10/12/2022
What a day for homeless news! We start out with an incredible piece of reportage (thank you, RangeMedia!!) followed by an article showing the real progress being made at reducing the size of Camp Hope, and then Shawn Vestal’s blistering piece skewering the Mayor and the Sheriff for their bloviation.
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RangeMedia
The Spokesman-Review
Camp Hope count drops to 443 residents
Shawn Vestal: Camp Hope is shrinking, no thanks to local politics
KREM
Spokane police confirms involvement in suspected fraud investigation of Guardians Foundation ####################################################
RangeMedia
Luke Baumgarten
On his way out the door last month, former Spokane Neighborhood, Housing and Human Services Director John Hall sent 27 pages of recommendations to the Mayor’s office. He also raised concerns about tens of millions of unspent housing dollars.
Almost exactly a month after his resignation from the top job directing Spokane’s Neighborhood, Housing and Human Services (NHHS), we now have a window into the dysfunction former director John Hall witnessed within city government.
RANGE has obtained a 27-page memo sent to Mayor Nadine Woodward and City Administrator Johnnie Perkins on Sept. 30, Hall’s last day on the job.
In the memo, Hall makes recommendations for how to fix the embattled office, which oversees three separate departments ranging from neighborhood outreach to housing access and the city’s homelessness response.
Hall also made detailed claims that the City of Spokane is out of compliance on a number of grant programs that should be channeling millions in federal dollars for affordable housing and other initiatives to combat Spokane’s housing and homelessness crisis, but which are either languishing unspent in city coffers or haven’t been requested at all.
Unlike Cupid Alexander, who held Hall’s role for about seven months and left in June 2021, Hall did not accuse the administration of racism in its practices. The memo does not offer any personal motive for Hall’s departure.
Hall’s feelings do align with Alexander’s parting comments about an NHHS that is understaffed and overworked.
Taken together, the accounts suggest that, in the more than year that passed between Alexander’s departure and Hall’s, the city has been unable to shore up staffing gaps that grind even seemingly routine tasks like executing an approved contract to a crawl.
Not only has the problem not gotten any better, it may be getting worse.
The memo
The document has three main sections. The first is a four-page narrative of the problems Hall witnessed within his office, the mayor’s office and city council, along with his suggestions on how to fix them.
Hall takes pains to say his former bosses did not ask for these recommendations, but that he’s providing them anyway: “The following unsolicited observations and recommendations are aimed to be non-partisan, honest and respectful,” he writes, “I simply want to see a high performing enterprise leading the way, especially in housing affordability and availability, homelessness and self-sufficiency.”
These will not be one-time fixes, Hall believes, but an ongoing process improvement focused on “hot issues & recommendations … that should be addressed continuously by the mayor’s executive team”
Hall’s list includes several specific issues that have caused tens of millions of dollars of federal grant money to build more housing, ease the burden of housing prices, and address the economic factors of homelessness to go either unspent by the city or unclaimed from available funds — along with specific strategies to maximize those dollars coming to Spokane and get those dollars actually flowing to projects.
He also cites an overall “lack of urgency to be results driven during this homelessness crisis” among administrative staff, and specifically “a separatist mentality” in the Community Housing and Human Services (CHHS) department — a division of NHHS — “that is not collaborative.”
Hall suggests taking CHHS out from under NHHS and making it its own cabinet-level department reporting directly to the mayor and city administrator, “so that the city administrator can hold its leadership accountable.” (He even suggests changing the department names, as “CHHS” and “NHHS” are so similar they cause confusion. To that we say, we hear you buddy.)
While most of the letter is aimed at the mayor and her staff, Hall also criticized City Council members for blurring the lines between the administrative role of the mayor’s office and the legislative role of the city council. He cited council’s active hand in Camp Hope (which he refers to as “the squatters on Washington State Department of Transportation right of way”) as “one such overreach.”
Outside of housing and homelessness, Hall said he is concerned for staff within the Office of Neighborhood Services (ONS), which acts as a liaison between the city government and Spokane’s 29 neighborhood councils and community assemblies. In Hall’s mind, the structure is “dysfunctional at best and often exposes staff to toxic and intolerable verbal abuse from the public,” he writes, “Staff may be better served reporting directly to the legislative branch.”
Hall’s memo goes into detail about specific dollar amounts and projects — including $10 million approved by council on Aug. 1 for 11 specific projects totaling 220 units of housing — that city administration has not acted on.
