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Downtown community sees beginning stages of safety overhaul as effects of pandemic linger
BELLINGHAM, WA (MyBellinghamNow.com) – On February 20, 2024, members of a desperate downtown Bellingham community were promised change.
As her first major action as the new mayor of Bellingham, Kim Lund announced an executive order aimed at addressing the fentanyl crisis in the city, with a specific focus on the safety and well-being of its downtown area. The actions included in the order ranged from increasing police presence downtown to cleaning up the streets in a more literal sense.
The city’s downtown area had been in a state some would liken to a crisis. Bellingham Fire Chief Bill Hewett says the pandemic changed the entire landscape of downtown, including how people engaged in their daily activities. Businesses are still recovering from shutdowns during the early days of the coronavirus, just as foot traffic is starting to return to pre-pandemic levels.
“Because of a lot of those issues that surrounded the pandemic, we did see a dramatic increase in issues related to homelessness in general and the downtown core, as well as an increase of more folks downtown either in mental health crisis or with substance abuse issues,” said Hewett.
Despite most pandemic-era mandates being lifted, the area continued to see alarming trends. The executive order noted that open drug use, overdoses and similar activities have had an adverse and disproportionate impact not just on downtown businesses, but on its residents and community spaces.
Downtown Bellingham had 38 calls reporting suspected overdoses in January this year compared to eight suspected overdoses in January 2023, resulting in a 375% increase. The Bellingham Fire Department and EMS responded to 104 overdose related incidents in January this year, 30 of which coming from the downtown area.
The wide-spread perception that downtown had a serious problem was reflected in its economy – Mayor Lund says many businesses told her that their cash registers are seeing a year-over-year decrease of 40-50%, a virtually unsustainable trend.
Now, roughly 50 days after Mayor Lund issued the executive order, the community seems to be noticing a real difference. Jenny Hagemann, Development and Communications Manager at the Downtown Bellingham Partnership (DBP), suggests that the most important step was to truly acknowledge the pain that the downtown core had been going through.
“That’s something we advocated for in the previous administration and have been hearing the need for, not just from the business community, but from folks who attend our events,” said Hagemann. “All around, it felt like step one was truly acknowledging that something needed to be done.”
Hagemann believes that the changes were made possible by a culture shift among Bellingham residents. She says Lund’s mayoral campaign, which focused heavily on downtown safety as an issue, deeply resonated with voters in last November’s election.
“The community feels ready for this right now and I don’t know that that was the case during the extent of the previous administration’s term,” Hagemann said. “I really think that the past 50 days and the improvement stems from having the boldness to acknowledge the problems in and of itself.”
Increased Police Presence
One of the main aspects of the executive order that residents who frequent downtown have likely noticed is the increased police presence. Bellingham Police Chief Rebecca Mertzig says their patrols have been largely successful, citing significant drug distribution investigations that began with an officers’ work downtown.
Mertzig even got word from one of the city’s Public Works officials that they overheard someone saying how officers were making it tougher to get their product – something Mertzig was thrilled about.
“That’s what I want to hear; that it’s hard for drug dealers to deal downtown, I love it,” said Mertzig.
Besides taking drugs off the streets, seeing the increased uniforms downtown has served as a comfort to many people in the community. Another action item on the executive order was additional community engagement activities by the police department, which can be as simple as officers checking in with businesses to see how they’re doing or talking to people on the street and asking if they need any help.
“I think when you have uniformed officers downtown and a large volume of them, it just proves the point that having an officer presence does make people feel safe and it does prevent crime and decrease victimization, and that’s what the goal is,” said Chief Mertzig.
Still, the increased downtown patrols aren’t without their costs. The police department has been struggling with staffing for a long time and spending more time downtown has forced them to balance their responses in a tougher way than before.
Mertzig says the added patrols can take officers away from other duties, specifically for less significant incidents. Calls for service are still given priority, but incidents in farther-out areas of town that don’t require an emergency response will take longer to respond to. The decisions on what to prioritize is something Mertzig leaves in the hands of her officers.
“It can be a little bit of a burden on other areas of the city for sure, but the whole point of this is that downtown is the heart of our city and it was in crisis,” Mertzig said. “We have to allocate resources to where the crisis is. So yes, it’s going to have a little bit of an impact, but we try to minimize that as much as we can and empower the people on the ground to make adjustments as necessary.”
