homelessness

Forensic Audit Finds KCRHA “Unable to Account for $13 Million” In Public Funds
KCRHA director Kelly Kinnison

By Erica C. Barnett

A forensic audit into the King County Regional Homelessness Authority’s finances found that the agency could not account for $13 million in public funding, according to a statement from Mayor Katie Wilson that also said “all options are on the table” when it comes to the embattled agency’s future. The city “will be pursuing immediate corrective action,” Wilson said.

PubliCola reported on the audit, by the accounting firm Clark Nuber, last week. The investigation, for which Seattle spent more than $600,000, started last August and was extended at the end of the year for additional work. One issue the audit looked into was KCRHA’s routine negative budget balance, which requires the agency to borrow money, at interest, to pay its contractors every year.

King County Executive Girmay Zahilay and Wilson sent a joint letter to Kinnison spelling out steps to establish “clear fiscal controls and accountability for taxpayer funds,” with a deadline of May 23. Zahilay’s office also provided a copy of the audit.

A spokesperson for KCRHA said the agency itself did not have a copy when we contacted them for a statement on Wednesday. They provided a letter KCRHA CEO Kelly Kinnison to the agency’s governing board late this afternoon, which said that Kinnison had requested the audit “to ensure transparency and establish a clear, independent understanding” of what she called “concerns related to our financial systems and reporting during the agency’s early formation.”

The audit covers the period through July 2025.

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In her letter, Kinnison said the audit’s negative findings “are concentrated in KCRHA’s early formation period and reflect structural challenges associated with startup conditions, the pandemic response, an initially fragmented governance framework, and a highly complex funding model. Since that time, we have made meaningful progress. Governance has been restructured, and core operations — including contracts, data systems, and provider coordination — are functioning more effectively. Our financial systems have also improved, though additional strengthening is still needed.”

Two Seattle City Councilmembers, Maritza Rivera and Bob Kettle, condemned the agency’s financial, and Rivera called for the KCRHA’s immediate dissolution.

“The results of the recent King County Regional Homelessness Authority audit are damning,” Kettle said in a statement. “It shows an epic, and consistent, failure of leadership at the top of the agency —especially at its start. It also reveals the failure of leadership of the county and city. The audit reveals troubling systemic issues that can no longer be ignored if we are to address the homelessness and public safety crisis in Seattle effectively.”

Rivera went further. “I am shocked and outraged after seeing the results of the forensic evaluation of the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, which I just received today,” she said in a statement. “It shows an egregious mismanagement of funds and an unacceptable lack of financial accountability.

“KCRHA has a history of dysfunction and inefficiency, and it is time to acknowledge that it has failed in its mission. I am calling for Mayor Wilson to provide a plan for the dismantling of KCRHA as soon as possible, and a commitment to work with City Council to determine how Seattle will move forward in meeting its shelter and housing needs.”

Kinnison’s letter to the board says most of the money that is unaccounted for is made up of “unreconciled receivables”—services that were delivered but “require further reconciliation within the accounting system.” Kinnison also referred to another $6.4 million in “overspend”—money the agency spent, but did not have—saying that this number “reflects budget reclassification and alignment across project program types rather than unapproved or inappropriate spending.” In general, Kinnison told the board, the agency did not lose or misuse funds.

The KCRHA’s governing board will take up the audit findings at its meeting on Friday. This is a developing story and will be updated.

Media

Seattle Times Fails to Credit PubliCola for Reporting on County Assessor’s Social Media Posts
Yeah, we’re showing ’em again

By Erica C. Barnett

The Seattle Times failed to credit PubliCola’s original reporting on King County Assessor John Arthur Wilson yesterday in a story titled “King County Assessor In Hot Water After Social Media Post.”

The King County Council discussed our reporting yesterday before voting to send a letter to Wilson demanding his resignation in light of new charges against him for allegedly stalking his ex-fiancée, Lee Keller, and violating a restraining order.

On Monday, April 20, PubliCola broke a story about two Instagram and Facebook posts in which Wilson appeared to flippantly celebrate a judge’s decision that he would not have to wear an ankle monitor, overturning an earlier order after Wilson claimed he had to to fully submerge both his legs every day due to a medical condition called lymphedema. The monitor was supposed to ensure Keller knew right away if Wilson came within 1,000 feet of her.

As we reported, both posts showed Wilson, shirtless and smiling at the camera, in a hot tub. The first, posted on Wednesday, April 15—the day the judge lifted the ankle monitor requirement— read, “What a great night to just soak in the tub and let your cares float away.” The second, posted two days later, said, “Great to soak my legs after a productive and successful week.”

