In late July, the city of Spokane solicited proposals for an organization to run TRAC — the city’s largest homeless shelter. The request came after nearly a year of the Salvation Army running the shelter and amidst consistent controversy over shelter conditions and budget overruns. The process was moving along according to schedule — until the selection committee recommended Jewels Helping Hands for the job. Then, the process ground to a halt.
After Jewels’ selection, the Woodward administration called for a pause on the Request for Proposal (RFP) process, saying funding hadn’t yet been secured for the contract. The Woodward administration did not explicitly express concern about the committee’s selection of Jewels Helping Hands (JHH), but the mayor clashed repeatedly with JHH throughout the Camp Hope saga. Senior leadership of Salvation Army, meanwhile, recently appeared with Woodward at a press event announcing the mayor’s petition asking the Supreme Court to overturn Martin v Boise, which has limited the ability of cities to incarcerate unhoused people.
Ben Stuckart, Executive Director of Spokane Low Income Housing Consortium (SLIHC), and co-applicant on Jewels Helping Hands’ proposal, sent an email in mid-October to follow up on the progress. By that point, the city’s published timeline showed the selection committee’s recommendation should have already been publicly discussed twice and approved by Spokane City Council.
Kim McCollim, director of the Neighborhood, Housing, and Human Services division (NHHS), which houses Community Housing and Human Services (CHHS), responded on October 19, telling Stuckart she was told the RFP was on pause until all funding to pay for it was identified. The email, sent to both Stuckart and Julie Garcia, Executive Director of JHH, reads, in part, “Once all the funding has been approved, I can move forward with the contract.”
But that wasn’t necessarily true.
On September 22, the Salvation Army, one of two other applicants for the RFP and the current provider at TRAC, had appealed the provider selection. This was a little over two weeks after the news broke in The Spokesman that Jewels Helping Hands was the recommended contractor for the Trent Resource and Assistance Center (TRAC), and almost a full month before McCollim’s email to Stuckart and Garcia.
That appeal would continue to stall the process of officially awarding the RFP, even after all funding sources were identified, leading to the news revealed at Thursday’s City Council Study Session: despite getting the official recommendation from the RFP committee, Jewels Helping Hands would not be receiving a contract. Instead, the Salvation Army was all but promised an extension to continue their operations.
According to a briefing letter sent to the city council by McCollim prior to the study session, CHHS was switching tack. The committee had recommended Jewels Helping Hands, but with the RFP planning for a contract start date of December 18, the city had simply run out of time to responsibly and safely transition to a new service provider. Some members of city council felt it left them with no choice but to retract the RFP and extend the existing contract with the Salvation Army.
Instead of following through with the RFP, McCollim recommended the city spend $3.2 million to renew the Salvation Army’s contract for the first four months of 2024. The briefing letter said the purpose of the decision was “to ensure uninterrupted emergency shelter services through winter and allow for a new transition plan to be created in 1Q 2024 that includes wind-down and transition scope and costs.”
Earlier in Thursday’s study session, it was revealed the Salvation Army has gone more than $700,000 over budget on their current contract with the city. The RFP for 2024’s operations required proposals to be under $9 million. We don’t know how much The Salvation Army’s proposal asked for, but Jewels budgeted for about $8.9 million.
“Now we’re in this crunch and we don’t have any options,” said councilmember Betsy Wilkerson. “I call it the bottom of the ninth. We’re not going to extra innings.”
The delay and subsequent retraction of the RFP has left council members, applicants and members of the recommending board reeling, and allows the Salvation Army to continue charging the city of Spokane more money than they would have been allowed to charge under the terms of the now-retracted RFP.
“They really should have got their ducks in order before they even put the RFP out,” Stuckart said. “If you’re this far behind, it is probably impossible for us to take over a facility.”
“Understaffed and overwhelmed.”
The published timeline for the RFP stated that CHHS would present a recommendation first to the city council’s Public Infrastructure, Environment & Sustainability (PIES) Committee on September 25, and then at two public city council meetings on October 2 and October 9 before the city council would make a final decision on whether or not to approve the provider. But the process stalled out somewhere in the CHHS department, before a recommendation could ever be presented to the city council.
