Dori: County’s bus ticket plan far more ethical than banning camp sweeps

King County Councilmember Reagan Dunn came on our show a few weeks ago, when he was the first person to float the idea of buying bus tickets for the homeless. If they have friends or relatives elsewhere in the country who can care for them and help them turn their lives around, they can receive a bus ticket and be reunited with their loved ones.

Lo and behold, King County found $100,000 to fund this plan of giving a bus ticket to each homeless person who has caring people to go back to. Good for Councilmember Dunn. I like him a lot.

Compare the bus ticket approach of Reagan Dunn, one of the few elected Republicans in the Seattle area, to that of people like Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant. In introducing this plan, Dunn emphasized reunifying families and giving homeless people a chance to get their lives back by getting them into the company of people who care about them.

On the flip side, you have the members of the Seattle City Council — people who have pledged to end sweeps of homeless camps because that is the “progressive” thing to do.

Dori: Are Sawant voters alright with encampment rapes, deaths?

A listener whom I absolutely trust as a source wrote in to me this week to tell me that while she was at the Harborview ER for hours the other day, she witnessed a 14-year-old girl who had been hit by a car and had had her leg fractured. The girl reported to the nurse that she had run away from home and now lived with her boyfriend in a tent encampment. Her parents came to the ER and confirmed this; she had also been treated for MRSA but quit taking her antibiotics.

Linda noted that Sawant and other council members want to stop encampment sweeps and remove restrictions on such homeless camps. That would keep girls like this one from being found and rescued. She asked why Durkan does not declare a homeless sweep emergency, to find trafficked children like this girl and get them into the arms of loved ones.

Think about this. Here you’ve got Reagan Dunn, who wants to buy bus tickets and get homeless people back with their families and friends so that they can get the help they need. Some activists, of course, decry this kind of thing as the action of a cruel NIMBY who just wants the problem out of sight and out of mind.

Meanwhile, we have Sawant and the Seattle City Council, who are happy to let these encampments be.

This tells me everything I need to know about the morality of these politicians.

Listen to the Dori Monson Show weekday afternoons from 12-3 p.m. on KIRO Radio, 97.3 FM. Subscribe to the podcast here.

Follow @http://www.twitter.com/dorimonson