Frustrations emerge at pace of building unified approach to homelessness in Pierce County
Earlier this year, Pierce County offered $1 million for a consulting firm to help implement a new coalition of local governments and organizations to coordinate a response to the homelessness crisis. The consulants’ project is underway, but it is unclear what the coalition will do and how it will help to better address homelessness in the region.
Pierce County Council member Marty Campbell expressed his frustration with how slowly the implementation process seems to be taking after representatives from the consulting firm outlined a multi-year timeline for implementation during a Select Committee on Homelessness meeting on Dec. 11.
“I hear this with frustration because I hear this: ‘Ah, we will get to it in a couple of years,’” Campbell said. “Last April we had a [URA] meeting. We know that took a few months to put together. Here we are a year later, and we are starting scoping, another implementation. So in that time three or four hundred people have died in the streets of Pierce County. By the time we are done, another three or four hundred will die on the streets of Pierce County, homeless.”
The county appropriated $1 million in the 2024-2025 biennial budget to hire a consultant to guide the implementation of the Unified Regional Approach (URA). According to County Council staff, the consulting firm known as Uncommon Bridges was selected and has been under contract since the end of October.
The URA held its inaugural meeting April 12, hosting representatives from the cities of Auburn, Bonney Lake, DuPont, Edgewood, Fife, Fircrest, Gig Harbor, Lakewood, Puyallup, Steilacoom and Tacoma. A news release from the county noted that the cities of Milton, Sumner, University Place and the Towns of Carbonado and Wilkeson were invited to the table, but representatives were not present.
Representatives from Pierce County Council also attended, including Council members Ryan Mello and Jani Hitchen, who convened the meeting. Hitchen said the URA is being established out of realization that the county’s current response to homelessness is a “patchwork” of community organizations, agencies and jurisdictions working without coordination. She said that, ultimately, that approach has allowed people to “slip through the cracks” of the region’s social-safety net.
One of the goals of the URA, according to Hitchen, is to create a “unified regional organization” that will work together to determine what services and supports exist in different communities and jurisdictions and to identify gaps.
During the Pierce County Council’s Select Committee on Homelessness meeting on Dec. 11, representatives from Uncommon Bridges presented some of their early work to help guide implementation of the URA.
Brian Scott, the project director from Uncommon Bridges, told the council the consultants believe the URA will require a three-pronged approach to be successful — getting all the governments on the same page, engaging community stakeholders and organizations in the process, and making sure the best available practices for addressing homelessness are being applied.
Liza Burell is a project manager for Uncommon Bridges working on the URA project. Burell told the select committee they are in the “scoping phase” of the project and have spoken with 13 of the 23 government partners of the URA, including Tacoma, Fife, Gig Harbor, Lakewood, Puyallup, Steilacoom, Orting and DuPont.
She said the purpose of their early conversations with local governments was to determine what homelessness looks like in their respective communities, what strategies are working, what challenges exist and how they are interested in engaging in the URA’s efforts.
Burell said she expects that process to last through early January.
“What does homelessness look like in each jurisdiction? It’s different in Puyallup than it is in Tacoma than it is in Orting,” Scott told the council of their early inquiry. “People are living out in the woods in some communities, and in others they are very visible out on the sidewalk.”
Scott said the firm is looking to identify who the top providers of services for the homeless are in Pierce County as well as what the highest priority populations are for trying to mitigate homelessness. He also said they are looking to identify what strategies are working and what strategies from around the country have been successful and should be adopted by Pierce County.
Scott told the select committee his firm intends to complete the “scoping phase” by February 2025. The work of that phase includes completing interviews with governments and partners, identifying common themes and challenges, organizing a second URA meeting and scheduling the “planning phase.”
According to their presentation, Uncommon Bridges anticipates the URA planning phase to take another 12 to 15 months to complete, and the third “implementation phase” to take another 8 to 12 months.
“Sounds like we have a plan for the plan,” Pierce County Council member Paul Herrera noted at the end of the consultants’ presentation.
Puyallup City Council member, Ned Witting, expressed a concern he had with the URA following the presentation. Witting has previously been critical of the idea of the URA and was worried that it would take too long to organize and would lack the leadership it needed to be effective.
“Getting consensus between our jurisdictions is going to be a pretty heavy lift,” Witting told the consultants during the Dec. 11 meeting. “Different jurisdictions approach homelessness from different angles. The answer for some jurisdictions is to do some sweeps and send them down the road to Tacoma.”