The CHHS department has seen a high turnover rate, losing its director in September, somewhere in the middle of this RFP process, which may have contributed to the delays, a sentiment shared by CHHS board members speaking at the study session and council member Karen Stratton, who also sits on the board.
“You had Jenn [Cerecedes] leaving, you had people trying to pick up the slack in meetings looking like they hadn’t slept in days,” Stratton said, “I mean, there was a lot of work on everybody’s plates.”
High turnover rates and hostile work environments have plagued much of Nadine Woodward’s tenure, so it’s unsurprising to hear it may have played a role in the issues with this RFP. But according to the CHHS board members and city council members, larger problems plagued the process.
The question of funding seemed to be at the top of the list for CHHS board members. The RFP was put out before funding had been officially identified and earmarked to fulfill it.
Minutes from the September 6 CHHS board meeting shared the official statement from the recommending body: “Along with our funding recommendation, this committee expressed an opinion that TRAC is a woefully inadequate facility in which no provider can deliver optimal services. Spokane needs to do better than this, but we can hope for nothing more than the status quo when a simple contract extension, uncertain funding, and an industrial warehouse lacking indoor plumbing are all there is to work with.”
Jeri Rathbun, the chair of the CHHS board who also sat on the committee that evaluates RFPs, told City Council members that there was discomfort with a lack of concrete funding from the beginning. “[It’s] not really a best practice to put an RFP out for a program or a contract that doesn’t actually have funding tied to it,” Rathbun said in an interview with RANGE. “Ultimately that, from our understanding, is what held up the process in moving forward.”
That’s also what McCollim told Garcia on October 19.
But an email sent to RANGE shows that McCollim, along with Council President Lori Kinnear and other key city officials, had been sent an email that showed funds had been identified by October 5 by Skyler Brown, Grant and Contracts Financial Manager.
By October 23, city council had voted to confirm all the funding — four days after McCollim told Garcia that funding was the only hold-up — but as late as November 1, City Council Budget Director Matthew Boston was still emailing back and forth with Brown, McCollim and interim City Manager Garret Jones trying to understand the status of the funding.
Garcia didn’t hear from McCollim again until this Wednesday, when Garcia says McCollim called her to say the RFP was being retracted because CHHS was recommending an extension of contract for the Salvation Army so that when Lisa Brown takes over as mayor in January, it will be her administration’s decision on how TRAC moves forward.
We called McCollim to confirm the details of her phone call with Garcia and received no response. But, an email she sent to city council members, their staff and the mayor’s administration stated the three reasons for her recommendation to extend the contract were to provide Lisa Brown the opportunity to develop her own transition team for TRAC, concerns about the new administration’s intentions about funding TRAC through 2025 and not disrupting guests who might be uneasy with a change in providers in the middle of winter.
Wilkerson told RANGE that questions about the election never came up when the city was developing the RFP, and she didn’t expect there to be a problem with the process regardless of who won the election. Wilkerson said the goals of the council were simple: put out an RFP to try and find a service provider who could deliver better services at a lower cost.
When we asked mayor-elect Lisa Brown, who attended the council’s study session virtually, if she thought this move would provide her with more freedom on how to handle TRAC come January, she said it seemed like the current administration was passing the buck.
“The administration has not planned adequately for the future. They’re not leaving flexibility, they’re leaving an unfulfilled obligation,” Brown said. “I guess you would just say the can’s being kicked down the road.”
While Rathbun and other CHHS board members found the lack of identified funding at the top of the process to be concerning and something they don’t want to see repeated, Nicolette Ocheltree, the Manager of Housing and Homelessness Initiatives for the city council, said in the study session that part of the reason for the RFP going out before funding had been attached was that they were looking for proposals that could deliver the services, but cut costs from what the city is currently paying.
Ocheltree also expressed frustrations that the process had been unnecessarily delayed. She said that the council had previously voted on contracts the same day they officially voted on funds for them at many points, which they could have done to keep this process on track, if the CHHS department would have presented the recommendation to them.
Wilkerson chimed in after that, saying, “If I was sitting on that side of the table as the volunteers, I would be highly, not using my French, but I’d be pissed because as a board [member], I have been totally left out of all these moving parts, even in an email stream as to what’s happening.”
