time once again for community form and we're very lucky to have back with us live here in the studios this morning reverend bill curlin hacket reverend bill curran hackett is the director of the interfaith task force on homelessness and we're going to talk about homelessness here in seattle in king county this morning bill thank you very much for coming in spend time with us again this morning thanks for the invitation good to be with you so start out for those that are not familiar what is the interfaith task force on homelessness we started in two thousand and one under the direction of reverend david bloom my predecessor and there was an event at st mark's cathedral that dean taylor started who was the staff there at the time because of tensity three being hosted on site and they asked what are we doing around homelessness so three hundred fifty people came and what they did was the first thing they did was form our task force and the second thing they did was say let's have a conversation about a plan and they started the conversation around the ten year plan both out of the same of it so we have been working since two thousand and one on education advocacy and since maybe the last eight or nine years on direct service and a good share of the direct service we've done has been around people living in vehicles so we are low profile low organizational style fluid and dynamic and respond quickly and try to help people partner so that's in a nutshell what we do and sometimes we cause trouble and sometimes we you know work with people to create new new ways of thinking i'll talk a little bit about boxes later because people are stuck in boxes and the system so so speaking of causing a little trouble september of twenty fifteen just a little over a year ago you had publicly started challenging mayor ed murray on declaring a state of emergency for the homeless and just a month or so after that began he did exactly that so i was hoping you could and you were on the show just briefly after that and hoping you can kind of give us an update where are we since that state of emergency has been declared sure i was not the only one who was frustrated with the lack of cohesive responses and recognizing what we thought was an emergency so i took to facebook and found out that if i put mayor ed murray and it would be on his timeline recall if i used the words state of emergency i must've i have the text at home i should reread it but nevertheless in early november which was several weeks after i stopped he and executive constantine did declare states of emergency which a lot of us in the community hearkened as a step forward we thought it would break down barriers it would get us into a way of thinking that we hadn't been using and  actually brought some show and tell which won't work for the radio but mike does record this so maybe it'll show up somewhere but it started with how we all think in the box and that's how our systems usually work and we try to keep to the confines of the box with our outcomes our non profits and our providers and our spending then we say we have to be outside the box and so there's the homeless person outside the box but the box still exists and we make more focus on the box than we do the people still so i heard thomas friedman recently and he said we have to throw away the box so that means for me when you declare a state of emergency you stop worrying about the boxes and you focus on the people just the people and the boxes become and celery or helpful to the people instead we're still stuck in the box we're systemic people we want to support systems that we've had and so we end up with what lots of siloed behavior lack of partnership in fact when folk a strategy came and did the report for all home adjacent to the barbara poppy report for the city their main point was we've got multiple systems operating instead of one system and everybody shook their head said yeah that doesn't work and she said yeah but that's you has how you're doing it so we're trying to work our way out of that but it's entrenched behavior it's like sam keen favorite mentor said the sign on the muddy road says choose your carefully you'll be in at the next ten miles we love the ruts we've been in so the only way out of these ruts is to do away with the box you know maybe in that case it would be do a of the road i don't know how that works but the main thing i know is that when we focus more on the people and look at it from the bottom up and systems always look at it from the top down when we look at it from the bottom up we would begin to see what's needed and there's too little of that right now we're not really looking at it through the eyes of the people going through this we don't tend to listen to them we still call them consumers if we call them consumers does that make us sellers or what does that make us i still can't get that word changed we still call the homeless who are in the system consumers so if you try to follow that capitalist model someplace that takes you to oblivion and it takes you to confusion and takes you to boxes so we're still trying to shake that way of thinking he have and that's why it's good that we're not in a box getting public money and kind of stuck doing report and outcomes and projected outcomes sometimes these are needed but we will not end homelessness that way and we're proving it so whatever you asked me i got that far so that seems to be a common critique of the city's response on doing its its two studies that it did that it just it didn't even incorporate talking to any of the people who are actually out there living on the streets well they interviewed people and i think focus probably did a better job of that barbara poppy might have interviewed people but at the same time she came at this with more of a framework that she wanted to apply she actually quoted