Bellingham City Council - Public Health, Safety, Justice, and Equity Committee

**Deputy Administrator Forrest Longman, on program goals:** "The intent of this alley closure ordinance is to provide the framework for an experimental, targeted, and temporary measure to disrupt the pattern of drug activity that's made some of these alleyways harmful for everyone, including the people that spend time there." **Forrest Longman, on enforcement approach:** "This is not an intent to criminalize this explicitly. We're hopeful that this would result in 0 citations." **Mayor, on downtown vision:** "That commitment to that neighborhood being everyone's neighborhood, we know the data is very clear in the heat map, the costs for the solid waste removal in that section of alley. That is not a space that's accessible for all right now." **Mayor, on enforcement focus:** "And our focus when we talk about enforcement, it's enforcement on predatory drug dealing. I want to be clear, this is not about people that are navigating the challenges of substance use disorder." **Deputy Ch

**Meeting ID:** MEETING-2026-03-23 # Temporary Alley Closures: A Tool to Disrupt Downtown Drug Activity ## Meeting Overview The Bellingham City Council's Public Health, Safety, Justice, and Equity Committee convened on March 23, 2026, to consider a controversial new ordinance that would grant the city authority to temporarily close downtown alleys to combat entrenched criminal activity. Committee Chair Daniel Hammill was joined by councilmembers Holly Huffman and Edwin "Skip" Williams for what proved to be a measured but decisive discussion about using physical barriers as a tool to disrupt drug dealing that has plagued specific downtown alleys for years. The single agenda item — an ordinance regarding temporary alley closures for public health and safety — represented a significant shift in the city's approach to addressing the intersection of public safety, business concerns, and social services in downtown Bellingham. What emerged was a picture of alleys so compromised by criminal activity that the city was willing to try physical closure as an "experimental" measure, while acknowledging the uncertain outcomes and potential unintended consequences. ## The Case for Temporary Alley Closures Deputy Administrator Forrest Longman opened the presentation by framing the ordinance as "an experimental, targeted, and temporary measure to disrupt the pattern of drug activity that's made some of these alleyways harmful for everyone, including the people that spend time there." This wasn't, he emphasized, intended to be punitive toward people using the spaces, but rather "to remove conditions that allow the dangerous behaviors to take hold and persist." The data Longman presented painted a stark picture of the problem's scope. In 2025, a three-block section of downtown alleys recorded 108 incidents of violence, 342 drug-related calls, and 89 overdoses. The financial burden was equally striking: Public Works spent $234,000 cleaning downtown through the solid waste division, with 80% of that amount — roughly $185,000 — spent cleaning just two sections of alleyway. "Year to date for those sections, the city spent over $40,000," Longman noted. The heat map data from bike patrol calls showed concentrated activity in specific alleys, particularly those between Railroad and Cornwall and between Holly and Magnolia. These weren't random incidents scattered across downtown, but concentrated problems in predictable locations. As Deputy Chief Jay Hart explained, "I've been here for 26 years, and in those 26 years, there are alleys downtown that I've have seen high rates of crime continuously. And no matter what we've done to try to stop that from happening, it just continues." The ordinance would allow alley closures at the request of the chief of police to the public works director. Crucially, it would maintain access for businesses, property owners, vendors, utilities, sanitation workers, and emergency personnel. The plan involved gating and signing the closed areas, ideally leaving gates unlocked so authorized users could still enter without dealing with locks. ## The Human Cost Behind the Data While much of the presentation focused on statistics and procedural details, the human impact emerged through testimony from city officials and committee members. Mayor [name not clear from transcript] emphasized the effect on employees who must navigate these spaces daily: "we know we've heard from employees that are in recovery themselves. There's employees that have had their own traumas in their life, high ACE scores, and it's a very challenging place for them to navigate as they go about trying to do their roles, just trying to be a good employee or a good small local business owner." Councilmember Huffman, drawing on 25 years of downtown experience, described conversations with business employees: "I have talked to over the last couple of years, actually I've talked to quite a few employees that work in the businesses along that alley and I've heard some pretty horrific stories. Weapons, aggressive behavior, biohazards, really nothing that people who are working in a food and beverage or downtown retail stores should be encountering." Longman added another dimension to the urgency: "We're hearing that we may be reaching a tipping point with some of the business owners along these corridors, where it's so dangerous and feels so unsustainable to them that they may be considering closing their businesses." The impact extended beyond businesses to service providers. When Huffman asked about communication with SSC (presumably the sanitation service company), Longman explained their concerns: "SSC is, there someone in the dumpster when they're trying to empty it out, worried someone's going to dart out and they're going to run somebody over. And so from what we've heard from them has been very positive feedback." ## Addressing the Concerns and Uncertainties Committee members pressed on the potential for unintended consequences, particularly the possibility that closing alleys would simply shift problems to other locations. Councilmember Anderson asked directly about plans "to just not move this to another section that other businesses will then have the same outcome." Longman was refreshingly candid about the uncertainty: "So we don't know what's going to happen and we're very open about that. We've talked to some service providers, we've talked to our bike patrol, There's a lot of different opinions about what might happen." The city's response would be regular monitoring: "that's one of those reasons that we're going to keep meeting really regularly to keep an eye on what those unintended consequences are." The comparison to Seattle's experience provided limited guidance. While Longman noted they'd observed alleys being closed and reopened with apparent success in disrupting activity, he acknowledged "we've had a little trouble getting a hold of anybody down there on the issue." More importantly, he noted that "Seattle's much bigger. So when they disrupt an area, you know, there's a lot of options, more options than downtown Bellingham for people to go, right?" Council President Stone pushed on whether other options had been explored before reaching this point, asking about "what other options have been right explored that got us to this point, because it, I mean, we're talking about disrupting really the criminal activity that's taking place. You would hope that, right, law enforcement has tools that, yeah, that they're utilizing to do that work." ## The