By Erica C. Barnett

The King County Regional Homelessness Authority has decided to continue its search for a new CEO, PubliCola has confirmed, after two high-level meetings in the past week at which agency officials and search committee members discussed whether to continue the hiring process or begin “winding down” the agency.

Last week, as PubliCola exclusively reported, former governor Christine Gregoire and Seattle Metropolitan Chamber director Rachel Smith wrote a letter to other members of the CEO search committee urging the committee to pause the hiring process until the agency’s future is clear; in their letter, Smith and Gregoire cited “challenges the agency has faced and/or been unable to respond to” along with ongoing questions about the agency’s governing structure. The KCRHA is headed up by an implementation board of subject-matter experts who make policy and budget decisions, and a governing committee made up mostly of elected officials board that is supposed to approve the implementation board’s decision.

The CEO search committee met on Friday. The original plan for that meeting was to whittle down a list of a dozen candidates for the permanent CEO position, currently filled by interim CEO Darrell Powell, who has reportedly applied for the permanent job. The agency has been without a permanent leader since its first CEO, Marc Dones, resigned last May.

Instead of talking about the candidates, the search committee discussed the broader future of the agency. Some committee members, reportedly including Seattle City Councilmember Cathy Moore, argued that the KCRHA needs to come up with a new governance structure before appointing a CEO in order to create a sense of stability at the agency. This, the theory goes, could lead to a deeper pool of more qualified applicants.

Moore declined to comment for this story, citing an NDA, and others involved in the internal conversations about KCRHA’s future did not respond to questions or declined to speak on the record. (The NDA, as described to PubliCola, pertains to the appointment itself, including the list of applicants. It does not restrict people from talking about the process in general or about other questions we had for Moore, such as how she would like to see the KCRHA’s governance change.)

The second meeting, held earlier this week, was called to discuss those governance concerns. It’s unclear whether the group reached any consensus about how the agency will be governed in the future. However, sources familiar with the discussions say representatives for Mayor Bruce Harrell and King County Executive Dow Constantine expressed their strong support for the KCRHA and its “regional approach” to homelessness. Last month, Harrell’s office announced the city was stripping KCRHA of its authority over encampment outreach and homelessness prevention, but Harrell’s office suggested it it might consider handing these responsibilities back to the authority at some point in the future.

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Many Seattle officials have argued that the KCRHA’s two-board structure (three if you count the federally mandated Continuum of Care board) is confusing and grants too much power to unelected experts who aren’t directly accountable to voters. Those with long memories will recall that this was also a heated debate back in 2019, when the KCRHA was created; at that time, the non-elected implementation board was seen as a bulwark against political influence.

One possibility, according to sources close to the discussions, is that the KCRHA will eliminate the implementation board and incorporate a handful of homelessness experts into the governing board, which would become the agency’s main decision-making body. There’s an existential issue at play here: Can the KCRHA can be successful if it’s directly controlled by political actors at King County and the city of Seattle, which together provide most of the authority’s funding?

Last year, the KCRHA was supposed to re-bid the entire homelessness system—a huge undertaking that could mean ending longstanding contracts and opening new ones with first-time providers—but that was put on hold to give the agency time to address immediate problems, including late payments to service providers.

Powell, who was Harrell’s pick to lead the agency, has been on the job for just over two months; earlier this week, the authority hired King County Department of Community and Human Services’ emergency response director, Hedda McClendon, as Powell’s interim deputy, after the mayor’s office proposed her name to Powell by email in January.