1. Earlier this month, the King County Regional Homelessness Authority dropped a bombshell: That “missing” $8 million the financially battered homelessness agency couldn’t account for in a recent forensic audit? Turns out it never actually went anywhere. Instead, according to recently promoted KCRHA Chief Operating Officer William Towey, the money amounted to a “one-time” ledger error by an unidentified person or people.
Towey spilled the details—eventually—during an update on the corrective action plan that’s being implemented by the consultant Turning Point Strategies at the city council’s human services committee meeting September 18. I was on vacation, but reported the news on Bluesky, thinking other media outlets that reported breathlessly on the missing money would be just as interested in reporting that it showed back up. Strangely, no one covered it, so I’m doing it again here.
As Towey initially (and confusingly) explained the situation, of “the approximately $8 million in receivables identified in the forensic evaluation as not reconcilable from the records available at that time, Turning Point has substantially advanced the balance sheet reconciliation and identified historical accounting entries and reporting practices that contributed to that balance.”
After another minute or so of impenetrable accountant-speak, committee chair Alexis Mercedes Rinck jumped to the public’s rescue, dragging it out of Towey that—contrary to his previous, alarming assertions—the city does not actually”owe” KCRHA any money. It took some more tooth-pulling (and several terse answers from Towey) for Rinck to get a somewhat clarifying explanation. Basically the money looked like it was missing because of a one-time “transactional entry error in our financial accounting system,” Towey said.
It’s possible, Towey continued, that while “that particular item was discovered and resolved successfully,” there still might be “other transactions of a similar nature.”
For now, though, the $8 million question has been answered.
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2. The council’s public safety committee passed a package of bills from Dan Strauss last week that would, over time, prohibit people from parking an RV for more than two hours on any public street in Seattle, including in the industrial areas where they can currently park for up to 72 hours.
The legislation, as PubliCola reported in August, would require everyone currently living in an RV in Seattle to get a special license and agree to participate in homeless services. Eventually, each licensee would be required to leave their RV behind and accept “appropriate shelter” (a term the legislation does not define; anyone living in a licensed RV who fails to comply with “all laws” could lose their vehicle sooner.
A key element of Strauss’ plan is that the city would only count existing RVs a single time, and anyone who arrives in Seattle after that census, or was living in an RV when it took place but wasn’t counted, would be ticketed and towed. To allow any leeway for current but uncounted residents, or to do another census in the future, would be tantamount to telling every homeless RV dweller in “Western Washington, Oregon, [and] Idaho that they should come to the city of Seattle because we will allow you to stay here,” Strauss said last week.
Without a strict, forward-looking RV ban, Strauss argued, Seattle will become a magnet for a particularly visible kind of homeless person.
Each of the six bills and accompanying resolution passed out of committee unanimously or nearly so, with Maritza Rivera voting against one bill that allocated capital funding for the proposal.
One amendment that didn’t move forward was a proposal from Rob Saka to expand the RV ban to Mercedes Sprinters and other large vans that can be tricked out for long, #Vanlife-style road trips. Saka called his amendment both a “modest” and “hyper-technical” change, arguing that a ban on RVs but not Sprinter vans could “create a market” for people to “circumvent” the RV ban by tricking out a Sprinter instead and living on the street.
“Having done this work extensively alongside our Unified Care Team”—the city’s encampment removal and outreach team—Saka said he was confident plenty of people were living in Sprinter vans in his district. Apparently, there’s at least one such van perennially parked not far from Saka’s house.
The rest of the council didn’t buy it—Bob Kettle noted that in his district, most people who park Sprinters on the street are well-off road-trippers— and rejected Saka’s amendment before voting for Strauss’ overall RV banishment plan.
