Category: homelessness

City Council, homelessness

Council Supermajority Passes New Licensing Law That Will Gradually Ban RVs in Seattle

By Erica C. Barnett

The Seattle City Council approved a new permitting scheme designed to gradually prohibit RVs from parking for more than two hours inside city limits on a supermajority 6-3 vote yesterday. The program, sponsor Dan Strauss said, is designed to “center humans,” end the “inappropriate use of public space,” and provide “pathways to housing for people in need.

Under Strauss’ permitting proposal , the city will conduct a one-time count of people currently living in RVs in Seattle and provide temporary “licenses” to eligible RV residents. These licenses will allow RV owners to park in Seattle as long as they obey “all laws,” to participate in services, and eventually accept shelter and leave their RVs behind. Anyone who “turns down” six offers of “appropriate shelter”—an undefined term—will lose their permit, and their right to park in the city.

Separate legislation in Strauss’ five-bill package will allow the city to stand up short-term storage for unoccupied RVs; expand the city’s Unified Care Team to add eight more city outreach workers focused on RVs; and broaden the definition of “junk vehicle” to make it easier for the city to designate a vehicle as “junk” and tow it away.

Under the new permitting system, no one who moves into an RV or arrives in Seattle in an RV after the one-time “census” will be eligible for a license, and if they park in Seattle for more than two hours, their vehicles can be ticketed and towed.

The council approved the most substantive piece of the legislation—the RV permitting program— after hours of public testimony, much of it from RV residents and advocates for homeless people who called the proposal ill-conceived and inhumane.

Dee Powers, a former RV resident who became homeless in 2015, said it took seven years to find a shelter that would allow her to stay with her partner and pets. “I personally know how badly the proposed ban will be for people living in their vehicles,” Powers said. “I would not survive in a tent. I would not survive in a passenger vehicle. A friend of mine ended up amputating a foot because he was living in a smaller car with no room to lay down. It’s inhumane to force people to live in even more substandard conditions for the sake of the city’s curb appeal.”

On Tuesday, the ACLU of Washington and Columbia Legal Services sent letters to the council opposing Strauss’ proposal. In the ACLU letter, the group’s Smart Justice Policy Program Director Jazmyn Clark said the plan relies on “punitive enforcement and impoundment practices that raise constitutional and civil liberties concerns and risk further destabilizing people living in vehicles.” Specifically, the civil-rights group wrote, enforcing the two-hour parking rule could subject people living in their RVs to “the loss of their home, shelter, possessions, and often their primary source of stability,” in possible violation of their constitutional protection against unlawful search and seizure.

Strauss characterized the package of legislation as the first real effort in many years to help people living in RVs get into safe, stable housing. “This legislation is about ensuring people who live in their vehicles are not forgotten, but that they are cared for, and that they have a clear road to a more stable life that we can provide them,  so that they can come inside into housing or shter keep higher to engage in housing or shelter that is appropriate for them, that meets their needs,” Strauss said. 

Councilmember Dionne Foster said the one-time nature of the “census” was a key reason for her vote against the permitting bill. Foster proposed an amendment at a committee meeting in September that would have made it possible to hold another count of RV residents in the future, but it failed.

“With that door not available, unfortunately, I just have too many concerns around people who may become homeless in the future and could be left out of this permanent program,” Foster said. “Homelessness, I know and I think many of us know this isn’t a static experience. We have success in getting people housed every year …  But we struggle to actually meet our goals on solving homelessness, because we also have more neighbors who become homeless every year for a myriad of reasons. All of those folks who become homeless will not end up living in their vehicles, but some of them may, and some of them may need access to different supports.”

The council declined to pass an amendment from Maritza Rivera, which she called a “line in the sand,” that would have excluded people convicted of promoting loitering for purposes of prostitution (a misdemeanor), sex trafficking, or selling any amount of drugs from the registration program. City-funded diversion plans, like Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion, target people engaged in survival crimes, including those sell drugs to support their own addictions, for diversion rather than criminal prosecution, so excluding anyone who sells drugs from homeless services would have been a departure from the city’s current approach.

Originally, Strauss proposed using $3.5 million that Mayor Katie Wilson had earmarked for a new RV safe lot and shelter to pay for his RV licensing plan, which will include the new city outreach workers and additional police and parking enforcement hours to enforce the new law. Last week, Strauss accused Wilson of being “uncomfortable” addressing homelessness because she proposed a budget that conflicted with his own RV proposal. This week, however, he changed his tune, saying he would identify $5 million in the budget to pay for a new RV safe lot as well as his own RV permitting proposal.

It’s unclear where Strauss plans to find the money. Shortly after this post went to press, Strauss got back to me to say he is “not taking the shelter money,” which totals $37 million over two years, to fund his plan.

At a press conference where WIlson announced a new citywide, neighborhood-based outreach strategy for resolving homeless encampments, I asked her about Strauss’ RV proposal. “We do have a lot of RVs around our city, and there are some real challenges associated with noise, with garbage, with, in some cases, criminal activity happening in and around those vehicles, and so this is a real problem.” But, she added, “I do have some very serious concerns about a number of aspects of the legislation, from the legal risk to the challenges of implementing this very complicated permit program, the cost of implementing it … about the challenges of actually doing this in practice. And I also have concerns about the human impacts.”

