I'm your host, Brian Kellerman.
What's next in the city's attempt to stand up another hotel as a shelter for homeless people?
And who's accountable for an incident involving blast balls, tear gas, and pepper spray after a surprise announcement from the Seattle Police Department?
Council Member Andrew Lewis joins me to discuss these issues and the ones you're asking about, too, next on Council Edition.
Regardless of what we do with this other money, that is not going to have an impact on number of officers on the street.
All that and more coming up next on City Inside Out, Council Edition.
And I am joined by Councilmember Andrew J. Lewis.
He, of course, is the chair of the Council's Committee on Homelessness, also represents District 7 on the council.
I should point out that Councilmember Tammy Morales was scheduled to be here, but canceled her appearance with us.
Councilmember Lewis, I want to talk about the city's approach to the COVID pandemic.
at a time when we appear at least a little bit her a lot of input now about w relief dollars that are c assistance, food banks, options there.
What are y
Well, Brian, thank you for having me here.
And thanks for queuing it up with this really important question, a $200 million question, as it were.
We are getting a significant amount of money in two separate tranches from the federal government.
This should be totaling somewhere around $220 million in total or somewhere thereabouts.
That first portion coming in this spring And we're currently deciding how we are going to divvy that up and what we are going to use that investment for.
It is fairly unfettered in terms of the guidance we've received from the federal government, though there are a couple of sideboards that our central staff are apprising us of that's coming in.
But we should really be leaning in to using this resource significantly to meet the scale of the crisis and our ongoing state of emergency on homelessness.
This coming fall, we're going to see the six-year anniversary of a state of emergency on homelessness.
We know even predating that declaration of state of emergency, this has been a really big issue in our community of having so many of our neighbors living with housing insecurity, living in tents, living in doorways, and really making sure at all levels we can leverage this federal support to meet the scale of that crisis.
And that does mean rental assistance when these rent moratoriums expire to make sure people can stay inside, that we don't have more people entering into homelessness, making sure that we are standing up well-funded and well-resourced shelter options that are desirable for folks to exit a state of homelessness, so tiny house villages in particular, which I know we'll probably talk about later in the program.
And really making sure that we're investing in the kind of outreach, engagement-led programs like Just Care that we've seen be very, very successful in the Chinatown International District in Pioneer Square.
in getting people inside and having a high success rate with individuals that historically have been determined to be service resistant.
The reality is we haven't been adjusting our practices to meet their needs.
And I think Just Care has been showing how we can do that and how it can really change the paradigm.
Let me let me break apart a few of those points if I could with you councilmember Lewis here Because I know that you have a meeting coming up as we're taping the show here a few days from now When it comes to your committee on homelessness there I know you had a bit of a tense meeting a few weeks ago when it came to that committee With regard to street sinks these hygiene facilities for people who might be living on the street Council's been pushing on this for some time right now hasn't made a lot of progress I'd like to talk about that piece and I'd like to talk about the possibility of a third hotel in from the city here, because I know both of those issues were getting stuck, and I want to know what was going on.
Yeah, so I'll start with the street sinks.
And for those who are unfamiliar out there, we've been working with a group over at the University of Washington called the Clean Hands Project that has come up with an innovative model of street sink, which is basically a, you know, it's like you take kind of like a plastic tub that you might get at a Home Depot or a Lowe's, uh, you kind of put it to garden, uh, a little drai into that little mini gar a rain garden.
It's a re and adaptive hygiene faci the community.
And this i I'm happy to support beca council member Morales t Charles Ferro, City of Boulder, City of Boulder, City of Boulder, City of Boulder, City of Boulder, City of Boulder, City of Boulder, City of Boulder, City of Boulder, City of Boulder, City of Boulder, City of Boulder, City of Boulder, City of Boulder, City of Boulder, City of Boulder, City of Boulder, City of Boulder, City of Boulder, Thousands of people, as we're all aware in our community, who are living with housing insecurity, who are living in tents, who don't have access to running water.
