By Erica C. Barnett

Kelly Kinnison, the CEO of the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, is currently the subject of an internal investigation into several complaints about her management style and hiring decisions, including one by a high-level staffer who quit the agency last week over what she described as a “toxic work environment.”

The KCRHA’s governing board, made up of elected officials from across the county, has held multiple closed-door executive sessions to discuss the ongoing investigation, which could result in discipline.

The investigation is expected to wrap up in the next few weeks, according to sources familiar with the board’s deliberations.

The initial spark for the complaints came earlier this year, when Kinnison, who is white, decided to create two new executive positions—a chief of youth programs overseeing Built for Zero work to end youth homelessness and a chief of systems innovation—and direct-hire two white men to fill them, including one who was reportedly allowed to write his own job description. (PubliCola has chosen not to name either man).

The salary for both positions was set at $200,000 a year. The Raikes Foundation would provide partial funding for the youth homelessness position, but the rest of the funds would have to come out of KCRHA’s budget, which faces potential cuts of more than $2 million next year. Emails obtained through a records request show that Kinnison had been directly talking with both men about potential jobs at the agency since 2024.

The proposed new hires, coming at at time when KCRHA was drafting a budget that would eliminate nearly 60 shelter beds and cut as many as 22 positions, struck many on KCRHA staff as irresponsible. Not only would both the new executive-level positions pay more tha most staff were making, there were, according to at least one of the complainants, multiple Black KCRHA employees qualified to fill the two roles if KCRHA management really believed they were necessary.

In a complaint filed on August 7, the staffer who quit last week, then-interim chief program officer Xochitl Maykovich, wrote, “I do not have faith that the current CEO of KCRHA can effectively manage the organization because she does not prioritize the responsibility the agency has to effectively manage tax payer dollars, she has not addressed concerns raised about racial discrimination, and she is making irresponsible financial decisions.

“Since I’ve been in the Interim Chief Program Officer role, I have raised consistent concerns about the appearance of racial discrimination and fiscal irresponsibility, but each time, rather than trying to find a solution, she has dug in and made me feel like she wants to fire me. I feel at very high risk of retaliation from the CEO for raising these concerns.”

Maykovich told PubliCola that when she heard Kinnison wanted to hire the two men, she was already wondering “why did I even get hired?” given that the agency’s budget, at the time, was several million dollars in the red. “I was so aggressive about it because it felt so wrong—this is so much money, we were having budget issues, and we could be in a position of laying people off,” she said.  “We don’t have the business justification for this, and morale was so low.”

Maykovich said she told Kinnison, “It’s going to create a lot of feelings if you directly hire a white guy at this level and pay him this much money, when we have at least three Black staff with expertise in youth homelessness who you pay a lot less, and you don’t consider them.”

In response, Maykovich said, “She snapped at me and said, ‘I don’t care about their feelings.” Maykovich included this alleged incident in her complaint.

PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you.
CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.

Support PubliCola

 

KCRHA has not hired either of the two men, and it’s unclear whether they plan to in the future. A KCRHA spokesperson declined to respond to questions, citing the ongoing investigation.

As news of the potential new hires leaked out internally, rumors also spread that Kinnison said it would be helpful to have white men representing KCRHA in discussions with elected officials, including specific Seattle City Council members. According to Maykovich’s complaint, she told Kinnison in a meeting of the executive team that “staff would have a lot of feelings about this decision,” to which Kinnison reportedly replied, “I don’t care about their feelings.”

Emails obtained through public disclosure requests show that KCRHA’s deputy chief, Simon Foster, also raised concerns about the optics and cost of the new hires. On April 16, Foster wrote Kinnison raising concerns about the new positions, including “budgetary alignment,” “mission consistency,” and “team cohesion.”

“We are actively asking our teams to absorb significant reductions, delay hiring, and reassess work plans based on limited resources,” Foster, who is Black, wrote. “Bringing on additional high salaried executive roles during this time may compromise our fiscal credibility and sustainability.”

Additionally, Foster wrote, the hires could call into question KCRHA’s “commitment to equity, not just in outcomes, but in process and leadership composition. Relying on a framing that centers White male representation as a political access point risks undermining the values we have stated publicly and internally.”

Kinnison responded by saying she planned to move forward with the two hires that week.

Two days later, in a separate email thread, Kinnison said she was “shocked” to learn that members of the executive leadership team knew about one of the new job descriptions, and said she was looking into “how this information was inappropriately shared so that we can ensure the integrity of our hiring processes and internal communication protocols.”

Kinnison also rejected “the perception that I feel we need white male representation to get political access. … That is not my belief, nor it is reflected in my hiring practices or guidance to hiring managers.”

