Even for easygoing Seattle, living in the parks has gone too far

When Edward Steele comes out of his assisted living home in the New Holly neighborhood, in Seattle’s South End, he often likes to roll his wheelchair across the street to the jewel of the Seattle Housing Authority complex, 6-acre John C. Little Sr. Park.

“It was the most heavily used park you can imagine,” Steele says. “There aren’t that many outside places for people to go down here.”

The New Holly housing project was designed that way, with tiny yards too small for kids to play in specifically so that “middle-class homeowners and poor people in public housing can live on equal ground,” said a Seattle Times story in 2007. “Sales literature promotes it as a return to the days when neighbors swapped stories on the porch and greeted each other with friendly waves as their children played catch in the park.”

If Steele goes to the park now, it’s to check on the construction. Starting in the summer, about 15 to 20 people started living in the park and, in addition to setting up the more typical tents, have now built a wooden, tarp-covered structure with a foundation, along with a paving stone stairway cut into the hillside.

It’s all within 20 feet of the children’s play area — which has some New Holly residents wondering whether they’ve been cut off from City Hall.

“They brought in tools and dolly-loads of scrap cabinet wood and plywood,” Steele, 65, says. “I know they say the homeless have nowhere else to go, but how can you come into a kids’ play area and just build your own structure? There’s got to be something illegal about that.”

Technically, yes. The reason the campers haven’t been cleared out of this park, though, or in any of the other park encampments around the city, made some sense, at least at first. The city made an emergency decision back in March to allow camping in place due to the coronavirus (because indoor shelters were already too crowded to comply with social distancing).

But even homeless-friendly Seattle, which has long looked the other way at encampments in low-trafficked greenbelts, has never approved homeless camps in developed parts of city parks such as children’s play areas, for obvious reasons.

Some New Holly residents have been petitioning the city about these obvious reasons for weeks now — about how their kids can’t go to the park during a pandemic, about drug use and nightly smoke from camp fires, about the occasional person in the park shooting a bow and arrow or brandishing a sword. City officials assured New Holly residents that the encampment would be temporary, and that the city’s outreach team, called the Navigation Team, would check on it regularly.

“The City’s Navigation Team is aware of the John C. Little park campers, and has received your report as additional information,” a Seattle parks division director wrote to one resident last month. The Navigation Team, he said, would continue to do outreach to the encampment to make sure it doesn’t grow out of control.

The letter closed: “This may bring little to no comfort regarding the illegal activities that you and your neighbors are experiencing.”

Well, now the city has eliminated even this Navigation Team.

If you haven’t been following along, this is the result of a huge cluster you-know-what between the City Council and Mayor Jenny Durkan. The council canceled funding for the outreach team because it has police officers on it and they feel it does too many punitive sweeps. Durkan vetoed that cut, and then when the council overrode her veto, Durkan announced that the Navigation Team is, as ordered, kaput.

Council members insist they wanted the money saved from the Navigation Team to be used to pay other outreach workers, but that hasn’t happened yet and might not until next year.

One would think you’d get the new team up and running before cancelling the old one. But that phrase “one would think” is being used, futilely, to try to divine meaning out of many a City Hall action recently.

Residents say the coronavirus threat for the homeless concerned them, too, so at first they welcomed some campers to the park. But now they feel abandoned.

“The city recently removed just such a camp from Cal Anderson park,” one resident wrote, referring to the park on Capitol Hill. “But that park is in a wealthier, more high-profile neighborhood, so apparently the ‘policy’ has been suspended there.”

Regardless, this is where we are right now: We’ve got an encampment digging in at a children’s play area in a city park, situated in a city housing authority development specifically designed around reliance on that park.

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/even-for-easy-going-seattle-camping-in-the-parks-has-gone-too-far/

Friendly fire? Leaked chat suggests toppling incumbent Seattle Democrats

As ballots drop this week, some of the most influential unions in Washington are pouring big money into an Eastside legislative race, trying to unseat moderate Democratic state Sen. Mark Mullet.

Labor-backed political-action committees supporting Mullet’s progressive Democratic challenger, Ingrid Anderson, have spent more than $1 million — the most on behalf of any legislative candidate so far this year.

The money gush isn’t done — an additional $510,000 in donations to a pro-Anderson PAC were reported on Monday, according to filings with the state Public Disclosure Commission.

The flex of political muscle against a Democratic incumbent could be a harbinger.

If the effort to oust Mullet succeeds, leaked chat messages from a political consultant this week suggest other incumbent Democratic legislators deemed insufficiently pro-labor could be targeted in 2022 — including two veteran Seattle lawmakers.

In the private online chat, a screenshot of which was obtained by The Seattle Times, an associate at a prominent Democratic consulting firm on Monday pointed to state Sens. Jamie Pedersen and Reuven Carlyle of Seattle, and Steve Hobbs, of Lake Stevens, as potential targets in 2022.

“Jamie, Reuven, Hobbs all getting primaried in 2022 if this ends up working. (Good!),” wrote Jamie Housen, an associate at NWP Consulting, the consulting firm founded by longtime Democratic consultant Christian Sinderman.

Sinderman replied in the chat that he’d recently spoken with Carlyle for 30 minutes on the subject.

“He will lose. I mean maybe not, but he deserves to,” Housen responded.

Both Sinderman and Housen downplayed the exchange as casual banter.

“It’s hot take by a young operative that certainly doesn’t reflect my opinions or any official statement at all,” Sinderman said, whose firm is working on the Anderson campaign.

The screenshot was captured by someone who saw it because Sinderman had the chat window open while sharing his screen on an unrelated Zoom call about a political mailer. He called the leak “shocking and disrespectful.”

In a direct message on Twitter, Housen, a relatively new associate at NWP, said: “It’s disheartening that a few private, irreverent texts were made public.”