Hall also proposes greater transparency from the Mayor’s office in the form of weekly press conferences, “to cover not only the housing crisis, but all matters related to the city,” in which all division heads would be required to attend “and be responsible for answering detailed questions” from the press and public.
Hall writes that he believes such a forum would more effectively disseminate accurate information, leaders and staff would be publicly accountable for progress, and the citizens of Spokane might take more comfort that their government is working for them.
Of the other 22 pages, two are dedicated to a series of Strength, Weakness, Opportunity, Threat (SWOT) analyses for each of the offices — a common wayto, at a glance, document what is currently going well and going poorly (the S and the W, respectively) as well as future opportunities to potentially seize and roadblocks to try and avoid.
The final 20 pages are supporting documents such as letters from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), validating Hall’s claims.
John Hall Resignation Letter by RANGE on Scribd
Housing funds unspent (or unasked for)
Hall spends the majority of his memo and supporting documents detailing several large pots of housing money that just aren’t being utilized, along with places where Spokane left millions of dollars on the table.
In addition to the $10 million earmarked by council for 220 housing units waiting to be executed, Hall outlines:
A minimum of $3 million in Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) money must be disbursed by May 1, 2023, after the city failed a timeliness test in May 2022. Failure to disburse those funds could result in the city losing between $1.1 million and $3 million, according to Hall.
A loan advance program that could allow Spokane to access $15 million in housing cash now and pay it off in chunks of CDBG allocation over the next 20 years.
A complicated series of American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) dollars coming from several different pots that Spokane didn’t properly understand or ask for. “The city could optimize $14.5 million in funding but appears to only be using $6 million and leaving $8.5 million on the table,” Hall writes.
In total, Hall seems to suggest that, aside from the “lack of urgency” in disbursing funds, even for programs that have been approved, the city just doesn’t have a staff with enough federal housing experience to even know all the funds that might be accessed and utilized. “The city must retain experienced housing practitioners and move with a sense of urgency to address the housing crisis,” he writes.
But how can a city retain experienced staff when it keeps hemorrhaging directors?
Transparency & Accountability
Council members Karen Stratton and Breean Beggs told RANGE neither of them had seen the document until today (Oct. 11), nearly two weeks after it was sent. Beggs told us he shared it with the rest of Council and legislative staff as well this afternoon, and none of them had seen it either.
When she finally did see it, Stratton says, “It was kind of painful to be honest. I felt if anyone was going to recreate or help this department succeed, it was John Hall.”
Stratton says in the short time she knew him, Hall was able to diagnose problems of both personnel and process in a way that impressed her.
That includes his criticisms of council overreach in this memo. She agrees with his analysis. “Absolutely I do,” Stratton says, “I do believe that there are times that council overreaches and we step out of our lane. I was a city employee, I know how that feels.”
Stratton says she believes the ongoing turmoil in housing services during what is unquestionably Spokane’s worst housing crisis in living memory is an issue of not just staffing, but staff support from leadership.
“That department used to be a robust, really well-run department until they started losing people,” she says, “We used to have the oversight. We used to have people who know what they’re doing.” As staffing began to slip, though, “we exhausted people. We still have good folks but they’re not getting the support they need to do their best work.”
The memo demonstrates how complicated this work is, both interpersonally — communicating with citizens and constituents, many of whom have lost or are in danger of losing it all — and bureaucratically — navigating intersecting revenue streams from state and federal government. In Stratton’s mind, Hall was that guy.
“John was really an expert,” she told RANGE, “That’s why it was so heartbreaking to see him leave. He could have been that leader who saw the strength of people and could start rebuilding this department.”
Stratton also believes previous administrations would have taken a memo like this and called all hands on deck to address the issues and agree on a path forward. “I’ve worked with two former mayors. The moment that memo came out, there would have been discussions,” Stratton says. “Talking about what we could have done better. Having the honest conversations to say you’re out of your lane, you can do better.”
She reiterates that, when she and her city council colleagues feel left in the dark, they start grasping for any switch that might be a light: “[Administration and council] just aren’t sitting down and opening up and having those conversations,” she says. “We do overreach and I cringe every time we do, but we don’t have the information we need. We’re asking questions and not making much progress.”
In his memo, Hall calls for a rigorous analysis of what is working and what isn’t, and an equally serious commitment to building back each limb of local government while figuring out how to keep them focused on their assigned roles and cooperating with each other. Stratton thinks that analysis is exactly right.
