On his way out the door last month, former Spokane Neighborhood, Housing and Human Services Director John Hall sent 27 pages of recommendations to the Mayor’s office. He also raised concerns about tens of millions of unspent housing dollars.
Almost exactly a month after his resignation from the top job directing Spokane’s Neighborhood, Housing and Human Services (NHHS), we now have a window into the dysfunction former director John Hall witnessed within city government.
RANGE has obtained a 27-page memo sent to Mayor Nadine Woodward and City Administrator Johnnie Perkins on Sept. 30, Hall’s last day on the job.
In the memo, Hall makes recommendations for how to fix the embattled office, which oversees three separate departments ranging from neighborhood outreach to housing access and the city’s homelessness response.
Hall also made detailed claims that the City of Spokane is out of compliance on a number of grant programs that should be channeling millions in federal dollars for affordable housing and other initiatives to combat Spokane’s housing and homelessness crisis, but which are either languishing unspent in city coffers or haven’t been requested at all.
Unlike Cupid Alexander, who held Hall’s role for about seven months and left in June 2021, Hall did not accuse the administration of racism in its practices. The memo does not offer any personal motive for Hall’s departure.
Hall’s feelings do align with Alexander’s parting comments about an NHHS that is understaffed and overworked.
Taken together, the accounts suggest that, in the more than year that passed between Alexander’s departure and Hall’s, the city has been unable to shore up staffing gaps that grind even seemingly routine tasks like executing an approved contract to a crawl.
Not only has the problem not gotten any better, it may be getting worse.
The memo
The document has three main sections. The first is a four-page narrative of the problems Hall witnessed within his office, the mayor’s office and city council, along with his suggestions on how to fix them.
Hall takes pains to say his former bosses did not ask for these recommendations, but that he’s providing them anyway: “The following unsolicited observations and recommendations are aimed to be non-partisan, honest and respectful,” he writes, “I simply want to see a high performing enterprise leading the way, especially in housing affordability and availability, homelessness and self-sufficiency.”
These will not be one-time fixes, Hall believes, but an ongoing process improvement focused on “hot issues & recommendations … that should be addressed continuously by the mayor’s executive team”
Hall’s list includes several specific issues that have caused tens of millions of dollars of federal grant money to build more housing, ease the burden of housing prices, and address the economic factors of homelessness to go either unspent by the city or unclaimed from available funds — along with specific strategies to maximize those dollars coming to Spokane and get those dollars actually flowing to projects.
He also cites an overall “lack of urgency to be results driven during this homelessness crisis” among administrative staff, and specifically “a separatist mentality” in the Community Housing and Human Services (CHHS) department — a division of NHHS — “that is not collaborative.”
Hall suggests taking CHHS out from under NHHS and making it its own cabinet-level department reporting directly to the mayor and city administrator, “so that the city administrator can hold its leadership accountable.” (He even suggests changing the department names, as “CHHS” and “NHHS” are so similar they cause confusion. To that we say, we hear you buddy.)
While most of the letter is aimed at the mayor and her staff, Hall also criticized City Council members for blurring the lines between the administrative role of the mayor’s office and the legislative role of the city council. He cited council’s active hand in Camp Hope (which he refers to as “the squatters on Washington State Department of Transportation right of way”) as “one such overreach.”
Outside of housing and homelessness, Hall said he is concerned for staff within the Office of Neighborhood Services (ONS), which acts as a liaison between the city government and Spokane’s 29 neighborhood councils and community assemblies. In Hall’s mind, the structure is “dysfunctional at best and often exposes staff to toxic and intolerable verbal abuse from the public,” he writes, “Staff may be better served reporting directly to the legislative branch.”
Hall’s memo goes into detail about specific dollar amounts and projects — including $10 million approved by council on Aug. 1 for 11 specific projects totaling 220 units of housing — that city administration has not acted on.
Hall also proposes greater transparency from the Mayor’s office in the form of weekly press conferences, “to cover not only the housing crisis, but all matters related to the city,” in which all division heads would be required to attend “and be responsible for answering detailed questions” from the press and public.
Hall writes that he believes such a forum would more effectively disseminate accurate information, leaders and staff would be publicly accountable for progress, and the citizens of Spokane might take more comfort that their government is working for them.
Of the other 22 pages, two are dedicated to a series of Strength, Weakness, Opportunity, Threat (SWOT) analyses for each of the offices — a common way to, at a glance, document what is currently going well and going poorly (the S and the W, respectively) as well as future opportunities to potentially seize and roadblocks to try and avoid.
The final 20 pages are supporting documents such as letters from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), validating Hall’s claims.
John Hall Resignation Letter by RANGE on Scribd
