At the March 4 meeting of the Spokane City Council, Earl Moore — who recently ran against Council Member Kitty Klitzke — stepped up to the mic to speak during the open forum.
“Did any of you notice it snowed last night and the temperature dropped down in the 20s?” Moore asked. “While we’re all warm and cozy right now inside this chamber, I’d like to remind you that the temperatures are going to drop again to 20 degrees.”
The first week of March was cold. It didn’t quite drop to 20 degrees, but March 6 and 7 logged lows of 26 degrees, according to the National Weather Service. Between March 1 and March 8, there was only one day where temperatures in Spokane did not drop below freezing.
Despite those lows, the city failed to activate emergency warming shelters, and had in fact closed the Cannon Shelter and reduced capacity at the Trent Shelter from 350 to 250 beds the week before, as the state of emergency declared by Mayor Lisa Brown in response to the cold snap early in the year had ended.
“Where is the outrage?” Moore asked council members. “The former administration would never have gotten away with anything like that for the homeless in the middle of the winter. The media would be all over this and people would be protesting.”
Moore told the council that the city’s failure to open shelter beds violated city code. Moore was right.
However, it took RANGE a few weeks to confirm that fact, as Dawn Kinder — director of the Neighborhood, Housing, and Human Services (NHHS) division and the person in charge of tracking the data and activating shelters — was on vacation out of the country.
Spokane Municipal Code states that the city must open extra shelter capacity in periods of both dangerous heat and cold when the capacity at the city’s existing low-barrier shelters — which do not require drug and alcohol testing as a condition for entry — were at 90% capacity or greater during the previous night. For cold weather, that threshold is whenever the National Weather Service predicts the temperature will drop to 32 degrees fahrenheit or below. When those conditions are met, the code states “warming centers sufficient to meet the shelter needs of currently unsheltered homeless individuals and other vulnerable individuals seeking shelter in Spokane will be activated.”
At a minimum, those shelters must operate during any hours the temperature is below 32 degrees.
According to data we received this afternoon, the city recorded temperatures were predicted to be lower than 32 degrees from March 1 through 8 and the low-barrier capacity was above 90% full, with very few open beds, for the entirety of that eight-day span. We counted up the total number of low-barrier beds on sheltermespokane.org and got 714 total beds (we sent an email to confirm these numbers with the administration and if they give us a different number, we will update this story), although some of those low-barrier beds are only accessible by young adults, men or people fleeing intimate partner violence, which further limits the amount of availability.
According to a spreadsheet RANGE received from Kinder and Erin Hut, Brown’s spokesperson, the city was out of compliance with the code every night between March 1 through March 8.
When Kinder returned from vacation, she told RANGE directly: “In the first week of March, I was out of the country, and again, there’s not funding to sustain those shelters to be compliant with the code,” she said. “There’s no way for me to accomplish that currently. There’s not enough resources allocated to sheltering to allow us to meet that code.”
The problems with sheltermespokane.org extend beyond a lack of historical data access. Because the system relies on shelter service providers to manually update their occupancy rates, and Trent Shelter, the city’s largest low-barrier shelter, frequently fails to do so, even real time numbers are unreliable. Despite those issues, the best information we have suggests low-barrier shelter beds have been at or near capacity frequently throughout the first three months of the year. Today for example, with temperatures approaching 30 degrees warmer than the first week of March, the website is only displaying 14 total low-barrier beds open across the entire system.
While temperatures are not predicted to drop low enough in the next week to trigger a need for emergency warming shelters, even if they did, Kinder says the city has already used all the funding allocated for emergency warming and cooling sheltering.
“It was woefully underfunded,” Kinder said. “They [the former administration and city council] allocated $250,000 from the annual expenditure and that’s nowhere near a realistic figure. Financially, we cannot sustain the shelter beds in the system.” Kinder did not offer a guess at what a realistic figure might be, but Spokane operates on a January-to-January budget cycle, meaning the city burned through their entire annual emergency sheltering budget in January and February.
The city’s projected $20 million to $30 million budget deficit has been looming since before Brown took office, but in a recent editorial in The Spokesman, Brown admitted the deficit is worse than she anticipated, writing, “Our community is facing the stark reality of a $50 million structural deficit across all city accounts.”
Brown poured $453,997 into emergency warming shelter contracts during the state of emergency, but there was no money to continue that response into March, leaving the city in noncompliance.
In response, Brown sent RANGE a written statement saying she supported the intent of the ordinance, “but it was written without the funding to support it. That is why I traveled to Olympia, advocated for, and helped secure $4 million from the state budget to go directly toward temporary emergency sheltering.” Brown added that her administration is working on “a comprehensive approach to expanding housing,” including more shelter, transitional and permanent housing. The intent, Brown said, is to get the process of helping people out of houselessness moving again, adding capacity to permanent housing options to make it easier to move people on from transitional housing like Catalyst, which would then make more room for those ready to exit congregate shelters.
City Council Members Paul Dillon, Jonathan Bingle and Zack Zappone said that any time Spokane is out of compliance with the code, it opens the city to liability for lawsuits. What that might look like is up for debate. “We can realistically be sued at any time for anything,” Bingle told RANGE. “The veracity of the lawsuit would depend on the facts.”
“Nadine [Woodward], I don’t think was ever compliant,” Zappone said. “For the two years I was on council with the prior administration, we were constantly pointing out that we were out of compliance with the emergency sheltering requirement.”
He said there’s always a tension between whether or not codes passed by the council are actually enforced. “There is no change until someone sues the city on that issue,” Zappone said.
Meanwhile, Kinder underscored, “We’re going to violate city code because I don’t have enough money to operate the number of beds currently in the system.”
