Hello, I'm your host, Brian Calamia.
What's the Seattle City Council doing to get more businesses to fill vacancies downtown as Seattle tries to emerge from the COVID pandemic?
City Hall Park is now clear of homeless encampments.
But how long will that last?
And can this effort be replicated in other parts of Seattle?
Plus, how can the city stop a record number of police officers from leaving the SPD?
Councilmember Andrew Lewis answers these questions and the ones you're sending in to next on Council Edition.
Can you really explain what the council's actions were on the police budget?
It's very different than what the public perception is as advertised by certain actors who frankly have a political agenda.
All that and more coming up next on City Inside Out Council Edition.
and council member Andrew here.
He represents distr Square to Magnolia.
He's a select committee on homel you very much for making busy period of time for t the summer recess here.
H Good, good, good to have to jump right into it an the work the council has b more flexibility to the z Seattle and some other ne allow more types of busin their offices, possibly, possibly.
What are you h this?
And with continuin pandemic as well, do you businesses that are eager
Yeah, so Brian, we've seen a lot of demand for folks to come and return back downtown as return to work looms ahead of us.
You know, that's been delayed for some big employers due to the surgence of the Delta variant.
But we do know that as big employers come back downtown, there's going to be a lot of demand to fill those street level spaces.
There's been a lot of innovative proposals that have come out during the pandemic from property owners who really want to put some new stuff down there at the street level that they haven't been allowed to before.
I'm not sure how aware viewers are, but downtown Seattle actually has some pretty restrictive zoning rules, or use rules, I should say, that don't exist in other neighborhoods.
So if you're in a business district in downtown Ballard or Lake City or Columbia, uh, you know, Columbia Ci of flexibility to allow y uses.
But downtown is pre you want to open a restau you really don't have a l So we're gonna really ope allow for more innovative I'd love to see something, for example, like a factory slash retail sort of placement like the Soto Filson factory.
You know, there's all sorts of different things that we could be doing to get more tenants and a bigger variety of tenants in those spaces and just be primed to time that with the return to work and a resurgent demand for street level use downtown.
Yeah, and I think a very interesting part of this.
The legislation you're working on would essentially open up applications for these permits for about a year.
But if a permit gets granted, it would be good in perpetuity.
And I wanted to talk about this, the potential change downtown on a more permanent basis.
I know you're working on this in South Lake Union too, but changing those neighborhoods a little bit where this might apply for a longer period of time.
Yeah, well, you know, you want to give people the assurance, right, that if they come in and they put in a use as a tenant, that they can continue to do that as long as they're meeting their obligations as a tenant and it's a, you know, it's a productive use of the space.
So we want to give that assurance to folks and say, look, you've got a year.
come forward with some of your innovative options for putting some new energy into the space.
And if you do, you can continue to do it and it can continue to be a part of the community.
And I'm really looking forward to the creativity of some of the folks that come in and want to add some of these new uses to make a vibrant downtown space.
And I think it's going to be a really great addition and make the neighborhood more vibrant.
sure.
A lot of things ge I guess you'd say as we e pandemic here.
I want to t reopening of sorts.
City south of the King County been cleared of encampment You visited the site righ I know there were a lot of public safety concerns around this camp, especially after a camp resident was accused of an attempted rape in a courthouse restroom.
I want to get to where all these people found places to live in just a minute, but there's been so much frustration over the fact that it took this attempted rape, plus a fatal stabbing in this park, a reported assault early this summer for authorities to act.
I had one viewer put it this way to me.
City Council members don't care about what we, the unrich, think.
The courthouse attack is their fault for their lack of holding anyone responsible for their actions ever.
Cranky Cascadia, thank you for the tweet.
Council Member Lewis, how do you respond to that?
yeah i think it first it's important to center we we don't actually know exactly where the person who did that attack in the courthouse uh...
was living so i think it's unfair to uh...
characterize uh...
being the uh...
can operation is really having a link with with an attack like that i think part of this is just that you know to have a broader conversation about the King County Courthouse.
I mean, it is a building where, um, justice is meted out, and it's a building that's full of folks who are standing, you know, accused of crimes.