“Cautious Optimism” Among Business Owners
In addition to the increased patrols, more frequent sanitation services seem to have made a real visual impact on the perception of downtown Bellingham. Hagemann says the DBP has heard from the downtown business community that they’ve felt supported and are seeing measurable improvements in the cleanliness of streets, sidewalks and alleyways. The cleaner streets have made for not only a more welcoming atmosphere for customers, but has cut down on the time staff have spent in cleaning their area themselves.
Cleaning the area around their shop is only one aspect of the downtown dilemma that businesses have had to take into their own hands in recent years. Mayor Lund says owners have had to pay for private security firms to make sure their shops are properly shielded from crime. But ever since the order was issued, Lund says owners have been able to modify their contracts to lean less on those private options as a result of the increased police presence downtown, translating to direct savings for the business.
Lund even cited one business owner who told her they planned to take those savings and parlay it into “innovative ways” to fill vacant retail storefronts they own downtown, which could lead to reduced rent for startup businesses.
“That kind of feedback is really encouraging to me,” said Lund. “That’s directly the kind of impact we want to have and we’re looking to build on those.”
The DBP has heard from business owners that they’ve appreciated law enforcement making their presence known and have seen the benefits. Django Bohren, one of the owners of The Comics Place on Holly Street, is among those that have noticed a significant difference.
“As soon as there was a police presence … things started changing pretty quickly,” Bohren said. “Like day-of, it felt different, and that so far has been the mood downtown. It’s been a lot mellower during the day on our block, just a lot less sketchy activity going on.”
Bellingham City Council President Dan Hammill, whose 3rd ward includes the downtown area, recently met with business owners to hear their experiences on how things have been going. The response was largely positive according to Hamill, who said owners are meeting the improvements with a “cautious optimism.”
Hagemann shares the sentiment that owners feel the city could be on the brink of genuine change in its downtown area.
“It feels like people are feeling ready to exhale from being really on edge the last couple of years.”
Measures of Success
The accounts from business owners and other stakeholders in the downtown community are overwhelmingly positive, but anecdotal evidence can only prove so much. To this end, Mayor Lund has been working to identify quantitative data as proof of change downtown.
Early statistics show that the city is responding quicker to reports of overdoses. Ever since the executive order took effect, “out of service” times for emergency response units have dropped from roughly 31 minutes per overdose call to just under 29 minutes per call (as of April 5). City officials say that translates to 4.5 hours of time on average each month that various units can be available to respond to other emergencies.
The quicker response times are mainly due to another action item in the executive order, which was to immediately establish a downtown public safety response office. Hewett says first responders already spent most of their time in the downtown area and that the office has made them more readily available to respond to the city’s central location for overdose incidents.
“That was one of the things that our team identified to us is the amount of time they spent just traveling back and forth between their offices and the downtown area, where they were spending most of their time anyway,” Hewett said. “It’s dramatically limited now that we’re home-based in that downtown core.”
While Police Chief Mertzig is grappling with balancing her department’s priorities to respond to, Hewett says the executive order has had an opposite effect on his team.
“Before, if we had an overdose, we might be pulling units from our station on Billy Frank Jr. Street or our station on Broadway. Now, they’re able to stay in their stations and be ready for the other emergencies that are going on around the city,” said Hewett. “So for us, it’s actually had the impact of providing a better level of service city-wide, not just to the downtown core.”
Another indicator that Mayor Lund identified was what she characterized as a “noticeable increase” in the number of people cited for drug-related crimes downtown. She made sure to emphasize that the jump in citations strictly addressed “impactful illegal behavior” and that the point of the executive order was not to punish people for simply existing downtown, noting no increase in citations for sitting and lying.
Lund said the city plans to create a public safety dashboard with some of these key statistics to share with the public in an effort to be transparent as progress continues.
The Downtown Bellingham Partnership has also taken on the task of using metrics to evaluate the state of the city’s downtown community. Hagemann says the Partnership is working with the Chamber of Commerce to facilitate bi-annual business well-being surveys to a cohort of downtown businesses.
She says the proposed survey would focus on how changes downtown are impacting the psyche of the business community and their customers. It would use a sliding scale to take stock of three main categories: increase or decrease in sales performance, perception of safety and optimism going forward.
The survey would give the DBP a tangible way to track the progress and effectiveness of efforts to improve downtown Bellingham from an economic lens that they could share with the city.
“We’re excited by these early days, as well as the mayor’s office’s attitude towards measuring the success often with a data-driven mindset,” Hagemann said. “We look forward to being able to see how the metrics determine future action.”
