Is homelessness an ‘emergency’ in Pierce County? The county executive doesn’t think so
A push to declare homelessness an emergency in Pierce County has been percolating for some time as the homelessness crisis worsens, but the person with the power to make the declaration has been reluctant to do so.
Pierce County Executive Bruce Dammeier has the ultimate authority to declare a state of emergency under Pierce County’s charter.
In an interview with The News Tribune, Dammeier said the homelessness issue does not warrant an emergency declaration.
“To me, the issue is this is a chronic problem. This doesn’t require an emergency response,” Dammeier told TNT reporter Becca Most on July 12.
Dammeier said an emergency declaration can streamline the procurement of funding and contracting of goods and services to address the issue, but he maintained that the county is already working to fund such services.
In the beginning of July the Pierce County Council passed recommendations for funding made by the executive’s Human Services Department, but some council members and service providers raised concerns over the speed of the process and a lack of transparency.
“I think that it is designed to get headlines,” Dammeier told The News Tribune about the prospect of an emergency declaration. “It’s not designed to solve the problem.”
Republican members of the Pierce County Council did not respond to a request for comment on whether they support an emergency proclamation, but their comments related to another recent emergency ordinance they opposed seemed to indicate they shared similar sentiments to the executive.
On July 9, council member Ryan Mello and his Democrat colleagues brought forward an emergency ordinance intended to make it easier to establish shelters such as tiny home villages in the county. The emergency ordinance circumvented the typical committee process for legislation and came before a council vote within a week after it was drafted.
Emergency ordinances do not follow normal legislative procedures because they are intended to address an emergency situation that requires immediate attention. The emergency cited by the drafters of the ordinance: a 23% year-over-year increase in homelessness revealed by the 2024 Point-in-Time count.
The ordinance required a super majority to pass and on failed along party lines on July 9.
In a news release regarding that ordinance’s failure, council member Dave Morell wrote that he did not “see the emergency” to justify the ordinance.
“I voted no on the proposed emergency ordinance because homeless is a chronic issue not a new emergency,” council member Paul Herrera told The News Tribune in an email.
The push to declare an emergency
Pierce County Council member Jani Hitchen (District 6, Democrat) told The News Tribune she asked the county executive to declare homelessness an emergency in 2021, to no avail.
Valorie Crout works for Associated Ministries, one of several organizations contracted by the county to manage the county’s homeless service and housing referral system, called Coordinated Entry.
In May, Crout told The News Tribune the system was overwhelmed by the number of people who needed housing and services, with Coordinated Entry only having the capacity to take in about half of the estimated 1,100 people who enter homelessness on a monthly basis in Pierce County.
During the Pierce County Council’s April 24 Select Committee on Homelessness meeting, Crout suggested the county government should declare an emergency in response to the homelessness crisis.
In an interview with The News Tribune she compared the current state of the issue to a “forest fire” that our communities are scrambling to put out.
This year’s single night survey of those living on the street found a nearly 24% increase from the previous year. That method of survey is widely understood as an under-representative figure of the true number of those living homeless in Pierce County.
Dammeier pointed out that the City of Tacoma had declared homelessness an emergency in 2017 and suggested that it had not had a substantial impact on their response to the crisis.
Spokesperson for the City of Tacoma, Maria Lee, said the emergency declaration provided the city with greater flexibility in the permitting and purchasing of temporary and emergency shelter sites to meet an “emergent need related to homelessness.”
The city does not conduct its own survey to count how many are living unhoused in its jurisdictions and relies on the county’s annual point-in-time count survey. The city cited data from the county’s survey in a recent report on Tacoma’s Homelessness Strategy showing that the number of those counted living homeless in Pierce County increased by 40% from 2017 to 2022.
It has been recognized that Tacoma has the broad majority of homeless shelters and services available in the county as the county has been working to establish additional shelter capacity outside of Tacoma.
Rob Huff is a spokesperson for the Tacoma Pierce County Coalition to End Homelessness — an organization with representatives from advocates, service providers and local governments cooperating to bring solutions to the homelessness crisis. Huff said the coalition would be in support of an emergency proclamation in Pierce County if it made it easier to establish temporary shelters and services in the region.
“Current temporary and long term shelter options are nearly all located in Tacoma, yet we know that hundreds of people in other communities across Pierce County are currently homeless,” Huff wrote to The News Tribune.
Chaplain Ed Jacobs has been conducting quarterly memorial services in Tacoma for those who have died while living unhoused in the county for years. He told The News Tribune 295 people were featured at his memorial services last year.
When asked if he considered the state of homelessness in Pierce County to be an emergency, Jacobs told The News Tribune “If one or two people were dying on the street, it’s still an emergency.”
The Pierce County Medical Examiner’s Office was unable to confirm the number of those who have died while living homeless in 2024, but a spokesperson said the office provides information on deceased unhoused individuals to Jacobs for his memorial service.
On Aug. 30, 2023, Human Services director Heather Moss sent a memo to the Pierce County Council regarding data from the Medical Examiner’s Office. The memo reported 158 people died without a known address between January 2022 and July 2023 — Human Services staff determined 61% of the decedents were listed in the Homeless Management Information System.
“This indicates the 96 individuals had sought assistance with finding housing at some point in that 18 month period,” Moss wrote in her memo to the council.
Jacobs said he thought declaring homelessness an emergency could help streamline the region’s extreme weather response. He said currently there is a multi-day delay during extreme weather events, causing the unhoused to wait multiple days before the Emergency Operations Center coordinates with vendors and service providers to get essential supplies like water bottles into the hands of those living on the streets without basic amenities.
“It is a huge emergency they are ignoring,” said Jacobs.
When asked about the hundreds of folks who dies living on the streets and what the threshold would have to be to declare an emergency, Dammeier attributed much of the death toll to the fentanyl crisis.
“I think we have to be doing a more things to address fentanyl, but a homelessness emergency, that’s not it,” he said.
Dammeier said the county is working urgently to address the homelessness crisis even though he has no intentions of declaring an emergency. He pointed to the county’s recent investments in homelessness programs which included more than $17.6 million towards a spectrum of emergency shelters, supportive housing and outreach.
This story was originally published July 30, 2024 at 5:15 AM.