And, you know, I think part of it is we just need to come up with maybe a better strategy for exactly where we, uh, parse out all these adjudications.
Like, should we have victims of sexual assault coming to the same place to get extreme risk protection orders, for example, as we're also having trials for perpetrators of some of those offenses.
Should those be done in the same facility or different facilities?
So some of it is just inherent to the courthouse as a place is there's going to be unique security concerns that we need to respond to as policymakers.
you know that are independent of things like the camera part uh...
you know the second thing that i would say is is we do know for a fact that there were concerning activities that were happening in that part i'm as you said there was a community member in the early summer was murdered in that part and that is uh...
certainly uh...
something that happened and had to be addressed Uh, you know, the council moved fairly swiftly in April to appropriate $12 million for the just care program, which ultimately was successful in providing placements for the people living in the park.
Uh, you know, all we can do is appropriate the money operationalizing that takes coordination from the executive authorities.
Um, you know, prosecution for people accused of crimes that falls on the county prosecutor in the city attorney.
So You know, all the council can really do is appropriate money for things, then have an oversight obligation to make sure that those things are followed through on.
Just Care was finally, that council funding authority was finally remitted to Just Care on August 1st.
And then I think we saw fairly swift action at Courthouse Park.
It is now the middle of August, and once we had Just Care out there doing their thing, it resolved the situation to everyone's benefit.
To the people living in the encampment, to the neighborhood, and to the Courthouse community.
Yeah, and I wanted to just jump in here and ask about that.
Where do these people end up going?
Where was Just Care able to place them?
And also, how do you replicate this in other parts of the city?
Because I'm sure there are other neighborhoods saying, me next for this type of activity.
What can you say about that?
Well, the first thing I think is important to do is we need to really center the interests of people who are living unhoused in the city at the beginning of any outreach operation, right?
I mean, part of it starts with, you know, who's there, what are their unique needs, and how can we design things programmatically that are responsive and address their needs so that they will accept placements in those kinds of locations.
So, you know, there were about 77 people living in Courthouse Park.
68 of the folks were placed by Just Care.
And there's seven people who are currently on a pending referral list to try to find the exact right placement that will serve some of their underlying public health needs.
That's an extremely low rate of displacement.
That means about two people who were living there were displaced.
Obviously, that was a complicated environment.
There were a lot of people that interacted with and hung out around that park that weren't necessarily living there.
And, you know, not exactly sure to what degree there might have been displacement among those folks.
But in terms of the people living there, very, very low rate of displacement, people going to a whole bunch of different shelter offers, the lion's share of which were the Just Care hotel-based shelters.
So Just Care has a bunch of hotels that they've leased for the term of at least one year where people get wraparound services for substance addiction, behavioral mental health, whatever else someone might need support with.
Basic support like getting people an ID in some cases or giving people access to job training and higher education opportunities.
All of that is happening now for 75 folks who were able to take advantage of those offers, who last week were in a position where they were exposed to extreme heat and smoke, and now they're inside and they're getting their needs met.
Sorry, just to wrap it up, some folks accepted offers to go to tiny house village shelters, also some enhanced shelters the city operates like the Navigation Center.
So we went in with a lot of different options, a much higher rate of acceptance than our past outreach practices.
And to your earlier question, Brian, about how can we scale this, it can scale proportionate to getting more of those shelter options online.
And the county has funded 2,250 shelter placements.
I think only a little over 300 of those have been stood up so far.
The faster we build those, the faster we can do more operations like City Hall.
Got it.
Thank you for breaking all those pieces down.
I want to stick with hotels for just one second because the city has opened two of these to house people who are homeless back in February.
These facilities are taking people in, but it doesn't seem like they're achieving the goal of moving people on to more permanent housing.
It sounds like there's a bottleneck of some sorts here.
Can you tell us what's happening when it comes to moving people out of the hotels into more permanent housing?
Is it this idea of standing up more of these places as you were talking about earlier?
well not so it's i think we are trying to brian is the rapid rehousing component that's and that's not for just care that's for uh...
we have a separate city hotel and program okay okay that is uh...
i remember what the mayor's term for it was it it's like that like the shelter search plan or something like that right right we have two hotels one is the uh...
the king's in belltown the other is the executive hotel specific those hotel spots have dedicated rapid rehousing slots.
