With a problem that encompasses poverty, homelessness, mental illness and drug and alcohol addiction and with one or more of those often contributing to the others, it’s clear there are no silver-bullet solutions.
It’s why the Everett Community Streets Initiative presented a list of 63 recommendations for programs, collaborations and changes to laws and policies that followed a months-long process launched by Mayor Ray Stephanson last year and involved stakeholders from city departments, social services, charities, churches, businesses and community leaders. Work continues on implementation of those recommendations: some adopted, others now works in progress and still others yet to be addressed.
Among the most recent examples:
- The Legislature has allocated $1.34 million of a $2.1 million project to renovate Everett’s historic Carnegie Library as temporary housing for those who are released from jail for nonviolent crimes and without housing. Along with 20 beds, the center will connect tenants with needed services, job training and other resources.
- The city and Snohomish County’s Department of Human Services are sponsoring a mental health worker who started this week and will work directly with the city police department to expand its toolbox beyond arrests to inform them as to social services and resources available to those they contact when an arrest isn’t necessary but assistance is. Chief Dan Templeton says his officers are enthusiastically behind the program, which has been implemented in a handful of cities elsewhere in the U.S.
- The city and the Untied Way of Snohomish County are looking to hire within the next 45 days a coordinator for the Streets Initiative who will track its projects and work with those implementing them and keep the public informed of progress. Related to that, a steering committee recently was formed, which includes some of those originally involved last year, to help guide further work.
- The city is three months into a six-month voluntary phase-in of its alcohol impact area, which will bar the sale of high-alcohol but inexpensive beverages, mostly in the downtown area.
The impact area passed the council by a 4-2 vote, and there’s push-back among some businesses and beverage distributors, Stephanson said. There’s concern that such area bans only push the problems outside the area. Admittedly, to some extent, they may. Deputy City Attorney David Hall, who devotes much of his time to Streets Initiative issues, said a WSU study found that when Tacoma set an alcohol impact area, alcohol-related complaints fell within the area by 36 percent but increased 10 percent just outside the impact area. Still, Hall said, that’s a net decrease.
Some of the Streets Initiative proposals will work better than others. Some may involve more cost than benefit. The program’s coordinator and steering committee will help judge what works and what’s cost effective.
One other program now underway — and one that makes clear the need — is identifying about 10 of the city’s “super users” of public resources, those who the police and fire department aid crews must repeatedly respond to, those who end up frequently in hospital emergency rooms. For some of these, the costs incurred by city, county, hospitals and others, can amount to $500,000 a year. That’s a half-million dollars for each individual. In identifying those “super users,” the hope is to tailor services for them that treat the underlying problems and halt the cycle of homelessness and substance abuse. One such person, after some daily monitoring by Everett officers until a bed was available, is now in a long-term detox facility.
The work of the Streets Initiative seeks to make sure our public resources are used wisely. And it seeks to make our city move livable and safer. Most importantly, it seeks to end the lock that addiction, homelessness and poverty hold on too many.
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