the focus strategies enormously in her report so it's not that they didn't tell us anything that we don't know or can't use but we've already turned away from some of the things that poppy was recommending which tended to take us away from housing tonight which is the word wave coing to for how to get people into a safe place tonight that's the first step out of homelessness is to get out of harm harm reduction harm alleviation she wanted us to really just try to get people straight into housing housing first which would be marvelous if we had housing stock that we could put people into but we don't and so the you need interim ways of doing that we called them interim survival mechanisms in the ten year plan and those are everything from tent cities to small houses to shelters in congregations to safe parking all kinds of other remedies that take people out of the harm that they face every day and begin to give them a chance to use their energy toward their own capacity to be out of homelessness and we know most people have that some have recovery needs and so we need a pathway for them that's different and they need to be walked through that because you don't do this alone especially recovery but even those who have capacity need people with them to exit homelessness we've learned that the hard way and we still think that you can just give a key to somebody and walk away and they'll be fine in an apartment it doesn't work even sam's embarrassment pathways  housing back in new york when they started housing first they were they realize that you need they're losing their old community when they get that key you know and sometimes that old community drags them back in and away from their stability so we know that  a lot of what we know we're not incorporating because we keep using that same rat or those same system tools or the same organizations that maybe aren't changing fast enough and they're still valuable organizations but they're not the ones that we should be making the pioneers money to you know some twenty five thirty million could be more than that now and don't don't quote me anybody but nevertheless that that's a lot of funding and we're not seeing the results that we ought to be seeing and we're seeing too many people who still turn back from pathways they too many people still having to wait even the coordinate entry i've described it kind of like a hovercraft because the system again built out from the top it comes down to the ground and it hovers over the ground it spreads out like an umbrella spreads over the ground but it never reaches the ground for everybody because you have to go somewhere to be assessed and you have to go somewhere to be referred and they're trying to get outreach workers that's why especially with vehicles we're talking about this  people in vehicles are not going to go to a regional access point and get assessed so they can be put into the almost management information system and wait for housing people whose urgency every day is food safety shelter are are not going to go oh look at i have my calendar up in my car and it says in four weeks i have an interview i mean come on that that's that's how we live in our house you know we mark the calendar in the kitchen wall but that's not how folks on the street live so that's what i mean we we don't have a frame of mind that actually incorporates into what we're trying to do that what people are going through and so a lot of that's around harm reduction too i mean we that's why the vehicle thing is so important for us every day we have the same rules in place and the very good public safety officers are out there just enforcing the rules we gave them so i can't even fault them i mean every now and then there's a few who maybe behave a little oddly and have a bad day and give out a ticket they shouldn't given out but for the most part we've given them the wrong tools to do the job so so talk more about that you do a lot of your focus specifically on people living in vehicles  has a picture of how many people are out living in a vehicle on a given night so this year the annual count the point in time count was different so we don't have those numbers until may but it's always been about a third of the total number we count so last year that number was in the around seventeen eighteen one thousand nine hundred i don't have those figures in front of me but we know that out of the forty five hundred it was about a third of those unsheltered and the problem we continue to have is that we've got i'll just talk for king county we've got thirty nine cities with thirty nine different ways that they respond to people living in vehicles and in seattle we've done some reports where it shows a new pup may not be able to see us but we've got no parking to five am signs up in many places around the city  i think that's a better map that shows where how many we've got and the only reason those are there is to keep people who would but their vehicle there overnight from sleeping in it it's not about storage of vehicles although it could be a little bit including that but mainly it's not about that and then the other thing that we've got going because of that is we've got people who don't have current tabs and it's hard to have current tabs when you're living in a vehicle because you don't have the money but the leading cause is from the court the leading cause of harm to people living in vehicles with tickets is tabs and it's the gateway to everything else you can't renew your license you can't put a title down and then they can give you one every day in fact one guy called me this week and he had been down to the court because he tried to renew his tabs and the licensing office said oh you've got tickets you have to go take care of those so you went down to the court the people we're working with and they've been really great to