10/28/2022
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The Spokesman-Review
City hires Salvation Army to operate homeless shelters
Shawn Vestal: Accountability for Guardians fiasco should reach deeper than contractor
Kiantha Duncan: Homelessness won’t go away until we address systemic problems
KXLY
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The Spokesman-Review
City hires Salvation Army to operate homeless shelters
By Colin Tiernan
Spokane has chosen a new operator for two of its homeless shelters just weeks after fraud allegations against one of the former operator’s employees became public.
During a special meeting Thursday, the City Council approved two contracts with the Salvation Army to run the city’s Cannon Street and Trent Avenue shelters. The Salvation Army will take over operations from the Guardians Foundation on Nov. 1. Spokane Mayor Nadine Woodward declared an emergency so the city could bypass competitive bidding requirements and approve the contract quicker.
The hasty switch to a new operator comes after the mayor’s office in late September learned that a Guardians Foundation employee may have embezzled between $100,000 and $1 million.
It isn’t clear if any of the missing dollars are Spokane taxpayer funds. The Spokane Police Department is investigating the incident, and the city is conducting an audit.
Spokane had two multimillion dollar contracts with the Guardians Foundation.
In September 2021, the City Council approved a $1.9 million contract with the organization to run the 72-bed Cannon Street shelter through June. The council later extended that contract through the end of 2022 for an additional $1 million.
The City Council in August approved a $6.6 million contract with the Guardians Foundation to operate the new Trent Resource and Assistance Center through 2023.
That shelter, which will eventually have 250 beds, could see heavy use in the coming weeks as Spokane and Spokane County look to clear out Camp Hope. Woodward has said she hopes to transition many of the homeless encampment’s 450 residents into the east Spokane facility by mid-November.
Financially speaking, the Salvation Army’s contracts will be identical to the ones Spokane had with the Guardians Foundation. The city will pay the Salvation Army$341,000 to run the Cannon Street shelter through Dec. 31 and $5.6 million to run the Trent Avenue shelter through 2023. Spokane’s contract with the Guardians Foundation included a clause that allowed the city to end the agreement at any time.
Spokane City Administrator Johnnie Perkins said the Guardians Foundation employees working at the two shelters will be offered jobs with the Salvation Army. The Salvation Army will assess the shelters over the next 60-90 days and determine if operational changes are needed.
The Guardians Foundation’s relationship with the city appeared to be in jeopardy since early October when council members Karen Stratton and Lori Kinnear disclosed that one of the organization’s employees may have committed fraud.
Stratton has said she learned of the missing funds through community members, not the mayor’s office.
Perkins said Thursday he learned of the possible embezzlement in late September and asked city staff on Oct. 6 to begin a forensic audit, shortly before he told City Council members.
Guardians Foundation CEO Mike Shaw has said he learned of the missing funds earlier this year thanks to an annual audit.
Shaw said the organization’s former bookkeeper was misusing funds and covering her tracks by manipulating expense records in QuickBooks. He said the issue began 18 months ago and he wanted to complete an investigation before alerting the city.
The Guardians Foundation has lost its tax-exempt status after failing to file the annual paperwork nonprofits are required to submit to the Internal Revenue Service. The organization also lost its business license on July 31, according to the Washington Secretary of State’s Office.
Perkins said the decision to end the city’s agreement with the Guardians Foundation was due to contract violations and troublesome accounting practices, not alleged fraud.
“There was an inability to maintain accurate records to account for expenditures and performance, which are terms that are very clear in the contract,” Perkins said. “We needed to make a change for the protection of the taxpayers of the city, the city itself, as well as the occupants of both sites.”
City Councilman Zack Zappone asked Perkins why the city hadn’t known before signing the Trent Shelter contract that the Guardians Foundation had lost its nonprofit status.
“I’m just really concerned about why did we get to this spot,” Zappone said.
Perkins said the city is still learning about the Guardians’ finances.
“We will continue to improve our systems to make sure taxpayer dollars are protected,” he said.
City Council members and Perkins all emphasized that they appreciate the work the Guardians Foundation and its employees have done over the last year.
“They did step up in a number of instances when the city needed them,” Perkins said. Colin Tiernan can be reached at (509) 459-5039 or at colint@spokesman. com.
