Several of today’s news articles highlight why Spokane needs to learn how to provide Emergency Shelter. The world is in turmoil, and it is not unrealistic to think that we may have a sudden influx of people fleeing environmental (Malden fire), political (Ukraine and Afghanistan), or personal disasters. Let’s prepare. We can start by having enough emergency shelter for 300 - 500 people, and use what we learn to reassure ourselves that if a disaster happens, we will be ready to shelter our citizens.
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Wall St Journal
Spokesman-Review
REBUILT WITH LOVE (Malden Fire)
ESCAPE FROM UKRAINE: NOW PAST BORDER, FAMILY PLANS FOR NEW LIFE
FIRST AFGHAN REFUGEES ARRIVE IN VIRGINIA
State Dems release $64B budget proposal
KHQ
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Wall St Journal
By Drew Hinshaw and Ian Lovett Updated March 10, 2022 10:24 am ET
WARSAW—Local governments can’t buy beds fast enough. Poles who offer to host refugees get more than 100 emails from newcomers looking for a place to sleep, often full of details of their ordeal. The flood of people has raised Poland’s population for the first time since 1987.
Europe is facing its biggest refugee crisis since World War II. In the nearly two weeks since Russia invaded Ukraine, 2.4 million people have fled to the European Union, with no end in sight. The overwhelming majority are descending on countries in the EU’s east. Officials are scrambling to expand housing, schools and social services for an influx of people expected to grow by millions more.
“They’re calling day and night, asking if we have beds,” said Marta Molińska, who turned the skydiving camp she runs in western Poland into a shelter for what was originally supposed to be 15 people. It now houses 50.
Two Ukrainians enter Poland every three seconds. The 1.4 million people who have arrived in Poland would create the country’s second-largest city. By next week, they will likely surpass Warsaw, the country’s biggest city, Polish officials expect.
Since 1987, Poland’s population has been steady around 38 million, held down by emigration and few births. In the 13 days since Feb. 24, it has hit 39 million, and within weeks it will likely top 40 million.
The abrupt arrival of millions of people entering the EU is already straining the transatlantic alliance, with Poland pushing the U.S. to shoulder a bigger burden. On Thursday, Vice President Kamala Harris, during a visit to Warsaw, announced $50 million in assistance, through the World Food Program, for refugees in Europe.
Poland’s President Andrzej Duda, during an hourlong talk with Ms. Harris earlier in the day, pressed for her government to do more: for example, to expedite visas for Ukrainians in Poland hoping to join relatives in the U.S. Without more help, Mr. Duda told reporters, “given the further influx of refugees into Poland, this will end up in a refugee disaster.”
The wave is crashing into Warsaw, where 200,000 Ukrainians have arrived in just over a week. If those newcomers stay, as the government expects most to do, one out of every nine residents of the capital would be a newly arrived Ukrainian.
That Polish government estimate is conservative. The tens of thousands of Ukrainians showing up at the city’s stations for food and medical help are just a fraction of those in the city, said Warsaw’s mayor, Rafał Trzaskowski. The number should keep rising. Ukraine’s prewar population stood at 44 million.
A reception point for Ukrainian refugees at the main railway station in Krakow, Poland, on Tuesday.
Photo: lukasz gagulski/Shutterstock
A Ukrainian refugee holds her baby in an effort to warm him at the border crossing in Medyka, Poland, on Wednesday.
Photo: Visar Kryeziu/Associated Press
From his desk at city hall, Mr. Trzaskowski has been working the phone, managing to find accommodations in neighboring countries: On Tuesday, he secured a stadium in Berlin willing to house 300 people, while a building in Vienna was available for 800. Just after he sealed those deals, the government called to say five trains, each packed with Ukrainians, were on their way to Warsaw.
“We get more and more people who have no friends and no family and are completely disoriented,” he said. “We really need, now, a system…. This is like our biggest humanitarian crisis after the Second World War. What can we do? We are one city.”
For the EU, which saw 1.3 million asylum seekers arrive in 2015—mostly from Africa and the Middle East—the current refugee crisis is bigger, and targeted at an entirely different set of countries. Then, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and Czech Republic all resisted a proposal to redistribute refugees who mainly headed for Germany, Italy or other wealthier European states.