The council funded a little over 200 of them, I think maybe 240. So 240 people that go through that program can get into rapid rehousing, which is basically a voucher system where we get people placed into participating apartments where they will have subsidy over the course of a period of 12 months.
in order to get settled in.
And then after that, they hopefully will be supporting themselves.
There are barriers to rapid rehousing.
It's a little higher than we were initially led to believe.
We had a briefing from the Human Services Department in late July, where they indicated that they're actually nearing about 100 of the rapid rehousing placements.
And again, The goal is to get to a little over 200 by the end of the year.
So it is higher than we thought it was going to be.
The Just Care program is going to get access to those rapid rehousing placements as well.
And that was committed to by the Human Services Department in July.
So we expect to see that rapid rehousing number go up.
And of course, we're going to be tracking the success.
There are some folks who have told us, particularly the Lived Experience Coalition, that it would probably be a more successful program given the expense of our housing market if that support could be there for up to two years instead of one going forward.
So I'm going to be monitoring that and that's something I'm going to be really, really interested in.
Make sure that this is an effective program and that we're getting people placed, that they're going to be successful, and most importantly, they're not going to be returning to homelessness once that subsidy ends.
Yeah, yeah, thank you for clarifying those pieces.
I did want to follow up on tiny home villages as well, because I knew I've been working on this for some time here.
I'm going to add a wrinkle to with a question from one of our viewers in a little bit here.
But your effort, it takes a village from the start of this year, had this goal of 800 tiny homes by the end of 2021. It appears that siting these villages, which I know can be a challenge, has been almost less of a problem than providing the services that are needed to go with these homes.
I wanted to talk about where you are with this goal of 800 homes.
Talk to us about some of the new sites that maybe Sound Transit might be able to provide.
I know you've been talking about that, and maybe some overall challenges that you're dealing with right now when it comes to tiny home villages.
Yeah, so at the top, Ryan, I'll confirm that that is definitely true.
Sites are not a problem, and we have tons of sites between Seattle Public Utilities, Seattle City Light, Seattle Department of Transportation, Sound Transit, a lot of faith partners, a lot of churches that have sites.
There are tons of sites to pick from to get to a system total of 800 tiny homes, which would involve 12 new villages being built.
The big bottleneck, as you alluded to, is services.
So tiny house villages have to have onsite attendant services in order to be successful.
A lot of folks that are going from the street to shelter need that additional level of case management for people who can provide treatment for behavioral mental health or substance addiction or a lot of the other public health barriers that our neighbors experiencing chronic homelessness typically have.
We had a hearing last week from our service provider community to discuss some of these barriers and how we can address in the budget.
But, you know, the sites, the tiny houses themselves and the political will is all there to get to get all these sites up.
It's just a matter of making sure we have people that can staff them.
So I'll put out a PSA here.
If you're watching this and you want to.
uh, hop in and help to do your part.
Uh, you know, go and apply for a vacancy at the downtown Emergency Service Center.
You know, apply to go work for the Low Income Housing Institute or the Defender Association or Chief Seattle Club.
Um, you know, we need all hands on deck.
It's a It's sort of a patriotic moment here to make sure we can build up, uh, enough resource to to support, uh, our on house neighbors and provide that kind of assistance.
The last thing that I would say is, despite all of that, six of the 12 villages are expected to be completed before the end of the year.
So I think we are making good headway despite a lot of the hurdles and challenges to get to 12 new villages.
Three of those should be online in October, and that's the village in the University District.
There's a village up in North Seattle on Aurora.
And then an expansion in District 7 in my district, a doubling of the size of the Interbay Village.
Those should all be done in October.
And then the hope is before the end of the year to get an additional three villages, hopefully another one in my district.
I would like to see another District 7 village in addition to the two that we already host.
But that work is coming along despite some of those hurdles, and it's just knock down one bottleneck at a time, and we can get there.
OK, I wanted a final question on homeless to send your way.
It comes in from one of our viewers.
Eric writes this.
Mayor Durkin says that before COVID only about 40% of our homeless population became homeless outside of Seattle, but that percentage is now up to 60% and rising.
