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Renton Councilmember Carmen Rivera and King County Regional Homelessness Authority imply our Red Lion Hotel and Convention Center is still hosting business and leisure travelers, even though it’s leased and boarded up by King County. It was converted to a shelter, and never converted back after ruinous fires and floods.
Is the Renton Econo Lodge next? Renton Council Member Carmen Rivera argues that since the County wrecked the Red Lion Hotel and can’t restore it, it shouldn’t count as a hotel that Renton has given up. So the Econo Lodge and others should now be available to the County.
At least one Renton Council Member appears to be arguing in favor of Burien moving some of their unhoused residents to the Econo Lodge Hotel in Renton. Burien’s official city website says they are still considering the idea (it’s the REBLX site in their official post). To help get more of Renton’s hotels converted to shelters, Council Member Carmen Rivera provided a guest editorial to the Renton Reporter so full of obfuscations and misstatements regarding my comments on the topic that it will take me several blog entries to unpack it. Her goal appears to be to increase Renton’s already way-oversized contribution of hotels to the County’s sheltering efforts.
The only accurate thing Councilmember Rivera said about me in her letter was that I voted in favor of an ordinance creating some reasonable size, location, and operating guidelines for homeless services use in Renton, along with four of my colleagues. We did so to ensure we didn’t have another hotel produce dangerous living conditions or fall into ruin the way the Red Lion Hotel and Convention center did. My opponent in my current council race, Kim-Khanh Van voted against this sensible ordinance, along with one other council member. And based on her op-ed, Carmen Rivera would have voted against this ordinance if she had been on council. In other words, like Kim-Khanh Van, she would like no limitations on converting Renton’s hotel space to shelters to solve other cities’ homeless challenges.
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