Candidates for Spokane City Council tackle homelessness at forum

Candidates for Spokane City Council’s northeast district on Thursday tackled – often with opposing views – perhaps the city’s most complex and contentious topic: homelessness.

Conservative incumbent Spokane City Councilman Jonathan Bingle and his challenger, progressive Sarah Dixit, addressed the multiple facets of the homelessness issue with Spokesman-Review reporter Emry Dinman at the Spokane Public Library in Hillyard as part of the newspaper’s Northwest Passages’ Conversations with Candidates.

The candidates voiced differing viewpoints on the City Council’s new law that outlaws the homeless population from camping in the city. The law, which emphasizes outreach over enforcement and is backed by Mayor Lisa Brown, criminalizes camping, but allows for an unspecified notice period and for someone to avoid a citation by leaving.

Bingle, who has opposed the new law, called it an “engagement-first and an engagement-only approach,” which was supported by Police Chief Kevin Hall’s comments earlier this month that the camping law has been difficult to enforce, with zero issued citations and no accepted offers for social services when approached by police at the time.

“That’s really out of balance,” Bingle said.

The city announced Thursday that the majority of people contacted at recently disbanded homeless camps accepted referrals to housing or behavioral health services.

Bingle said services should be offered to help homeless people access programs to improve themselves, but enforcement is necessary if they partake in “unacceptable” behaviors, like using drugs in public.

“I want to help you very much, but also my kids are not going to see you doing drugs on the sidewalk just because you have a problem,” Bingle said. “That does not become an excuse for allowing behavior that everybody else must endure. That’s the problem.”

Dixit said the H.O.M.E. (Healthcare, Outreach, Multidisciplinary Engagement, Economic Security) ordinance is on the right track in terms of the homelessness prevention and housing stabilization pieces. She said keeping people housed in the first place is a great way to address homelessness and that it’s important to know the diversity of the homeless population.

She said strong enforcement is “punitive,” adding that incarceration is expensive and does not explore the root cause of someone’s substance use disorder. Community and drug courts have been more successful, she said.

Dixit said she believes more homeless people would accept services if police officers weren’t the ones offering them. Hall, at least in part, echoed those comments this month, saying officers are not equipped to act as social workers and navigate a web of potential service providers to find a place for someone to go.

Dixit said the council acknowledged some of the law’s issues and is going back to the drawing board.

Hall and Councilman Zack Zappone, who is up for re-election in November, said earlier this month the council and city administration would try to fast-track reforms through an emergency law-making process to toughen law enforcement responses to homelessness, public drug use and related issues.

The city announced Thursday that its new street outreach teams, in partnership with Catholic Charities of Eastern Washington, closed 96 encampments in its first 10 days. The city acknowledged the majority of the sites did not have people living there, but that 96 encampments were cleared nonetheless. Most of the homeless there accepted connection to behavioral health or housing services, including the navigation center, a hub to navigate people to the appropriate homelessness services.

Bingle said that sounds like a huge accomplishment, but in reality, he believed many of those encampments had already been cleared but were still counted as part of the 96 cleared .

Public bathrooms

They also differed on whether to implement public bathrooms downtown.

Dixit called it a “human dignity issue” and said bathrooms would deter people going to the bathroom on sidewalks and streets. She proposed using easy-to-clean materials to construct the restrooms.

“I believe that investing in the dignity of people who are living downtown, who are visiting our downtown, is in our city’s best interest,” she said.

Bingle responded, “But how do we keep those spaces safe? That’s what really matters, right?”

He said restrooms wouldn’t work because the city doesn’t have the money to pay for security to monitor them.

He said public restrooms in cities like Seattle and Denver have been dominated by “pimps,” drug dealers and the like, and have become a serious problem. Plus, businesses provide bathrooms for customers, he said.

Treatment services

Bingle said the city needs to address substance-use disorder and mental health issues with long-term facilities, which it doesn’t have. If the goal is to have a regional response to treatment, then regional partners need to be involved. He mentioned Eastern State Hospital as “wildly underused” and that beds are available there.

Many rural communities don’t want treatment services to encroach in their jurisdiction, however.

“I understand why,” Bingle said. “If you think it’s gonna look like downtown Spokane, I wouldn’t want it either. OK, but here’s a way that we can invest and make sure that it’s a safe and good place for us to be able to help folks in crisis. It’s not going to negatively affect your population. We’re going to bring in some good jobs and investment or tax revenue into your area.”

Dixit said the city’s approach to meeting people where they’re at is moving in the right direction with street clinics and the Spokane Fire Department’s Community Assistance Response Team. She said she believed long-term facilities would be expensive, and involuntary treatment is illegal and ineffective.

Shelter services

The candidates also opposed each other on “scatter-site” housing.

Bingle said he’s not a fan of the new approach, and the housing units shouldn’t be placed into Spokane’s neighborhoods.

The Trent Resource and Assistance Center closed its doors almost one year ago as the city moved toward a scatter-site model Mayor Lisa Brown’s administration argues is more effective at getting people permanently off the streets, compared to the roughly 10% who transitioned out of the Trent Avenue shelter.

“I think that it’s curious to see that we are down 571 shelter beds from last year, and we have an ordinance on the books that says anytime you remove a shelter bed, you have to replace it,” Bingle said. “And if Nadine (Woodward) were mayor, we’d be banging our fists on the table and going nuts on the fact that we haven’t replaced those beds yet. But, suddenly it’s OK because now we have a new mayor and we’re heading in a new direction.”

Dixit is fond of the scatter-site model.

“If that’s the goal of shelters, to house people, allow them to transition with help, I think that is much more effective than huge congregant shelters like the (TRAC),” she said.

She said TRAC was expensive, unsafe and inhumane.

Some residents feel scatter sites are concentrated in their neighborhoods.

Dixit said the homeless need to be allowed somewhere, if not downtown or at scattered sites.

“We’re distributing this problem and not coming up with a solution that works,” she said. “And so yes, scattered sites being in neighborhoods is helpful because we are not creating communities of people who then have to be isolated and then set aside from our community, right? They’re part of our community.”

Bingle said scattered sites tend to settle in poorer areas of Spokane, like Bingle’s District 1, because it’s cheaper for nonprofits running them to operate in those areas, instead of the South Hill, for example.

“I’m not even saying that it’s nefarious that it gets pushed into District 1,” he said. “I’m saying it will get pushed into District 1 or into the poorer areas of the city simply because of the economics.”