Should the Seattle Council do anything to discourage the homeless from moving to Seattle, occupying public space and requiring services like free housing?
The age old question here about a magnet effect when it comes to services and housing in Seattle.
How do you respond to that?
Yeah, so I would just say that we actually haven't really seen any evidence of a broader magnet effect from folks coming from other jurisdictions outside of the state.
At least no more pronounced than any other major American city.
In terms of people, and I think the statistics being referred to is a lot of people from the broader region come to Seattle because this is where a lot of the services are.
And we have certainly seen that, right?
I mean, we have a lot of folks who are from Renton, who are from Auburn, who are from Redmond.
And they end up in Seattle because this is where the services are.
This is where the major hospitals are.
And frankly, in a lot of cases, you know, they get arrested in some of those jurisdictions, and this is where the county jail is.
So I think that the result of all of those things combined mean that we're in sort of a unique place.
I think the way to address that is through the Regional Homelessness Authority.
which is going to finally provide some regional coherence.
I think that we've seen the county acquiring a lot of hotels in some of those suburban cities.
So there's now been hotels acquired in Redmond, in Renton, in Auburn, all gonna be supportive housing for people experiencing homelessness in the region.
And that should take a lot of pressure off of just Seattle being in a position where we need to provide those services.
Thank you.
Thank you for answering that question while you're taking care of a very active cat and a cell phone.
You're judging a lot right here.
So I appreciate that.
You can ask your next question, Brian.
I'm actually going to go grab that cell phone and mute it.
But I'm listening as you ask your next question.
I wanted to make sure I did ask this question here.
The question I wanted to ask is about public safety, another committee on which you serve here.
The council recently reviewed a quarterly budget from the Seattle PD that showed officers are still leaving the department in record numbers.
So from a budgeting standpoint, there's been some savings from that.
So I do want to start there.
The S. P. D. Has my ideas about how to use this money.
The council is reviewing those requests from the S.
P. D. Right now.
So before we get into this larger issue of officer attrition, I do want to talk about that.
What do you think of the S.
P. D. Supposed proposals about where these dollars this $15 million should be going?
Yeah, so we're still seeing high attrition, as you just mentioned, from the department, Brian.
We're also seeing increased optimism about the recruiting that's occurring.
And we're also seeing the attrition begin to ebb from the high that we were seeing last year and start to go down a little bit more, though it is still record attrition.
We do expect to have a good second half of the year in recruiting, like that kind of came out in our committee hearing last week, where we do expect to mostly meet the goals that the council set for the department last year.
You know, the council funded 114 new hires.
We expect that it'll come in around that number.
I expect the council is likely also going to fund a full hiring class for next year as well.
In terms of things we can do right now, because I think there's a lot of community desire that we see increased police staffing.
There's really not much that can be done beyond funding the cap of the amount of officers that can go through the academy.
That's 114 council fully funded.
So I think what it really comes down to is what can we do to set up alternative services and things that can take some of those calls so we can free up officers to respond to things only they can respond to.
And there's some of that in these proposals that have been coming down from the department and the mayor.
They want to put some money in to start up this triage one response service, which is going to be based in the new public safety department.
Triage one is going to respond to calls that officers don't have to do and that they're currently expected to do, that's going to save a lot of time if officers no longer have to go to this whole class of calls.
You know, we've seen the Health One service expand, and that service is going to be tripled by the end of 2021, which should make a big difference.
And then finally, you know, the department wants to hire a new class of community service officers.
These are officers who have backgrounds in social work and community organizing.
It's a good investment because typically the way that they operate is a patrol officer will respond to a call for service.
It's evident when they get there, this doesn't need a police officer.
So they clear the call and they dispatch a community service officer who can help deescalate people, do system navigation for social services.
or all sorts of other attendant things that they're capable of doing.
So those are the things I'm most excited about to provide tangible service benefit to what people can see and experience on the street.
What we need to make sure that we're doing is continuing to stand up these alternative civilian services so that sworn officers are only responding to things we need them to respond to.
Got it.
I wanted to focus of officer attrition.
