investment grants for transit projects, including those that have already been approved. In briefing materials for yesterday’s meeting, Sound Transit expressed optimism at the fact that “In response to the Administration’s proposal to no longer award new [Capital Investment Grants], Congress is demonstrating its strong, bicameral and bipartisan commitment to keep the CIG program funded.” However, the fate of the Federal Way grant, as well as a $1.2 billion grant for a northern light rail extension to Lynnwood, which is also $500 million over budget, is ultimately in the hands of the administration, which has been dragging its feet even on grants that the Federal Transportation Administration has already approved.

On Thursday, Rogoff said Sound Transit had “the financial strength to withstand increased project costs, lower than anticipated federal funding,” or a recession, but if two or more of those problems occur simultaneously, it would “put stress on our ability to deliver.”  Rogoff said he was “cautiously optimistic” about the likelihood that Sound Transit would win both grants. However, he added that “In the coming months, the staff and board will have to look closely at how some of these same pressures will impact the rest of the system,” and how market forces in particular (like high construction costs) “could have impacts across the more than two decades of projects of delivery ahead of us.”

In addition to those two financial question marks, Federal Way faces a separate challenge: Revenues have been falling short in the Board members and Rogoff hinted yesterday at another possible way of saving money, if the federal grants don’t come through: By shifting federal dollars from one of the five Sound Transit subareas (say, the North King County subarea, which includes Seattle) into the South King subarea, Sound Transit could fund the Federal Way extension. Sound Transit has a policy called subarea equity that requires funds raised in each of five geographic subareas to be spent in that area, but that policy does not apply to federal funding. As Rogoff said Thursday, “The Sound Transit 3 plan gives the Sound Transit board broad discretion over how to allocate federal assistance between subareas as necessary to complete the system plan, and as necessary to focus federal funding on the subareas facing the greatest challenges.”

Of course, if the Trump Administration decides to starve transit agencies of funding, the question of  where to spend federal funds will be the least of Sound Transit’s problems.

Support

2.The Sound Transit board also approved a new policy that will allow drivers of single-occupancy vehicles (SOVs) to buy monthly parking permits at park-and-rides that are currently over 90 percent of capacity on weekdays, which will provide certainty for solo commuters, who often have to show up well before 7am or drive around looking for scarce free parking in the lots. The new permits would cost drivers, on average, $90 a month (the exact price for reserved parking at each lot is still TBD), but low-income drivers (those who are eligible for the low-income ORCA Lift pass) would pay around $30 a month. Meanwhile, carpool permits, which currently cost $5 a month, would become free. Half the space in park-and-ride lots subject to the new rules will be reserved, but the rest will still be available free of charge to carpool as well as solo drivers.

The idea behind the SOV permits is to raise revenue for Sound Transit (about $2 million a year) while giving people a financial incentive to carpool to transit instead of driving alone. (The permits will also, incidentally, make driving alone more convenient for people who choose to pay for new SOV permits). Editorializing here: Given that commute-trip reduction (reducing the number of commuters who drive alone) has been official state policy since 1991 , why not encourage carpooling (and increase revenues)  by not only making HOV permits free, but charging a parking fee to everyone who chooses to drive alone?

3. One Table, the long-dormant task force charged with coming up with solutions to the root causes of homelessness, will meet again this coming Friday for the first time since April. In advance of that meeting, five mayors of King County cities (Renton, Bellevue, Kent, Auburn, and Kirkland) wrote a letter to the chairs of the task force urging action in several areas, including behavioral health. Specifically, they suggested that One Table look at ways that people who “refuse treatment … could be helped by new legislation allowing for involuntary treatment for those presenting an imminent likelihood of serious harm to self or others, or who are gravely disabled as a result of substance use disorder.”

The legislation, known as Ricky’s Law, allows specially designated mental health professionals to detain people who “present at risk of harm to self or others, or are gravely disabled as a result of a substance use disorder” in a secure detox facility,  where people can be physically restrained, secluded, and forced to stay, for up to 17 days.

