I spoke with Councilmember Nick Licata directly yesterday. It took months for me to get this guy to call me, but by using classic Seattle passive-aggressive techniques, I finally prevailed.
Unfortunately, I can’t tell you everything he said, because there are sensitive negotiations in progress, but here’s the gist of it, including, as always, a goodly share of my own artful interpretation:
¶ Mr. Licata has forthrightly approached the City Council on the Nickelsville issue, and the majority feeling there is that Nickelsville is not sustainable. (As a matter of fact, they don’t like encampments on City property in general, which we know from reading the newspapers.)
At the same time, the majority on the Council want the Food Lifeline project to go ahead, as does the Mayor. We all know that Nickelsville will have a hard time standing against that, because Food Lifeline helps poor people. So the City obviously has some political leverage there . . .
Meanwhile, the clock is ticking. Food Lifeline wants to break ground this fall, and they will need two months of lead time to prepare the site before they start building.
¶ Mr. Licata has asked Nickelsville (read: SHARE/WHEEL) to give the City a move-out date so the City can start planning for relocation, but so far NV has declined, insisting that the City has to find a place for them first. As far as that goes, the options are no different now than they have been since the beginning, to wit:
-Churches
-Other existing encampments
-Some other city property (subject to permit)
For whatever reason, NV doesn’t like any of those options, and as a result they have not given the Council a move-out date. This means that unless someone comes up with a better plan between now and summer, there’s going to be a showdown.
So that would be SHARE/WHEEL’s leverage, I guess: forcing the City’s hand on a mass eviction, complete with TV cameras.
¶ Regarding the proposal to permit and legalize NV-style encampments (which I now understand was put forth by both Mayor McGinn and Nick Licata) there’s just not enough support on the Council to move forward with that. Even NV had problems with it, calling it too “restrictive.” So for now, it’s a dead letter.
¶ Mr. Licata is still trying to come up with a plan. He would like the NV to explore the option of moving outside the City limits where visibility, land-use restrictions, and other code issues would not be as much of a problem. He said that Portland offers a good model of such an encampment (more on this later) but even that idea is not without its problems. Seattle is not Portland, and wherever NV goes, you still need to have access to services such as bus lines. Anyway, that idea, even if it works out, could still be several months down the road, and we may not have that much time.
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I’m glad Mr. Licata finally called me. I know he’s a good man, a capable man, and after talking with him, I have much greater sympathy for what he has to deal with here. But I still want him and our other city leaders to step up and lead us out of this mess.
Before I let him go, I expressed my frustration with the City over the NV issue and asked him why he and his peers weren’t showing more leadership on this. He chuckled, but I could hear the frustration in his voice, loud and clear:
“To be a leader, you need followers,” he said, “and right now I’m having a hard time finding any of those.”
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–I’ll follow you, Nick. As long as you do everything I say.