We’ve already explored our skepticism of Andrea Suarez’s claims that she has saved the city over $10 million, and we now have cause to be equally as skeptical about the other metrics We Heart Seattle frequently references.
The Receipts
Some interesting records came into our possession that we will unravel over the course of the next several weeks, and we’ll kick it off with a cross-departmental communication between city of Seattle employees that warrants questioning what else Andrea Suarez has lied to us about.
They mostly collected the trash from the encampment trash program (Purple Bag program) that was piled up for collection. This isn’t the first time We Heart Seattle has shown up and collected the purple bags and piled trash and then taken the credit.
City of Seattle
The city of Seattle collected over 40,000 pounds of trash from the Dexter-Mercer encampment alone, beginning in December 2020 through the end of last year, and We Heart Seattle fraudulently claimed credit for several thousand additional pounds collected under the purple bag program.
We Heart Seattle
Andrea Suarez currently claims her org has cleared over 450k pounds of trash from city parks, and helped 86 people into housing. We’re certain that these metrics are about as true as We Heart Seattle having saved the government over $10 million dollars (laughable)
What are they really?
What would these figures be if We Heart Seattle had not taken credit for work they didn’t do? How many other similar instances of this are there? We have no way of knowing for certain, but prior experience indicates that the margin of falsified data is likely to be significant.