EVERETT — The Association of Washington Cities opened its annual conference in Everett this week, and Everett’s approach to managing its large population of homeless people took center stage.
Julie Frauenholtz, Everett’s Community Streets Initiative Coordinator, was one of three members of a panel on homelessness.
She outlined Everett’s experience with the Streets Initiative task force and the Safe Streets Plan that is implementing several of the task force’s recommendations.
Among the programs she highlighted were the crisis intervention training that all police officers must undergo, the city’s membership in an organization that aims to help opioid users, and creation of a police unit with embedded social workers.
“The embedded social workers have been key in our own agency learning new tools,” Frauenholtz said.
Providing tools is one of the main drivers of the AWC’s annual conference, which has brought several hundred city officials to Everett this week for a packed schedule of panels, talks and study sessions.
“The issues around homelessness, affordable housing and human services, they’re all interlinked,” said Candice Bock, the AWC’s legislative and policy advocate.
The member cities asked the AWC to make tackling homelessness part of its legislative agenda, but the annual conference also is a good opportunity to showcase its host city’s progress.
“Everett is doing some things that other cities are looking at,” Bock said. “They’re right there in the mix, leading in some areas.”
Everett’s program also was featured in AWC’s Cityvision magazine in the January-February 2016 issue.
On the panel, Frauenholtz also highlighted the CHART program to identify the heaviest users of emergency services, the city’s work crew diversion program, and the current drive to build an apartment building to permanently house some of the most chronically homeless in a setting where they can have security and ready access to social services.
Monroe councilman Kevin Hanford asked Frauenholtz how the city is addressing neighborhood conflict about the choice of location for the building.
Word that Everett is considering a location just off Evergreen Way for the housing project drew an outcry from some neighbors who were concerned the location had been selected without their input.
Everett City Councilman Paul Roberts, who was moderating the panel in his role as president of the AWC, jumped in.
“First of all, I don’t know that we have” selected the location, Roberts said.
He said there are many challenges in the process of building a permanent housing project, including the public’s perception of how low-barrier housing works and what effects they will have on their communities.
“If they’re well run, there really aren’t challenges in the neighborhoods they’re in,” he said, adding that “well-run” means having on-site supervision and social services for the tenants.
“We’re still struggling and working with these siting issues,” he said.
Mount Vernon Mayor Jill Boudreau, another panelist, talked about how her smaller city is watching Everett closely.
“We are so proud of this. We are following Everett’s lead on an embedded social worker” in the police department, she said.
Boudreau added that the city hopes to build a 50-unit housing development for the homeless and formerly homeless.
With a population of only 32,000, however, she said Mount Vernon’s model for many big projects is to form partnerships with Skagit County and others to share costs and to acquire funding a city might not get on its own.
That’s a practice Everett also benefitted from during the Streets Initiative process, which included participation by the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office, nonprofits, faith organizations, businesses and community groups.
“They were all at the table,” Roberts said.
Chris Winters: 425-374-4165; cwinters@heraldnet.com. Twitter: @Chris_At_Herald.
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