February 22, 2006

SHORT TAKES

Safe Harbors: clunky

Technical shortfalls with the city’s new homeless tracking system are eating up time at homeless service agencies, where shelter staff are doing unforeseen and unbudgeted data-entry work.

The Safe Harbors computer system, which has cost the city and the federal government $1.8 million over the past two years, is meant to replace the shelters’ current recordkeeping on clients. Lutheran Compass Center program manager M.J. Kizer has entered data from the Lutheran Compass Center’s client files, but she can’t retrieve it — and she needs to complete reports for the agency’s funders.

She’s not alone. “I’ve heard of no one using the system who’s able to get the information they need out of it,” says Kiser.

Until that changes, agencies are stuck doing double duty, entering information into their old system and then into Safe Harbors. Sinan Demirel, director of the U-District young adult shelter program ROOTS, estimates it took 80 hours, not the usual 25, to enter information last month. He doesn’t expect that to continue this month, but the Safe Harbors work still adds up. A 25-bed shelter, ROOTS currently has three full-time paid staff.

“ It’s one more thing to add on to staff that are already stretched to the limit and making choices to not do things we need to do,” says Demirel. “We would need at least another quarter-time [staffer], if not a half-time, to meet the ongoing demands of this system.”

Part of that time is spent simply waiting. Using Safe Harbors software is “like trying to do MSNBC on dial-up,” says Kiser. She says her staff experience frequent lag times of 10 seconds or more.

Remedies for these problems are possible, says HSD Community Services Division director Alan Painter. An advisory group of Safe Harbors users has been “very direct in telling us when we need to make the software more accessible.” The computer program is slated for four to six upgrades per year, so that problems will be identified quickly, he says. And “any new program has things that need to be improved.”

— Adam Hyla

Reason to be mad

Older African American woman tend to be in poorer health than the general population. They have more functional impairments, more limited education, lower income, and pay more out-of-pocket costs for health care.

So says Dr. Maxine Hayes, State Health Officer of the Washington State Department of Health, who will address these issues at a forum called “The Plight of the Older Black Woman.” The forum, to be held at the University of Washington School of Social Work and presented by the Mayor’s Council on African American Elders, will have a four-person panel discussion and a keynote address by Hayes.

Hayes plans to highlight areas of action in her talk. “The good news is that many of these issues can be prevented or mitigated,” she says. Health promotion and disease prevention have been known to make a difference: “The talk is about preparing for the future.”

One of the problems is the lower average income of older African American women. Economic resources and health are closely related, according to a study done by the State Department of Health in 2004.

For information on attending this event contact Margaret Boddie at (206) 328-6840.

Sweetening the pot

This week the state legislature considered a bill that authorizes local governments to enact or expand affordable housing incentive programs. House Bill 2984 is designed to allow counties, cities, and towns the ability to write affordable housing incentive programs into their own zoning laws. If it passes, local incentive programs to create affordable housing can no longer be interpreted by property owners as legally suspect “takings,” says Carla Okigwe, executive director of the Housing Development Consortium.

The goal is “to make the tools available to the local governments to use some of these incentives,” says Representative Fred Jarrett, (R - Bellevue) a co-sponsor of the bill. Jarrett says that state legislators want to leave zoning laws to the local governments so that they can write them in the manner that best suits them.

As the housing market has heated up, the price of housing has priced out many lower-income families and individuals. Inclusionary zoning is a way to help mitigate that problem.

HB 2984 is an attempt to establish that local governments have the legal authority to enact programs that provide incentives for developers to include affordable housing in or adjacent to new construction. There is currently nothing in state law that says the local governments have this authority.

The bill seeks to avoid language that makes inclusionary zoning mandatory — which is opposed by development groups such as the Building Industry Association of Washington.

“ Their main concern is with language that they are afraid will require them to do certain things,” says the bill’s primary sponsor, Representative Larry Springer, (D - Redmond.) Developers “don’t like to be required to do anything.”

— Justin Ellis