By Erica C. Barnett
Mayor Bruce Harrell’s Human Services Department told the King County Regional Homelessness Authority that it is taking control over contracts for outreach and homelessness prevention, clawing back a total of about $11.7 million from the regional authority. HSD director Tanya Kim informed the KCRHA of the decision in a letter last week.
Programs to prevent homelessness—for example, by helping people pay their rent—will move back to the city this summer, Kim wrote. “This shift aligns with HSD’s role in leading upstream housing and community stability efforts, while RHA continues leading the emergency homelessness response system.”
Outreach programs will follow at the beginning of next year, as part of “an effort to carefully examine how outreach investments align to the evolving needs of the city and ensure effective use of City funding in meeting desired outcomes.”
According to mayoral spokesman Jamie Housen, KCRHA informed the city in April that “due to their focus on Partnership for Zero, the system re-bid, outreach coordination for the state’s Right-of-Way Safety Initiative, and implementation of their Five Year Plan, they did not have capacity to fulfill the outreach, coordination, and referral roles” the city council outlined in a budget amendment in 2023.
Last week, deputy mayor Tiffany Washington, who oversees homelessness, touted the UCT’s transition to a “neighborhood team”-based model last year, with discrete groups of city workers doing outreach, trash removal, parking enforcement, and encampment removals in five different geographic areas. During that briefing, Washington presented a slide that showed outreach as a joint responsibility of the city and KCRHA.
Alison Eisinger, director of the Seattle/King County Coalition on Homelessness, said the Harrell Administration’s “unilateral decision” to take over two areas of the homelessness response system “fractures our homeless service system deeply and ill serves people who are homeless.” Separating outreach from the rest of the system is “not effective,” Eisinger continued, and “undermines the necessary regionalism Mayor Harrell and other Seattle officials say they are committed to.
“It’s not legitimate for Seattle to insist it can pick and choose which system functions it wishes to politicize and control and withdraw millions from the regional entity it helped to create, and then cry about other jurisdictions needing to do their part, any more than it’s legitimate for Des Moines, Federal Way, Kenmore, and Burien to block and delay housing and shelter and then claim they support regionalism.”
Harrell has expressed increasingly open skepticism about the KCRHA and its ability to forge a “regional approach to homelessness,” given the fact that many cities in King County have not “bought in” by helping to pay for agency operations and are actually passing laws to prevent housing and shelter in their cities.
A spokesperson for the KCRHA said the agency has “been made aware of the upcoming changes to the City’s funding of KCRHA. We’re working to understand likely impacts on our provider community, unhoused neighbors, and how we address the homelessness crisis in King County.”
The KCRHA oversees two broad categories of outreach—geographically based outreach, in which outreach workers focus on a specific area, and population-based outreach, which focuses on different population groups (such as veterans or families with children) throughout the region. The KCRHA’s privately funded in-house outreach and case management program, Partnership for Zero, shut down last year.
REACH, a longtime outreach provider that has moved toward a geographic model in collaboration with the Unified Care Team, will see $2.4 million in contracts move back to the city. REACH director Chloe Gale told PubliCola, “We’ve spent the last year designing the model,” Gale said, and “I think this is the year that we’re really going to see if we can we produce some better results to move people inside and also maximize resources when there are not places for people to go inside.”
Housen said that by bringing outreach back to HSD, the city will be able to identify “the most appropriate and efficient ways to meet neighborhood outreach needs across the city, in conjunction with the budget exercises currently underway to optimize funding and ensure effective services.”
The city shut down HSD’s Homelessness Strategy and Investments division, which Deputy Mayor Washington previously headed, as part of the protracted transfer of all homelessness contracts to KCRHA in 2021. From the beginning, the city resisted giving up control of outreach contracts—arguing that city’s own outreach staffers, now part of the UCT, needed direct access to outreach workers with groups like the Chief Seattle Club and REACH. Washington was the deputy mayor overseeing homelessness for Jenny Durkan while that debate was going on.
According to Housen, “HSD will be assessing whether current staff can effectively administer outreach contracts and determine if additional supports are needed.”
PubliCola first reported the decision, and posted Kim’s letter, on X earlier this afternoon.
KCHRA is on life support. I applaud the Mayor and the County Executive’s shared vision of a regional approach. It was a good idea in 2019 when the Interlocal Agreement created the KCHRA, and it is a good idea today. I won’t relitigate the many missteps by KCHRA here, but the vacuum left by its failure proves the very need for its existence.
I have written several times about the need for KCHRA to be a technical, training, and policy resource to an existing field of independent private providers. The providers need an accessible agency to be a place where they can get good information and guidance…not chaos.
The county already has a model for this role, the Regional Support Network (RSN). The RSN is a county agency that oversees and provides, support, training, collaboration, coordination with all the community mental health agencies in the county. They are not a direct service provider.
The county has the in house knowledge and infrastructure to fulfill this desperately need role. They have contract managers & payment specialists, HR staff and policies. They have expertise working with federal grants, Title XIX, and maximizing federal funding.
I like this mayor. He got to close and fire useless staff at the now defunct HSD’s Homelessness Strategy and Investments division by transferring funding to KCRHA. KCRHA management has proved they cannot effectively target houselessness outreach and enforcement inside Seattle city limits. Mayor Bruce gets to implement his own ground up strategy; five separate teams. Five managers that can provide feedback to mayor Bruce on what’s working and what’s not.
Seattle, the city which thinks shelter beds solve homelessness and where we have a craptacular transit system where we fight over (the lack of) bus service. I guess that’s what we get for not having a state or city income tax.
The City is clueless about how to genuine, meaningful and effective outreach. My guess is that they’ll use the extra money to more aggressively pursue it’s cruel and ,soon to be proven, illegal “sweep with impunity” strategy.
This is a move in the right direction. KCHRA came into the weekly outreach provider calls wet behind the ears and never got their act together. There was a year of nonchalant silence and lack of initiative. HSD had long-term staff who had a functioning process that was ripped from them by KCHRA.
It may have functioned well by its own terms of reference, but the number of homeless people in King County boomed during that process’s time, which can only be considered failure. I was one of those homeless people, and I never experienced what I’d consider “outreach”: I was offered pastries a few times, but never shelter, let alone housing.
I heard this was coming and more on the way!