Our story circulated widely on social media and was one among the reasons county council members said it was time for Wilson to step down. Prior to voting on the letter Tuesday afternoon, County Councilmembers Sarah Perry and  Teresa Mosqueda both cited PubliCola’s coverage directly. “I want to appreciate the reporting from Erica C. Barnett,” Mosqueda said, “in terms of the journalism that was done after that court hearing.”

The Seattle Times reported on that meeting and the social media posts, presenting the news as their own original coverage, last night, and included a screen shot identical to one of the two PubliCola posted on Monday. They did not link PubliCola’s coverage or credit our work, despite the fact that it had been widely circulated and even cited directly in the meeting the Times was covering.

This was not the first, or even the twentieth, time the Seattle Times has failed to credit PubliCola’s original reporting when writing their own followups on stories we broke.

Editorially, the Seattle Times often complains about the demise of local news reporting in areas outside Seattle, focusing exclusively on the closure of small print newspapers. In their own city, however, they seem more than happy to lift smaller outlets’ work—not just from PubliCola but the Urbanist, Capitol Hill Seattle, and many smaller outlets. Editors at the Times, who are ultimately responsible for deciding whether to credit outlets where stories originated, have ignored every request for a link and credit that I’ve ever sent them, demonstrating that they think it’s fine to run roughshod over local reporters in their own backyard.

While it might sound like a small thing—a series of rude social media posts by a local politician is hardly Watergate—the cumulative impact of the Times’ routine failure to credit small outlets like ours is significant. Compared to PubliCola, the Seattle Times is a behemoth, with revenue from ads, sponsorships, foundation grants, and paid subscriptions to both their print paper and their paywalled online content. When the local paper uses PubliCola’s work without credit, our original reporting becomes invisible—Google results promote the bigger outlet, other outlets link to the Times, and before you know it, it’s their story, even when it was our reporting.

This, of course, is the part where I encourage you to support PubliCola, and also all the other scrappy local outlets that are out here busting our asses to report news the big daily paper is more than happy to ignore—or scoop up a day after we publish and present as their own. With rare exceptions, we all see each other as part of an ecosystem, covering stories and neighborhoods that the big daily paper and TV stations ignore. The Seattle Times’ management has shown over and over again that they don’t see itself as part of this same ecosystem, which is a shame. If they’re the only one left standing, think of all the stories that won’t get covered.

King County, labor

Union Members, King County Employees Protest Three-Day Office Mandate

By Erica C. Barnett

Members of the PROTEC17 union, including King County employees, held a demonstration in the lobby of King County’s Chinook building on Tuesday to protest King County Executive Girmay Zahilay’s three-day-a-week return to office (RTO) mandate, which county employees have called punitive, expensive, and counterproductive.

Carrying signs with slogans such as “Communities not cubicles,” “King County is Bigger than Seattle,” and—memorably—”I don’t have a desk,” the staffers showed up with a giant “blank check representing the expense King County will incur to rent private office space so that employees, including many who were hired as fully remote workers, will have a place to sit downtown.

A staffer for Zahilay showed up in the lobby to accept the check and said she would make sure he gets it.

The county gave up much of its office space during the pandemic and agreed to allow many employees to work from home indefinitely under an agreement called “Green Where You Work.” Now, many county employees don’t have desks to “return” to as part of the “return to office” plan—a misnomer for county employees who were hired over the past six years and have never had a physical office downtown.

David Dahl, a capital projects manager for the Department of Natural Resources and Parks, was hired as a remote worker for a job that takes him to sites across King County. Living in Seattle, he said, might make it relatively easy for him to come downtown to meet the three-day mandate, but for many of his coworkers, the extra trip would add hours of unnecessary commute time to jobs they could previously do from the part of the county where they lived.

“We have a lot of people who have projects in the south end and live in Auburn or Kent or Tacoma, and they can easily get to those projects in a very short amount of time,” Dahl said, “whereas if they have to come into an office and then go back to a park site, that’s a ton of driving to do something that should be pretty simple.”

King County is much larger than the city of Seattle, where many workers also chafed at return-to-office mandates. The county covers more than 2,100 square miles, and many staffers live far away from Seattle, in areas where housing is more affordable.