Shawn Vestal: Accountability for Guardians fiasco should reach deeper than contractor
The accountability mayor has a long way to go to be even minimally accountable in the Guardians Foundation debacle.
The City Council approved an emergency measure Thursday to allow the city to end its contract with the Guardians – 17 days after it became public that an employee of the foundation had admitted embezzling funds – and hire the Salvation Army to take over operations at the Trent and Cannon Street shelters.
City Administrator Johnnie Perkins told the council that following the news of the embezzlement allegations, he and city staff took a closer look at the books and found “irregularities” and a lack of internal controls that – above and beyond the embezzlement – meant that the Guardians were in violation of their contract.
The decision was the right one, if made bafflingly late.
What remains murky is a clearer, more definitive timeline of when the mayor knew about the embezzlement allegations and what she did before this knowledge became public; how her administration managed to overlook these irregularities for months while handing over taxpayer dollars to the Guardians to run two shelters and a winter warming center; and why she has been so very quiet about this debacle, when in the past – on matters involving her political opponents, say – she has spoken up loud and clear about perceived ethical problems in the contracting process. “Where is the accountability?” Councilman Zack Zappone asked during the meeting. We do not have a good answer to that simple question. And it’s not very clear whether the twin investigations into the embezzlement – an internal audit and a belated Spokane Police Department probe – will shine any light on it, either.
Zappone was not the only council member to note the absence of a stronger public statement from the mayor as well as the long time it took to reach Thursday’s vote.
After all, the head of the Guardians Foundation, Mike Shaw, learned of the possible embezzlement of hundreds of thousands of dollars in May, he’s said in past interviews. KREM reported that he described this as “solid evidence of potential fraud.” He says he reported it to no one for months on end because he was focused on getting the Trent shelter up and running.
The employee alleged to have committed the embezzlement left Shaw a letter Aug. 11, confessing to the embezzlement. She remained on the job until Sept. 23.
Shaw waited to report it to the police Sept. 29, via a call to Crime Check. That call somehow did not result in a Spokane Police Department investigation – which only began after the news became public.
In the time between Shaw receiving the letter confessing the embezzlement, and his call to Crime Check, the Guardians began operating the mayor’s Trent shelter.
Perkins has said he learned about the allegations shortly after the Crime Check call, after which he alerted the mayor, who ordered the internal audit.
This one came without a news release. It was only after word leaked to Councilwoman Karen Stratton, who reached out to Perkins on Oct. 7, that he began informing other council members. Stratton and Councilwoman Lori Kinnear then called publicly for a criminal investigation Oct. 10.
In the more than two weeks since, Perkins told the council, he and city staffers examined the Guardian contracts and records and found problems that he referred to in the vaguest of terms – irregularities, a lack of internal controls, some “administerial” issues.
He did not specify what these were, but they were above and beyond the alleged theft. Zappone pointedly asked why it took so long to discover these problems, given how long the city has been paying the Guardians – and given the fact that people have questioned other expenses by the organization, such as the seemingly steep cost billed by the Guardians for overseeing the convention center debacle.
Perkins didn’t have much of an answer, other than to say the city continues to learn a lot about what was going on and the staff is doing a swell job. He enthusiastically and repeatedly praised the staff, but the problem does not lie not with the poor, overburdened employees of the short-staffed city.
It’s about accountability up top. The city made deals with the Guardians worth $6.6 million (for Trent) and $1.9 million (for Cannon Street), and threw $136,000 at them to run the convention center warming shelter for two weeks, which left some folks scratching their heads.
Given how closely the mayor’s homelessness program, such as it is, has been yoked to the Guardians, it is crucial the public understands as much as possible about what she knew and what she did, back when the embarrassment was still under wraps. Shawn Vestal can be reached at (509) 4595431 or at shawnv@spokesman.com.
SHAWN VESTAL
SPOKESMAN COLUMNIST
Kiantha Duncan: Homelessness won’t go away until we address systemic problems
Dear Kiantha,
I live in Spokane and have my entire life. I am sick and tired of seeing what homelessness has done to our beautiful city. What ever happened to the Spokane of old when people worked to earn a modest living and paid for room and board without expecting a government handout?
