October 7, 2024. Dena Jensen
How can we expect law enforcement to adhere to their documented intentions for just treatment of marginalized community members when other City officials, in an effort to try to ensure they do, can’t follow and adhere to theirs?

Tonight, Monday October 7, Bellingham City Council will be voting for a final time at their 7:00 p.m. meeting on whether to dissolve the Immigration Advisory Board. So far, the vote has been 4-2-1 to get rid of the board. This action will be the final matter of business for Council tonight.

It’s time to make our last efforts to change that vote and keep the IAB alive and making recommendations to address the critical needs of our friends and neighbors who are immigrants. Email Council at ccmail@cob.org. Also folks can show up at City Council, Monday night, at 210 Lottie, to bear witness to the vote and/or comment afterward.

Last week City Council Members approved the creation of a limited term Keep Washington Working Act Advisory Work Group. The agenda bill for this resolution states the following:

“This item proposes the creation of a limited-term advisory work group to examine the City’s compliance with the Keep Washington Working Act (KWW), established in 2019 to honor the vital role of immigrants in the workplace and our state’s economy, and ensure Washington remains a place where the rights and dignity of all are protected. The purpose of the proposed work group is to research, discuss and arrive at a shared understanding of the City’s actions to achieve and maintain ongoing compliance with the KWW, and report findings and recommendations to the City. The work group would include community members with lived experience and/or connections to the immigrant community in Bellingham and people with experience and training in specified fields relating to the goals and requirements of the KWW.”

While the resolution notes recommendations that were made by the the Immigration Advisory Board, none of the board members were consulted in the creation of this workgroup or in the discussions officials had which reviewed the IAB’s establishing ordinance. These discussions have been pointed to as resulting in the decision to dissolve the IAB.

The problem is that City Council Members documented and told the public, including IAB Members, that they were going to engage with IAB Members in the process to do both of those things.

Here’s the email I sent officials on Friday detailing these circumstances:

Sent: Friday, October 4, 2024 at 01:02:23 PM PDT

Subject: Regarding dissolving the IAB and the proposed KWW workgoupDear Bellingham City Council and Mayor Lund:

I have been trying to sort through all of my responses to your discussion at your September 30, 2024 Committee of the Whole meeting about the proposed ordinance to dissolve the Immigration Advisory Board and the proposed resolution to create a Keep Washington Working Act workgroup. I wanted to hone them down get to the most central, and hopefully communicable distress I have about Council taking these actions. 
Back at the end of this past January at your Committee of the Whole meeting, where the ordinance to suspend IAB meetings was being voted on, it had been expressed by officials that the City/Mayors hadn’t had enough buy-in in the work or scope of the IAB, either prior to the formation of the board or during the years it was meeting.

As a result, in trying to evaluate barriers to the work of the IAB during the suspension, attaining that buy-in seemed to be a strong priority that was proposed for the work during the suspension period.  The Mayor had noted at the August 12, 2024 Committee of the Whole meeting that Council Members and the Mayor’s Office met together monthly numerous times. From what Council Member Stone and Mayor Lund stated during the meeting this past Monday, work toward attaining that buy-in occurred. 
What hasn’t occurred in this process, however, was having discussions about any of this – let alone working to gain buy-in – with the members of the Immigration Advisory Board. 
The “Proposed next steps” which were presented to Council Members back in January, included a bullet point which noted selected board members would be included in discussions about updating the ordinance:

• “Ordinance update: Determine updates needed to the IAB ordinance, with selected IAB members, to be presented to Council for consideration.”

It was stated during Committee of the Whole this week that City Council Members and the Administration held discussions about updating the IAB ordinance. However, IAB members weren’t included in that process. This approach precluded any insights and ideas those members may have had from informing or impacting the positions held by officials during their discussions about the ordinance. 

