Spokane City Council pours cold water on proposal for regional homeless authority

Many who want to see a marked improvement in homelessness in Spokane have staked their hopes on creating a regional coalition.

However, on Monday, the Spokane City Council reached for the brakes on a process they argue has barreled ahead without a clear path forward, calling the proposed timelines “unrealistic.” The council voted 5-1 on a resolution calling for more data and transparency, removing “detention” from the coalition’s priorities and otherwise asking for more time to make a decision.

Skeptics on the City Council pointed to dire warnings from the Spokane Regional Continuum of Care board, the Spokane Homeless Coalition and other organizations. Numerous service providers also spoke Monday night in support of a slower approach.

The council’s skepticism has frustrated Mayor Nadine Woodward and the organizers behind Spokane Unite, the group working to get the coalition off the ground, who are trying to overcome inertia and maintain momentum. Spokane Unite organizers originally wanted the organization to get off the ground before the end of the year, emphasizing the coming winter and other concerns.

“There is a cost to waiting,” Woodward wrote Monday evening in a text.

Councilman Jonathan Bingle voted against the resolution, warning that stepping out of sync with its tentative partners, such as Spokane County and Spokane Valley, could derail the process.

“There’s not a lot of trust between a lot of different people on this,” Bingle said. “I think we’ve seriously jeopardized this moving forward, and I don’t know that there’s going to be any salvaging this moving forward.”

“Maybe I’m wrong,” he added.

The regional authority has been envisioned as a way for politically divided jurisdictions in the area to come together and coordinate homeless services, eliminating inefficiencies and theoretically removing politics from policy decisions. But a number of service providers, city staff and several City Council members have expressed growing concern with the coalition’s proposed structure and what they believe has been a lack of specifics on how the organization would operate.

Some have raised concerns about how a new regional organization would include service providers and the formerly homeless, while some opposed the emphasis placed on criminal detention as part of the response to homelessness and the possible influence of controversial developer Larry Stone.

The council originally had been set to consider a resolution Monday signaling support for sharing data and staff from the city, the county, and the cities of Spokane Valley, Medical Lake, Airway Heights, Cheney and Liberty Lake, with the skeleton organization of what would eventually become a regional homeless authority. It was a largely symbolic move following Woodward’s Aug. 3 executive order pledging access to city staff, data and other resources to the coalition to help get it off the ground.

“A regional collaboration is an important advancement of the plan we developed with stakeholders to make our system more efficient at moving individuals quickly into supportive situations that produce better outcomes,” Woodward said in a prepared statement. “We need this final push of data and information to launch this collaboration and the City is committed to partnering regionally.”

The other jurisdictions already unanimously approved similar resolutions, said Gavin Cooley, former city chief financial officer who is one of three lead organizers for the coalition. But the City Council voted to defer that resolution indefinitely Monday, instead introducing a separate resolution that made only limited, short-term commitments to support the regional authority, demanding clearer answers from Cooley and his collaborators, and publicly expressing their concerns.

The council resolution didn’t just take aim at the regional authority, but also at the Woodward administration, which it accused of failing to provide a detailed accounting of how much money the city spends on homeless – funds which would in theory largely be delegated to the coalition.

The City Council would not assist in the creation of the regional authority unless all data shared by the city also was shared with the council, according to the resolution. Any commitments in 2024 would be contingent on a clear budget identifying the start-up contribution needed from the city, a commitment that criminal detention would be minimized as a part of the coalition’s mission, and other concessions.

Cooley was unaware until late Monday afternoon that the City Council would consider a resolution critical of the organization he, alongside two other City Hall administrators, Theresa Sanders and Rick Romero, has been shepherding.

“It doesn’t feel like a resolution that’s pushing things forward,” he said. “It feels like it’s throwing roadblocks in the way.”

Cooley emphasized that he, Sanders and Romero are unpaid volunteers that would soon be handing the nascent coalition off to the local governments, completed or not. He has been troubled by the depth of the contention that various groups have brought to the discussion, he added.

“Even the principles that people have argued about, like detention, you try to strike a balance where incarceration should be a tool available as a last resort,” Cooley said. “For some, that’s required language, and for others that’s absolutely off limits, but ultimately the solution is going to need to strike a balance.”

Cooley stressed he hopes the coalition’s biggest critics, whom he believed were allowing the perfect to be the enemy of the good, could recognize that the status quo had failed.

“Normally you might get frustrated and go home on an issue where people are dragging their heels, but faced with the prospect of thousands living on the streets this winter, failure doesn’t feel acceptable,” he said.