Moving more than 1,000 employees into “a space with maybe 80 desks” would be impossible, Dahl said, and the new spaces the county has come up with at the King Street Center aren’t up to ergonomic standards. “It frankly should be the bare minimum that if you’re asking someone to work in an office, you should provide them an ergonomic place to sit and to do their work,” Dahl said.

Another DNRP employee, Brad Moore, said requiring county employees to travel to downtown Seattle for work would lead an “extremely high and unknown cost” for office space “that we feel could go towards much better things—for example, the public service that we’re all supposed to be providing.”

Moore, who lives in Shoreline with his extended family and was hired as a fully remote staffer, said the mandate will add a one-way transit commute of between 45 minutes and an hour to every work day. That will make it harder for Moore to help take care of kids in the family and help his wife, who has mobility issues, get to work.

But Moore added that the situation is much worse for some of his coworkers, who live in places like Everett and “are being told that they have to come into the office two or three days a week. I mean, in the morning, it could take two hours,” Moore said.

Affordability, Density, podcasts

Will Dialing Back Fees on Housing Fix Seattle’s Construction Crash?

 

Photo by Joshua T. Garcia, via Wikimedia Commons. Creative Commons CC0 1.0 license.

By Erica C. Barnett

On Seattle Nice this week, Sandeep and I brought on two special guests to explain why developers want a holiyday from Mandatory Housing Affordability fees, which are added on to of the cost of every new multifamily residential building in Seattle. The fees pay for affordable housing (or a developer can skip them by building affordable units on sight), but they’re bringing in less money than ever as housing development slows.

Since MHA passed, in 2019, Seattle has undergone a political evolution on housing. Density, which neighborhood activists and most political leaders once saw as having an entirely negative impact on neighborhoods, is increasingly seen as a necessity as Seattle’s renter majority grows. Many people no longer agree that the city should segregate renters from property owners by restricting them to dirty, polluted arterials far from parks, libraries, and tree-lined streets. There’s a growing consensus that to reduce the cost of housing, you have to build more of it.

Our guests this week, land use and housing consultant Natalie Quick and former Seattle Chief Operating Officer Marco Lowe, don’t go so far as to call for a total repeal of MHA, but they do make a strong case for its eventual replacement with an incentive-based approach called funded inclusionary zoning. FIZ, which we’ve covered at PubliCola before provides tax breaks, similar to Seattle’s existing Multifamily Tax Exemption program, in exchange for a requirement that developers build affordable units on site. Instead of charging a fee for housing, which drives up rents, FIZ makes it possible for affordable and market-rate housing to coexist.

As Marco points out, housing slowdowns don’t just lead to a shortage of housing, driving up rents. They also deplete city resources, because when developers decide it’s too expensive to build, the city loses out on all other kinds of non-MHA revenues, from sales taxes on materials to taxes on real estate transactions to property taxes on the housing itself.

This one’s a wonky episode, but one well worth listening to if you want to understand why so little new housing—particularly larger units—is getting built right in Seattle right now and what the city could do to reverse the trend.

Editor’s note: This story originally identified Marco Lowe as the former Office of Economic Development director. This error has been corrected.

King County

County Assessor, Charged With Stalking, Posts Taunting Pics as Council Again Demands His Resignation

By Erica C. Barnett

On Tuesday, the King County Council will take up a motion to send a letter to King County Assessor John Arthur Wilson demanding his immediate resignation. Wilson was charged late last month with stalking his ex-fiencée, Lee Keller. This will be the second such action by the council, which unanimously passed a resolution calling for Wilson’s resignation last year after Keller provided new evidence of Wilson’s harassment in a petition for a protection order and dissolution of their domestic partnership.

Wilson, who refused to step down, was arrested less than a month after that vote for showing up at Keller’s house in violation of the protection order. He’s now facing charges of stalking, a gross misdemeanor, and under a five-year no-contact order.

Last week, a judge reversed an order that would have required Wilson to wear an ankle monitor to ensure that he stays at least 1,000 feet away from Keller. The decision came after Wilson argued that he has a medical condition that requires him to soak both his legs every day, which would damage the ankle monitor.

Just hours after his hearing, Wilson appeared to brag about the ruling by posting a photo of himself, shirtless and in a tub, on Instagram and Facebook. The caption read: “What a great night to soak in the tub and let your cares float away”—an obvious reference to his victory in court hours earlier.

Three days later, Wilson did it again, posting another semi-nude photo of himself in the hot tub under the taunting caption, “Great to soak my legs after after (sic) a very productive and successful week.”

