Real Change News | Perception vs. Reality

November 26, 2008
Vol: 15 No: 49

News

Perception vs. Reality

by: Cydney Gillis , Staff Reporter

Burgess making streets safer — but for whom?

As part of his Safer Streets Initiative, Tim Burgess, chair of the Seattle City Council’s Public Safety Committee, plans to introduce legislation to expand a special downtown taxing district to include all or part of Belltown – a potentially controversial move that would pay for private bicycle patrols and street cleanup in the neighborhood.

Photo by: Lucien Knuteson , Contributing Photographer

Printer-Friendly Version

Like it? Share it!

A chill hits the air as the sun goes down on the Recovery Café, a warm oasis of windows and lights at Second and Bell in downtown Seattle. Inside, participants in an AA meeting sit in a circle talking. Outside, a small cadre of recovering drinkers and addicts stands on the sidewalk smoking, some keeping an eye out for the next crack sale in Belltown.

“I’m tired of watching all the drug transactions,” says a woman with a short puff.

So are many Belltown residents, who have complained to the Seattle City Council — in particular, its new public safety chair, Tim Burgess — about the rise of open-air drug dealing and other problems, including graffiti, panhandling, prostitution, and people using the streets as a toilet.

Belltown isn’t alone: Even though violent crime is at a 40-year low, Burgess says residents from Fremont to Rainier Valley have told him they feel the same. In August, the first-term councilmember and former police detective responded by proposing a 12-point plan that aims to reduce misdemeanor street crime by adding more police and providing more mental health and treatment services.

It’s a combination long backed by Councilmember Nick Licata, who credits Burgess for what he’s accomplished so far, including getting King County to fund two new programs for juvenile prostitutes and the mentally ill.

However, two of the remaining proposals that Burgess plans to take up next year — one to hold business owners responsible if they allow criminal activity on their premises, and another to add Belltown to a special downtown taxing district that pays workers, in part, to move the homeless along — could face protracted battles.

In the 2009-10 city budget passed Nov. 24, the City Council approved a core goal of the Safer Streets Initiative — hiring 20 new police officers a year — with Burgess calling for the police to put more resource officers in middle and high schools (the council funded nine) and conduct more emphasis patrols like the ones he says have already started in Belltown.

He also led the charge to get the county to use its new mental illness and drug treatment fund to pay for two pilots he proposed. One will provide secure housing and treatment for Seattle’s growing number of underage prostitutes. The other will pair cops with mental health counselors so that people in crisis can be triaged without having to go to jail or the mental ward at Harborview Medical Center.

“The purpose,” Burgess says, “is rather than send them to jail or the Harborview emergency room is to get them alternative services, including treatment.”

As part of Safer Streets, he also got the council to raise the fine for those who solicit prostitutes from $500 to $1,000 and to pay for a new full-time prosecutor to file charges in arrests involving “high-impact offenders” with more than 10 prior felonies or misdemeanors — the latter including violations of laws against sitting on the sidewalk, aggressive panhandling, and urinating or defecating in public.

As a result, critics of Safer Streets say it’s aimed at the homeless — an idea Burgess rejects. “The city is well within its prerogative to say no to that kind of behavior,” he says, citing a map of 38 downtown restrooms that includes Macy’s, Nordstrom, and the Seattle Art Museum.

Every morning, custodians who work for downtown Seattle’s Metropolitan Improvement District (MID) pick up trash and clean urine and feces from downtown alleys and doorways. Belltown could be cleaned every day and get private bicycle patrols of MID “ambassadors,” whose job includes rousing the homeless, if its property owners voted to join the MID and pay extra taxes for the services, which are run by the Downtown Seattle Association in every part of the city core but Belltown.

The MID was formed in 1999, but Belltown’s largest land owners (primarily developer Martin Selig at the time) voted against being part of it. In 2006, Jim Turcott of the Alliance of Belltown Condominiums circulated a petition that called on the City Council itself to vote Belltown into the MID one chunk at a time — something the law allows the council to do with an adjoining district and no property owner vote.

A group called the No-MID Coalition rallied against Turcott and the council dropped the idea.

Burgess says he hasn’t decided whether he will propose a vote of Belltown’s property owners or direct council action, which would require a public hearing. But, under his plan, the tax — which Turcott had proposed at $9 a year for each unit of nonprofit housing and $65-$75 a year per rental or condo unit, with commercial buildings assessed by square footage — would pay for patrols of two to three off-duty police officers several nights a week.

“We’ll take that up right after the first of the year, and I think that will be controversial,” Burgess says. “The property owners will oppose it because they view it as an increased cost, and the residents will favor it because they have seen what the MID has done in other places downtown where it exists today.”

Resident Zander Batchelder, president of the Belltown Community Council, wants real police patrols as well. “Belltown’s problems are too big for mall cops,” he says of the MID bike patrollers. But he’s not in favor of joining the MID because it’s undemocratic, he says: The voting is weighted by how much land a person owns, giving renters and condo owners no voice in how revenue is spent.

For now, that leaves Burgess with the police emphasis patrols. But over the years, Belltown and Seattle have seen just how well they work on drug dealing, Councilmember Licata says.

“You’re just moving it around,” Licata says. “You’re satisfying one community for a period of time until the receiving community realizes there’s an increase and then they start complaining.”

----