legal aid
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https://www.alternet.org/2022/03/florida-gop-ban-legal-assistance/ to election officials
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an 12 24
Washington is on track to have more eviction filings this year than any other year on record.
Nine counties, including King and Spokane, hit new high marks, and seven others are on their way.
“The state is in an eviction crisis at this point,” said Tim Thomas, research director at the University of California Berkeley’s Urban Displacement Project.
Washington’s policies, like its right to counsel program, have helped keep some of those people from becoming homeless, Thomas told the Senate Housing Committee on Friday. But he said without more action and funding, evictions will rise further.
Some lawmakers are voicing similar concerns.
“The increase in eviction filings is startling and alarming,” Housing Committee Chair Patty Kuderer, D-Bellevue, said. “There will be a tsunami of homelessness if we don’t handle this correctly.”
Kuderer is moving on from her role in the state Senate next month after she was elected in November to be Washington’s next insurance commissioner.
Evictions dropped significantly during the pandemic, largely due to national and statewide eviction moratoriums and rental assistance programs. Once those programs expired, evictions began to climb again.
One in 50 Washington renters, or about 2%, faced an eviction filing in the last year, according to data from the Urban Displacement Project.
During 2024, Clark, Grant, Jefferson, King, Klickitat, Okanogan, Spokane, Thurston and Whitman counties have already broken their records for the number of eviction filings in a year. Asotin, Columbia, Douglas, Kittitas, Pend Oreille, Skagit and Walla Walla are on track to break theirs this month.
Looking at trends in states similar to Washington, like California and Oregon, Thomas said he expects that evictions will not slow anytime soon.
He said one way the state can attempt to manage the record number of evictions is to expand its right to counsel program, which he called “a really powerful policy counterbalancing the crisis and keeping people housed.”
The program was established in 2021 and requires an attorney to be appointed in eviction proceedings for tenants with incomes below 200% of the federal poverty line. In 2024, that’s one person making $30,120 a year.
Since it launched, the program has handled 22,889 cases. About 81% of tenants in these cases ended up in permanent housing, and about 56% remained in the home subject to the eviction proceeding, according to the Office of Civil Legal Aid, which manages the program.
“The role that this program plays is not only a procedural safeguard,” said Philippe Knab, eviction defense and reentry program manager at the Office of Civil Legal Aid. “This program and these attorneys serve as a safety net.”
But as eviction filings rise, attorneys are struggling to keep up, Knab said. “We are currently experiencing a volume of evictions unlike anything we anticipated,” he said.
And with limited resources, some tenants fall through the cracks, Thomas said.
Just under 45% of tenants facing eviction had legal representation in January 2024, according to research from the University of Washington’s Evans School of Public Policy and Governance. A lack of information on the legal process, psychological barriers and logistical challenges are among the biggest reasons why some tenants never receive representation, Will von Geldern, a University of Washington Ph.D. candidate and researcher, told the Housing Committee.
Attorneys can only help those they can reach, he added.
The Office of Civil Legal Aid is asking lawmakers for $8.8 million in the next two-year budget cycle. That money would go toward continuing funding provided in the last legislative session along with adding five additional attorneys in King County.
This budget request will allow the program to keep pace with the current eviction levels, not expand any services, Knab said. He acknowledged that legislators will have budget struggles this year given a multibillion-dollar deficit.
Along with continuing to fund the right to counsel program, lawmakers will likely look at other policy solutions to ease the growing wave of evictions. Financial assistance to tenants and landlords, caps on certain rent increases and improving access to social services could all be on the table when they return in January.
Washington State Standard is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Washington State Standard maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Bill Lucia for questions: info@washingtonstatestandard.com.
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Jim Hightower: Can ‘powerless nobodies’ fight the corporate powers?
