Undercover panhandling sting?
Warren Trout says he's had enough of panhandlers. He's put his Belltown condo up for sale and is leaving Seattle.
"I'll go to a small town," he wrote to Seattle City Councilmember Tim Burgess last month, "buy a MUCH cheaper home and pay MUCH less taxes. Maybe some of my tax money will not then go to support these scum of society."
Trout is one of about two dozen people who have e-mailed the councilmember since September, when Burgess, chair of the council's public safety committee, raised the idea of banning panhandling at certain times or places, such as after dark, near cash machines or at intersections. Real Change obtained the e-mails through a public records request and, while Burgess has yet to introduce the legislation (a draft is still up in the Law Department, an aide of his said last week), the correspondence reveals that one of his ideas died on arrival because it wasn't legal.
"Let's drop the hours of darkness restrictions, especially since Law [i.e., the City Attorney's Office] has described the case law that won't allow this restriction," Burgess e-mailed his aides on Sept. 16.
He and outgoing City Attorney Tom Carr are looking at another way to target beggars though: undercover panhandling operations. In a July 7 e-mail, Burgess asked Carr if his office had "relaxed the filing standards re: panhandling to allow for prosecutions arising from police undercover operations," adding "that would be a very good thing."
Carr answered that he was working with the chief of police "to draft a protocol for undercover panhandling operations," which could involve plainclothes officers trolling for aggressive begging, which is already illegal in Seattle.
In an e-mail to Real Change, Burgess says his focus was on changing how charges are filed in aggressive panhandling cases. The old prosecution standard, he says, required that police have a citizen making a complaint. The new standard allows officers to file charges on their own without a witness or victim. How that's enforced, says Burgess, is up to the police.
"I suppose it could be either a uniformed or plainclothes officer as the witness. That's a detail better left to the police commanders," he says.
No word yet from Carr's office on whether the new standard is in place. But the comments Burgess has been getting on panhandling are running 3-to-1 in favor of new restrictions. "I purchased an expensive condo in Belltown and hate going out and having to deal with aggressive panhandlers and crack dealers," Michael White wrote to Burgess in September. "I can't get from where I live to work without being solicited for something or other."
Belltown worker Nicholas Peringer said he not only feels threatened by "aggressive types," but by Real Change vendors.
--Cydney Gillis
Money keeps more libraries open
Library patrons got some good news on Nov. 12: a City Council vote to add $866,000 to the Library's budget ensured that 11 branches will operate seven days a week next year.
That may not sound so great, considering the city has a total of 27 branches, including the downtown complex. But the day before the council vote, it seemed even fewer branches -- only six -- would offer weeklong service in 2010. That's because the Library, which ranks more than 6 million visits a year, according to the American Library Association, had to find $2.8 million in cuts. In response to the fiscal threat, the system planned to trim service to five days a week for the vast majority of branches; thanks to the council, fewer branches have to close their doors.
Even so, the council's Hail Mary pass -- which will keep Ballard, Beacon Hill, Broadview, Capitol Hill, Douglass-Truth, Greenwood, Lake City, Northeast, Rainier Beach, Southwest, West Seattle and the downtown branch open 60 hours a week -- won't win the game for the whole system: Fifteen branches -- Columbia, Delridge, Fremont, Green Lake, High Point, ID/Chinatown, Madrona-Sally Goldmark, Magnolia, Montlake, NewHolly, Northgate, Queen Anne, South Park, University and Wallingford -- will operate only 35 hours a week, with closures on Friday and Sunday.
Andra Addison, library spokesperson, says the council asked the Library board to name the branches that had the most capacity and highest use of materials as it tried to find funds to keep as many branches open as possible. That still leaves a budget hole for the Library, which, Addison says, certainly means program shifts at some branches and a one-week closure of the entire system sometime next year. But, she adds, "it's a lot better than it could have been."
The City Council will approve the entire budget Mon., Nov. 23.
--Rosette Royale
Budget outlook dire
When a new budget forecast is released on Nov. 19, it's likely to show the tight spot state government is in: the persistently poor economy means at least another $2 billion in cuts to services already diminished this year, says staff at the Washington State Budget & Policy Center.
Locally, says BPC Research Director Jeff Chapman, the state economy has been neither short nor mild, as economic forecasters had predicted 18 months ago. The Seattle-Bellevue-Everett area has fewer jobs than it did nine years ago, at the start of the 2001 recession; one out of five construction jobs is gone, and the unemployment rate is the highest since 1984.
Without work, people aren't buying, Thompson notes: an "unprecedented" drop in retail sales continues to hurt the state's coffers. With the housing market in the tank, real estate excise tax collections are at their lowest point since 1998. And even while services have already been cut to the bone, people still get sick, turning to state-funded care when they don't have employer-paid insurance. The BPC tracked a 14 percent increase in state health assistance payments for families with children from March to September.
All these factors have torn a $2 billion hole in the state budget -- a hole so big, says BPC director Remy Trupin, that it would swallow the entire legislative and judicial branches, plus all State Parks, plus any Medicaid services not mandated by the federal government, plus Basic Health for low-income people, plus drug and alcohol treatment, plus funding to reverse economic disparities between school districts, plus... the list goes on. "We're talking really deep cuts in specific areas," says Trupin.
Trupin says legislators and the governor's office are warming to the idea of raising taxes to fill the hole, and he has an idea: a 0.3 percent sales tax increase combined with a tax rebate for low- and middle-income households. It would raise $400 million, offsetting 20 percent of the impending cuts, says Trupin, and would cost families earning $28,000-$52,000 a year about $29 a year.
That's a higher tax, yes, but the BPC also notes that 30 economists signed a letter last month saying taxation would be less damaging to the state's economy than another round of cuts.
--Adam Hyla
Hunger in Washington up 24 percent
The U.S. Department of Agriculture delivered a grim report last week: 49.1 million Americans faced food insecurity at the end of 2008, a 35 percent increase from December 2007 and the highest jump since the department started tracking the data in 1995.
Food insecurity means that, on any given day, a household's members may not have enough to eat -- something that has driven more and more families to food banks and meal providers as the economic downturn has worsened.
In Washington state, the number of food-insecure households increased to 288,000 in 2008, an increase of 13 percent. The rise in households experiencing hunger -- a more dire category of food insecurity -- jumped to 112,000, or 24 percent. According to the Children's Alliance of Seattle, that means as many as 373,000 children in the state live in households where food is in shortage.
"These numbers are even worse than we anticipated," Linda Stone, the Children's Alliance senior food policy coordinator, said in a statement. "Families will go to extraordinary lengths to make sure their children get something to eat, but this report shows that more and more families can't put food on the table no matter how hard they try."
--Cydney Gillis