Pedersen, who represents Seattle’s ultraliberal 43rd Legislative District, who had seen the chat messages, said he believes the spending against Mullet “absolutely” is a “shot across the bow” aimed at other elected Democrats.

“If you think they are spending $2 million just on Mark Mullet — it’s not rational. These are smart, strategic people that we are talking about. So clearly the purpose of it has to be to intimidate people,” said Pedersen. “There is no other way to understand it.”

Carlyle, who represents Seattle’s 36th Legislative District, said he didn’t take the chat messages seriously and had a “very thoughtful” conversation with Sinderman. “I think this is an unfortunate product of political chatter … from a young, inexperienced person learning the ropes,” he said.

The race between Mullet and Anderson is a rare instance of powerful Democratic Party-aligned groups seeking to take down a Democratic incumbent.

The intraparty fight in East King County’s 5th Legislative District is both a display of raw political power and a reflection of frustration among progressives at Mullet’s opposition to policies such as a capital-gains tax on the wealthiest Washingtonians.

In an unusual move, Gov. Jay Inslee has weighed in, endorsing Anderson and criticizing Mullet for opposing a proposed clean-fuel standard to reduce automobile emissions.

The district, which stretches from Lake Sammamish to Snoqualmie Pass, includes all or most of Issaquah, North Bend, Maple Valley, Black Diamond and Carnation. Not long ago, it had been considered a swing district which elected Republicans. Mullet, a businessman, was elected in 2012, running as a moderate.

Mullet said the massive spending against him is puzzling as he has sided with Inslee, unions and climate activists more often than not. “They want to send a message to every other Democrat that if you are not with them 100%, they will take you out,” he said.

When it comes to PAC support, Mullet is far from defenseless. Business-backed PACs already have put more than $550,000 into independent expenditures on his behalf. And his own campaign committee has raised roughly $390,000 to Anderson’s $190,000.

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/friendly-fire-leaked-chat-shows-plan-to-target-moderate-seattle-democrats/

Unofficial ballot boxes are legal and they’ll keep using them, California Republicans tell state officials

Unofficial ballot boxes are legal, California Republican leaders said Wednesday, saying they will continue to use them despite cease and desist orders from the California Attorney General and Secretary of State.

They told told reporters that any box marked “official” was an error made by volunteers and has been corrected. But the party said it will continue to collect vote-by-mail ballots that are voluntarily delivered to local party offices or headquarters.

“In this case, voters have decided, for themselves, that they trust the staff and volunteers at their local political Party headquarters, or their church, or a business that they patronize, to securely deliver their completed VBM ballot to the appropriate election official,” party officials said in a letter to Secretary of State Alex Padilla on Wednesday.

The incident highlights a longstanding rift between Republicans and Democrats over the practice of ballot collection, sometimes called ballot harvesting. Ballot collection allows a designated person to deliver a voter’s mail ballot for them, and Californians have been doing it for years. More recently, party or campaign volunteers have been allowed to go door-to-door and offer to return ballots on voters’ behalf.

California Republicans have decried the change supported by state Democrats, saying it opens the door to voter fraud and puts ballots in jeopardy. Now, they are using the same law to collect ballots of their own.

“We believe that temporarily holding VBM ballots in a locked box at a church or local Party headquarters is more secure than a Party volunteer or paid operative holding harvested ballots collected from voters at a senior center in the back seat of his or her car – though both are legal,” the party said in its letter to state leaders.

State Democratic leaders swiftly condemned the unofficial drop boxes, issuing a cease and desist letter to the state and local Republicans. Attorney General Xavier Becerra and Secretary of State Alex Padilla said they were “prepared to take action to enforce state law, should it become necessary.”

State law requires those who deliver another person’s ballot to sign the envelope and state their relationship to the voter. Therefore, Democrats say, unofficial drop boxes are not permitted, because the voter has not designated a specific person to deliver the ballot.

But the law also states that a ballot will not be rejected solely because the returner did provide their information on the envelope. This provision, Republicans argue, allows ballots to be collected by private individuals or organizations en masse without identifying a specific returner.

“The California Republican Party opposes ballot harvesting and wishes you had enacted adequate ballot security provisions after the laws were changed,” the party wrote in a letter to Padilla Wednesday. “Its program of collecting (not soliciting) VBM ballots from voters who voluntarily choose to entrust their ballot to the Party volunteers, is more secure, by far, than the door-to-door solicitation we have seen from the Democrat Party.”

Republicans argue that Democrats have done a similar practice of collecting ballots through neighborhood “hubs.” The party provided state officials with materials that appear to be from Democratic Congressman Harley Rouda’s campaign. The materials outline a “Harley neighborhood ballot hub,” such as a porch or outside of someone’s home, where voters can drop off the ballots. Hubs would be staffed by volunteer ballot collectors.

Officials with both Becerra’s and Padilla’s offices said they have received the letter and are reviewing it.

Republicans say they will continue to collect mail ballots, keep them in a locked and secure box, and deliver them to elections officials within 72 hours. The party will also ensure the boxes are consistently monitored and they will not be kept outdoors or represented as “official” drop boxes.

The boxes, and instructions on their proper use, will be available to any person or organization that wants to collect ballots, the party said.

Democrats across the state, including Gov. Gavin Newsom, have criticized the party and said the unofficial drop boxes must be removed. In a call with reporters on Wednesday, Marc Elias, legal counsel for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said the party could face sanctions if they don’t comply with state orders.

“They are in serious legal jeopardy right now for the actions they’ve taken,” Elias said. “Having been formally warned by the state of California that what they’re doing is illegal, if they act in defiance of that, that they risk significant sanctions by the state of California.”

https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article246456175.html