In response, Foster confirmed that he was the one who shared the job descriptions, saying he did so as “an effort to surface critical feedback early and ensure that if we move forward, we do so with clarity, buy‐in, and organizational alignment.”

“I want to be clear, the discomfort being expressed within the Executive Leadership Team and throughout the organization, is not merely about an individual hire, but about a pattern of decision making, communication, and lack of clarity that is beginning to erode trust,” Foster wrote. “While you and I may have different perspectives on the intent behind these decisions, the perception among senior leaders is very real, and needs to be addressed head‐on, not deflected.”

In a followup email, which Foster shared with KCRHA’s human resources director Irwin Batara, Foster asked Kinnison to participate in a special meeting with the entire leadership team to discuss, among other issues, “unspoken frustrations, questions, and concerns that haven’t been given proper space for direct engagement with you.”

That meeting apparently didn’t happen. But less than two weeks later, at a meeting of top agency leaders that Kinnison did not attend, Maykovich and at least one other staffer complained at length about her plan to hire two new executive staff at a time when many lower-level KCRHA workers stood to lose their jobs. Two days later, the executive team met again, this time with Kinnison in attendance.

According to multiple accounts, Kinnison told everyone on her team to come out with whatever complaints they had, and each did so in turn. Some raised concerns that Kinnison and Foster were being too public about their internal leadership disputes, while others, including Maykovich, said KCRHA had become a hostile work environment, particularly for people of color. (Maykovich is Latina). In response, Kinnison reportedly said that she has the final say over all KCRHA decisions, including who gets hired.

At the end, Maykovich said, Kinnison told the leaders, “‘If you think you’re in a hostile work environment, bring it on.'”

After the meeting, Batara reportedly recorded the comments of each member of the executive staff as a separate complaint against Kinnison—about a half-dozen complaints in all.

About half an hour after the meeting ended, Kinnison wrote an email to Foster and Batara expressing “concerns about Xochitl’s performance”—effectively an HR complaint against Maykovich. The email described several recent meetings at which, according to Kinnison, Maykovich had been unprepared or spoken out of turn (Maykovich disputes this) and concluded by calling her “combative” and suggesting that “we escalate the coaching we are providing.”

Two days later, after meeting with King County Councilmember Jorge Báron, Kinnison wrote another email to Foster telling him to hold off on disciplining Maykovich; she did not cite a reason, and Báron, citing the investigation, declined to comment.

“I want to hold on taking any action on this until things settle, so no rush on bringing back recommended next steps,” she wrote.

The KCRHA’s general counsel, Edmund Witter, was reportedly among the staff who raised concerns about the perception of racial bias in Kinnison’s hiring decisions. Five days after the meeting where the executive leadership team aired their grievances, Kinnison told Witter he would no longer represent the agency on any HR matters, “so that we have his housing and agency expertise available to the many other things on his plate,” according to an April 29 email. (Witter declined to comment).

As the result of that decision, KCRHA has retained an international law firm, Ogletree Deakins, to represent them on employment matters. In addition to the additional cost of hiring an outside firm, the agency plans to hire a consultant, at an estimated cost of more than $60,000, to do an organizational assessment. It’s unclear if this outside assessment is part of an internal agreement to resolve the complaints; this is one of the questions we posed to KCRHA that a spokesperson declined ot answer.

A report on the investigation into Kinnison’s actions as CEO has reportedly been completed, so it probably won’t be long before its conclusions are public.

Meanwhile, the KCRHA still faces many internal and external pressures. As we’ve reported, the Harrell administration directed the authority to go through an “exercise” of cutting its budget by 2 percent earlier this year; in response, the agency came up with a proposal that it said would result in a $4.7 million shortfall in its administrative budget, which already falls far short of what most government agencies set aside for these positions.

The city of Seattle has tremendous sway over KCRHA’s actions because it provides most of the authority’s budget, along with King County; in recent years, the Harrell administration has used that power to claw back control over homelessness prevention and outreach, which the city restructured earlier this year. Harrell has reportedly not wanted to get involved in the dispute over Kinnison’s management of the agency; a spokesperson for the mayor declined to answer questions, citing the investigation.

Kinnison was chosen after Harrell’s pick to head the KCRHA on an interim basis, Darrell Powell, withdrew his name for the permanent position and stepped down after PubliCola reported statements he made about LGBTQ staffers and allegations that he repeatedly used an ableist slur in the presence of staff, among other issues.

KCRHA’s budget is also perennially in the red, ever since—in an effort to do a better job of paying contractors on time—the agency began taking out loans to fund up-front payments to nonprofit homeless service providers, leaving the agency in debt until all its funding comes in at end of the budget year.