It was revealed earlier this week that a local non-profit organization which receives taxpayer funds, is the group behind the Friday, July 5 protests on I-5 which clogged the freeway near Boeing Field in South Seattle.

Urban Family is a non-profit organization focused on youth and crime in Seattle’s Skyway neighborhood.  They are funded by taxpayers through programs run by King County and the City of Seattle.

Urban Family’s webpage states that the organization’s mission is to create a “web of care and support around black and brown communities, providing positive youth programs, family support, and neighborhood safety.” Yet in reality, the group used taxpayer dollars to organize the freeway protest which it labeled on its webpage as “Traffic Jam for Peace.”

One can just imagine a taxpayer sitting in the freeway backup and becoming frustrated learning that her higher taxes are not being spent to help those suffering from homelessness, but instead the funds were given to an organization that spent the money implementing a freeway shutdown cause the taxpayer to be late for work or a flight out of SeaTac.

Having taxpayers fund quasi-political groups, which then use the money to create a freeway-clogging protest is among the questionable budget decisions made by King County Executive Dow Constantine. The fourth-term executive has seen the county’s budget nearly double since 2015 (from $9 billion to $16.2 billion).  It often appears that budgetary decisions are made to reward political friends/supporters instead of being focused on helping those who are homeless.

This week’s revelation that taxpayer funds were used to plan a freeway protest comes on the heels of numerous calls to defund another King County-financed organization, the Housing Justice Program. This taxpayer-funded legal services organization administered by the King County Bar Association) has recently been in the news as it defends and pays the rent of a deadbeat squatter (and his family) who has refused to pay rent in a $2 million Wilburton neighborhood (Bellevue) home.

King County Councilmember Reagan Dunn has called for meaningful reform of the Housing Justice Program stating it was not the intention of the program to allow individuals to live rent-free in affluent neighborhoods, or to pay the rent of wealthy individuals.

The councilmember stated it was unfair for public funds to be used to pay for legal services for the tenant, yet, the landlord in the dispute receives no taxpayer-funded legal services.  Thus, small property owners must pay for all their legal fees (along with the mortgage and other property bills), while the tenant is funded by the taxpayers. Dunn said, “You’ve got a lot of mom-and-pop landlords who are falling further and further behind because they have to pay the mortgage on the property, the property taxes, and in some cases the utility taxes.“

King County taxpayers are growing increasingly frustrated by their tax bills increasing yet the homeless problem continues to worsen. They are tired of watching County Executive Dow Constantine wasting money on political projects for his progressive friends while the homelessness rate jumped another 23% last year.

Political leaders must become more efficient in how tax dollars on spent on the region’s homeless crisis. We shouldn’t be hiring more attorneys to bring financial ruin to small landlords, and we certainly do not need more protests on our freeways.  What we need is common sense political leaders committed to help those suffering on the streets by following the science of what works and what doesn’t work.