4/20/2022
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Spokesman-Review
CITY TO RESTART PROPOSAL PROCESS FOR HOMELESS SHELTER, CITING POTENTIAL CONFLICTS OF INTEREST
Fentanyl scourge is causing increased mortality year after year
KREM
Spokane council votes down zoning change tied to proposed homeless shelter
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Spokesman-Review
CITY TO RESTART PROPOSAL PROCESS FOR HOMELESS SHELTER, CITING POTENTIAL CONFLICTS OF INTEREST
By Greg Mason
THE SPOKESMAN-REVIEW
The city of Spokane will restart its process of soliciting proposals from potential operators for a more than 33,000-squarefoot homeless shelter in east Spokane, citing conflicts of interest with the city board tasked with recommending an option to the administration.
Mayor Nadine Woodward previously identified a vacant warehouse at 4320 E. Trent Ave. as the site of the new shelter. The mayor has said the city exhausted a list of around 100 properties before settling on the site, as previous attempts by the city to locate an emergency shelter have faced fierce opposition from neighbors.
The city had received proposals from three organizations – The Guardians Foundation, Jewels Helping Hands and Salvation Army Spokane – in response to a request for proposals issued by the city’s Community Health and Human Services division in March. The request for proposals called for pitches to operate “a regional flex capacity shelter” with an estimated daily usage of 250 beds and surge capacity as needed.
The proposals were given to Spokane’s Continuum of Care Board, which was tasked with making a recommendation from the options. The proposals, and the identities of the groups that had submitted them, were not released by the city administration in the interest of this review process.
City officials say that members of the Continuum of Care board “who were parties to one of the proposals” participated in board discussion Friday about which one to recommend, according to a release from the city. And while those board members did not vote on the proposals, their participation violated the board’s conflict of interest policy.
Additionally, the proposals were shared outside of the board before the recommendation process was completed, creating “the potential for outside influence,” according to the release.
“Homelessness and the process of selecting a provider to meet the basic shelter needs of those in crisis is an emotionally charged challenge the City has been working exhaustively to meet,” Woodward said in a statement. “It’s really disheartening to get this far and to have it disrupted by even the potential appearance of outside influence in this competitive process.” According to the city release, concerns about the integrity of the process were raised by staff on Monday and Tuesday. Accounts of those concerns were captured in meeting minutes and email.
Details on what the restarted process could entail, and the timeline, will be announced soon. City officials said the agencies that made proposals have been informed.
“The decision to start over was the right one even if it was extremely difficult because it potentially delays the opening of needed additional shelter space and hurts those who need help the most,” Woodward said.
Continuum of Care Board Chair Ben Stuckart said Monday a majority of the board “was not comfortable” with recommending any of the proposals “because people didn’t feel like they had enough answers to questions they had.” Friday’s in-person vote occurred after an emailed vote earlier in the week yielded similar results, he said.
Stuckart was identified in the Jewels Helping Hands proposal as a project manager at the start of the project. Meanwhile, one of the partnering organizations identified in the Jewels Helping Hands proposal is Compassionate Addiction Treatment, of which Hallie Burchinal is executive director.
Both have recused themselves from votes on the issue, Stuckart said. Nevertheless, he and Burchinal were reportedly still invited by the city to the Continuum of Care Board’s in-person meeting Friday.
In an interview Tuesday, Stuckart criticized the city for failing to answer questions like what will fund the the proposals and the length of a lease for a facility.
“Overall, it’s a good thing that they are starting over because they had a poor proposal,” he said. “They will now be forced to listen to the community that everybody else I’ve talked to understands that 250 people in a building is not a good idea or recipe for success.”
The topic will come up during the Spokane City Council’s regular study session Thursday.
Given that the Continuum of Care Board voted on the proposals, Council President Breean Beggs said he received a copy of the proposals Monday night and circulated those to members of the City Council, as he was of the understanding that the review process was done.
The Spokesman-Review also obtained copies of the proposals.
Since the city does not have a lease for the East Trent Avenue property, Beggs said he does not believe reissuing the request for proposals will slow anything down.