People fleeing Ukraine walk toward a bus for relocation across Poland after crossing the border in Kroscienko, Poland, on Wednesday.
Photo: Omar Marques/Getty Images
This time, refugees are overwhelmingly headed into the EU’s eastern countries, the same ones that tried to restrict the arrivals of refugees escaping wars in Syria or Libya. For Ukrainians, both Polish and Slovak are similar languages, and their countries have centuries of shared culture and history.
Tight labor markets, affordable cities and a pre-existing diaspora have made those countries more appealing alternatives for Ukrainians, who find options slimmer in Europe’s west. So far, the U.K. has accepted about 700 Ukrainian refugees.
The government, which has vowed to accommodate as many Ukrainians as it can, has floated a 8 billion zloty, equivalent to $1.7 billion, budget package to manage the influx. Its proposals include a one-time welfare payment to refugees, along with a stipend for the Poles who house them.
Poles, overwhelmingly sympathetic with their eastern neighbor’s plight, have opened their homes and businesses to house Ukrainians. In Krakow, a nonprofit turned an old theater into a shelter that housed 12 people on the first day of the war, 100 people on the next day, and has been packed ever since—thronged with scores of people flopped down on mattresses on the floor and just three showers. Some 3,500 people offered their apartments in the city, all of them now full, said Karol Wilczynski, who runs Salam Lab, a migration and human rights group.
Online, more than 10,000 Poles joined a website pledging to host refugees in their homes, for free. Each offer can get more than 100 responses from families asking to stay. Volunteers have complained to the website’s founder, Rafał Rybacki, that their phones won’t stop ringing.
Ukrainian refugees getting food and other things they need at Berlin's central station on Wednesday.
Photo: ANNEGRET HILSE/REUTERS
A mother sleeping with her children in a temporary shelter hosting Ukrainian refugees near Przemysl, Poland, on Tuesday.
Photo: afp contributor#afp/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Some refugees are branching out to alternative parts of Europe. On Wednesday, trains leaving Warsaw’s western railway station for Berlin were sold out, leaving Oksana Poplavska, a 36-year-old mother of two kids with nowhere to spend the night, after nine days of nonstop travel from their home Kyiv. As her children nibbled on pastries and drank hot cider from paper cups, she cried, asking bystanders if there was any place that would house her.
Other European countries are bracing for an influx of Ukrainian refugees. Italy, with one of the largest Ukrainian populations in Europe, says 800,000 refugees could arrive in the coming weeks. Europe learned from the 2015 refugee crisis and is moving quickly to address the crisis. In just one day, European Union countries approved temporary measures that give Ukrainians access to housing, medical coverage, schools and social-welfare assistance.
At Warsaw’s central railway station, a mother and her two children navigated a thin footpath through the crowd of refugees sitting on the floor, steps, their suitcases or bags. A driver took her money and left without her, she said, leaving them to spend the night among the dozens of families camped out on blankets in front of a packed McDonald’s.
“We’ve got a problem with these people who don’t know what to do. They are from some countryside in Ukraine, they speak only Ukrainian, and they have no idea where to go or how long they want to stay,” said a nearby volunteer, filtering through the crowd.
Before he could finish his next sentence, an elderly woman traveling alone from rural Ukraine interrupted, saying she wasn’t sure where to go.
“I have no place to stay and I don’t speak the language,” she said.
Video: Russian Airstrike Hits Ukrainian Maternity Hospital
Video: Russian Airstrike Hits Ukrainian Maternity Hospital
Ukrainian officials say a Russian airstrike hit a maternity hospital in the besieged city of Mariupol, as conditions have grown desperate for civilians unable to flee the country. Photo: Evgeniy Maloletka/Associated Press
—Yana Tashkevych contributed to this article.
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Spokesman-Review
By Emma Epperly
THE SPOKESMAN-REVIEW
Sun poured through the windows of a nearly empty house as 90-year-old Jim Jacobs, tears in his eyes, looked around in awe.
He finally had a home. It had been 548 days since Jacobs loaded his wife, Joy, 97, into their blue minivan and sped away from the flames engulfing their Malden, Washington, home.