We have seen the spread.
I serve on the Board of Health along with Councilmember Morales.
the spread of diseases that are spread through a lack of ability to wash hands, like hepatitis A.
Hepatitis C is born by needles.
Hepatitis A is driven by bodily fluids that can get on people's hands.
And if you can't wash on a regular basis, you can transmit it.
Very, very horrible and very communicable disease that poses a public health threat.
Best weapon we can use against that, street sinks and more accessible hygiene facilities.
So we had a conversation in committee the other day to bring it back to your question, Brian, where we were asking Seattle Public Utilities how we can get these sinks out in the field.
There's been some logistical issues that the department is working with.
We're trying to help them through it as a council.
But I'm just saying, you know, if we as a city and a state and a region, if we can build some of the biggest floating bridges in the world, if we can build um, the skyscrapers in d we can dig a deep or tunne some plastic sinks in our people can wash their hand to working through whatev there are to make it a rea really should not be an ex Can you touch on that hot I know that's a bit of a you were very bullish on, those are ready to go and hotel location.
What's go
Yeah, so we did get an update from the Human Services Department in our last committee meeting towards the tail end of May, saying that they're looking into securing a third hotel.
As viewers may be aware, the city is currently leasing the Executive Pacific Hotel downtown and the King's Inn in Belltown to serve as emergency enhanced shelter for people experiencing homelessness.
Those have been highly desirable placements, as you can imagine, the city's hope team has been very successful in getting people into those placements and those hotels are nearing capacity.
We have some money in reserve here, a bill that I sponsored earlier this spring, with the unanimous support of my colleagues to approve some spending with the anticipation that FEMA would reimburse the money.
There's still some spending authority left in that appropriation.
It was for about $12 million.
The idea is that we'll be able to secure a third hotel for that effort.
In addit to and the hope is that t the end of the spring or we continue to talk to t the progress on that.
Oka the update there.
I want affordable housing quest
Eric is trying to rent out an ADU in his backyard to help with the need for affordable housing.
He's particularly frustrated with the housing choice voucher program that Seattle Housing Authority runs.
His question goes like this.
There is no help for homeowners that want to build or rent out space at affordable rates.
Shouldn't city government be doing something more to encourage private market affordable housing?
A question there from Eric.
I thank you for sending that in.
Your response to that, Councilmember Lewis.
Yeah, I think that that's definitely something we should be looking into, right, is how we can make sure that there's more opportunities on the private housing market through some kind of regulation or subsidy to give folks, particularly workforce housing, right?
So, like, people who are, you know, who are doing, like, service sector jobs, making minimum wage or adjacent to minimum wage.
There is no way for folks positioned in that way to rent or own in the city of Seattle currently.
And part of that really should be, how can we look at providing incentives for Eric, who sent his question in here, to be able to rent at a more affordable rate?
I think that there's a lot of ways we can do that.
We can look into more affordable housing vouchers.
We can look into a broader rent subsidy and maybe keeping some of these programs that came up during COVID, keeping them going.
If landlords want to opt in to some kind of rent subsidy program, where you have to sort of agree to keep it at a certain level, but this comes in and we say we will, you know, we will pay the subsidy to allow you to keep that on the market that way.
I think that that's something we should definitely be looking into.
And some of the initiatives that we're going to be doing with the ARCA money around tenant and rent support, there might be a way to sort of pilot an initiative like that.
Okay.
All right.
Thank yo up.
I wanted to talk abou in your district and D sev facing at the downtown ar does its future line?
I k this in a few different w question come in from a is next for Pioneer squar heads up.
This one's got on it.
So here it goes.
What is councilmember lou Square corridor?
Is it ju glass encased buildings a art galleries, shelters services are taken away f about Pioneer Square ther Lewis and downtown to for emerge from Covid.
Well, y in terms of neighborhood Square has is it's a hist You know, it's one of the few historic districts that we have in the city.
