SHARE/WHEEL's application for funding this year was rejected by city officials because the group refused to comply with a new data collection system called Safe Harbors. The computerized database would include individual information about homeless persons obtaining services: name, date of birth, race, and gender, among other items.
In SHARE/WHEEL's view, the new requirement amounts to the government tracking homeless persons. The city has held repeated meetings with SHARE/WHEEL members in an attempt to find a compromise. The city offered to accept unique identifiers of a person's initials, date of birth, and gender. That wasn't good enough for the group, which already collects data on its members, including age and gender but not names.
Pete Kuhns
The group that runs tent cities—like Tent City 3 at St. Mark's Cathedral—is fighting with the city over shelter bed funding and privacy issues.
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Freeman and others contend that even their initials will allow them to be tracked. SHARE/WHEEL has offered to turn over aggregate demographic data to the city.
Rasmussen and city officials continue to assert that the system will not be used to track individual homeless persons. Few in the SHARE/WHEEL camp believe that, however, and that leaves the city and the group at an impasse.
"It's really short-sighted" to cut off SHARE/WHEEL, says Nicole Macri, a member of the Seattle/King County Coalition for the Homeless, a group that was one of the architects of the 10-year plan. Like other observers, Macri believes there is an element of political payback in the city's insistence that SHARE/WHEEL cough up its clients' identities. "To me, it seems strange that this is the reason they would cut SHARE off."
In fact, federal regulations do not require that 100 percent of homeless persons be entered in the computerized system. According to Judy Summerfield, the city's interim program manager of Safe Harbors, the feds expect 90 percent compliance. In King County, that would work out to about 800 people who wouldn't need unique identifiers, far more than the number of homeless in the SHARE/WHEEL system.
End users of the Safe Harbors system say the city's data requirement is causing problems and that the city has misplaced its priorities for ending homelessness.
"It's hard to understand why they put Safe Harbors so far up the to-do list, when we have so much other stuff to do that produces services to people," says M.J. Kiser, program director at the Compass Center, a homeless shelter provider. "Our case manager at our shelters is spending time putting data into the system instead of calling a mental-health provider or filling out a housing application to put someone in housing." She says that the computerized system is not working as advertised by the city and that it'd be "optimistic" to expect it to within six months.
Still, the funding extension may only postpone a city versus SHARE/WHEEL fight another month.
"If they follow through and create three more tent cities, then all bets are off on how the city is going to respond," says Tim Harris, executive director of Real Change. "My bet would be that the Nickels administration would not tolerate it for three minutes. They'll play hardball."
The city attorney's office has already sent SHARE/WHEEL a letter, outlining that the group would violate its 2003 agreement with the city.
"We don't want to go to war," says Rhodes. "But these are shelter beds being lost."
pdawdy@seattleweekly.com