work with by the way because they were part of a protocol that came up under mayor mcginn to work with us and so this is the scofflaw mitigation program that i do with jan darcy so he went out of the court they said you don't have any tickets they should be giving you your tabs you know and he's going to pay forms so he went back and they still wouldn't give it to him but in the time it took him to do that he got two tickets within one minute of each other for not having current taps so in other words to parking enforcement or patrol probably parking enforcement people came by and it is tapped on current and but more tickets on so i told we have to actually go back to the court and maybe the court can actually send a licensing office once he takes care of those other two some kind of you know information that you're clear of tickets but the problem is he could have tickets in another jurisdiction meaning out of state or some other place that he hasn't known about and that now that he's trying to renu the tabs or interfering so that's how convoluted this is for a person living in their vehicle he may not be able to reno is tabs without going to another state or who knows someone so that's the licensing office they have that's where you have to go and you wait two or three hours to talk to someone at the and find out what's blocking me from they're the only ones who know that so i talk about silos this is a messy siloed system for people living in vehicles just to stay safe and the only way he could get out of that is if he parked off the street at a faith community or somewhere like that otherwise every time he's on the street he's subject to more tickets because his tabs aren't heard and the only thing that we've worked out with with the city parking enforcement and the court is that when we're doing outreach and we get e mails from them when they find a candidate for scofflaw which is four or more tickets they send us an e mail about doing outreach we go out while we're doing that in this electronic system they have harm is suspended now the word they shouldn't get any more tickets or be responsible for any more while we're doing outreach which i'll do with this guy i'll say hey we're trying to conduct outreach with him  you're still getting tickets so they made their those up we'll see but the point is the system is still so messed up that if he's got out of state tickets or something else we can't fix it and that's why i'm talking about the kind of harm that keeps happening to people  i've got dozens of stories about different ways that people get harmed through the laws and scoff the law had no provision and in seattle for the indigent people living in vehicles we've tried since two thousand and eleven when they passed it to get the ordinance changed council has this is perfect i have a children's toy here council has been on the stump you know they get elected they run for office they've got big issues they're really good with some like immigration right now you know i love some of the stuff that they're on the stump about but the problem is when it comes to vehicle residents and this includes all the mayors and all the councils in the whole county that's what the stump looks like we can't find them they are passing policies to help they aren't doing anything to bridge the gap and the name of the interim homeless response from the mayor is bridging the gap they're not doing anything to bridge the gap so we've met with the director of homelessness george scroller the mayor appointed and george really listening well and he's truly bothered by this lack of response around their calls so we don't know where it's going yet he's been involved in these other interim things the city's doing the three new encampments the navigation center  these in themselves are good things they're still not anywhere near enough they're like little episodic transactional effort they're like putting band aids on a wound when your whole leg is on fire you know it's helps a little but it's not going to but when when george heard about the reality of what's going on vehicles and there's no policy he wants to be part of that but we don't hear anything else from the city i mean they talk about a study group or work group the council doesn't want to change the law as long as the law works against the poor and this is across the board on all issues but as long as the law works against the poor it will still harm the poor you know and that's what we're battling in some cases we're like fingers in the dike all over the place at the same time we're trying to walk with them to court and and help the court behave well which it has done you know i praised the seattle municipal court they've done great jobs and for the most part parking enforcement has done a great job with this but we're we're bridging a gap between those responses in the city where the city isn't owning up to what it should be doing between the gaps now we're doing it for no pay from the city and even george understands that and the mayor won't meet with it i don't think he hasn't an idea about a policy around this he's never talk to us about it we can't seem to get a meeting with the mayor to talk about it but this is also true in every other city in king county so we're taking it to the state you know in a way for maybe in a lot legislation next session around but having them be complimentary and there's ways to do that because the revised code of washington allows indigency to have responses that help remove the harm from their indigency and tabs as is the biggest one and this would include even low income housing housed persons who can't get their tabs current and need to go to medical appointments or other things like that so we've got groups like disability rights washington and others kind of signing on so we're going after that the number one harm vehicle