Cooperation From Within
In forming the basis of her executive order, Mayor Lund put an emphasis on coordinating the response effort between the city’s departments. The city has been meeting in what she calls a “large cross-departmental team” every other week to build a comprehensive plan that’s focused on the future of downtown Bellingham.
“It’s been really inspiring for me to watch the city team engage in this big picture thinking about what is possible and where we’re heading next,” Lund said. “We’re coming out of our departmental silos to invest and reimagine downtown.”
The team’s conversations include how to improve economic development downtown and attract businesses into its commercial core. Lund touted the recent addition of global outdoor retailer Fjallraven to a city-owned store space next to the Commercial Street Parking Garage as one such success. It was part of the city’s 2018 Downtown Bellingham Retail Strategy, developed with the DBP, to revitalize the retail industry downtown and attract more investment.
Hagemann says the DBP recently invited Chief Mertzig and Chief Hewett to talk during a meeting of downtown business owners. The two spent time answering questions and detailing the role of first responders, but more importantly, lent a face to personify the work that was being done on the streets. Hagemann sees that opportunity to offer human connection towards the downtown business community as extremely helpful.
“I think that level of access is something that we’re really grateful to see and have support from the mayor’s office to make other leaders in the community available to not just our organization, but the business community,” said Hagemann.
Chief Mertzig echoed many of the same sentiments shared by the DBP. She says police are feeling supported again, stemming from a mix of past police reform legislation that has since been loosened by the state and the department’s increased interaction with members of the downtown community. The downtown patrols have resulted in positive feedback from the public, with people going out of their way to praise specific officers for their help while on-duty. Mertzig adds that the coordinated response by different departments across the city has helped to gain that sense of empowerment.
“Everyone [is] just driving toward the same mission. You have a CEO that said ‘this is what we’re doing as a city,’ and then ok, let’s get behind it,” said Mertzig. “And then, knowing that it’s not just law enforcement; it’s the fire department, it’s public works and all the other department heads who actually have a stake in this, and we’re all rowing in the same direction.”
Moving Forward With the Real Problem at Hand
Despite taking effect less than two months ago, members of the downtown community have reported a positive change since Mayor Lund issued her executive order. Still, it’s too early to make any conclusive takeaways. Lund says the city plans to take a look at metrics at around the three-month and six-month marks of the order’s issue date to get an idea of what progress has been made.
“Really around that six-month mark I think we’ll be convening with our partners, especially at the county level, and taking a look at what has been the impacts of these actions and what changes we need to make,” said Lund. “I think we’re all approaching this with a willingness to adapt as needed and I’m excited to see where we go from here.”
And yet, all the perceived improvement hasn’t distracted from the main problem at hand: Downtown Bellingham may have the image of a cleaner environment, but the fentanyl that plagues it has not gone away. The key objective of the executive order was to address the fentanyl crisis, which has been a burden that’s too great for the city to take on itself.
Emergency department visits from opioid overdoses have remained consistent throughout the beginning of 2024 compared to the same time last year. Fire Chief Hewett estimates the city responds to about one overdose per day in the downtown area, though that number fluctuates as a byproduct of the unpredictable potency of black-market pharmaceuticals that come through in batches. Some days, it can spike up to four or five overdoses in a day downtown.
“I’ve done this for 20 years. Fentanyl is different than anything else,” said Police Chief Mertzig. “It’s hijacking the brain in a way that I haven’t seen in my career, and I think we need to figure out something else in terms of a solution.”
Hewett still says the short period of time since the executive order took effect has been helpful in identifying the critical function that having a downtown presence serves. He says the city is considering the creation of a dedicated overdose response unit.
Meanwhile, Mayor Lund took encouragement from Whatcom County’s decision to ramp up its response to the fentanyl crisis. County Executive Satpal Sidhu just signed a similar executive order with over three dozen action items to attack the epidemic. Among the key points it addresses is the need for an interdepartmental and multiagency coordination.
“The city has a limited set of tools in its toolkit to take action right now,” said Lund. “We need the county to be a partner in this, especially because the county is the seat of public health for Whatcom County. The Whatcom County Health Department is a key ally in this work.”
As for the city’s continued effort against the downtown fentanyl crisis that seems to be an uphill battle of the largest proportions, Police Chief Mertzig sees only one way to fight it.
“We’re just gonna keep our foot on the gas pedal.”