Seattle leaders may have deal reached to fill gap left by Navigation Team

Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan had to suspend the city’s Navigation Team in September, after city council voted to strip its funding as part of the reworked 2020 budget partly focused on cuts to police. Now, it appears as though a tentative deal has been struck to fill the team’s role while the city figures out its long-term future.

Mayor Durkan forced to immediately suspend Navigation Team

Many on the council, as well as homeless advocates and others in the community, have long criticized the Navigation Team. The team included outreach workers and Seattle police officers who tried to get people into shelter but also cleared hazardous encampments. That led to the controversy that also has grown into a lack of appetite to send an armed person to help people into shelter.

On the flip side, others argue sending outreach workers or any civilian to do such work is a risk as it is not uncommon to encounter someone dealing with an addiction or other mental health crisis, and that can turn violent, hence the need for the armed officer.

That is why similar teams in Snohomish County with cops and social workers are set up as they are. There is also an effort in the Legislature to expand that model to other jurisdictions in the state.

However, there is little support on the Seattle City Council, with most members firmly against armed officers embedded in homeless outreach programs. The council has also often been critical of the relatively low rate of accepted offers of shelter the Navigation Team gets when it clears encampments.

With that, Councilmember Andrew Lewis says he’s struck a potential deal with the mayor’s office to fill the gap left by the elimination of the Navigation Team.

“To stand up the unsheltered Outreach and Response Team, which will be the city’s central coordinating team to empower and collaborate with the outreach efforts of our contracted providers,” Lewis said during Monday’s council meeting.

“Contrary to popular belief the city’s outreach efforts have never exclusively been the purview of the old Navigation Team,” he continued. “The dedicated staff of reach chief Seattle club, Downtown Emergency Service Center, the Urban League, the Defender Association, and many others have always been the fundamental core of our community based outreach model, and they remain that today.”

The legislation will proviso, or conditionally approve, more than $2 million in the 2020 budget to maintain and expand contracts to non-profit organizations that will assume the roles of encampment outreach and engagement previously performed by employees of the City’s Human Services and Police departments. No more than $245,000 will be spent to support the salary of an eight-member team of Human Services Department staff to coordinate and support the contracted service providers.

For critics who raised concerns about the absence of the Navigation Team in the past couple of weeks, Lewis stressed that outreach workers had been continuing their work on the interim, and with this new team would be able to help more people through the end of 2020. His proposal expires at the end of the year, as the council and mayor try to find a longer term agreement on this issue and others, notably the size of the police department, in the 2021 budget.

Seattle council slams Navigation Team on homeless camp sweeps

For now, though Lewis strongly believes his plan is the way to go.

“This new team that would be in HSD is focused on building and empowering that tradition of centering outreach and community providers. First, this team will not be authorized for infield outreach – that will be the exclusive purview of our community based outreach providers,” explained Lewis.

“It goes without saying that this team will be exclusively civilian. The city practice of using armed and uniformed police as agents of homelessness outreach and coordination is resolutely over,” stressed Lewis, who has other council support and says he’s been in talks with mayor’s staff on the plan.

The mayor’s office commented on the agreement as well, praising it for “expanding outreach and restoring citywide outreach positions at HSD, [and] understanding the significant impacts of the elimination of the Navigation Team,” Durkan spokesperson Kamaria Hightower said.

“This proposal is a first step in addressing Mayor Durkan’s significant concerns about the elimination of all City resources to coordinate outreach and mitigation of health and safety impacts at unmanaged encampments,” she added. “In the coming weeks, the City will prepare to operationalize this plan to scale outreach, shelter, and address the most hazardous encampments that pose a risk to encampment residents or surrounding communities. As Council knows, outreach and mitigation at those encampments that present significant public safety or health risks may continue to need the support and services of the Seattle Police Department. This bill would attempt to reduce the number of such cases by expanding outreach.”

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