The Babb Road Fire destroyed some 120 homes in Malden and Pine City, leaving the community at the northern edge of Whitman County devastated. With only 40% of the structures lost insured, many people, like the Jacobses, were left without a safety net.
Just a few weeks after the fire, the couple returned to the burned-out piece of land that had been their home for the past 20-some years. Joy, who had already been struggling with dementia, was so devastated by the loss that “she just gave up,” Jacobs said.
Jim Jacobs, an elderly resident of Malden, Wash., shows a photo of his late wife to the work crew that just completed his new two-bedroom home Wednesday.
JESSE TINSLEY/ THE SPOKESMAN-REVIEW
She died less than six weeks after the fire.
In the time since, Jacobs has had one focus: rebuilding Joy’s house.
That dream finally came true Wednesday, when he officially moved into a house built by a group of Amish and Mennonite missionaries from St. Ignatius, Montana. The money came from donated funds to the Red Cross.
“This house was built with loving hands and it’s going to be maintained by loving hands,” Jacobs said with tears in his eyes. “This house is Joy’s house. I’m the caretaker.”
Building Joy’s house
Late last year, the Western Anabaptist Mission Service offered to build houses for Malden residents. Jacobs was one of the first on the list. Construction began Jan. 3, and the homes were completed in just seven weeks.
The group’s goal is to be “the hands and feet of Jesus” by donating their skills as builders to communities in need, Chairman Toby Yoder said. The group was founded in 2013 and has built dozens of homes since then for people and communities in need.
They had finished two homes in Malden in March 2021, and returned this year to build six more.
After finishing construction two weeks ago, Yoder and a group of mission service members returned Wednesday to bless the homes and officially give Jacobs the keys.
The men piled into the house, a teary-eyed Jacobs greeting them.
Unable to stand idle, the group quickly got to work peeling stickers off the home’s 11 new windows, installing a last-minute vanity and fixing little odds and ends.
It’s “by far” the best day of the entire process, Yoder said as he watched Jacobs pace around the home. When every finishing touch was completed, Jacobs signed on the dotted line and he was officially home.
Making a house a home
Kim Maxfield pulled up to Jacobs’ house Wednesday morning with cups of coffee and a trailer loaded with furniture.
Maxfield, a case manager for Masons Care, the branch of Washington Masonic Charities that supports the elderly, has been with Jacobs since the beginning.
She came to Malden hoping to help where she could and found Jacobs and his wife struggling. Since then, she has supported Jacobs, helping him advocate for himself and making sure his basic needs are met.
The lead-up to movein day has been busy for Maxfield, who worked with Jacobs’ disaster management caseworker to try and secure funds to furnish the home.
She even took Jacobs furniture shopping last month to see what he might like, a challenge after half a century of Joy taking care of the decorating.
The two most important things to Jacobs were finding a secretary desk and hutch just like Joy’s, where he could display china and other trinkets similar to what Joy had before the fire.
Maxfield and Jacobs found just the two pieces at Owen’s Auction on the South Hill. On Wednesday, Jerry Collins, a member of the Spokane Scottish Rite, quickly began unloading the new pieces.
Jacobs insisted the large hutch would fit between his living room windows without even measuring.
“I don’t have to, I have precision eyeballs,” Jacobs said. Sure enough, the hutch fit. A lifelong craftsman, Jacobs said he’s thrilled with the workmanship of his new home.
“I feel wonderful,” Jacobs said as he looked around the house.
Maxfield was able to secure a few pieces of donated furniture, but the home remains largely unfurnished. Jacobs isn’t worried, though; he said he has plenty of time to get things just right.
While he still doesn’t have a bed, or dresser, or pots and pans, he’s in awe that he made it this far after more than a year of living in an RV.
“It’s like a fairytale,” he said. “I see it, I can feel it and, by golly, it’s real.”
Maxfield pulled out photos of Jacobs and Joy to adorn his first two pieces of furniture.
Jacobs tearfully showed the missionaries a photo of his wife before telling each person how thankful he is for what they contributed to making his dream a reality.