Written by Jim Hightower December 21, 2019
The many sparkling bays along the Texas coastline of the Gulf of Mexico have long provided both a working-class living and a valued lifestyle for generations of shrimpers, oysterers and other fishing families. People and seafood, however, are not the only creatures here, for such wildlife as alligators and snakes also call many of these interconnected waterways home. Yet, by necessity and experience, the hardy people of the water have figured out how to share the bays so all creatures can get along.
But in the 1980s, a strange and invasive new critter entered Lavaca Bay, near the town of Port Comfort. Far from getting along, this species proceeded over the years to devour whole harvests of seafood, along with the livelihoods of local Gulf communities. This marauder was not some monster from the deep but a massive, 45,000-acre factory looming over Lavaca Bay. It is the Formosa Plastics Corporation, founded by the richest man in Taiwan.
As its name implies, Formosa is not here for seafood. It is the world’s second largest fabricator of polyvinyl chloride,the tiny, highly toxic pebbles and powders used to make the gabillions of plastic bags, pipes, bottles, etc. that are choking the Earth. For decades, the Formosa plant has cavalierly been dumping trillions of these poisonous pebbles and tons of the polyvinyl powders into its wastewater — which end up in Lavaca Bay.
That poisonous content then spreads to other bays, nearby waterways, the Gulf itself … and into the shrimp, oysters, fish and other creatures living there. The result has been species vanishing from these waters, creating economic and social devastation for families and port communities that rely on nature’s bounty.
Wait, isn’t this against the law? Of course, but petrochemical behemoths like Formosa have corrupted the law, turning Texas lawmakers and environmental regulators into their puppets. When leaders won’t lead, The People must, and that’s exactly what’s happening in this case. A defiant, determined former fourth-generation shrimper named Diane Wilson, along with a scrappy environmental coalition on the Texas Gulf Coast, have just won the largest citizen environmental lawsuit in U.S. history, forcing Formosa to stop its gross contamination of the bay, the local economy and the law.
It’s good to have a happy-ending story for the holidays — one that’s not sugar-plum sappy but genuinely uplifting.
It “feels like justice,” said Wilson in early December when a federal district judge OK’d a $50 million pollution settlement against Formosa Plastics Corporation. Judge Kenneth Hoyt, a Ronald Reagan appointee, had previously ruled that the Taiwan plastics conglomerate was a “serial offender” whose violations of America’s Clean Water Act were “extensive, historical, and repetitive.” How the case got there is as important as his ruling.
Wilson, the indefatigable local shrimper, had been trying for some 30 years to get state and national officials to stop Formosa from dumping poisonous plastic chemicals into the Lavaca Bay ecosystem. The corporation’s deliberate contamination was destroying seasonal seafood harvests upon which she and thousands of Gulf Coast fishing families relied. She was ignored by those in power and then ridiculed and then demonized. Yet this lady of the sea wouldn’t quit.She kept speaking out, mounted hunger strikes and even tried to sink her own beloved shrimp boat in the bay as a public protest.
Nothing. But then, backed by a volunteer network of regional environmentalists and a savvy group of nonprofit legal service lawyers, Wilson filed the private citizens lawsuit in July 2017 that came to trial this spring in Judge Hoyt’s courtroom, finally producing an overdue measure of justice. The $50 million settlement doesn’t go to Wilson or the other plaintiffs but to projects that will revitalize local marine ecosystems and create a shrimping and oyster cooperative for local families. It also will pay for citizen-group monitoring of Formosa’s compliance with the judge’s orders for “zero discharge” of its plastic pollutants.
Even more significant than the money that the Formosa settlement provides, this victory sets a major legal precedent to advance other citizen lawsuits against polluters, requiring that the polluters (not taxpayers) pay for their messes. Who needs Santa Clause when “We the People” can deliver such democratic gifts to ourselves? For information on the details and impact of this remarkable people’s victory, go to the Texas RioGrande Legal Aid website.
Populist author, public speaker and radio commentator Jim Hightower writes “The Hightower Lowdown,” a monthly newsletter chronicling the ongoing fights by America’s ordinary people against rule by plutocratic elites. Sign up at HightowerLowdown.org.
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