The immediate  problem, as is always the case when the conversation around homelessness turns to no-cost detox or “treatment on demand” for people experiencing homelessness, is that there simply aren’t enough treatment beds for even a fraction of the people who need them. Actually, in King County, there aren’t any secure detox facilities.

So why not just ship people with incapacitating addiction outside the county? Statewide, there are only about 46 secure beds, total—22 in Chehalis and another 24 in Spokane. Because Ricky’s Law does not allow cities to detain people with addiction if there are no beds available, suggesting it as a solution for homeless people struggling with addiction in King County smacks of grandstanding.

And even if a person in King County was detained and sent to Chehalis or Spokane, the “treatment” provided is completely inadequate for severe substance use disorders. Involuntary treatment can work, but it is far more likely to be effective if a person stays for six months to a year or more, and has a supportive place to live and a stable support system when they get out. No one is proposing the kind of intensive, costly care that would actually produce results; instead, they’re misunderstanding what treatment actually is, and treating it like a silver-bullet fix for addiction. Go in to detox, come out cured.
Nor is detox even appropriate for many kinds of addictions. In fact, withdrawing from most substances does not require medical detox. Only alcohol, and in some cases benzodiazepines, require medical management and monitoring for potentially deadly seizures , Heroin and opiates, however—unlike alcohol—have very long withdrawal periods. Seventeen days would barely be enough to even begin treatment after the acute detox phase has passed—and then it’s back (literally) on the street. Relapse, under those conditions, is practically inevitable. Hell, it’s hard for people with jobs and supportive family and outpatient treatment and massive support systems to stay clean. Now try doing it without all that and living on the street.

If you’re addicted to alcohol, the most likely scenario is that you end up right back where you were—drunk on the street, creating a “nuisance” for the same people who reported you to authorities in the first place. If you’re addicted to heroin, relapsing can mean death. In fact, the period immediately after treatment is the most dangerous point for opiate addicts, who often relapse with the dose they’re accustomed to using, and overdose because their body has lost its tolerance to the drug.

Now you’ve got an increase in overdoses and a new round of treatment “failures,” which anti-homeless activists can use as a justification to say, “See? We told you so! They just want to sit around and use drugs and drink, they don’t want to get better!” From a policy, medical, and human perspective, 17-day detox, even if it includes the kind of vague “referrals to services” that we like to provide instead of actually, you know, funding services that actually work and providing housing to help them stick, is almost worse than nothing.

City Council, homelessness, housing, human services, King County, Mayor Durkan, Morning Crank, Transportation

Morning Crank: A “Reset” for Move Seattle

1. The Seattle Department of Transportation and the Durkan administration will soon propose what is being called a “reset” for Move Seattle, the $930 million levy that passed in 2015, to reflect the reality that the federal funding that the city assumed would be available for many of the projects has not come through from the Trump Administration, as well as increased cost estimates for some projects on the levy list.

The “reset” will likely mean significant cuts to some of the projects that were promised in the levy, particularly those that assumed high levels of federal funding, such as seven proposed new RapidRide lines, which were supposed to get more than half their funding ($218 million) from the feds. “They’re calling it a ‘reset,’ but I don’t know what that means,” says city council transportation committee chairman Mike O’Brien.  “It’s not terribly encouraging.” Additionally, O’Brien says, “costs have gone up significantly in the last few years because of the pace of the economy,” making capital projects, in particular, more expensive than the city bargained for.

The City Budget Office and the Seattle Department of Transportation are still having conversations about what the cuts might look like, but according to multiple current and former city staffers familiar with the situation, one possibility is that some of the planned new RapidRide lines might no longer happen on schedule or at all; another is that some projects could be dramatically scaled back, but not eliminated entirely. A third possibility is that some projects could be delayed until a future levy (or Presidential administration) or paid for with other funding sources .Move Seattle taxes will be collected through 2024. The mayor and SDOT are expected to release details of the “reset” in the several weeks.

One possibility is that some of the planned new RapidRide lines might no longer happen on schedule or at all; another is that some projects could be scaled back, but not eliminated entirely.  