“You did a wonderful job. Words can’t describe,” Jacobs said. “I’ve seen miracles in my life, and that’s a miracle.” Emma Epperly can be reached at (509) 459-5122 or at emmae@spokesman. com.
ESCAPE FROM UKRAINE: NOW PAST BORDER, FAMILY PLANS FOR NEW LIFE
By Dave Cook
FOR THE SPOKESMAN-REVIEW
As long, difficult and stressful as it was to find liberation in Poland, Chris Hansen wasn’t there for long.
The next country may be a different matter as escaping turns to waiting.
Hansen, his wife, Victoria, and stepdaughter Sonja are now safely in the Czech Republic after fleeing Ukraine during the invasion by Russia .
A week ago, when making the decision to flee their fourth-floor apartment in Kharkiv, Hansen predicted their trip to freedom would take 20 hours. That was just about right after they concluded their exodus with an 18-hour bus ride on Wednesday morning to the border.
It began last Saturday with a two-hour trek to Poltava.
Less than an hour after they arrived at the border, they made it through customs and were in the town of Medyka in Poland. They waited two hours for their ride, then began the six-hour trip to a house owned by a colleague of Hansen’s in the fishing industry in Alaska, Vojtech Novak.
“It was very nice of them,” Hansen, a former Eastern Washington University football coach and player, said Wednesday of the assistance. “I really am tired – I hardly slept at all on the bus. Then it didn’t take long to get through processing.”
Although their stay in Medyka was short, Hansen echoed the media reports from that area about the enormous humanitarian efforts taken as some 2 million people have fled Ukraine to neighboring countries. “The Polish people are very friendly and helpful,” he says.
“There are a couple of hundred tents with people giving away clothing, cooked food, desserts and water,” he said of their short stay. “There are medical tents and people around the world helping mankind. It was very impressive.”
What Hansen witnessed on the cross-country trip across Ukraine will not be forgotten anytime soon. He estimates there were 50 stops at checkpoints, which turned what should have been a 15-hour trip into 18 hours.
Sometimes they would get a wave-by at the checkpoint, and other times the driver would just be questioned. During other stops, Ukraine officials would get on the bus and do random passport checks, or sometimes check everybody’s identification.
“Every place was different, but they all did checks,” he said. “We could hit a string of three within 10 miles, or you could go 10 miles without one. It was very well thought out, you can say that.
“They are all fortified with bomb shelters and pill boxes right on the road. You have to snake around the stations. They’ve set up zones to ambush if necessary, and there are places where infantry can fall back to.”
Even roadside farms were prepared, he observed.
“Every farmer’s road has obstacles in the way of getting to their houses,” Hansen explained. “And they have armed people there – it wasn’t one or two, it was like 200 of those we passed.
“They’ve prepared for this a very long time – forever,” he adds of their vigilance from being invaded. “And it’s professional. Every side road has something or somebody there.”
Hansen was also quick to credit the bus driver, who he tipped afterwards. The trip itself was a reasonable $100 in American dollars for each of them.
“Our driver was outstanding,” he said. “There was snow, black ice and white-out conditions. He was passing people who were slow, but he was safe doing it. About a mile away from the border it was bumper to bumper with cars on the far left and far right, but he just stuck it in the middle and went by everybody.”
Beyond that, Hansen noticed the terrain as being a real obstacle for Russia to invade – let alone win the war against the defiant Ukrainians.
“Think of the rolling hills of the Palouse, then add huge forests of trees that separate all those fields,” Hansen said. “There are valleys, hills and ravines. The Ukrainians are not going to quit, so it stuck out to me that the Russians can take the cities but they won’t take the country. No way.”
The beauty and size of the Dnieper River to the south of the capital city of Kiev also stuck out to him. That river originates in Russia, then flows through Belarus and Ukraine on its way to the Black Sea. In that area were numerous abandoned factories and businesses.
“It’s a skinny, two-lane bridge and it’s well protected,” Hansen said of the crossing.
Now that they are in a safe haven, the process to get back to the United States will be the next step. The father-in-law of Hansen’s brother, Aaron, helps get people into America from third-world countries.
