The city council bailed on passing a resolution to approve mayor Ed Murray’s homeless encampment plan, signing off on the mayor’s proposal to site three encampments around the city with a letter instead yesterday.

Late last March, the council unanimously approved Murray’s legislation to establish three homeless encampments on city property. That council ordinance called on the city to then identify the sites.

Murray’s Department of Planning and Development came back with three sites last week—one in Ballard, one in Interbay, and one in SoDo (with four backup sites)—and forwarded the list to council.

“We wanted to ensure that the council had appropriate time for a discussion of our recommended sites,” Murray spokesman Viet Shelton told me, saying the mayor’s office was hoping for a formal council resolution; council legislation would have come with a public hearing, as all legislation does. Did the mayor’s office specifically want a council hearing? “That was up to them,” Shelton said.

I do know that the mayor’s staff was visiting council offices yesterday, lobbying to get a resolution and a formal process.

 Shelton says the council’s letter reads like a “green light” on the mayor’s plan.

 The letter, signed by eight of the nine council members (no signature from neighborhood avenger Tom Rasmussen), said: “Each of these sites appears to meet the locational criteria outlined in the ordinance including being proximate to transit. All of the proposed sites appear to be viable and we support further exploration of all of them.” The March ordinance stipulated that the sites be close to transit and social services, be big enough to house 100 people, and formally connected the sites to social services.

After Murray’s office announced the preferred sites last week, Ballard businesses and residents sent angry letters protesting the process and the Ballard site (2826 NW Market st. between 28^th Ave. NW and 30^th Ave. NW, about six blocks northwest of old Ballard.)

“None of our leaders or constituents were consulted in your selection process,” a July 2 letter from the Ballard Chamber of Commerce said, adding: “For the following reasons, we believe the site at 2826 NW Market Street is particularly inappropriate for a transitional encampment… Market Street serves as a gateway to and from historic downtown Ballard and the Chittenden Locks and Golden Gardens. This route is very busy for local residents, Seattle visitors and tourists who travel through this gateway corridor by car, bicycle and foot… Ballard already accommodates more than its fair share of the city’s homeless population, including hundreds of vehicle residents. Establishing this encampment even temporarily will only expand the problem we already face.”

A lone Ballard business owner wrote in: “I would ask that you please reconsider this location, as it is going to negatively impact dozens of small businesses and thousands of residents in the area, who have chosen Ballard as a safe, family-friendly neighborhood. We have already seen our block of Market Street deteriorate dramatically in the last 1.5 years, and become a place where me and my employees are accosted and feel threatened regularly by an increasing population of homeless and mentally ill people. My lease is up at the end of this year, and the addition of this homeless encampment at 2826 NW Market St will certainly be cause for me to consider moving my business out of Ballard.”

And this, from 30-year residents: “We are stunned by the thought of a tent city on the main street of Ballard.”

Murray responded with a letter of his own to the Ballard chamber, citing the homeless “crisis” and saying last week’s notice about the preferred sites was “only the first step in the process based on the strict parameters set forth in the ordinance.” He went on to say that the process dictates that the encampment operators “must hold at least one public meeting for the surrounding community” before submitting their permit application. He also noted: “Encampment Operators are also required to form an ongoing Community Advisory Committee that connects the community with the Department of Planning and Development, the Human Services Department, and the Encampment Operator.”

The council’s letter stressed the public process: “We expect that your Office’s and/or departments engagement include, a minimum, outreach to any Community Council, District Council and neighborhood Chambers of Commerce in each of the proposed neighborhoods, as well as providing a clear place that the public can go to have their questions answered.”

Editorializing here, but that is certainly rich coming from a council that short circuited its own public process on the controversial sites (in Ballard's commercial district, anyway) by choosing not passing a resolution where they'd have to officially and publicly vote on the sites. The council's timidity is hard to miss given that this is the same council that intoned about including single-family neighborhoods in the encampment siting process when they voted on the ordinance in March, passing an amendment authorizing a feasibility study for siting encampments in residential neighborhoods.

Their epistolary sign off now, however, doesn’t bode well for the hope that council will actually face down neighbors and end encampment redlining by taking up the issue with future public meetings.

The council's incongruous letter said the public process "should not be utilized by neighbors...as a platform to exclude transitional encampments from any of our neighborhoods. The council will not lend a sympathetic ear to these efforts." Without holding public hearings of their own, however, their posturing is undone by the fact that their not brave enough to lend any ear at all. 

I called council yesterday for a comment about this issue.