“My constituents are mad. All of Seattle is mad, and to be honest, I’m mad too,” Councilmember Tammy Morales said in a statement Friday. “If the Mayor is worried about risk or logistical hurdles, I say taking a risk or jumping a hurdle is important if it saves even one more life. You must try.”
Morales referred to Mayor Jenny Durkan’s decision to not pursue Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) assistance to house people experiencing homelessness in hotels, which advocates have long urged. A thorough investigation by Publicola‘s Erica C. Barnett revealed the lengths that the Durkan administration was going to avoid this step, which included a seven-point memo from City Budget Director Ben Noble laying out objections–some of them spurious and easily dispelled.
Long memo short, the argument is that Seattle may end up drowning in paperwork and footing most of the bill despite the Biden administration’s promises to cover 100% of hotel costs–boosted from the 75% covered by the Trump administration. Hotels have largely sat empty during the pandemic as travel has declined. A December report put Seattle’s hotel occupancy rate at just 20%. Downtown Seattle alone claims almost 15,000 of King County’s 43,490 hotel rooms, according to Visit Seattle figures. Thus, the city has an empty hotel room for every single one of the 11,751 people experiencing homelessness counted in the most recent count in January 2020.
Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda also expressed frustration in a statement Friday. “I am outraged at the choice to not pursue 100% FEMA reimbursement for our response to the COVID-19 crisis,” Mosqueda said. “This is a public health crisis and the choice not to act at this moment is astounding.”
Don’t shoot the messenger
By Tuesday, Barnett revealed that the Mayor’s staff was attacking the veracity of her reporting in an apparent move to deflect criticism, wiggle out of reopening the policy decision, and evade accountability for Seattle hitting its one-year anniversary of the Covid emergency without more progress in housing our homeless neighbors in safe de-intensified shelters.
“For almost a year, advocates have been begging the city to fund hotel-based shelters in Seattle, focusing on FEMA reimbursement specifically over the last several months,” Barnett said. “Durkan’s office has been reluctant to stand up shelters in hotels, as PubliCola has documented extensively over the past year, although her office agreed last year to use existing COVID Emergency Solutions Grant funding (not FEMA dollars) to stand up two hotels totaling just over 200 rooms, which are supposed to open late next month.”
While attacking the reporting, the Mayor’s spokespeople also claimed they weren’t given the chance to comment and that a decision hadn’t been made yet. That appears untrue. “As for the claim that PubliCola never talked to the budget office or the mayor’s office, in fact, we reached out to the budget office and mayor’s office for this story,” Barnett wrote. “The mayor’s office responded to both inquiries, stepping in on the budget office’s behalf. Elsewhere in her email, Formas wrote that PubliCola’s story was ‘printed without any evidence or sources,’ which is both self-evidently untrue (on-the-record sources are cited and quoted in the story) and suggests that journalists have an obligation to reveal background and off-the-record sources in response to accusations from the mayor’s office.”
Durkan delay is played out
Barnett’s claims match up with the experience of our reporters, who have also watched the Mayor’s office swoop in to manage correspondences and keep a tight lid on the flow of information when seeking comment from a City department. We’ve also witnessed the Mayor kill a project with slow agonizing foot-dragging rather than a swift clear decision, which is why Barnett reported this was a deliberate policy decision rather than just an unmade choice. We’ve seen this before. In addition to Barnett’s example of stalling police budget cuts, there’s also the the 2018 head tax fiasco, 35th Avenue NE bike lane scuttling, and Center City Connector streetcar stalling.
“[Mayor] Durkan’s history and practice do not support the idea that the mayor will have a sudden change of heart and embrace both hotel-based shelters and FEMA funding in the face of her budget director’s advice against it,” Barnett wrote. “Rather than making unambiguous statements that would be unpopular with the public, Durkan’s practice throughout her administration has been to raise strong objections and throw up roadblocks that have the same effect as a formal refusal.”
If you care about Seattle’s homelessness response, this is really earthshaking reporting from Publicola. As we run our spring subscriber drive, also keep in mind our intrepid colleagues at Publicola—Patreon here. (Barnett was our monthly meetup guest in November if you’d like to check out the video.)
Coverage of the FEMA decision is already changing the policy conversation. During the Finance and Housing Committee today, Councilmembers pressed Noble and other City staff to explain their process objections and clear a path forward through them. Their questioning revealed that the Mayor’s office had largely kept Council Central Staff in the dark about their FEMA decisions until last week’s memo. That meant staff couldn’t answer many of their questions, but were following up on them as they are able to complete their reseach.