to use a bad pun that's being used to keep people and it keeps people in poverty and it keeps them always moving around every seventy two hours or at bellevue every twenty four hours i mean i think they're the best managers in the world to stay out of harm's way we probably should hire them because that's how you know the ones that we don't hear about are the ones who manage to follow all these rules and stay out of chaos all the while still trying to survive so i mean the more we talk about or get in contact with people going through these stories three weeks ago we had a family of nine living in the explorer and the explorer got towed you know and then we were it was right around the same time as the countess in and through a combination of neighbor care and cumbia city mary's place thanks to colleague joe martin at pike place a b c towing in tukwila release that car you know that's never happened so just because we did some legwork that family has stabilized but a family of nine living in an explorer you know and that's the kind of craziness we're seeing and it makes me sometimes want to go down and not just protest but you know just start knocking things down somewhere because it's that hard to bear the suffering we're seeing and that's why i struggle you know when the politicians are still inside the stump hiding and they go out and they have a big fanfare about how they're looking at something and then they come back and they don't do anything i mean i was at the opening of the housing ronald commons yesterday sixty new units in shoreline for three twenty million dollars so i figured that's over three hundred thousand dollars a unit for sixty units and i thought ok this is a nice way t homelessness and i really and i really do appreciate the fact that this is going to be a beautiful place for these folks in the food banks in the bottom and i appreciate all that but that is not the way to end homelessness because we can't keep doing it that way we don't have we're not going to dedicate thirty million or twenty million dollars per project or more i've heard variations of two hundred fifty million a unit to five hundred million or five hundred million a unit for what happened at san point so i mean we just can't end homelessness that way so we need these true interim mechanisms whether more tent cities safe parking sites and then engagement at each level to help people start to exit you know here's the pathway w alk with you we're just not doing that well right now and it's very frustrating well it seems in the newspapers both locally and nationally the tiny houses concept is  being touted as a reasonable stepping stone for a loving but vehicles seem like you know well they're kind of tiny houses i mean not not as nice obvious really yeah super tiny and obviously you can't sleep and normally in most of them however they already do exist so why wouldn't a city you know ease up on on that issue itself didn't the city they did try they have r v s they had three interim sites one was a more formal site and two were just safe spots off the street but they were all interim the only one that in any form still survives is down in soto near the bridge spokane bridge and it's a i said disaster for the people there it's just not near anything it's not a pleasant place to be and they sort of gave it up yankee diner they cite they they overspent on things they should never have spent money on and the project  a time limit because the land was only available for nine months or so so it's like the bridge and bridging the gap is let's try bad interim solutions gap plan and the mayor has said he's at one point when i think it may have been more around the jungle that we're making this a lot of this up as we go along the problem with that is he's really not taking advice from people who work with people on the streets he's taking advice from people who sit in the seventh floor of sixth floor fifth floor and city hall many of whom never have worked with folks on the streets who are maybe thinking politically about his re election some of whom are thinking about his image some of whom maybe just don't want to lose the job for bringing up a idea that may offend him all the various things that are going on some who have ideas they're afraid to say whatever it is i always come back to and it's you know we're getting near the end here i was going back this is a leadership issue it's a leadership issue and we're not being led well anywhere really in king county also work in sonoma county and we just i'm a part of the host policy taskforce up there and we just met with their continuum of care a group called the partnership and homelessness and what we said to them is they're the ones responsible for the spending of the money in the big ideas and the homeless policy task force is the long term group that used to do  that we said we're not working together there's a gap between us that we need to close because people in this county don't even know there's a partnership and homelessness and it's not different than it is here i show the materials from all home and we have impressive materials through all homes strategic plan died or go look at them but a lot of people i meet out in king county don't know we have a strategic plan even you know that we're all trying to partner that the average citizen is valuable in this that every organization faith community is valuable to this that you can all begin to do something around this we're struggling with that because again it's that same hovercraft mentality it hasn't reached not only the homeless on the ground it hasn't reached and now for the citizens on the ground who can create assets we're meeting with some folks who were created connected to us from kind of a group that isn't always a favorite of the liberals smart growth seattle which is kind of developers and what what