I mean, another good example is downtown Ballard, like the stretch where the farmers market is.
So, you know, to a certain extent, don't worry, you know, it's not going to be all glass and steel towers down there in Pioneer Square.
A lot of those buildings are protected by the virtue of the historic district.
You know, I think that as we're coming back generally in downtown, Pioneer Square included, what we really need to start looking at is what is the future of work in downtown is going to be?
And we have seen a really strong recovery in office space demand that was not necessarily anticipated by all economists.
So it looks like people are coming back to work to use office space and that that is not going to be as fundamental of a of a revision.
to our urban core as was originally anticipated during the darkest days of the COVID pandemic.
But, you know, I think that looking forward, we do need to recognize that there will be less emphasis on congregate space and congregate work.
So, for example, is there an opportunity to put in more maker spaces, you know, places where artisans could, artisans and 3D printers could be making, you know, essentially manufactured products, you know, like industrial manufactured projects, somewhere in the downtown core.
There's probably going to be more demand for sort of co-working spaces for office places that want to maybe have a primarily cyber commute-based work model.
They do want to, on occasion, get together for the board meeting, get together for some congregate activity.
So there could be more demand for those kinds of spaces, which currently are a little constrained in how we get in there because of our zoning.
I'm working with a lot of stakeholders to expand the scope and scale of some of the uses in the downtown core beyond the traditional just retail and office space.
There's probably going to be room for some other things, too, as we look into the future.
Yeah, certainly a work in progress there.
I'm going to switch gears with you if I couldn't talk about a few issues on the Public Safety Committee on which you serve.
Recently, the SPD interim chief Adrian Diaz reversed a decision from the Office of Police Accountability regarding who was responsible for a decision to use blast balls, tear gas, pepper spray on a crowd up on Capitol Hill last June during some of the many different activities that were happening up there with protests.
The chief says this matte but I know that you and o have some questions about concerns about this case?
acknowledge the hardship, pain that so many people o on that night of what has the pink umbrella riot.
R tipping point incident.
I following the incidents t and what have you.
And th of big demonstrations on every night resulting in a deployment, a massive deployment of lesser lethal weapons in ways that we'll wait for the full impact of the investigations, but that seemed very extreme and still do.
And the Pink Umbrella Riot, perhaps the best example of extreme excessive use of lesser lethals that had a really, really traumatic effect on an entire community on Capitol Hill.
Someone has to be held accountable for that.
Whoever made that decision has to be held accountable.
And look, I'll give space to the chief if the chief thinks that it's at the assistant chief level and not at the level of the lieutenant that was present on that night.
But I just have to say we need to make sure that this process is transparent.
We need to make sure that all the evidence that is leading to that determination is made public.
We need to make sure that the accountability is sufficient in meeting the scale of the incident.
And that is where we need to go with this.
So I don't support this being the be all end all of this being left off the hook.
You know, if if that lieutenant is not I'll back the chief up on got to be held accountab it's got to be more than And who, who investigates do that?
It feels like it and I'm trying to figure goes where this quote un is happening, how it's ha
Well, it should be going through the Office of Police Accountability.
The OPA, as you mentioned before, we were still trying to clarify exactly what's going on with this because we did get a communication from the chief saying, look, you know, I understand the concern of the council.
We're still looking into this.
Someone's going to be held accountable.
But I do want to make sure going forward here, because like, look, the chief holds the ultimate power on holding his department accountable based on investigations from the O.P.A. But the way that we get the transparency, the way that we have civilian oversight, the way that we make sure this is all being done above board is if those investigations are being done by the civilian authorities of the O.P.A. I don't want us to get into a trend here where we we expect the chief to be doing his own sleuthing on the side of the OPA when it comes to these accountability measures.
And, you know, I'm not necessarily saying that as someone who does not think that Chief Diaz will ultimately have good judgment and how he met that accountability in this case.
But it's a matter of transparency and it's a matter of norms.