Enforcement Reality Deputy Chief Hart provided context for the limitations of traditional law enforcement approaches: "We try to be visible and present in those areas. And our bike patrol and our officers that work downtown do a very good job of preventing crime and stopping crime from happening when they're there. The problem is that we can't be there all the time." Hart described the current situation as "probably the worst that I've seen. It's always been active, but it's not good right now. So we just drove through this morning, in fact, and evidence of drug use and trash, and it's not good." The ordinance would make unauthorized entry into closed alleys a misdemeanor, but city officials emphasized this wasn't intended as a criminalization strategy. Longman explained: "This is not an intent to criminalize this explicitly. We're hopeful that this would result in 0 citations. Once the gates are closed, you know, if Seattle has done something similar and when we've traveled and seen in those alleyways, there's just no one in there because people understand when there's gates and fences that those areas are closed." ## Broader Context of Services and Support Committee Chair Hammill brought important context about existing services in the area. He noted that Unity Care's mobile methadone and suboxone treatment unit serves "20 people that actively use that for methadone and suboxone treatment, and they have a higher census of 40 clients that periodically will access those services there." Unity Care's main campus is "about a block and a half from the end of the alley," with another facility on Division Street serving roughly double that clientele. Hammill described observing "a sort of a mixed reception" when walking with outreach workers, with "Some people would take the outreach cards and want to learn more about the services that Dequal each provides." This highlighted the complexity of the population using the alleys — not all were unresponsive to services, but the location itself had become problematic. The mayor clarified the enforcement focus: "And our focus when we talk about enforcement, it's enforcement on predatory drug dealing. I want to be clear, this is not about people that are navigating the challenges of substance use disorder. This is not about people who are unhoused, and I don't want to conflate. This is really the epicenter of a legal and illicit criminal drug dealing in our community." The mayor's concern extended to the visibility of the drug market: "because it's been there so long in such a public, invisible way, it's also where we know that people are accessing these illegal, very harmful substances for the first time. It's clear where you would go if you wanted to be a customer for the first time in our community." ## The Broader Policy Framework Councilmember Huffman used her remarks to contextualize the alley closures within a much broader array of city investments and initiatives. She detailed a comprehensive approach that included two Portland Loos (public restrooms), the Way Station with hygiene facilities, partnerships with the Dijwalik Wellness Center for mobile medical units, creation of a community court as a therapeutic alternative, support for the All Hands Walk Opioid Summit, an upcoming $1 million state-funded day shelter, and $15 million in housing services funding. "This is one part of that bigger picture," Huffman emphasized. "We can do short term, we can do long term at the same time." She acknowledged that while the alley closure was "a very short-term band-aid solution" that was "temporary" and "experimental," it could provide meaningful relief for business employees who were bearing "more than their fair share of the challenging situations in our downtown right now." Councilmember Williams connected the approach to earlier city actions, noting similarities to the fentanyl ordinance passed several years earlier: "The purpose of that was more to disrupt the behavior, not to put people in jail per se, not to take away anything other than we're going to disrupt the behavior and maybe it will lead to some resolution to some of this." Williams, speaking from personal experience with family addiction issues, emphasized the importance of "disrupting the behavior and being consistent so that the person that is abusing drugs or using drugs can go to somewhere to get the help they need is very, very important." ## Long-term Vision and Environmental Design The ordinance represented just the first phase of a longer-term strategy. Longman explained that while alleys were closed, the city planned "to do get them back to a ground zero, a nice safe environment, and then undertake an assessment to do CPTED improvements." CPTED — crime prevention through environmental design — could include "increased lighting, it could be video cameras, it could be a number of things that we have not yet determined, but we want to get them clear and safe so we can do that assessment without a bunch of disruption around that." The city already had success with this approach elsewhere. Longman pointed to "all the great work that's gone into the Sunset Alley and those murals and the lighting associated with that and the activation. And we'd love to see something like this in our alleys that aren't activated, something like that. But the current conditions just don't allow for that." Council President Stone questioned whether alley closure was necessary for implementing CPTED improvements, asking about "other right incremental steps that can be taken in the interim or if the alley closure is necessary to actually decide what those next steps are." The mayor responded that closure was indeed necessary, based on feedback from businesses and employees who needed the disruption of "entrenched behavior" to allow improvement work to proceed safely. ## The Vote and Moving Forward The discussion concluded with Councilmember Williams making a motion to recommend the ordinance, which passed 3-0 with support from all committee members. The decision reflected a pragmatic acceptance that traditional approaches hadn't solved the entrenched problems in specific alleys, combined with recognition that this was one tool among many in addressing complex social challenges. The committee's support came with clear acknowledgment of uncertainties. As Longman had emphasized throughout the presentation, this was explicitly experimental: "we don't even know exactly what is going to be the outcome of this. is why we've sort of framing this as an experimental undertaking, this program. But we want to try something new and this gives us a tool to do so." The ordinance would move to the full council for consideration that evening, carrying with it both the hope for relief among downtown businesses and employees, and the uncertainty about whether physical barriers could meaningfully address the underlying social and economic forces driving the drug market. What seemed clear was that the status quo had become unsustainable for the businesses and workers who shared space with an entrenched illegal market, creating pressure for the city to try something different, even if the outcomes remained unpredictable. The committee's willingness to approve the measure reflected a balance between acknowledging the limitations of enforcement-only approaches while recognizing the immediate need to provide relief for those most directly impacted by the current conditions. Whether that balance would prove effective would depend on careful monitoring and willingness to adjust course based on what actually happened once the gates went up.