My position on the homeless situation is so incredibly clear.

Let’s break them down into three categories: 1) The unfortunate, down on their luck, 2) The drug addicts and 3) Those battling mental health issues.

All three deserve our help. They are human beings, lost souls or people who just didn’t get the breaks that we did and weren’t trained how to handle the setbacks.

With the over $1-billion being spent every year in Seattle and King County, I can’t understand how the situation is getting worse, rather than better.

Those in category one, that’s a no-brainer.  Sometimes people need help, training, guidance, support, housing, etc. I think we’re all in agreement that helping them is a good idea.

However, somewhere in our extreme thinking, free-spirited minds (or at least by the people in charge) it has been decided that leaving people alone is the right thing to do. If someone wants to be a drug addict or roam the streets mentally challenged, that’s OK. Bring ’em a sandwich and we feel so much better about ourselves. Offer them help, only to be declined–well, at least we tried.

Not the kind of world I was raised in and not what we all deserve.

Right now in Seattle, this little chunk of paradise in the northwest is experiencing a huge blight of people sticking up tents and living whereever they choose. It’s trespassing. It’s loitering. It’s all kinds of things that we have laws against, yet we don’t enforce the laws. And when you don’t enforce the laws, word gets out to those who aren’t fans of the law.

So, you may saying to yourself, “Tim, why are you launching out at the homeless situation this week?”

Because it could have cost me my life this last weekend.

In the past, I had some drug-dependent loser wheel away my $350 pressure washer off my car port at 4am on a Sunday morning. I have the grainy footage to serve as a memory.

But this past weekend, we rented a U-Haul truck from the Ballard rental facility to move my step-daughter’s things. After loading up and relocating everything, we went to a gas station to fill up the truck. As the pump chugged away, there was a strong odor of gas. I looked under the truck and everything we had been pumping had just gone all over the ground. At least three gallons’ worth of gasoline. One spark, one idiot continuing to smoke while he fueled up and we would have been toast.

What happened?  I looked under the truck. The hose to the gas tank had been disconnected from the fueling tube. Upon returning it to U-Haul, the guy explained they had been having trouble with people coming to their lot at night and siphoning out gas. Someone decided to disconnect the hose so they could get to the gas, and then just left it.  We had driven around town in the truck with the tank disconnected, another way that something could really have gone wrong.

They loosened the clamp and disconnected the hose

The location of this U-Haul store was not far from several homeless gathering spots, some living in dilapidated RV’s.  We weren’t charged for the gas missing from the tank because apparently this happened before. It’s just one of the bi-products of the Seattle world gone mad.

We dodged the bullet. This time, we were lucky.

I hope that someday, Seattle’s leadership will wake up and do something to return our area to a place you can live without fear of stepping on a needle, having your property stolen or worse. It wasn’t always this way.

I’m placing most of my hope in next year’s elections. It’s time to make a serious change.

Tim Hunter