“He’s dealing with embassies and consulates all the time,” Hansen said. “He’s already contacted the capital in Prague, and he’s already given them our information and that we are coming. He’s forwarded to me six or seven phone numbers that will be important for us.”
Earlier in the invasion, Hansen had contact with the State Department and the office of Congresswoman Cathy Mc-Morris Rodgers. A worker in her office has been particularly helpful.
“We’re on a first-name basis now, and he’s asked me to let him know when we leave and to keep in contact,” Hansen said before they departed Kharkiv. “They wanted to track us.”
Hansen is hopeful the worldwide crisis would help speed along United States citizenship for Victoria, and now Sonja. They had started the 18-month process for Victoria to become an American prior to the war starting.
“We have every document we need – birth, marriage, divorce – and I have a passport,” he said.
Those documents will become critical to the process of eventually getting them to the U.S. through some sort of emergency or refugee visa.
Hansen knows, however, even the best-case scenario could take months. He can do some of his work for Silver Bay Seafoods remotely but spends the summer months in Alaska. He said that ideally they would be there with him.
“It’s not going to be easy – it’s just not,” Hansen said of the process, which will include meetings and communications with the United States Embassy in Prague. “It’s going to be time-consuming, and I can see the writing on the wall. We’ll get our proper paperwork in this weekend, and then try to make an appointment sometime next week.
“Hopefully something will materialize, but I don’t see it happening right away,” he continued. “One month, no way. Two months, maybe. It will probably take five to six months, something like that.
“I can leave anytime,” he added, “but I’ll stay here with them as long as I can.”
FIRST AFGHAN REFUGEES ARRIVE IN VIRGINIA
By Ben Fox
ASSOCIATED PRESS
WASHINGTON – A first group of Afghan refugees have arrived at a new temporary housing facility in Northern Virginia as the U.S. works to resettle people who fled the Taliban takeover of their country in August, the Department of Homeland Security said Wednesday.
Afghans arriving from overseas will stay at the National Conference Center in Leesburg, Virginia, until they can be placed in more permanent housing around the country with the assistance of private resettlement organizations, DHS said in a statement announcing their arrival at the new facility.
Afghan refugees who arrived in the U.S. as part of Operation Allies Welcome were housed until February at military bases around the country for up to several months as they awaited resettlement. Those arriving now include people who managed to get out of Afghanistan after the U.S. withdrawal and have been at overseas military bases.
Those who arrive at the center, which is normally used as a corporate training facility, have already undergone medical and security screening overseas. While in Leesburg, they will complete immigration applications and participate in workshops on U.S. laws and civic education, the official in charge of OAW, Robert Fenton, said in the statement.
“We will continue to work closely with state and local partners to ensure we can continue to resettle our Afghan allies as quickly, safely, and successfully as possible,” Fenton said.
The first group of about 300 came to the conference center on Tuesday and are expected to stay for two to four weeks, said Angelo Fernández Hernández, a DHS spokesman.
The center has a capacity for 1,000.
More than 76,000 Afghans have come to the U.S. since the fall of their government to the Taliban in August.
A majority have so far settled in communities with established Afghan communities, including Northern Virginia and the surrounding D.C. area; Northern California and Texas. Their resettlement has been slowed by a shortage of affordable housing and cuts to the refugee program under the Trump administration, among other factors.
DHS has previously said about 40% of the Afghans will qualify for the special immigrant visa for people who worked as military interpreters or for the U.S. government in some other capacity during America’s longest war.
Most of the rest, however, do not yet have permanent legal residency in the U.S. because they did not come under a refugee program but were admitted under a type of emergency federal authorization known as humanitarian parole.
Advocates for the refugees, including a number of prominent veterans groups, are pressing Congress to provide permanent residency with an “Afghan adjustment act,” similar to what has been done in the past for Cubans and Iraqis.
Operation Allies Welcome is expected to run until later this summer, at which point Afghans will be processed through the existing U.S. refugee program.
