By Erica C. Barnett

On Tuesday, the King County Regional Homelessness Authority’s implementation board is expected to approve the appointment of Kelly Kinnison, a division director at the US Department of Health and Human Services, as its new CEO. In the last two weeks, two of the other finalists for the position, including interim CEO Darryl Powell, dropped out, leaving Kinnison as the only remaining candidate.

As director of HHS’ Division of Family and Community Policy, Kinnison “oversees the development of research, legislative proposals, and policy” in a number of areas, including marriage, fatherhood, poverty, incarceration, and housing, according to her official bio; before joining HHS, she led a team researching federal food assistance for the Department of Agriculture.

Earlier this month, Powell—a longtime friend of Mayor Bruce Harrell and his choice for the interim CEO position—dropped out of the running, saying that the agency’s governance structure was too complex, with “too many cooks in the kitchen.” Powell also said he felt constant pressure to do the bidding of the agency’s funders (the city and the county), rather than being allowed to act independently. Finally, he complained about PubliCola’s reporting on comments he made during his interview to the effect that he didn’t “get” the “LGBTQ stuff,” saying the hiring process was supposed to be “confidential”—comments he repeated to a number of people in the weeks after withdrawing his name from consideration.

As PubliCola reported exclusively on Twitter, another candidate dropped out last week; in a statement, the KCRHA told PubliCola that the search firm it hired (at a cost of about $90,000 through February), Nonprofit Advisory Group, “has performed an exhaustive nationwide search” for a CEO and that there was nothing “uncommon” about two candidates dropping out late in the process.

“The final candidate is qualified and enthusiastic about leading the regional effort to address homelessness in King County,” the statement continued. “We are interviewing the remaining candidate with the same rigor and standards we would for any finalist and are committed to selecting the right person for this position.”

Multiple sources told PubliCola that a Seattle elected official told the candidate who dropped out most recently that the job was short-term—that is, that the new CEO is supposed to wind down the agency, not save it. The future of the KCRHA is still very much in the air, but a comment of that nature would not exactly inspire confidence in someone seeking a job at the agency.

Earlier this week, Councilmember Cathy Moore called on the KCRHA to halt the CEO search process so that the search committee, on which Moore sits, can “take time to reassess.” In her statement calling for a “pause,” Moore said, “I appreciate the time and candor of each of the candidates. However, when two out of the three finalists you’re interviewing withdraw their candidacy in close succession, it’s clear there is a larger problem. Given the myriad of challenges facing KCRHA, it is imperative that we make the best hiring decision. We can’t afford to have our choice made by default.”

Currently, the implementation board is still scheduled to vote on the new CEO appointment on Tuesday at 4:30, with public comment (not originally on the agenda) scheduled for 4:35.

The struggle to find a new CEO for the homelessness agency probably stems less from the challenges of the agency’s two-board governance structure or the “leaks” that both Powell and Moore cited as concerns (the KCRHA’s lack of transparency, down to their refusal to publicize sudden changes in meeting times, is an embarrassing anomaly in a region where most governments conduct leadership searches at least partly in public) than from the larger existential crisis the agency faces.

Alison Eisinger, who directs the Seattle/King County Coalition on Homelessness, said the KCRHA’s primary issue isn’t “governance” but the fact that the agency lacks autonomy and stable leadership.

“The more we have a regional homelessness authority that has neither the resources nor the leadership required to carry out its areas of responsibility well, the more I am inclined to believe that this entire project has been an exercise in deflected responsibility,” Eisinger said. “It is unacceptable to underfund the homelessness crisis response system, and that is the biggest issue that should be attracting the most concerted attention by all government officials.”

Just this month, the KCRHA’s boards rather blithely approved a budget that will require slashing hundreds of shelter beds, adding to the number of people facing unsheltered homelessness in the region, simply because the city told them they had to make cuts. As long as the region’s homelessness authority is beholden to the whims of its funders—a problem from the KCRHA’s inception, as an agency with no funding authority governed largely by elected officials—its priorities will be whatever its funders tell it to prioritize.