$64,000 (and counting) To Keep Out Nickelsville Refugees!

In earlier posts, I told you how the City of Seattle has had to shell out for a series of post-Nickelsville clean-up operations at Myers Way South, a mile up the road from where the original Nickelsville camp was, before it was evicted.

Here’s a picture of the Myers Way clean-up in progress in late October:

Here’s a pic of the fence the City built around site. It was finished a few days ago:

And here’s a picture of homeless people (probably ex-Nickelodeons) moving right back in behind the fence:

See also this series of posts:

October 8, 2013
October 27, 2013
October 28, 2013
December 3, 2013
December 18, 2013

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As promised, I put in a public disclosure request to the City of Seattle to find out how much the Myers Way clean-up operation and fence cost us. The total cost is around $64,000 so far. That’s about $26,000 for the clean-up and $38,000 for the fence.

Now here are the itemized bills. And remember: this is just for the Myers Way refugees. It doesn’t even count the City’s costs for cleaning up the Nickelsville camp itself. (That stuff is coming.)

Myers Way Clean-up Bill

Myers Way Fence Bill

(Note: The owner of the fencing contractor, All-City Fence, donated to Mike McGinn’s re-election campaign. See here.)

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So what’s the lesson here? What can other communities learn from Highland Park’s experience with Nickelsville? Just this: Don’t ever let a Nickelsville franchise get started in your neighborhood, or you’ll NEVER see the end of it. When you finally do get the main part of them to move on, you’ll still be faced with a long and ugly clean-up: building fences, wasting money, and gradually losing control of your parks and green spaces.

It was already hard enough for the City to keep hard-core homeless people from living in our greenbelts before these folks came here. When you add the Scott Morrow / Nickelsville attitude of angry entitlement on top of that, it becomes nearly impossible.

(Thanks to Ms. Nancy Craver and the Seattle Public Disclosure staff. These people are, in my opinion, some of the best public servants we have.)