they're putting us together with are people who are building small houses have other options for small houses that actually collapse and then have to be carted away on a flat bed we had a small house group two or three years ago we're starting another one with new ideas that are where there's no box you know how can we actually make some of this happen faster and small houses you know some of the more sophisticated ones will cost more than twenty two hundred dollars that the volunteer ones that they're putting together now are but that's still less than the three hundred thousand dollars you know and some of them you know the ones i've seen the last five or ten years that people begin to stabilize from survival needs they can begin to get a job get income move up their own ladder of stability and to a place they might afford it might not be in seattle but somewhere but right now we are not at that level below the hovering system we're not helping people take those first steps and that's just it's as simple as that it sounds crazy to believe that it's that simple but it is that simple we're not helping the people on the ground from their point of view so just about four minutes left so yeah fifty million dollars seems like we should be able to solve the problem fifty eight million per year seems like we should be able to solve this problem so if again if you were put in charge regionally even in seattle we work regionally we've got you district ballard west seattle groups going and there's others in king county we've got the side homo survives where they're starting another one on north and south county we're starting it all home vehicle residency work group and our main goal is to do the same thing to work regionally and regional solutions but solutions that begin with what's going on for the people there not one of the assets we can bring to this and then let's just spread them over it you know that that's the opposite of putting a seed in the ground and letting it grow from the bottom up this is like kind of creating something from the top and i'm not sure what the garden illusion would be there but but that's how we continue to think what resources can we bring to bear on this instead of realizing well let's look at what the people need and then  elop those pathways for them into those resources we don't do it that way you know and so more outreach is needed more listening to people who are consumers that it's an ugly word more partnering among those who can help them or walking with them the craig ran a bomb model that now does out of seattle mental health chaplaincy of a company meant companionship almost like a mentor you know if you're the homeless person i stick with you i walk with you till you're stabilizing you know maybe we stay in touch and we become friends down the road or we don't but we don't have that this system working like that and we've got plenty of people out there willing to help at some level who don't know how to help because the hovercraft is not reaching them either i mean in my faith community same thing there been sixty people or more trained and companionship who hardly are being used anywhere right now because they don't know where to plug in so i just think you know if i was going to talk to the mayor i'd just sit on your head or do something to see that you've got  three letter word backwards but they can email me straight i t f h at comcast dot net they can call me i mean everybody on the street has my number it's on the flyers parking enforcement gives out four to five four four two five four one eight we are hosted out of st luke's lutheran in bellevue at thirty thirty bellevue way nine eight zero zero four so that's where that's how we're able to do this we always need funds we always need more people interested in coming to our meetings which currently are the second wednesday of the month noon to one thirty at university congregational at forty fifth and sixteenth people are always welcome we don't have members we have act activists people who want to do things so help we need help is what we need and not just our task force the system we need help well with that we are unfortunately out of time i want to thank you for coming in spending time with us again this morning i hope people watch the video so they can see the puppet ok it will be will be posting that on the right thanks again time once again for community forum and we're very lucky to have back with us live in the studios this morning tom carpenter tom carpenter is executive director at the hanford challenge prior to his current position he was the director of the nuclear oversight campaign for the government accountability project he also helped establish and is a board member of the hanford concerns council and its predecessor the hanford joint council and was a former member of the hanford advisory board tom thank you very much for coming back  and spending time with us again this morning thanks mike good to be here so start out tell us for those that are unfamiliar what is the hanford challenge well they have for challenges a nonprofit organization our mission is to oversee the cleanup at the nation's most contaminated nuclear facility called the hanford site which is located here in washington state eastern part of the state and it was built in world war two to make  plutonium used in our nuclear arsenal and so that mission is over there not making plutonium any more but the the hangover if you will for making that plutonium is this very large  area of of contamination where they have tanks of nuclear waste that are sitting there needing remediation there's a lot of contaminated ground water it's really it's just if you talk about a superfund site this is like the granddaddy of superfund sites and it's going to take decades to clean this up maybe maybe longer and it's costing the taxpayer about