SEATTLE NEWS ARCHIVES & FEATURES
Dori: City cutting navigation team proves homelessness is an industry
Nov 15, 2018, 1:36 PM | Updated: 3:16 pm
Seattle police officers Wes Phillips, left, and Tori Newborn talk with Corvin Dobschutz as part of Seattle鈥檚 Navigation Team. (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson, File)
(AP Photo/Elaine Thompson, File)
Let’s talk about what politics is truly about in our region. In Seattle, the city’s navigation team goes out and meets with the homeless to offer them services, such as drug and mental health treatment and counseling. If we want to actually turn people’s lives around, it is critical to give them these services.
The Seattle City Council has just cut an expansion of the navigation team’s budget about in half, from $480,000 in 2019 to $244,000 in 2020. They are going to cut many of the nav team workers who are out on the street.聽 The reason? People like Kshama Sawant and Teresa Mosqueda want as many people on the streets as possible. And Mike O’Brien stated that even though he voted to cut the budget for the navigation team, he still supports expanding the navigation team. Huh? I’ll tell you what — despite this guy’s elite education at Lakeside and Duke, he is pretty far out there.
So why would government want to have more people addicted to heroin and sleeping on the street? Because that is power. That’s how you can tell people that there is a visible problem for which the city needs to raise their taxes.
RELATED: Politicians in Seattle get rich off of homelessness
Why in Seattle would they cut positions of people designed to get the drug vagrants off the streets? I don’t know if I’ve ever had a better example of what I’ve been telling you for more than 20 years. It. Is. About. Money. Homelessness is a gigantic industry. Homelessness is a cash cow for government. The more drug vagrants there are are on the street, the more government can demand your tax dollars. And with those tax dollars, do they change lives? Do they save lives? No. They hire cronies and give them six-figure jobs. I mean, look at these groups that supposedly work with the homeless — the Low-Income Housing Institute director makes something like $200,000 a year, and the CFO of LIHI makes over $150,000.
It’s business. They do not care about lives lost to the spiral of drugs. They do not care about humanity. They do not care about saving lives. They care about getting and preserving six-figure jobs for their cronies. If there is one message I can get across to people who live here, it is that homelessness is nothing but a huge cash cow industry for our local government.