We want to have civilian control and we want to have civilian oversight of our police.
And the only way to do that is to make sure that we are following our three-pronged accountability model, which is composed of the OPA, Civilian Police Commission, and the Inspector General.
And we want to avoid going back to sort of the internal affairs mode investigating themselves.
So I've got my questions out to the department.
I'm waiting for them to get back to me, but we do just need to make sure that we're keeping stock of that as we're going forward, right?
Right, thank you for that.
Another issue still brewing for the council when it comes to our.
Police Department a proposed cut to the SPD's budget based on a dispute regarding overtime costs for the SPD last year.
I should point out the SPD is fully funded in terms of its hiring plan for this year, but with attrition, the council, as I understand it, is hoping to recover some money, put that into participatory budgeting, which we're going to talk about in just a minute here.
What is the future of this possible cut?
Because I know the federal monitor overseeing the consent decree process isn't all that happy about this.
Yeah, you know, I think that this is one of those things where, you know, we sometimes get into a space, there's an old saying that a, you know, a compromise is like a camel, you know, a horse made by committee, right?
Okay.
And, you know, we've been sifting through as a council ways to get more resources into participatory budgeting.
Um, to, to continue a broader project of getting resources out there, um, into some of these other types of first response systems, um, you know, like a co-lead like health one.
Um, and also, I mean, frankly, Brian, making sure there's accountability, uh, for, for SPD, uh, the department goes outside, um, of the lines of the, the budget authority that the council delegated, you know, we have the power of the person.
And there have been instances of the department overspending on the barriers we put in last fall for this broader project.
So, you know, we're trying to balance all of that also with our commitment, which we take very seriously to honoring the terms of the consent decree, which requires certain resources.
But there's important things we need to keep stock of.
And for the general public watching, I think this is a good opportunity to kind of talk about it.
You know, and we have this ongoing dialogue with the monitor as you as you stated.
No matter what we do with this bill that Councilmember Herbold has put forward, that resource does not affect the 2021 staffing plan for SPD.
The council approved a staffing plan last fall to hire 114 officers.
SPD has come and presented at our committee that they're on track.
They're making hires.
They're bringing people in.
Regardless of what we do with this other money, that is not going to have an impact on number of officers on the street.
And most of the monitor's concerns have mostly been around staffing levels.
So I do think that's important to note.
Regardless of what happens with this bill, and that's why we're trying to understand better the monitor's concerns, it's not going to affect the staffing plan that's been funded and we're not trying to cut it.
Can I just want to make s because when you say it d the Seattle Police Departm people, I feel like there involved where people wo the public.
Wait a minute budget again.
Why would I
Yeah, well, I think it's really important to know, right?
Like a lot of people talk in the press about the 20% cut that the council did to SPD.
And like, sure, on paper, that's true.
It's been a 20% cut.
But most of that was civilian positions getting transferred to different departments and keeping those units intact.
Most of the harder work that has to be done to really transform the department is bogged down right now in the consent decree.
figuring out collective bargaining issues that have to be resolved in standing up alternatives in our participatory budgeting process.
So fundamentally, the core of what people expect when they're getting service from the police department, which is you know, an officer responding to a 911 call, that function is not something that has been the target of council budget reductions.
So that's just important to point out.
I think it's important for stakeholders in the media to take stock of that.
I do think that some folks out there have kind of highlighted the the 20% cut and try to imply that that's a cut to patrol.
But that's not the case.
We have had a lot of resignations from the department and that does have an impact on staffing.
But that's not due to defunding.
Like I said before, The council fully funded the staffing plan for the department for 2021. We're hard at work standing up alternative response services.
The health one program is going to have tripled by the end of this year.
That's going to have a really big impact.
Yeah, and let me make sure I jump in with another piece of this puzzle here, and that's the formation of the Community Safety and Communication Center, or CSCC.