two billion dollars a year and will for the next several decades in order to get a handle on containing that nuclear mass so our job is to help nuclear whistleblowers there to inform the public educate the public about what's happening to work with congress to on occasion bring lawsuits on environmental matters or to protect workers and so that's that's our mission all right so we last talked to you in february of this year and since then there have been numerous developments out of the hanford reservation one of the issues that you have been at the forefront of regarding hanford is injured tank farm workers can you talk about that very reactive it's very dynamic and so they they burp gases in vapors workers on top of the ground that are doing work to transfer waster to simply take the temperature of the tank and that kind of thing  often inhale these vapors and over the years many people have become exposed and made sick and ill from these exposures so  and fourteen after you know a good twelve years of study it a new round of exposures happened and at that point a lot of a lot of the observers like after challenge  you know unions at the site and even the attorney general's office for the state of washington decided that this time there needed to be a permanent and lasting fix to the vapor exposures because hanford simply was not doing what was necessary to protect these workers so after some seventy or so workers eighty workers got exposed to any fourteen  follow a lawsuit which gave them three months to get their act together a report came out that that said all the things that were wrong there how they were protecting workers and how they were doing everything wrong unfortunately this was like the twentieth century port so you know we weren't at all secure in the knowledge that they would go forth and implement the recommendations so that's why we filed a notice and  gave them almost a year to start implementing these recommendations and then that timeframe a whole bunch of more people got exposed so we did file a lawsuit in september of two thousand and fifteen and since that time  there have been more exposures but at this past summer there were most of those exposures happened in april and may in june when they conducted a transfer so at that point to put all the workers finally supplied air respiratory protection and the exposures have largely gone away since then and the unions also issued a stop work so since that time people have been pretty protected so i think you know we're maybe hoping to wind down this lawsuit will will sustain it as long as we need to because we don't have permanent protections yet they're not nailed down so we need an enforceable agreement so that's kind of where things are exposures have largely gone away because of the use of supply there which is what we've always been pushing for but in the end there needs to be an engineer control where these vapors don't enter the breathing air environment of the workers at all right they filter these vapors or they blow them away from where the workers are are working one of the other but right now their only choice is respiratory protection for supply there is very dangerous stuff it appears the resistance from d o a and its contractors to having supplied air as a regular feature for the workers is that it slows down the whole process is that correct yeah that's what they say and it doesn't it doesn't really add up they've done some self serving studies on it but what  they don't do is make it easier to use the supply there so for instance they're making workers out there carry these thirty five pound tanks on the on their backs and you do that for a couple hours then you know you got to take a break and it's hot and everything else well you know does modern science has come up with something called an airline where you have a tank and all you're carrying around is a line kalak a scuba diver ill from exposure management just does not want to do it does not care about their workers and you know that's got to change and if it takes a lawsuit to make them change will do that but yes they've been not pulling the economic card on it and it's costing them so much more to not deal with the issue so that's really what the funny part about the whole thing is is that they had implemented these protections twelve years fifteen years ago like they should have when they first got notice of this stuff then we wouldn't be in the spot we're in today can you briefly touch on some of the physical manifestations of the exposures that the workers are having to do with no yeah i mean  obviously when you breathe and the toxic vapors like this you know number one is there are hundreds and hundreds of chemicals that are known to be toxic they mix together you know having unknown health effects when they mix together  people are suffering lung disease you know industrial asthma something called reactive air airways dysfunction center him or rads you know if they have problems breathing for the rest of their lives you know that they can't go out into the community because something like a deodorant or a dry erase marker could cause them to go and go into kind of a toxic shock you know so their lives change who have died from that other people are still suffering the effects of it which might include dementia you know what's called neuropathies where you lose control of part of your body including maybe your speech patterns and that kind of thing so these have been documented diagnosed by doctors people have gotten compensation through the workers comp system and other systems and yet hampered continues to you know kind of maintain that the vapors are not dangerous and that no one's been hurt and they take this position and federal court recently and the judge said what are you talking about the record is replete with examples of that so i think