By Erica C. Barnett

Editor’s note: This post has been updated to reflect the fact KCRHA is hiring for five newly created positions.

The King County Regional Homelessness Authority made good on its promise to cut dozens of jobs if its funders, primarily the city of Seattle, didn’t provide more funding for staff, laying off 13 people, including Deputy CEO Simon Foster, and leaving 15 positions vacant. In addition to Foster, the cuts include the agency’s general counsel, chief financial officer, and director of data and research.

In an internal email sent to staff on Wednesday, KCRHA director Kelly Kinnison told staff  that “Due to our budget shortfall and after careful consideration, the four executives “have been included in the workforce reductions.”

A few lines later, however, Kinnison wrote that the KCRHA will actually be hiring five new people, including at least three executive-level positions —a budget and administration coordinator, associate director of strategy, director of special projects, director of program policy, and an IT coordinator. Currently, only the associate director of strategy position is listed on the KCRHA’s website, at a salary ranging from $181,300 to $227,920.

“I understand that transitions like this can bring about a sense of uncertainty and apprehension. However, I am incredibly confident in the expertise and resilience of this remarkable team,” Kinnison wrote. “By fostering collaboration and embracing innovative approaches, we are driving meaningful change and uplifting our entire community.”

Earlier this year, the KCRHA painted a dire picture of what would happen if the city didn’t help it fill a $4.7 million budget shortfall. At the time, Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell’s deputy mayor in charge of homelessness, Tiffany Washington, said Harrell would not accept any cuts to services, so the only option, given that the city provides most of KCRHA’s funding, was to cut staff.

“The board, the public, other stakeholders that we’ve been working with have asked us to make cuts that will not affect services,” Kinnison said at a KCRHA governing board meeting earlier this week. “So at the direction of the board, I’ve partnered with HR Interrupted Consulting to get a sense of what someone from the outside who’s an organizational consultant would say about our org structure and how we should move forward with reducing our footprint.”

HR Interrupted is the company the board hired in September to provide “executive coaching” to Kinnison in response to at least four complaints from staff alleging the CEO was racially biased and had created a “toxic work environment” for staff.  The staffers complained about Kinnison’s plan to create two new executive-level positions, each at a salary of $200,000 a year, and direct-hire two white men to fill them, bypassing the usual hiring process.

All four people who complained about Kinnison lost their jobs in the layoffs, as did Deputy CEO Foster, who had frequently clashed with Kinnison and strongly objected to her proposal to hire the two men. In addition to the racial equity concerns raised by other staffers, Foster argued that the new hires didn’t make financial sense and could make morale at the agency even worse than it already was.

At the board meeting this week, Kinnison said the layoffs would get rid of an excessively “top-heavy” structure at KCRHA and eliminate non-essential staff who were hired during a more optimistic time last year. Many of these recently hired staff were in “administrative positions that were sort of newer, when we thought, this time last year, we were going to have more funds and different things that we were going to need to take on with potentially a different federal administration,” Kinnison said.

In addition to Deputy CEO Foster, the 11 people being laid off include the KCRHA’s general counsel, chief financial officer, chief of research and data, emergency operations coordinator, data science director, Emergency Housing and Services division director, and human resources director. These individuals provide legal advice, provide reports on how many people are homeless in King County and who they are, coordinate shelter during weather emergencies, and oversee the KCRHA’s budget.

Kinnison intimated that some of these critical roles could be filled by “in-kind” support from Seattle and King County, but did not offer any details. A KCRHA spokesperson did not respond to multiple phone calls, emails, and texts about the layoffs.

In addition to the 11 outright layoffs, the KCRHA is eliminating 15 jobs that happen to be currently unfilled. HR will lose seven of its 10 employees, including an IT specialist and a payroll specialist, while the other vacant jobs include the agency’s chief program officer, three planners, two positions focused on youth and young adult homelessness, and a senior housing stability coordinator.