The city was counting on about $564 million in federal funds to leverage the $930 million in local tax dollars in the voter-approved levy, but since the 2016 election, all bets are off. (Seattle’s sanctuary city status has prompted several threats from the Trump Administration to withhold federal grant funding from the city.)  SDOT has not released a 2017 financial report for Move Seattle, so it’s difficult to say how much federal money came in during the first full year under the new federal regime, but in 2016, the city received and spent just $16.3 million in federal funds on Move Seattle projects—a tiny fraction of that $564 million total. I have requested the 2017 spending report for Move Seattle from SDOT and will update this post if I receive it.

The projects on this list that could be particularly at risk for cuts include those that rely heavily on federal funding, including not just the seven RapidRide lines but bridge safety improvements, pedestrian safety projects, and sidewalks in neighborhoods that don’t currently have them. The percentage of federal funds assumed for each category of projects ranges from none to 86.7 percent.

“We’re still giving between 70 and 75 percent of our lane miles [downtown] over to folks that are only 25 percent of the [commuter] population. To me, that seems like a really inequitable use of public space.” – Council member Rob Johnson  

It’s a particularly inopportune time for more bad news from SDOT. Last week, Mayor Jenny Durkan announced she was putting the Center City Streetcar on “pause” because of dramatic cost overruns, and earlier this week, Durkan announced that the city would delay a long-planned protected bike lane on Fourth Avenue in downtown Seattle until 2021, when the Northgate light rail station opens, ostensibly to avoid eliminating motorized traffic lanes on Fourth during the upcoming “period of maximum constraint” downtown. Interim SDOT director Goran Sparrman got an earful about the delayed bike safety improvements from both O’Brien and council member (and former Transportation Choices Coalition director) Rob Johnson during his presentation on the One Center City plan earlier this week; Johnson said that one of his “frustrations” was that although the city says it prioritizes pedestrians, cyclists, and transit riders over cars, its actions downtown have done exactly the opposite. “It’s not just that we aren’t dedicating enough of the center city to bicycle facilities, but ditto on the transit side of things, Goran,” Johnson said. “We’re still giving between 70 and 75 percent of our lane miles [downtown] over to folks that are only 25 percent of the [commuter] population. To me, that seems like a really inequitable use of public space.”

2. On Wednesday, with little fanfare, One Table—the 91-member work group tasked with coming up with recommendations to address the regional homelessness crisis—released its recommendations, in a nine-page document that includes no cost estimates, no funding proposals, and no timeline for implementing any of the ideas on the list. The city of Seattle’s progressive revenue task force, which recommended a tax on employers that could raise up to $75 million annually, has said that it would wait until One Table to release its recommendations before recommending additional taxes, with the ultimate goal of raising a total of $150 million a year.

The recommendations, which were released jointly by King County and the cities of Seattle and Auburn, are mostly familiar: Providing 5,000 units of affordable housing across the county over three years, by building new housing and by “increasing access to existing housing choices”; treatment on demand; financial assistance for housing, including short-term help for people in crisis; and increased investment in job programs for people at risk of homelessness. Since the list of “actions” doesn’t include any dollar amounts, it’s hard to assess how ambitious the proposal truly is, but 5,000 units in three years throughout King County (to say nothing of the three-county Puget Sound region) will house fewer than half of the 12,000 people living outdoors or in sanctioned encampments or shelters in King County alone. Job programs and homelessness prevention efforts will undoubtedly prevent some people from falling into homelessness and making that number even larger, but until it’s clear how the recommendations would cost and where the money would come from, it’s hard to say what impact the proposals will have, and whether One Table will live up to its promise to “best tackle this problem to ensure expansive and lasting solutions,” as Mayor Jenny Durkan put it when the work group held its first meeting in January.

If you enjoy the work I do here at The C Is for Crank, please consider becoming a sustaining supporter of the site or making a one-time contribution! 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 time I put into reporting and writing for this blog and on social media, as well as reporting-related and office expenses. Thank you for reading, and I’m truly grateful for your support.