“The cost of the Salvation Army was so expensive,” Wilkerson said. “We wanted to see if there was anybody else out there who could deliver the same level of service or better for less. And you heard – Jewels came back with a more detailed proposal than the Salvation Army.”
It wasn’t listed as a reason for the retraction of the RFP in the email McCollim sent city council, but the appeal filed by The Salvation Army was the other major player behind the scenes of the delay.
“Head them off at the pass.”
On page eight of the 11-page RFP, there is one line on the appeals procedure: “Applicants wishing to appeal a funding decision must make their appeal to the CHHS Director.” No other details are given.
The Salvation Army filed their appeal on September 22, a few weeks after news broke in the Spokesman that Jewels Helping Hands would be the recommendation, just one day after Cerecedes’ last day of work, leaving the CHHS department with no director to process the appeal and confusion over whose job it was to even judge the appeal.
And there were other questions about it as well: the line in the RFP says folks can appeal a funding decision, but what does that actually mean? The appeal filed seemed to treat the recommendation made by the RFP committee as a funding decision, but some members of the CHHS board took issue with that.
“It’s kind of funny timing for an appeal,” Rathbun said in the meeting. “Because at this point, it’s only a recommendation, a contract hasn’t even been awarded yet.”
Leslie Hope, another member of the board, said that was her concern as well. “The Salvation Army’s appeal says, ‘I’m asking you to reconsider the CHHS committee decision.’ We don’t make a decision. We make a recommendation to the council.”
The originally posted timeline for the RFP set October 9 as the day the city council would vote to make the official decision.
Other concerns expressed by almost everyone at the table were that there wasn’t a clear appeals process. Karen Ssebanakitta, another member of the CHHS board present at the meeting, said that the Salvation Army’s appeal came with additional information and positions of support from Neighborhood Councils and other organizations that might’ve swayed the decision-making on their recommendation, had they been submitted with the original application. But no one was sure if that material should be considered by the recommending board, because again, they had no process set up to handle appeals, and the information wasn’t submitted with the original batch of applications they considered.
Council Member Michael Cathcart asked, “Is there not a place for a sort of quasi-appeals approach at the council level, because we have the ability to make a different decision based on what’s recommended? We do that every once in a while with other recommending bodies.”
Kinnear thought perhaps the appeal came from a misunderstanding of the process and a desire to “head them off at the pass.” But she also said it wasn’t the way to do it.
“This body (CHHS) has sent stuff to council before. We’ve shot it down, or we’ve sent it back. I expect that to happen again in the near future,” Wilkerson said. “And so for those appeals to come out of the recommendation, it didn’t make sense to me.”
Rathbun, the CHHS board chair, echoed the council’s confusions, “My understanding, with my experience, is that nothing about this process has been standard or typical, and it’s been a big challenge, with the funding, the precarious funding for TRAC in general and all kinds of other challenges that TRAC has had with their facilities.”
Regardless, it worked. Even after funding had been identified, the RFP didn’t move forward because no one really knew what to do with the appeal.
Ocheltree found the appeal process “highly problematic.” She said that the council received the full text of the appeal filed just that day, and when they’d tried to inquire about the process earlier, “nobody seemed to know what’s going on.”
“Obviously, looking back, it’s a lot easier to make judgements on what happened or didn’t happen, but I do wonder what role the appeal process played in the delay — now we have no choice but to extend the contract,” Ocheltree said. “It does seem to at least have the appearance of a conflict of interest when you have the current shelter provider, who was also a respondent to the RFP, file an appeal that could potentially delay that, such that they will benefit from having a contract amendment extension of the four months at the higher rate, higher than the RFP that they submitted for the contract year 2024, and at a higher rate, for which we decided to go out to RFP because we wanted the cost savings.”
The Salvation Army has already burned through several tranches of money, including $5.6 million originally contracted to run the shelter from November 2022 until the end of this year, and an additional $3.5 million allocated on August 21. In the study session, an additional $730,000 was identified as needing to be paid to the Salvation Army. That $730,000 is currently part of a $3.93 million shelter operations amendment that would extend the Salvation Army contract through April 2024. If that $730,000 is granted, the city will have paid the Salvation Army $9.83 million for its 13-month contract to date.