Dear Friend,
I have not lived in Spokane my entire life; however, I am very aware of the challenges Spokane is having around homelessness.
I will give you my perspective on your question from a broader national lens, because homelessness is a national crisis.
Let me first say, we are in alignment so to speak. I, too, am sick and tired of homelessness – though for a slightly different reason. I don’t see the homeless crisis as something that has been “done to” cities like Spokane; I see our national homeless crisis as a consequence of systemic power and the devaluation of human life, namely the lives of the poor and middle income people.
Power itself is not a bad thing. When power is driven by what is in the best interest of those who are not “in crisis,” however, the solutions are typically more harmful than helpful. That means that homelessness and other social woes are not being done “to us” but instead “by us.”
Generic homeless remedies, like encampment sweeps and broad one-size-fits-all solutions, have never worked, nor will they. Why, you ask? Because they do not address systematic barriers to housing.
If you take 100 homeless individuals and ask them to tell you how they became homeless, what barriers keep them homeless and what does a housed reality look like for them, you will get 100 different answers. Therefore, we must have a robust and complex strategy to addressing the individual needs of those experiencing homelessness across our country.
We assume that unhoused people are homeless by choice or because of their inability to “work hard and earn a living.”
While there are cases in which those assumptions may be factual, we tend to focus more on the homeless person versus focusing our attention on the reality of social and class bias coupled with disparities and a dollop of the benefits of these broken structures. We neglect to acknowledge that poverty and homelessness are, in fact, great sources of financial and political benefit and gain to those in power.
We live in a beautiful country and the object that is dimming the beauty and lights of cities like Spokane is not homelessness. It is our inability to acknowledge and change ineffective systems and leadership.
If we want to see a drastic decrease in homelessness across our nation, we must first increase our levels of accountability and commitment to dismantling the systems that cause it.
Soul to soul, Kiantha
Dear Kiantha can be read Fridays in The Spokesman-Review. To read this column in Spanish, visit www.spokesman.com. To submit a question, email DearKiantha@gmail.com.
KIANTHA DUNCAN
SPOKESMAN COLUMNIST
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KXLY
Posted: October 27, 2022 6:41 PM Updated: October 27, 2022 7:22 PM byJordan Smith
SPOKANE, Wash. — Currently, the waitlist for low-income housing in Spokane County is three years. It’s partially due to the pandemic, but also because of the growing homeless population and skyrocketing rents.
Despite the community being in dire need of relief, Spokane’s housing crisis is continuing its daunting reign.
According to rent data, the Fair Market Rent (FMR) prices in Spokane are more expensive than nearly 90 percent of other FMRs in the country.
“We saw after COVID that rent skyrocketed. In the last three years we’ve seen rent increase by over 50 percent,” said Bob Stuckart, Executive Director of the Spokane low-income housing consortium.
The average cost of a two-bedroom apartment is roughly $1,300. Those high rent prices restrict many prospective renters, especially those with extremely limited income.
“Then, people can’t afford their rent and so they end up on the streets,” Stuckart said.
It doesn’t help that the line to access low-income housing is at an unsustainable length. Stuckart says the ideal wait time would be three months, but that’s certainly not the case.
“We have three-year wait lists for low-income housing in Spokane,” Stuckart said.
If you qualified for low-income housing today, it wouldn’t be until October 2025 before you could move in.
Stuckart says there’s simply not enough housing supply for those with limited income. To alleviate this situation, the county would have to double the current amount of housing options it has.
“We have a need for about 7,000 low-income apartments in our communities right now. We have about 7,000 to 8,000 right now. So we need to double what we’ve produced,” Stuckart said.
To assist the problem, the county has been awarded over $57 million in rental assistance since 2020. So far, the county’s received $41 million of those funds.
About $37 million has been deployed towards rental assistance to roughly 6,000 households. Around 50 percent has gone towards assisting those categorized as extremely-low income.
Stuckart says whatever money the county receives from the federal government and state is extremely useful, and its being spent as quickly as possible to alleviate the housing crisis.
Even with the relief though, Spokane’s housing crisis remains an uphill battle for the time being.