SEATTLE NEWS ARCHIVES & FEATURES
Dori: Seattle Mayor spending our money on homelessness with no real plan
May 26, 2016, 2:48 PM | Updated: 10:11 pm
Seattle Mayor Ed Murray admitted that city leaders don't have a concrete plan in place to deal with homelessness. (AP)
(AP)
Taken from Thursday’s edition of the Dori Monson’s Show.
Seattle Mayor Ed Murray famously said earlier this year that he needed another nearly $50 million a year to fight homelessness in Seattle. We already spent $50 million, but he wanted to double that with a huge bump to the property tax levy.
What do we get for all that?
“We’re actually making this up as we go along.”
That’s what Murray said Wednesday after the incredible contradiction of how they were going to clean up the ‘Jungle.’ A week ago, the mayor’s sidekick, Scott Lindsay, said they would clean out the Jungle.
Related: Seattle’s Union Gospel Mission president sets the record straight on the ‘Jungle’
“We’ll be starting next week with (Seattle’s Union Gospel Mission) deploying a team of five or six outreach workers, plus additional support,” Lindsay, special assistant to the mayor, said at the time. “And after about two weeks, hopefully many of the folks will have accepted the shelter and service options that are offered or will have decided to uproot and move on.”
So it’s ‘be in a shelter’ or ‘move on.’ Then Murray completely contradicted his aide.
“Were not going to do a sweep,” he said Wednesday. “I’ve said this to folks before again and again … that I believe it will take an extensive amount of time for us to empty out the jungle. And quite honestly we don’t have the resources to provide everybody shelter so it’s going to be impossible for us to remove everybody.”
Really? Lindsay said eight days ago it would be two weeks. Now you say it’s impossible? How can you explain such a discrepancy coming in a week?
“We’re actually making this up as we go along.”
Yeah, that’s the answer. They are making everything up as they go along. And this shows the absolute folly of how we’re dealing with homelessness in Seattle. Because the way you approach problem is this: You identify what the problem is. You then figure out a plan to get to the desired outcome. Finally, you figure out how much that will cost.
But they do it the exact opposite in the mayor’s office. They tell us: give us an extra $50 million. And then?
“We’re actually making this up as we go along.”
They have asked for an incredible public investment and they have no clue how to deal with this problem. But we’ve (King County) spent $1 billion over the last 12 years and have only seen the problem get dramatically worse.
It is just not how problems get solved. But, then again, we’ve got somebody in charge who is not a problem solver.
Taken from Thursday’s edition of the Dori Monson’s Show.