If do have a number of offi 100 at the start of the y of them through the end o I heard at that most recen there.
And I think you've interviews from these of are not feeling supported I know in that recent mee Herbold council member Pe of thanks for officers wh job.
But I know there are thinking, wait a minute.
Just last year, this council was talking about defunding the police by 50%.
So I wanted to ask the question, how do you improve the trust between the department and the council to get the buy-in of rank and file officers as the city continues down this path of reimagining public safety?
Yeah, well, I think it's important to say, you know, the council needs to continue to admonish bad police work the same way we need to continue to respect and hold up good police work, right?
I mean, we have an oversight obligation.
I think that from reading those exit interviews, and I've read quite a few of them, there certainly are issues with the things that some council members say about the police.
There's also quite a lot of complaint in those exit interviews about command staff and command decisions.
I think that what's really hard for the council is when we see things which we now have significant public record about, a Sentinel review from the Office of the Inspector General confirming that certain strategic decisions the department made last summer made matters worse and exacerbated public disturbances through police decisions made by the command staff.
When we see situations like a federal judge, Judge Jones, make a ruling from the bench that the police were in open violation of federal orders using excessive and unconstitutional force against demonstrators.
These are things that I see and I say, look, what's the council supposed to do?
We can't sit back and stay silent when our police force in our name is doing things that objective oversight actors are saying are wrong.
And, you know, I'm going to tell you, Brian, I don't necessarily blame the frontline officers that are just following orders.
But, you know, I think that there is something to be said for the need for more accountability from the top of the department.
We have not really seen any admonishment or accountability for people in the high level of the police command that made some of those calls last summer.
And I think we need to address some of those frustrations to regain trust, because you're right, rank and file officers are suffering poor morale as a result of a system where you have a lot of community frustration with a department where they're not seeing sufficient accountability.
So I think that has to be part of it.
We also, the council, I'm sure, as I said earlier, will continue to fund hiring new classes, recruiting classes of officers as we go through this bridge period of standing up alternative services.
And I think we also, you know, and this is a connection I made at the committee.
Look, it's about officer wellness to say, officer, you don't have to respond to a person down call.
You don't have to respond to someone in mental health crisis.
Like we're going to send a different service to do that and take it off your load so you can do what you were trained to do.
And I think that has to be part of this conversation as well.
So, you know, I think that we all need to take a step back and contextualize it.
I think it's important to contextualize that most of the council's actions have actually been in that vein of standing up alternative services.
I would say this.
If there's any officers watching, the council has not made a single cut to a police officer position.
The cuts that we've made have been moving civilian entities to other departments in the city.
And it's important that they're actually, these be accurately communicated because I think there's a morale effect there too.
When you have certain political actors in the city misrepresenting council actions, that has an effect on it as well.
Because I think when you really explain what the council's actions were on the police budget, it's very different than what the public perception is as advertised by certain actors who frankly have a political agenda.
So I think I'll leave it at that.
Thank you for breaking all those pieces down.
I have one last question I'd love to try to squeeze in here when it comes to less lethal weapons.
And I know we could spend a whole show on this one, but moving from this total ban to a more restrictive list of things that would be banned like blast balls, tear gas, etc.
Tell us about this process briefly.
If you think it'll pass muster with Judge James Robart in the federal consent decree process got about a minute and a half.
Yeah.
So, you know, Council Member Herbold, I think, has done a really good job navigating a very complicated area with some feedback from the judge and the monitor that I don't completely agree with.
But I will tell you, I mean, they're the judge and they're the monitor.
And until we're out from under that consent decree, we are, to a certain extent, confined by some of the rules in the consent decree and the decisions that the judge and the monitor make.
I think that Council Member Herbold has responded to that feedback to craft a policy that is going to have real implications for limiting the use of these weapons that the department has historically had very little formal restriction on.
I don't think this is the end of this work, and we need to continue to work within the consent decree framework and beyond to strengthen these provisions.
And I think it's a good start.
I'm going to vote on it today for it, as I did in committee.
And hopefully, we can build on it as time goes by here.
All right.
Thank you very much, Council Member Andrew Lewis, joining us for Council Edition.
We will see you next time on the show.
Thanks very much.