“If council and administration don’t work together, we all see what happens,” Stratton concluded, “We’re all responsible for a piece of this, and we need to take responsibility for our portions.”
A call and an email to Spokane Director of Communications Brian Coddington were not returned by the time of publication. If we hear back, we will update this story.
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The Spokesman-Review
Camp Hope count drops to 443 residents
By Quinn Welsch
THE SPOKESMAN-REVIEW
Management at the East Central Neighborhood homeless camp known as Camp Hope counted 443 residents living at the camp, according to a recent tally.
That number is down by 180 from a peak of 623 people in July, according to a statement from Maurice Smith, a spokesman for the camp who works with Jewels Helping Hands.
The latest figure comes after the camp began issuing photo ID badges for the existing camp residents over the weekend. The new ID badges are meant to increase security and help keep track of who is living at the camp, Smith said. Additionally, the Department of Transportation, which owns the land the camp is situated on, announced Security Services Northwest began providing 24/7 security as of Monday.
“We want to be able to identify every person we’ve got (at the camp),” Smith told The Spokesman- Review last week. “We can’t keep bringing new people in while were trying to assess old people. At some point, we have to say, ‘No more.’ ” About 40 of the people who have left Camp Hope have gone to the nearby Trent Resource and Assistance Center, 4320 E. Trent Ave., which is operated by the Guardians Foundation. Guardians Foundation CEO Mike Shaw said that number is closer to 70 people. Other former residents of Camp Hope have moved on to family, transitional or stable housing, Smith said.
Any new arrivals attempting to enter Camp Hope will likely be diverted to the Trent shelter.
See CAMP HOPE, 8
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Although the shelter’s starting capacity is 150 bunks, it can flex to 250 bunks, according to the city. After that, the shelter could provide an additional 200-300 sleeping mats, Shaw said. The shelter reached just under 160 people as of Monday night, he said.
City administration is relying heavily on the Trent shelter to handle the brunt of the homeless population once Camp Hope is closed, until more permanent housing is available.
“In theory you could put everybody in there,” city spokesman Brian Coddington said on Sept. 27. “That’s not ideal; that’s not the city’s desire.”
“We can provide a lot more space at Trent, and we have other shelters within the regional shelter system that can expand as well,” Mayor Nadine Woodward said.
Shaw suspects the Trent shelter’s numbers will increase as the weather worsens. He estimates about one-third of Camp Hope’s population will leave the Spokane area when that happens. He is confident the Trent shelter can provide for the remainder.
“We won’t take them all,” he said.
Camp Hope has been under scrutiny for months after Jewels Helping Hands, the camp’s primary services provider, estimated more than 600 people were living there this summer, making it the largest homeless encampment in Washington. The number has been frequently cited by public officials.
Spokane County Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich estimated the camp population to be as high as 400, but in one interview on Fox and Friends, said it could be as low as 150, citing numbers he said were provided by the Spokane Fire Department.The sheriff, who leaves office at the end of the year, has declared his intention to remove the camp by mid-November.
The Spokane Police Department estimates that the camp’s population has fluctuated between 250 and 600, depending on the time of day, according to department spokesman Cpl. Nick Briggs.
“It was 600 at one point and it’s 400 now,” said Zeke Smith, director of Empire Health Foundation, which has been tasked as a provider at the camp. “One way or another, this problem is still pretty acute.”
Smith anticipates that the camp will be cleared before the mid-November deadline, but worries that there are not enough services for all of the camp’s residents.
“We’re going to have to address the fact that supply and demand in this community don’t meet the expectations,” he said.
Camp Hope management also released a list of more than a dozen rules on Tuesday that camp residents are expected to read and sign, most of which put into writing existing site policies. For instance, the Camp Hope “Site Rules Agreement” prohibits weapons, drug use/ sales and prostitution, and outlines rules for personal property and bathroom usage.
The agreement also includes a “good neighbor policy,” which asks residents to clean up after themselves, not vandalize property, or gossip about others at the camp, among other things.
The camp recently established an 8 p.m. – 8 a.m. curfew and erected a chainlink fence around the lot. Reporter Colin Tiernan contributed to this report. Quinn Welsch can be reached at (509) 459-5469 or by email at quinnw@spokesman.com.