“I shared with the administration that council is going to provide them input on what the scope of the new (request for proposals) will be,” Beggs said. He later added, “We’re not anywhere imminent to opening a new shelter even if the (request for proposals) had not been restarted.” Greg Mason can be reached at (509) 459-5047 or gregm@spokesman. com.
Fentanyl scourge is causing increased mortality year after year
By Arielle Dreher
THE SPOKESMAN-REVIEW
Deaths from fentanyl overdoses in Washington have increased by 845% in the past five years.
In 2017, 120 Washington residents died of an overdose involving fentanyl, a potent synthetic opioid that has flooded the illicit drug market in Washingtonstate. In 2021, 1,134 residents died from fentanyl overdoses, more than half of the overdose deaths reported, according to the Washington Department of Health.
In Spokane County, 93 of the 169 reported drug overdoses in Spokane County last year involved fentanyl. And the problems seems to be worsening. In March 2022, EMS units in Spokane County responded to 153 possible overdoses, 102 of which involved opioids.
“The exponential increase in deaths is due to exponential increase in availability of fentanyl,” said Dr. Bob Lutz, adviser with the Department of Health.
At this point state public health officials are warning residents that any substance not obtained from a pharmacy or licensed marijuana retailer may contain the highly addictive and potentially deadly opioid.
“You have to assume fentanyl is in what you’re taking,” Lutz said.
What makes fentanyl different
The opioid crisis has been ongoing for years, with prescription opioids flooding the market and leading many to addiction. But fentanyl is different from oxycodone or hydrocodone.
Just 1 or 2 milligrams of fentanyl can cause an overdose, a small amount that often goes undetected if it’s laced into a different substance.
Fentanyl is 50 times more potent than morphine, said Dr. Nicole Rodin, professor at Washington State University’s College of Pharmacy.
Because fentanyl is more potent, it releases more dopamine in a person’s brain and works quickly. It also persists in the body longer than other opioids.
The effects of fentanyl can produce a rapid high and then rapid low, making a person think they need more to maintain the high. The problem? Fentanyl stays in a person’s system longer than that.
“While the amount you’re taking is more and more, it hasn’t left your system, and people are adding more drug on top of a filled system and as a result they overdose,” Lutz said.
The widespread availability of fentanyl also means the already-present need for addiction treatment could grow in the coming months.
The demand for treatment grew during the pandemic, and local providers see a need for more physicians to offer opioid use disorder treatment, more detox beds and more services for people struggling with addiction and mental health disorders.
Addiction is a disease of the mind, rewiring the pathways in your brain to manipulate your reward system, and as Rodin points out, it can be treated when people are ready for it.
“The good thing is with abstinence and decreased use over time, your brain can go back to normal,” Rodin said. “You can rewire those pathways with treatment, and that’s pretty hopeful and a huge takeaway.”
Increasing access to evidence- based treatment, like medication-assisted treatment for opioid use disorders, is also important, she added.
“We still have a lot of treatment centers that are unwilling to provide (treatment) to patients,” Rodin said.
Investing in education, prevention
Preventing overdoses and deaths starts with education.
Rodin, who serves on the Spokane Alliance for Fentanyl Education, said that these conversations start at home, between parents and teenagers.
Alerting teenagers to the inherent risks of fentanyl showing up in substances they might get illegally is not going to encourage them to seek the drug.
“Just because you start the conversation doesn’t mean you start the ideation; in fact, we know it’s quite the opposite,” Rodin said.
Social media and innovation have led some teenagers to believe they are being careful, but some of these tools are now much less helpful.
Phone apps that identify types of pills, Rodin said, will not be able to show if a pill is laced with fentanyl. Local families have experienced that painful reality, as they have lost teenage children to misidentified pills, thinking they were taking a different substance and subsequently overdosing.
Recently, local police have found pills that look like prescription narcotic, called mexi-blues, are often laced with fentanyl.
The Department of Health is working to launch a public awareness campaign around methamphetamine and fentanyl for youth and adults, with $2 million in funding from the Legislature.
The campaign will focus on harm reduction to prevent addiction and deaths, including education about naloxone, which is used to treat overdoses.
Reversing overdoses
While fentanyl overdoses can be lethal, they don’t have to be.
Naloxone, a drug administered as a nasal spray sometimes identified by its brand name Narcan, can reverse the effects of a fentanyl overdose and save a person’s life.
