Real Change News | SHARE gets shafted

November 19, 2008
Vol: 15 No: 48

Just Heard

SHARE gets shafted

by: Cydney Gillis , Staff Reporter

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Somewhere in the city budget process, a “green sheet,” or funding request, was submitted to the Seattle City Council that disappeared without a vote, with councilmembers giving various accounts of what happened.
What happened, says SHARE/WHEEL, which operates 14 emergency shelters nightly at churches around the city, is that the mayor killed its request for an extra $50,000 in backroom budget cuts. The group says it asked councilmember Nick Licata for the money to fill a budget shortfall that threatens to close the organization. Three other councilmembers signed on, creating a green sheet that combined SHARE’s request with one from St. Martin de Porres for an extra $41,000.

The $91,000 green sheet and others then went into confidential negotiations with the mayor, budget chair Jean Godden, and three other councilmembers, and — poof — it came back out without SHARE, as a new green sheet allocating $50,000 a year in 2009-2010 to shelter men 55 and older (St. Martin’s). The council passed the new version in a final Budget Committee vote Nov. 17. (Another green sheet that passed includes $50,000 a year in 2009-2010 for the Lazarus Day Center.)

Council President Richard Conlin says he remembers the $91,000 green sheet, but Godden insists no one backed it or moved it in committee. “SHARE/WHEEL is getting $300,000,” of the full budget, she says, which the council will vote on Nov. 24. “Everybody asked for more this year, [but] we can’t spend money we don’t have.”

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