Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda discusses stabilizing human service provider contracts

Well, good afternoon.

My name's Teresa Mosqueda, and I want to thank all of you for being here today with us.

In just about 15 minutes, we're going to head into a special work session to hear from folks in this room about the need to stabilize human service provider contracts.

This is an issue that we are going to hear directly from the issue experts in the room here today and talk more in depth over the next hour about the need for human service providers, about the impacts that these providers have on our community residents, and about those who've experienced services directly and the impact it's had on their individual lives.

At a time when homelessness and income disparities have led to a homelessness crisis, to a crisis of housing inaffordability, and an increase in the need for human services, what we do on the front line for human service providers matters.

Without adequate funding, these workers and their organizations face tremendous challenges, huge burdens to making sure that they deliver services on a daily basis.

Our job as city contractors, as the person who holds the contract with these organizations, is to stabilize these contracts, to stabilize the workforce, and that way we can deliver services to our most vulnerable.

Let's be clear, this is our obligation as a city to ensure that our most vulnerable have the services that they need.

And our human service providers, who are here in this room and so many more, provide that essential service.

They help the youth to make sure that they have a stable place to live and access to jobs and training.

They help at senior centers in making sure that our elders in the community have the services and food that they need.

They provide services at community clinics.

They provide assistance to those who've experienced domestic violence and sexual assault.

They help respond to daily crisis and trauma, and they provide food and meal programs and homeless shelters, as well as prevention from falling into services.

Welcome, everybody, and thank you so much for being here.

I want to be blunt.

The city, we, as public servants, we have fallen down on our obligation to serve and ensure that human service providers have the contracts to meet the needs of our community.

This is an issue that has been largely fueled by a historic underfund of human service providers.

And I want to acknowledge our council colleague, Council Member O'Brien, who's been working on this historic and legacy underfund.

But we're at a turning point.

We're at a turning point right now in this city.

Last year, we made some steps in the budget to make sure that all human service provider contracts got at least a 2% inflationary adjustment, and that was a step in the right direction.

But after 10 years of not every single human service provider contract at least getting an inflationary adjustment, we have a lot more to do.

We need to ensure that these contracts continue to receive inflationary adjustment increases.

And next week, we'll be introducing legislation.

But today, we're talking about why.

And that's why I'm incredibly excited to be here with our colleagues to talk about the why and turn it over to the experts in the room.

Why don't we start at this end of the table?

And if you want to introduce yourself, and we'll go down this way, and then we'll hear from two of our providers.

Dara Sita, Batayola, CEO of International Community Health Services, a community health clinic.

Clintania Van, Clinical Support Specialist for the Downtown Emergency Service Center.

Tristan Spears, I am a youth care recipient, I'm a youth care alumni.

I'm Mark Okazaki, I'm the Executive Director for NeighborHouse, a community action social service agency.

Allison, why don't you start at the back row.

I'm Allison Isengar, the Executive Director of the Seattle-King County Coalition on Homelessness.

I'm Debbie Heal with Corporation for Supportive Housing.

I'm Paul Rosenthal with Plano Housing Group, we're an appropriate supportive housing provider.

I'm Jim Wickfall, I'm the CEO of Sound Generations.

I'm Evelyn Correa, I'm the Human Resources Officer at Youth Care.

I'm Flo Beaumont, Associate Director with Catholic Community Services of King County.

At this point, I'd love to turn it over.

Tristan, if you'd like to give us a little bit more information on the work that you do and why stabilizing human service provider contracts is so important.

Yes, definitely.

I like to bring attention to this issue because the youth in this community don't really have a lot of people to turn to.

And when they find an organization such as Youth Care that's out there to help them, It's really hard for them to build a relationship with the staff member when the staff member's constantly changing.

It doesn't give them time to even get to know them.

And you can't really express intimate problems in your life to bring them to the attention of the organization that can help you get out of those dark times if you can't even build a relationship with the person who's constantly changing in your life.

So I just would like to bring attention to the fact that this organization needs to have better stabilized budgets so that they can have stable staff for these children to have stable lives.

Thank you so much.

I'm gonna turn it over to you, Clintonia, to talk a little bit more about the work you do and why this is important.

So, I work for a mental health program, and I like to compare it to if we had teachers that were, we had a high turnover of teachers every year, and what that would do to student education.

We feel those effects with our turnover.

It's hard to, just like my friend over here was saying, to stabilize and engage with clients if the turnover is really high.

in our services, their mental and emotional stabilization depend on strong relationships that their care providers provide.

So it's really, I, we are heavily dependent on call staff at our site, and we appreciate them, but we are able to stabilize clients and engage them more and offer better services when we have a stable staff that sticks around for a while.

And we are going to open it up to questions from the press.

Before we do so, I wanted to give a chance to both Teresita and Mark.

As the leaders of two of our human service provider organizations, we've heard about staff turnover and vacancy rates in the 30% to 40% area.

And this, we know, has an impact on the individuals you're trying to serve.

Do you want to talk a little bit about any of the impacts you've seen of an unstable provider contract, either one of you?

So as a community health center, we serve everyone who comes through our doors.

And last year, we served over 31,000 patients.

And over half of them are low income.

Unfortunately, what we've been seeing is destabilization of the Affordable Care Act.

So more and more of them are uninsured.

And when the attacks on immigrants, more and more of them are afraid to come in for regular care.

So when we see them, they come in saying they don't want to do Medicaid, they don't want to enroll in public programs, and they come in when they're very, very ill already.