The additional proposed $3.2 million to extend SA’s contract through April works out to $800,000 per month, or the equivalent of $9.6 million per year. The now-vacated RFP called for proposals under $9 million. JHH’s budget in the proposal they sent in budgeted $8,988,975.60 for a year’s worth of operations.
This means, in all likelihood, that the Salvation Army will be paid more to operate TRAC for January through April than they would have been paid under their own RFP proposal, had they not lost the bid, and had the RFP not been revoked.
“The way the appeal was, when it was submitted, it sounds discriminatory. If not discriminatory, certainly biased,” Wilkerson said. “The way that went down, a bias was created going forward in this whole process with this appeal that has no process — which council didn’t even know about the appeal.”
Council Member Jonathan Bingle chimed in to say he hadn’t yet read the appeal and wanted to know what was biased about it.
“At the time that it came in, that appeal with no process stopped everything,” Wilkerson answered.
Garcia said after the study session that she wouldn’t have cared if she didn’t get the RFP, but having to go through the bidding process with hefty requirements and a strict deadline, only to have someone submit something later that changed the results of the process was frustrating.
“And so that held [the RFP process] up long enough to force them to pay Salvation Army whatever they’re asking,” Garcia said, “which isn’t fair to the taxpayers of Spokane, nor the providers that put in the time [to apply].”
Who dropped the ball?
This study session wasn’t just a squabble over budget confusions, an unclear appeals process and miscommunication. It was a discussion with real impacts: who will be running TRAC for the next year, or at least the next four months in the extension proposed by McCollim? What services will the unhoused guests receive? How much will the city pay for those services, and most important, where will the money come from?
Even after an hour-long discussion, it was unclear where exactly the plot got lost: the budgetary hell of unidentified funds, an appeal with no clear process, or an outgoing administration with an ax to grind against the winning provider?
Emry Dinman’s article identifying Jewels Helping Hands had won the recommendation of the RFP committee also said that the city administration had specifically called for a pause to identify funding.
Almost two months later, Woodward publicly tweeted on November 5 about Jewels Helping Hands’ application to operate TRAC, stating “Julie, who advocated for more emergency, night-by-night beds in the city yet refused to encourage people at Camp Hope to seek shelter at TRAC because it ‘wasn’t humane,’ now wants to be the operator of TRAC in 2024. Unbelievable!”
Everyone on the city council seemed to be on board with the RFP in July: they asked for it to be put out, they wanted to see proposals that could do more for less money. Even if members didn’t agree with the provider recommendation, they at least wanted the ability to vote yay or nay on the recommendation. But the slowdown of the RFP process and the subsequent cancellation of it, quickly replaced by McCollim’s recommendation to just extend the Salvation Army’s contract for another four months, took away all their options. It’s left some involved parties feeling like the mayoral administration may have had a hand in it slowing down the process.
“There is this thing that a council member can do: if, say, the mayor doesn’t want to sign a contract, council president can sign that contract,” Ocheltree said. “Having the option to be able to do that when the funds are all identified, with our fee process already gone through, and having that option just in case they want to, was removed from their toolbox.”
“I think we all have our suspicions, but just looking at the timeline, it’s questionable,” said Wilkerson.
Stuckart, who served as the City Council President until 2020, said the RFP process getting delayed was out of the ordinary, but that it wasn’t the first time a mayor had dragged their feet on helping unhoused people, citing the events of 2018, which led to the first tent encampment outside city hall during the Condon administration.
“We’ve seen these shenanigans play out multiple times,” Stuckart said.
As for this specific shenanigan, Stuckart offered a couple possibilities. “Maybe it’s just they’ve been short staffed for four years and are so, uh, understaffed — short staffed, overwhelmed — that it’s just purely they couldn’t even execute,” he said. “It could be they deliberately slowed it down so that we end up here in November and Jewels now doesn’t get the contract that an unbiased committee voted to give them unanimously.”
“It could be incompetence. It could be deliberate. Who knows?”