we're finally on a track where and you know i think we're going to get some remedies and some protections into the future because there's a lot of people going to be working around this waste for the next forty years as they main as they empty these tanks as they need to do  for decades now and didn't the price tag just go up on it yeah so waste treatment plant is is a large facility next to the tank farms that they started the latest iteration they started building in two thousand and turn it into glass and it's it's a good idea and it's happened and other facilities around the world but at hanford for some reason they're having a lot of troubles making that a reality so the facility was supposed to open in two thousand and seven and then that changed to two thousand and nine and then two thousand and eleven and you know in two thousand and ten so whistleblowers came forward top management engineers and scientist and said this facility is the design is dangerous the construction is fraudulent you haven't used the correct parts that have been nuclear certified and they were just missed they were fired they were laughed at you know they were ostracized in their own communities and unemploy after after they spoke out and yet you know because of a massive amount of attention that we helped bring to this and the national media and in congress we testified in congress several times et more difficult and more of a challenge as a high gamma emitting waste but the fact is that you know some nine hundred twenty billion dollars have been spent on this one facility this you know this this issue actually of vitrified wast thousand billion yet not one drop of high level waste has been processed and we're years and years away from it so the last date that we heard for opening this site was  twenty thirty six for full operations of the waste treatment plant they're hoping to get the low activity waste facility up and going sooner than that but you know they say twenty twenty two but that date also slips in the g a o says you'll never make it so last week the you know right before christmas hanford of the deal we had you know put out a paper saying the cost of the facility was going to rise from thirteen point six billion dollars to sixteen point eight billion dollars so a four and a half billion dollar increase now the original projected cost was four point three billion so it's gone up quite a bit  you know i don't believe sixteen point eight billion i think is probably double that before we finally get to where it needs to go and frankly i don't care whatever it takes to make this a safe and effective facility  you know we spent about seven trillion dollars to make nuclear weapons hanford was a big part of that it was the factory that made that plutonium and whatever it takes to protect current and huge future generations we got to do that so that's where we are and you know if we're not if we're not not going to make the same mistakes going forward we do need a change in approach from the government in from the contractors to make sure that they don't make the same mistakes over and over again but i'm afraid that's the track we're on right now is is essentially a fraud treadmill having said that the companies involved in facility just paid one hundred twenty five million dollars to settle a fraud suit brought by whistleblowers on behalf of the government they paid this money to the government they did not admit  guilt they say they didn't do anything wrong but here's one hundred twenty five million dollars so you know the allegations in that lawsuit were that they used the wrong parts that they used government money for lobbying congress which is a big no no that the design was was fraudulent they knew it and they went ahead anyway and they enrich themselves etc sattar again they didn't admit liability but they did pay out the money so we'll see what happens next they're still working at that site right so backed all in still have the job was one of the issues that was brought out by the whistleblowers was that the proposed design at that time would potentially have hydrogen explosions within it and or you know major nuclear releases yes the  problem with the plant i was so many problems it would take me several hours to kind of detail them all but so the big ones were you know if you've got these enclosed facilities and tanks it's all in a what's called a black which there's no doors or windows or lights in there so all the processes are happening in this very large room the size of a football field as high right so it's you know lots of tanks and pipes and whatnot the problem was once you remove the waste from the tanks and pump it into these tanks you add acid to dissolve that way so you can start processing that filtering it out the mix seen in these tanks was insufficient so heavy particles of plutonium could fall to the floor of that tank and that causes you know   alpha particle bombardment of of water can actually break apart the water molecule which as we know from our high school science is hydrogen and oxygen so now you've got free hydrogen gas and oxygen floating around in the headspace of the tank the tank was not designed to handle that so there's no way to vent that hydrogen out of there and you know you reach a certain point of concentrations of hydrogen you have oxygen in there it will catch fire or it will explode it just it is a given is very dangerous stuff think the end in berg right it doesn't take a whole lot to set it off so the smart guys that they had hired to oversee this facility in the design said you're mixing isn't going to make it right you're going to have this problem and the response to that was to walk him out the door and get rid of him walk him aside is settled his wrongful discharge suit for four point two million dollars right and also is he's one of the people that