And in terms of the workforce, we have to compete with the hospitals and other private providers.

And they love phishing our staffs because our staffs are trained.

They are culturally and linguistically capable and competent in healthcare, and so they're very prime for the bigger establishments.

And these adjustments are very, very important to us at a time when we're starting to really see uninsured care going up, prescription drugs continuing to go up, and the status of our families and our communities' health is starting to destabilize again because of all the external attacks, especially at the national level.

I would just probably like to add just one additional point to what my colleagues have already mentioned and one of the things for us is about worker retention, staff retention.

We have staff who can no longer afford to live in the city and are moving deeper into the suburbs because of affordable housing and therefore leaving neighborhood house because the commute times are much too long, and so we are losing staff for many, many reasons, and an inflation adjustment is really crucial at this time because of wage compression, housing costs, and many other factors that we are all feeling.

Thank you.

Happy to take questions.

Well, you've already touched on it, but can you get into, again, what the reason is for a lot of this turnover?

I mean, it sounds like there's several different factors.

Anybody like to take that?

So what Mark just said in terms of the cost of living here and the housing costs and increasing commutes because people move out is definitely one of the big drivers now.

But unfortunately, this is a city where we have a lot of competitive employers.

And they really do want to recruit and they hire and they have hiring bonuses for many people to move over to the hospitals, to the bigger private providers.

And so we become more of a training ground and so we start seeing more of a churn with our staffs.

Oh, I mean, I just wanted to add, it's college debt, too.

We have a lot of employees that are coming out of college.

And with the cost of living and paying off college debt, it's a struggle.

Right.

Do you want to add anything, Tristan?

Go ahead, Mark.

With a lot of the organizations under contract with the city of Seattle, contracts from year to year, when the funding remains flat and our costs keep going up, we have to find adjustments somewhere.

So yeah, it's not a guarantee.

So we're always under cost pressures.

And city contracts aren't your only source of funding, right?

Are there other sources, different contracts or different sources?

Thank you.

So we do get funded by the city, by the county, by the federal government.

We also do our own private fundraising.

But I think the bigger point is that when we are underfunded and when our essential costs of doing business continue to rise year over year and our contracts don't really change to stabilize that fact, then what ends up happening?

Quite frankly not only do staff have other choices, but while we have really staff that feels committed to doing this kind of work it becomes exhausting to have 30 20 30 positions open on a month-to-month basis and and not to know how many staff you're going to be working with on any given night, recognizing that youth in crisis are going to need attention immediately.

And so it's a stressful job.

I feel like our staff are highly committed to it.

And I also feel that, you know, your commitment can only take you so far.

You really have to figure out how you're going to make a living and afford to live within the King County region.

and have a commute that seems reasonable.

So for all of those reasons, wages tends to be the number one reason that folks leave us.

So we're seeing higher turnover, and we're also seeing staff who stay with us for shorter periods of time.

So for example, a year and a half is now pretty common for staff to stay with us, and that's a problem.

Thank you.

So I am the director of the Seattle King County Coalition on Homelessness.

We are not a direct service provider, but we have over 60 member organizations all around King County who do the work every day and every night of providing basic safety, shelter, and housing for thousands of Seattle and King County residents.

And we do that, our member organizations do that, because local government has determined that the way it will provide vital life-saving services is to contract with community-based organizations.

When the city and the county build their budgets, they plan for the increased cost of doing business, including increased wages for city and county employees, increased utility costs, increased operations and facilities costs, and non-profit community-based organizations must do the same.

The point is that actually local government contracts are the primary source of funding for much of the work that happens in this community to keep young people, elders, people who have health care needs and people experiencing homelessness safe and to move our community forward.

And the reason that we are working with Councilmember Mosqueda and her colleagues to secure an actual planned solution is because we actually all have much more important other work to do and we don't want to have to come back to this again and again in every budget season.

We have about one minute for one more question.

that we've set by legislation, so that's what you're going to have to take?

I mean, is that how it works?

I mean, or aren't they like any other contract that would be negotiated?

Yeah, usually our funding is flat.

And so for Neighborhood House and all of our other colleagues, we just have to go into our budget and figure out the negotiation is about service levels.

And the last thing we want to do is cut services.

So we're trying our best to preserve services.

But there's only so much we can squeeze out of our budget to adjust for inflation and other staffing needs.

So our priority is always around maintaining services.

But that is the give if your funding is flat.

And that's not a good thing to do.

Typically that, yes.

May I add one other thing?

It's such an excellent question that you asked it, and it may be so obvious that we fail to articulate it, but there is not much room for negotiation.

And the reason is that actually this is the model that for over a century has been in place to provide human services in communities all across the United States.

So by adjusting for inflation, really what local governments can do is protect their previous years of investments in community-based organizations providing good services.

This is how we build on the investments that have already been made.

That's right.

So we'll be rolling out legislation next week that has been informed by the conversations with many of the human service providers in this room and more.

We'll have more on that next week.

That is precisely what we're interested in addressing is an inflationary adjustment at a bare minimum.

There is very good reasons that we contract out these services.

These are our trusted community partners.

They are able to provide services in language, bicultural, bilingual ways.

In many cases, they are experts in their field.

And in many cases, because of their focus, it is more cost effective to do so.

Thus, we need to make sure that the investments we are making are holistic and comprehensive enough to meet the services that they've committed to providing.

With that, we're going to head to our work session in full council chambers.

Huge round of applause for all of our participants.

And we'll take a picture.