Camp Hope is shrinking, no thanks to local politics
Here is something you probably won’t hear from the sheriff, the county commissioners, the prosecutor, the mayor or the chief of police: Camp Hope is shrinking, no thanks to any of them.
The state-funded effort to move people from the East Central Neighborhood encampment along Interstate 90 is proceeding, even as the aforementioned public officials grandstand, bluster, threaten and try to undermine it. Around 180 people have left the camp – some to the Trent shelter, some to transitional housing, some to family members, some just away, according to an update on camp conditions by documentarian and camp security official Maurice Smith.
Importantly, the people have not been simply scooted off to recamp under one of the crowded viaducts downtown or along a riverbank.
“While politicians threaten and argue over who should sue who, while offering no actual solutions,” Smith wrote in his update, “we’re moving ahead with the actual solutions our unsheltered homeless friends need to move forward with their lives.”
The Camp Hope population is down from a peak of 623 in July to 443 this week, he said. This comes as the state’s $24 million operation to move the campers into housing continues, though the effort is flocked on all sides by a storm of chaos and confusion sown by the very public officials whose long-running failures brought us to this pass.
Monday’s news that an employee of the Guardian Foundation, which operates two shelters for the city and oversaw the convention center debacle last winter, is believed to have embezzled hundreds of thousands of dollars landed like the arrival of another plague in a series of them.
It’s still early, but the case looks like an accountability fiasco, both for the Guardians and the accountability mayor.
With every passing day, some new effort to undermine the success of the state’s work to clear Camp Hope comes from some new corner of local politics – threats to sue, or drive away the homeless, or fine the state, or huff and puff, or whatever. These efforts all amount to politicians stomping their feet and demanding – without any attempt to offer a practical way forward – an immediate, simplistic end to the camp.
This rush to the microphones began with the unhinged letter and news conference a couple weeks ago from Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich, who had never even set foot in Camp Hope, threatening to personally drive people out and put them on buses out of town.
This has been accompanied by threats from Mayor Nadine Woodward and then Chief Craig Meidl to use city nuisance laws against the camp – apropos for an administration that seems to regard homeless people as roadside junk. The chorus was then joined by the county commission and Prosecutor Larry Haskell, making their own threats and setting their own absurd deadlines.
All are demanding a faster closure of the camp than is remotely realistic, unless the goal is just to spread people to new homeless camps. There is simply not enough available housing to move them all immediately, and the city’s claims to the contrary are absurd – they are based on the idea that hundreds of people would go to the Trent shelter, well beyond the number of beds there.
It’s hard to know exactly what these blusterers think is going to happen if they get their way. Some of them, no doubt, are in the grip of the wishful-thinking problem with homelessness – the simplistic and satisfying idea that if some stern father figure just puts his foot down, all will be well. Some want to peacock before the election, because running against homeless people is, sadly, a safe way to get votes.
A conspiratorial thinker might wonder whether they see that the state is beginning to make progress – progress that these politicians have done almost nothing to aid and have actually tried to obstruct – and want to claim some credit for making it happen down the road.
Whatever it is, what they have combined to produce is a disastrous failure of community leadership. It compounds years of inaction on homelessness, fosters division instead of unified effort, leans on threats instead of cooperation, and deepens enmity among those who should be partners.
One part of this sorry stew – which bubbles up in whisper campaigns and Facebook rants – has been a narrative smearing those who are actually trying to help bring a positive end to Camp Hope as cynical money grubbers, getting rich on the homeless.
These claims are so common in anti-homelessness circles – and stated explicitly in the sheriff’s letter to the state – that it was really something to learn this week that if anyone affiliated with homeless services had stolen public funds for personal gain, it was a former Guardians employee.
The Guardians have been the mayor’s ride-or-die on homeless services, the recipients of multimillion-dollar contracts to run the Cannon Street shelter and Trent. Months after the plan for the Trent shelter was developed, it remains hardly more than a concrete warehouse, resembling an offseason expo barn at the fairgrounds – a symbol of the deep insincerity of the administration’s efforts.
It’s too soon to say much with certainty about the embezzlement case, but it does seem that the allegations were quite slow to make their way to the right authorities, and they call into question the oversight and level of due diligence practiced by the Guardians and the Woodward administration.
The Guardians apparently saw the first signs of trouble last summer; it wasn’t until the end of September that the police and officials at City Hall were alerted. Yet it was only this week, after two City Council members alerted the public, that the accountability mayor announced she was ordering an internal audit and the police department said it had assigned a detective to the case.