Families evacuated from Kabul, Afghanistan, walk through the terminal before boarding a bus after they arrived at Washington Dulles International Airport in Chantilly, Va., on Aug. 27.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
State Dems release $64B budget proposal
By Laurel Demkovich
THE SPOKESMAN-REVIEW
OLYMPIA – With just Thursday and Friday left in the legislative session, Democrats on Wednesday released their final budget proposal, spending $64.1billion on new investments in K-12 schools, programs designed to reduce poverty and homelessness, behavioral health and money to help the state recover from the COVID-19 pandemic.
On off-years, such as this one, legislators are tasked with adjusting the two-year budget passed the year prior. This year, lawmakers had an unprecedented amount of money to use to adjust the next year’s spending.
Last year, lawmakers passed a $59 billion budget and came back this year with more than $5 billion in additional revenue, plus $1.2 billion in federal COVID-19 relief funds not yet spent.
“This is such an unusual supplemental budget,” said Sen. June Robinson, D-Everett. “We were blessed with both state revenue and federal resources that we were able to invest in our communities, in our people.”
The budget leaves $800 million in reserves for the next two years plus an additional $2.75 billion left in an account set aside to help Washington recover from the COVID-19 pandemic, or a similar emergency.
The final plan does not propose any broad tax breaks. A proposed three-day sales tax holiday over Labor Day weekend did not make it into the final budget. Budget writers said there were too many technical challenges.
Rep. Nicole Macri, D-Seattle, said retailers felt a short-term holiday like that would be too “burdensome,” and it would take more time to implement that program.
There are tax breaks for small businesses. Beginning Jan. 1, 2023, small businesses that make less than $125,000 a year do not have to pay a business and operations tax in Washington.
Republicans criticized the budget proposal for not having more largescale tax breaks. “I just think that our middle-income families are being hit the hardest and I don’t see help for them, and we really had an opportunity to do that,” Sen. Lynda Wilson. R-Vancouver, said in a conference committee meeting on the budget.
Rep. Timm Ormsby, D-Spokane, said much of the additional money the state had this year was one-time funds that Democrats decided should be dedicated to transportation and capital budgets.
The budget transfers $2 billion in one-time funds plus more than $50 million a year to a 16-year transportation package, which funds new transit, road projects and maintenance across the state. It also transfers $650 million in one-time funds to the capital budget, which provides for construction and infrastructure projects statewide.
Ormsby said those are one-time expenditures that will benefit every corner of the state in both transportation and capital investments.
Republicans also criticized Democrats for failing to include them in budget negotiations or share the final proposal with them until the day they were set to vote on it.
Rep. Drew Stokesbary, R-Auburn, said there were some good things in the proposal, but he was disappointed that Republicans did not have a bigger role, especially as they represent 40% of the state population.
“It does them a real disservice,” he said.
What’s funded
The budget includes
a significant amount of funding for K-12 education, including money to adjust for inflation for salaries, materials, supplies and operating costs, as well as funding for additional nurses, counselors and school support staff. It also includes $150 million for a state student loan program, which would offer loans to students with 1% interest rates.
It also includes funding to improve the number of nurses and health care workers in the state. That includes funding for building health care simulation labs, creating a bachelor of science in nursing program at Eastern Washington University, creating additional nursing slots and repaying student loans for those who choose to become nurse educators.
The budget also includes funding for refugee assistance for those coming to Washington from Afghanistan and Ukraine.
There is also $375,000 to study the four lower Snake River dams “as part of a comprehensive salmon recovery strategy,” according to a budget highlights document. That was included in Gov. Jay Inslee’s proposed budget last December.
The budget uses the remaining $1.2 billion in federal coronavirus relief funds allocated to the state last year. That money mostly goes to onetime COVID-19 expenses, such as utility assistance for renters, business assistance, vaccines, data collection, relief for behavioral health providers and enrollment stabilization for public schools that lost a number of students during the pandemic.
More than $350 million is included to increase rates for vendors providing services to people with developmental disabilities or long-term care needs.
More than $230 million will fund wage increases for state employees as per their collective bargaining agreements last year.
The 60-day legislative session is scheduled to end Thursday.
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KHQ
SPOKANE, Wash. - Multiple agencies responded Wednesday night to a fire at Tent City in Spokane near 2nd and Thor.
According to fire officials on scene, a camp fire got out of control. The fire is now out and nobody was injured.