From April 2019 to this February, the state health department received reports of 9,840 overdose reversals by laypeople because of efforts to distribute naloxone widely. These are self-reported numbers, which means there could have been even more overdoses in that time.
At the Spokane Regional Health District, the treatment services and syringe services programs give out naloxone kits. In 2021, both programs gave out 2,203 naloxone kits that resulted in an estimated 855 overdose reversals.
In March, EMS units administered naloxone 67 times in Spokane County, and it improved the response of the person, a state health department report shows.
The state would like to get even more naloxone out into communities. The Department of Health is working in more than 30 counties with about 200 organizations, including syringe services programs, housing organizations, community health clinics and school districts.
Due to the potency of fentanyl, sometimes an overdose may require multiple doses of naloxone to be reversed.
Because naloxone has a shorter half-life than fentanyl, a person might wake up from an overdose after receiving naloxone but then go back into overdose, Rodin said, and learning how to properly administer naloxone as well as always calling 911 if you’re administering it are both practices she encourages and teaches.
As overdose deaths due to fentanyl continue to increase, stakeholders say everyone needs to be prepared for an “all-handson- deck” approach.
“If you’re a venue where people are partying, if you want to keep people partyingsafely, you should have naloxone and people on your staff should be trained in using it,” Lutz said.
This is happening elsewhere on the West Coast.
Bars in San Francisco have started to stock up on both naloxone and fentanyl testing strips, after a number of overdoses resulted from people using cocaine laced with fentanyl.
There is a statewide standing order in Washington for any person to get naloxone at a pharmacy without a prescription, and health officials encourage anyone who is around people using substances to carry the nasal spray withthem.
Testing substances
Fentanyl strips, which can be used to detect fentanyl in a substance when mixed with water, are another strategy to potentially prevent overdoses.
Some health districts in Washington participated in a pilot program to administer fentanyl strips from 2018 and 2019 at syringe services programs. Test strips affected how people used substances, according to the syringe services director at SRHD, with many participants reporting back that their tests were unexpectedly positive.
Recently, SRHD had stopped distributing fentanyl strips “out of an abundance of caution” according to their legal counsel for about two months.
A law passed in the 2021 legislative session changed this, however.
Senate Bill 5476 decriminalized some drug paraphernalia for specific purposes, including testing, which would apply to fentanyl test strips, according to Department of Health spokesperson Frank Ameduri.
In the last week, SRHD changed course, however, and after an internal review, the district starting to distribute fentanyl strips again.
Other health districts in the state have been distributing fentanyl strips all throughout 2021, and the Department of Health confirmed that both state and local health departments have the authority to distribute fentanyl test strips.
King County Public Health distributes fentanyl test strips to community- based organizations including syringe service providers and needle exchange programs.
Since March 2021, that district has distributed 37,000 test strips.
Of course, no test is perfect, and health officials are warning that any illicit substance, even in pillform, could be laced with fentanyl.
Ultimately, harm reduction strategies and prevention strategies are what health agencies and stakeholders, like Rodin, are advocating for to fight back against the wave of fentanyl in the community.
“We know programs like DARE didn’t work: the scare tactics, the abrasive stuff didn’t work and didn’t prevent deaths or addictions in any way shape or form, so now one of the primary pillars of prevention is the education piece so really getting in there and being transparent is key,” Rodin said.
Reducing overdose deaths through harm reduction also acknowledges that humans are going to choose to behave in a certain way as well as acknowledging how addiction works, too.
“Now the message really has to be, knowing you’re going to do it, if you do it, do it safely,” Lutz said. Arielle Dreher can be reached at (509) 459-5467 or at arielled@spokesman. com.
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Dr. Nicole Rodin
Professor at Washington State University’s College of Pharmacy
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KREM
Spokane council votes down zoning change tied to proposed homeless shelter
Community members raised concerns while city council members deliberated on an interim zoning ordinance.
SPOKANE, Wash. — Spokane residents voiced their concerns of the East Trent homeless shelter during today's city council meeting.
These concerns were raised while city council members deliberated on an interim zoning ordinance. The motion ultimately did not pass, as less than five council members voted for the ordinance.