Meanwhile, the difficult, important work of bringing Camp Hope to an effective, humane closure continues. Some campers have been moved into housing, outreach workers continue to identify solutions for those remaining, and security procedures and rules are being enhanced to deal with the very real problems of crime and safety.
The bloviators and blusterers who are rushing out to make demands and stomp their feet will, no doubt, take credit for any progress that occurs at the camp. But make no mistake: The positive steps at Camp Hope are not the result of demand letters and news conferences and false deadlines.
They’re coming from the people on the ground whose efforts the big talkers are doing their best to undermine. Shawn Vestal can be reached at (509) 459-5431 or at shawnv@spokesman.com.
SHAWN VESTAL
SPOKESMAN COLUMNIST
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KREM
An initial group of security officers have arrived at the homeless encampment, with more on the way.
SPOKANE, Wash. — As conflicts over the homeless encampment near I-90 and Freya Street reach a head, occupants at the camp are finding themselves in the middle as the city and the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) hash out what happens next.
As part of a four-step plan to clear the encampment, WSDOT has hired security to patrol the area. Contracted by Security Services Northwest, this security is part of the Right of Way Safety Initiative to address safety at homeless encampments across Washington.
According to WSDOT, an initial set of security is onsite at the camp and more will arrive in the coming days. The security will provide a 24/7 patrol around the encampment and will work with staff on-site at the encampment to control access at the entry gate.
"While security is a significant component in the plans of the state agencies and outreach partners, it is important to note that security staff are not law enforcement," WSDOT said in a statement.
Spokane County Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich's deadline to clear the homeless camp is steadily approaching, and now both occupants and non-profit organizations are racing to find long-term solutions that appease both sides of the coin. Introducing security and fencing to the encampment is WSDOT's second step in clearing the site.
WSDOT's next move is to now help residents transition to appropriate shelter and housing. Once residents are moved off the site, clean-up and restoration of the WSDOT land will begin.
On Monday, Spokane City Council members said they learned a former Guardians Foundation employee was allegedly mishandling money.
SPOKANE, Wash. — Spokane police confirm they're now involved in the investigation into reports of suspected fraud involving a large amount of money in the city's housing and homeless system.
On Monday, Spokane City Council members said they learned a former Guardians Foundation employee was allegedly mishandling money. The claims prompted two council members to call for a criminal investigation into the suspected fraud. They said the stolen funds range from anywhere between $100,000 to $1 million.
The Spokane Police department confirmed on Tuesday there is an open investigation into The Guardians Foundation. SPD assigned a detective Tuesday to look into the allegations of theft and embezzlement within the organization. That means city council members who were calling for a criminal investigation got what they wanted.
Details surrounding the suspected fraud within the Guardians Foundation continue to develop.
We do know right now the Mayor's office ordered an internal audit, which is currently underway. That's because the city awarded millions of taxpayer dollars to the Guardians to operate shelters in the city.
The Guardians Foundation became a tax-exempt non-profit in 2011. Its CEO, Mike Shaw, founded the organization with the intent to help veterans.
The organization's website said it maintains multiple facilities that house at-risk veterans and their families in Washington, Idaho, Oregon and Utah.
In May 2020, The Guardians took over operations at the Cannon Street center in Spokane.
Then, in September 2021, the city of Spokane awarded the Guardians a $1.85 million contract to operate the Cannon street center as a year-round shelter.
In August 2022, City Council approved a $2.4 million agreement with the Guardians to run the new Trent Avenue Shelter.
We searched the non-profit's status with the Washington Secretary of State's office. It lists their business status as delinquent.
And in a search on GuideStar, a website that monitors non-profits, it said, "this organization's exempt status was automatically revoked by the IRS for failure to file a Form 990, 990-EZ, 990-N, or 990-PF for 3 consecutive years. Further investigation and due diligence are warranted."
Still, the Guardians remain the operator for the city's Cannon Street and Trent Avenue Shelters.
We still do not have a police report of the suspected fraud. We also don't know who the suspected former employee is or how much money was stolen. We continue to press the city, the Mayor's office, and The Guardian's CEO for more information. But at this time, they have not given any more details.
In the meantime, City Council member Michael Cathcart said a forensic audit is currently underway and is expected to be completed by October 31.