Wilson has claimed that a medical condition called lymphodema requires him to completely submerge both legs in water every day. In court, Keller said that for the four years they were together, he never had the condition in both legs. After deciding Wilson could go without the ankle monitor, Seattle Municipal Court Judge Andrew Simon advised Keller to figure out how record any calls from Wilson and to take screen shots if he contacts her by text or email.

The county council’s letter demanding Wilson’s resignation reads, in part,

You have been embroiled in a domestic violence dispute for over two years, accused of stalking and harassing a King County resident. The King County Superior Court found enough evidence to issue a temporary protection order as well as a restraining order to prevent you from contacting that same King County resident due to your repeated stalking and harassment. The petition for the restraining order also alleged that you improperly used county resources to engage in the stalking, which would be a violation of the public trust and unacceptable.

These allegations and court orders have caused irrevocable harm to the public’s trust and faith in you as a public servant and elected official. You have fully lost our confidence in your judgement and ability to perform the duties of your role. It is for this reason that the King County Council unanimously passed a motion calling for your resignation on June 10th, 2025.

When an elected official breaks the public trust like this, it’s not possible to effectively serve the public and execute the duties of their office free from distraction. Our residents rely on the Office of the Assessor to provide critical County functions and, at this point, they would be best served by your resignation.

The county council has no power to remove Wilson, an independently elected official; only the voters can do so, by holding a recall election.

Police

SPD Gives Medal to Officer Who Chased Man Into Traffic, Leaving Carful of Kids Behind

 

Body camera footage from the chase.

The department used 911 audio of a panicked domestic violence victim, without obtaining her consent, in its video promoting the officer’s courage for apprehending her abuser.

By Erica C. Barnett

The Seattle Police Department put out a video last week congratulating police officer Albert Khandzhayan, who received the department’s Medal of Courage for apprehending a man who had kidnapped his wife’s three children by breaking the window of her car, dragging her out, and driving off with the kids inside.

The video begins with 911 audio of the woman crying and screaming unintelligibly as cinematic music swells. “It started with confusion. A woman screaming,” a narrator intones. “A dispatcher trying to make contact. Chaos pouring through the line. And then. Sudden silence.” The screen goes black. Then the audio picks up again with the woman, still crying, explaining that her husband took her children. (SPD’s blog post identifies the man as her “ex-boyfriend.”)

The 911 audio is quite upsetting, and I was surprised that SPD put it out at all, given the likelihood that publicizing it would retraumatize the victim and potentially other domestic violence victims who came across it. If they did debate whether to use the audio, I wanted to know how they they decided that using it to illustrate Khandzhayan’s achievement outweighed the potential for harm.

SPD didn’t answer those questions, but they did acknowledge that they never reached out to the woman to ask if it was okay to use the audio. “This was an oversight and is highly regrettable. It is never our intention to cause trauma to anyone, and it is our goal to always be helping those in need. We will do better in the future, and we appreciate you highlighting this,” a spokesperson said.

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After the 911 audio concludes, the video’s narration shifts to Khandzhayan. “[He] heard the call. He thought about the roads. The on-ramps. The choices someone might when fear takes over,” the narrator says. As swelling orchestral music plays, the video shows Khandzhayan pulling into a gas station, walking up to a car, then chasing a man out of the station and across a crowded highway. Through a series of rapid cuts, the video shows Khandzhayan eventually catching up with the man and tasing him to the ground.

The video then cuts to a scene back at the gas station, where a different officer opens the car door and a child can be heard crying, “Mommy! Mommy!” “Reuinted with their mother,” the narrator says. On the video, an infant in a baby carrier is visible in the back seat.

“This is courage under pressure, bravery anchored in discipline, a superior performace of duty in service of three children and their safety,” the narrator concludes.

But is it? I asked SPD whether officers are supposed to chase people on foot out into traffic, a situation that could result in crashes and injuries not just to an officer or suspect, but anyone who slams on the brakes or swerves to avoid them. I also asked if they could point me to any training or official protocol about chasing suspects onto roadways. “Foot pursuits are inherently dangerous, and the domestic violence kidnapping suspect crossing the active highway demonstrates this,” the spokesperson responded.

Finally, I asked whether SPD encourages officers to leave young children and infants alone, as Khandzhayan appeared to do in the video, to pursue a suspect. The spokesperson responded that “in the case of runaway children and children in dangerous circumstances, a sworn employee is immune from liability if, acting in good faith, they fail to take a child into custody.”

As of publication, the video remains available on SPD’s Blotter blog and on the department’s Youtube page.