In addition to this, regarding the creation of the proposed KWW workgroup, this workgroup as presented does not meet with the direction of City Council Members regarding an ad-hoc workgroup on January 29, 2024, with a vote of 5-2. Council Members did not direct the administration to work with Council leadership to create an ad hoc workgroup to which they would then invite IAB members to apply to potentially be a member.  The direction shown in the minutes for that meeting was for “the City administration to work with City Council leadership, IAB members, and other parties to create an ad hoc workgroup.”

So not only has there been no buy-in sought by City officials from IAB members for either the workgroup or the upcoming status of their board, the City led them to believe they would be included in discussions about updating the IAB ordinance, as well as in the creation of a workgroup, and they were not. Invitations to IAB members to apply to be workgroup members after the fact do nothing to secure their involvement in the creation.
 

On top of this, the officials who were involved in these new proposals never granted Immigration Advisory Board Members the dignity of meeting with them face to face to inform them about the proposals.As someone who has been following the meetings of the board throughout its development and existence, the Mayor’s recent letter to IAB members, which she characterized on Monday as optimistic, is painfully reminiscent of another Mayor’s email to those board members.
 
There was an email of former Mayor Seth Fleetwood’s which was also read aloud to IAB members last November, not by him, but by the interim Deputy Administrator, that revealed he had been dishonest when informing IAB members about the reasons that one of their members was not reappointed. That email too, came after months of him not responding to or meeting with IAB members about the issue of that reappointment. That email too, was optimistic, with him expressing that he was looking forward to the future success of the Immigrant Resource Center project, which is something for which now, officials offer no future plans or assurances.

And these are just a few cases of a failure of officials to communicate with these board members since their formation in 2020. The continued pattern of unmet assurances and non-transparent communication from City officials to members of marginalized communities is the greatest source of my distress about the City’s approach to the Immigration Advisory Board. 

When you are unsure of next steps in creating equity or in what the fullest version of it looks like, it seems to me that, while buy-in from people in power has to be achieved, it certainly can’t be attained without buy-in from the people who have been marginalized. If government leaders work with each other in a process that looks like its designed to distance themselves from and potentially alienate people they are expressing they would like to or should include, it increases the likelihood those people aren’t going to want to participate at some level and amount of time that leaders could possibly allow them to. To me, this is what inequity looks like. 

I don’t think any of you want inequity. I think you can do much better right now in this case to achieve it. I don’t think any of us have to wait for the hiring of a strategic initiatives director that may eventually help identify barriers to remove. There are identifiable barriers that can be removed right now. You had said you would include board members in certain parts of this process regarding the Immigration Advisory Board, and they have not been included in those. Remove those barriers. If you think you need a facilitator, you can use one now. You can use any deescalation and trauma informed response trainings you have received, should challenges arise. You can go back to the December 2023 and January 2024 meetings of the IAB to remember how members welcomed you and how glad they were that you came to talk to them and work on the challenges they were facing at that time. Don’t give up.
Sincerely, 
Dena Jensen
Birch Bay, WA

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This email was sent to the following addresses:

To: ccmail@cob.org <ccmail@cob.org>; Daniel C. Hammill <dchammill@cob.org>; Jace A. Cotton <jacotton@cob.org>; Hannah E. Stone <hestone@cob.org>; Michael W. Lilliquist <mlilliquist@cob.org>; Hollie Huthman <hahuthman@cob.org>; ehwilliams@cob.org <ehwilliams@cob.org>; Lisa A. Anderson <laanderson@cob.org>; mayorsoffice@cob.org <mayorsoffice@cob.org>

Cc: G. CC. Immigration Board <immigrationboard@cob.org>; Janice L. Keller <jkeller@cob.org>; WREC <wrec@chuckanuthealthfoundation.org>; phab@co.whatcom.wa.us <phab@co.whatcom.wa.us>; council@co.whatcom.wa.us <council@co.whatcom.wa.us>; Satpal Sidhu <ssidhu@co.whatcom.wa.us>; charlottealden@cascadiadaily.com <charlottealden@cascadiadaily.com>