Looks like the council will be able to transfer these 911 operators out of the police department into this new agency, but the parking enforcement officers, the PEOs, some issues there.
Not everyone on the council agrees that they should be part of the CSCC.
Where do you stand on this issue, and how does the council break this impasse?
Well, I think our parking enforcement officers are a really big pillar of the future of public safety.
And I'll break it down and I'll tell you why.
So, you know, everyone in this community, you know, we know the parking enforcement officers, we see them on the street where sometimes we're not all too happy to see the parking enforcement officer out there.
But it's important to note that our parking enforcement officers are 60% women, over half BIPOC.
They speak 27 languages total in the unit, in the aggregate of everybody that's there.
These are folks that are very close to the community.
These are folks that are very representative of the type of public safety system we want to see.
It is responsive to BIPOC leadership.
And what we really want to do is have a future public safety system where a lot of these citation only sorts of offenses, things that you might get a ticket for beyond just parking, that these are things that we can have unarmed professional public safety officers take over that could evolve out of our or parking enforcement unit, that they could take on this broader range of duties.
That guild has been very, very vocal about wanting to do that, wanting to stand up to serve, to be an unarmed civil enforcement workforce.
And this is significant.
About a quarter of the calls for service, it's estimated, that are currently being done by armed police officers could instead be done by unarmed public safety officers.
It matches a similar system that's been put in place in Philadelphia, where through charter amendment, the people of Philadelphia voted in the fall of 2019, create unarmed civil enforcement officers, make sure that we are not treating everything as a criminal matter, but that we are in treating some things as more of a civil enforcement matter.
And I want to see them evolve into that role.
Okay.
Okay.
Thank you for that.
I wanted to work in one last question here.
Council member Lewis, the council working on this participatory budgeting process right now had a lot of challenges getting this started.
The state auditor I know is looking into some of the financial issues involved with this.
What was supposed to be online by the spring might not be until next year.
And then there's this challenge of who votes on these priorities as to where this money goes in the communities.
How do you do that equitably?
One viewer summed it up with this comment right here.
Council members frequently use the term community.
most recently with participatory budgeting.
Which groups specifically are they referring to when they use this term?
Your response to that in the future of participatory budgeting.
Yeah, well, we had a great hearing the other day and Councilmember Morales's committee and heard from a number of really good stakeholders on this issue.
Obviously, you know, my friend Sean Good over at Choose 180, who has just been a great leader in reform to the criminal legal system to elevate previously excluded voices and focus on restorative justice.
I've heard from a council member from New York.
New York City, yeah.
And you know, New York City, it was really interesting to hear from the council member there because they have a really interesting system where every city council member gets $5 million a year.
Goes out to the districts, basically.
Yeah, they can afford to their district.
And you know, I'd sure be down for a program like that, I don't mind telling you.
But look, the important thing to do here is to make sure that we do this right instead of doing it fast.
And I think Council Member Morales has put together a good, deliberative process to really, really engage with a lot of people who've been previously excluded from city decision-making to really focus in on what we're going to do with this unique opportunity to apportion $30 million of community investments through participatory budgeting.
And look, this is a broad coalition of folks, right?
It includes Decriminalize Seattle, includes Choose 180, who I talked about earlier, Community Passageways, who are some of the community organizations that we've been talking to.
And look, we're gonna set up a participatory budgeting process, but there's a lot that goes into exactly how we do that to make sure it is accessible and make sure that it is something people can participate in.
But our goal as a council is to make sure that it's inclusive and make sure people walk away feeling like they were treated fairly.
And sometimes that means we gotta take our time with it.
And the important thing I tell people though, that are impatient about that process is, look, $30 million is sitting there and that $30 million is our commitment.
It's like a lock box, it's for participatory budgeting.
And we're gonna get it right on how we apportion it, but it's progress that there is no doubt that that money is gonna get out there to community.
And that's the start of this, the start of a new way of doing things.
All right, Councilmember time we have for right no you for being here.
Yeah,