brought this this other false claims act lawsuit charging these companies with committing fraud but yeah there were some very h safety issues putting the northwest at risk so we owe these people a great deal a great debt of gratitude in my opinion for bringing out these problems even though they they suffered with their career to bring it out any chance  of those people going back to work on this bill sillett it to you know keep an eye on what is happening from here on out that would be such a wonderful development if you got a kompany in there that actually believed in hearing problems and fixing them in a timely manner what a message that would send to to the workforce that we have a change now where we are welcoming people to raise questions but it's not go happen with this administration or the next administration it's not going to happen with these companies they've they've declared themselves enemies of dissent in a maze of people bringing forth problems and they will punish and retaliate against anybody who brings forth reports because it gets in the way of their profits and they they talk a good game and say no we're making progress but actually the studies don't support that there's a high level of fear  at the facilities as you know very punitive companies that run these that run these facilities and people have have a great deal of of a chilling effect of not willing to be you know the person that brings out the problem because they saw it happen to watch an aside as in john a bushie and gary bronson and some of the other folks out there is if if you can get rid of your top managers like that drawing in some pretty big salaries how am i going to fair a pipefitter right or a mid level manager i don't have a chance right so people want to keep their high paying jobs are going to keep their mouths shut there's an as a member of the tri party agreement doesn't washington state have any leverage for getting decent people in at these facilities for if nothing else oversight jobs yeah yeah the party of ecology does have oversight have they have some staff committed to the waste treatment plant and in the end that that plant has to be licensed by the state of washington they have to get a permit to operate under rick ross which is the waste law so that they can't regulate the radioactive part but they can the chemical part and really it's a big chemical facility so they're very good good shape but they don't involve themselves and employ retaliation and etc there and they're not very transparent with us or anyone else about what's happening so the whole host scene out there is very insular they consider themselves part of the hanford team so you know you go to a public meeting those guys all sit together and chat right their neighbors their kids go to school the same schools they go to the same parties and so you know and their their staffs interchange a lot right so someone who works in department ecologies state of washington sally's working at back dollar or one of these other companies and for many in the government that's the retirement you know pathway is to go to work for one of these companies but they're not going to get hired if they weren't nice to these companies so you know it's it's called regulatory capture and that's what's going on in hanford and  a problem that needs to be tackled all right well you touched on it earlier obviously we have a new administration coming in here shortly and what are you anticipating from some of the the folks who are going to be in charge of both department of energy and as wells are washington state reps well you know i've i've long said that the department of energy is is the problem at the hanford  site contractors come and go in the results of you know dysfunction and mismanagement and lack of oversight leading to you know fraudulent behaviors that satar a continue it's got a terrible record for environmental remediation and hanford just awful lots and lots of waste of money at satirise so part of me hopes that there will be big changes at the department of energy if trump came in and abolish the whole department it probably wouldn't break my heart it would be an opportunity for something new i don't think he's going to do that though i think you know mostly what the department of energy does is maintain our nuclear arsenal that's eighty percent of its budget you know seventy eighty percent hanford is a part of that you know trump has announced rick perry  a guy who has a degree in animal husbandry was the governor of texas you know couldn't remember the name of the department of energy as you know the agency he wanted to abolish what's you know about it well he comes from a state you know that a lot of oil so it's my guess is that they will cut the budgets for cleanup and hanford that they will there'll be less transparency that a lot of tools that we rely upon you know for instance the hanford advisory board at saturn to get information may go away so you know there's you know maybe maybe something good will happen unexpectedly but pretty much in the hamper clean up i think you know right is going to fight for it well what kind of power or influence he's going to have with the trump administration i mean look at the o m b director that they're proposing to bring in is a big budget hawk right so he wants to cut cut cut so where will washington state delegation get on this i don't know but i i hope that he's able to keep hanford funding in place because we need the money to be able to continue the cleanup even though it's limping along if you cut it far enough then you are risking disasters right there are areas that at the hamper site that need care taking and if you don't care take these highly dangerous image tori's then it can be a bad situation one day explosions you know release of radiation cetera so you've got to spend the money to keep