While council president Breean Beggs voted in favor of the ordinance, other council members, including Betsy Wilkerson, believed there was not enough information or planning to follow through on zoning.
"After going a little bit deeper, to me, it's part of a three-legged stool about our housing issue and our shelter issue," Wilkerson said. "It's not just the zones. The council has yet to see the proposal for the rental estates."
Spokane Community College President Kevin Brockbank also voiced his opposition to the emergency ordinance, saying that the community college was never called or made aware of the shelter on East Trent.
"I think there are some major oversights here in placing it where it currently is and some things that have not been vetted very well," Brockbank said.
Brockbank made note of the shelter being on a bus line within daily campus activities, as well as the early childhood development center.
Jewels Helping Hands founder Julie Garcia also voiced her concerns, stating that council needed to offer better analysis of locations when determining shelters for the homeless.
Ultimately, residents cited a lack of communication and oversights from Mayor Nadine Woodward and her selection of the shelter.
"There is never a perfect location," Mayor Woodward said in a previous interview. "There are always people who will have concerns and there will always be some pushback, but I think this location really meets the needs that we're trying to address."
According to the city, the process will start over after a "conflict of interest and a breach of the process".
SPOKANE, Wash. — In a press release, Spokane City Council announced that they will be restarting the process to select a provider for a new night-by-night drop-in shelter.
According to the city, the process will start over after a "conflict of interest and a breach of the process".
In the release, Spokane City Council said that The Continuum of Care board was asked to review responses to the Request for Proposals for a shelter operator, which was issued on March 10. While the board's RFP committee reviewed and scored the proposals and made a recommendation for the whole board to review, the voting and recommendation process from the full board to Community, Housing and Human Services was never completed.
“Homelessness and the process of selecting a provider to meet the basic shelter needs of those in crisis is an emotionally charged challenge the City has been working exhaustively to meet,” Mayor Nadine Woodward said. “It’s really disheartening to get this far and to have it disrupted by even the potential appearance of outside influence in this competitive process.”
Concerns about the process were also brought up by city council members during Monday's legislative session.
“The decision to start over was the right one even if it was extremely difficult because it potentially delays the opening of needed additional shelter space and hurts those who need help the most,” Woodward said.
According to Spokane City Council, the restarted process and timeline and will be announced soon.
Project Beauty Share has received national notoriety for helping people who are fighting hygiene poverty, but now they need the community's help.
SPOKANE, Wash. — Project Beauty Share provides personal hygiene, cosmetics and beauty products to non-profit organizations in the community. However, the increase in inflation is causing the nonprofit to suffer from a scarcity of basic products.
Inflation is causing a rise in the cost of nearly everything, from cars to basic products like toothpaste and feminine hygiene products. The rise is also exposing a major problem with hygiene poverty, which is when a person is unable to buy things like shampoo, soap and grooming products.
Project Beauty Share has received national notoriety for helping people who are fighting hygiene poverty, but now they need the community's help.
"Last year, we donated 85,000 pounds of product valued at nearly $3 million that went into the community," Julie Farley, Project Beauty Share funder, said. "So the issue right now is that we are serving more individuals, more people with less product, because the need is so great, right now."
Farley works around the clock to make sure that people don't have to choose between buying food and buying personal hygiene products.
The organization takes the donations they receive from manufacturers and the general public and gives them to other non-profits like shelters.
"The most in-demand item or items right now are the personal hygiene, shampoo, conditioner, body wash, and you know, with the supply chain issues, they're a little bit harder to come by," Farley said.
The rise in consumer goods is making nearly everyone rethink their spending habits.
"It's not that they're necessarily giving less, they're thinking about it twice," Farley said.
Last month the organization posted an urgent call-out on its social media asking for donations and within days the reorganization received more than 70 boxes of products from community members.
"In the last year, slowly, you know, our shelves are a little bit lighter, we have some agencies that normally come twice a month are now only able to come once a month," Farley said.
But as the cost for just about everything continues to rise and more people are in need of their services, it's getting more difficult to keep up with the demand.
"I believe that project beauty share exists, to be able to help ease the pain of the crisis that many families are going through right now," Farley said. "These are the items that we take for granted every day that we use, that the women and families that we're serving, are so appreciative of."