The ACLU and Columbia Legal Services also objected to the expansion of the definition of junk vehicles, which requires a vehicle to meet at least three criteria on a list. That list currently includes having a value of less than $500, being on a public street for more than 24 hours, having a broken window, and failing to have an up-to-date registration. Strauss’ junk vehicle legislation expands that list to make it easier for the city to declare a vehicle “junk”; now, if someone’s license or registration is missing or not fully visible, that will count toward the three criteria that the city can use to justify taking it. The new list also now includes vehicles that need repairs to “side or back windows, wheels, tires, lights, body panels, or seats”—items that can be expensive to repair.

“For people with limited financial resources, these conditions may reflect an inability to afford registration, repairs, or other costs, not abandonment of a vehicle,” the ACLU’s Clark wrote. “When that vehicle is also someone’s home, the consequences of an expanded definition are particularly severe.”

The legislation gives the city until July 2027 to come up a plan to implement the legislation, which could include changes to the underlying program—although the 6-3 supermajority that supported the proposal as written suggests there won’t be the kind of fundamental changes opponents have asked for, like allowing amnesty for unregistered RV residents to participate in the program after the one-time cutoff in the legislation.

Business, City Council, homelessness, housing

Greater Seattle: We’re Number 1 (in Home Listings Jump); Small Biz is in a Bad Mood; and Sweeps are Not a Solution

by Josh Feit

More Sweeps ≠ Less Homelessness 

During last week’s city council budget hearings, Ballard council member Dan Strauss channelled a business owner in his district to give a speech criticizing Mayor Wilson. There’s an encampment in front of the business, Strauss said, leading to this dais grandstand: “We have seen in this last year, since last October, a complete change in the city and how effectively the city is addressing homelessness.”

He continued: “I have a business in downtown Ballard that had an encampment in front of their business last October and .. it wasn’t moved until, I believe, March. And that person reported to me that they have had an encampment on one of the four blocks around their business—and it’s a small block—270 days out of the last 365 days.” This demonstrated, Strauss said, that “just the ability to interact with and work with people has changed from a three-week cycle to a three-plus-month cycle”.

What Strauss’ (and his constituent’s) sidewalk tent example actually shows is not that we need more sweeps, but the opposite: Sweeps don’t work. They simply push homeless people around the city. Logically enough, in the context of an ongoing, active sweeps campaign, an encampment has now landed on this particular doorstep. Sweeping the people living in that encampment to another part of Ballard just means that a different business will eventually end up in Strauss’ ear.

Consider: Wilson is actually doing more sweeps than her tough-love predecessor, Bruce Harrell. According to the UCT’s own records, they’ve done more than 150 full encampment removals this year, compared to 112 by this point in Harrell’s term. According to the UCT’s “site journals,” the team rarely connects encampment residents to shelter.

Complaining about a homeless encampment in front of a business as an argument for more sweeps—when the people at that encampment were likely swept there in the first place—reminds me of the illogical days when neighbors argued against upzones on the grounds that they would make housing more expensive even as housing prices were skyrocketing under the strict Seattle zoning that prevented building more housing.

Seattle Home Listings Increase > Home Listings Increase in All Other Metro Areas

This brings me to the post-single-family-zoning-only Seattle housing market. According to Zillow data for September 2026, Seattle has the biggest percentage increase in home listings for US metro areas. Seattle’s current 14,877 listing represented a 20.3% increase from September 2025.

With housing prices dropping 1.1% month over month and 2.2% year over year, Seattle is a buyer’s market right now.

Rents, by the way, dropped .2% in September and ticked up only minimally, and far below inflation, at 1.8% year over year with typical rent at $2,250.

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Cutting $950,000 is Not a Good Look 

As I’ve noted before in this column, I’m frustrated with Mayor Wilson’s approach to reviving Seattle’s business climate. Following the recommendations of a report her Office of Economic Development commissioned, the mayor seems focused on prompting more tech-adjacent startups as opposed to girding existing small businesses. The thinking goes that tech businesses have a disproportionately positive impact on jobs and the local economy. But my thinking is that indie businesses, just like childcare and affordable housing, are prerequisites for economic growth. Indie small businesses, for example, bring the crowds and lines that make cities vibrant. Lines around the block at clubs are a public policy win for a city.

I’ve been asking managers at bars and shops lately what the city could do for them right now. One thing I’m consistently hearing has to do with the costs of repairs and infrastructure upgrades—how those costs, often related to city inspections, can be debilitating. One manager, who recently oversaw the closure of a longtime North Seattle business (and still manages a couple more across the city), gave a specific example about graffiti, reporting that the cost of  repeatedly cleaning up the graffiti —as the city requires—became onerous for the neighborhood bar that closed.

I’m not convinced graffiti cleanup could sink a healthy business, nor do I think the city’s fixation on graffiti —particularly under Mayor Harrell, who actually funded anti-graffiti education for kids—is discerning policy. But I took this bar manager’s request for city support in earnest—and, lo and behold, it turns out Wilson’s budget cuts $950,000 for a program that helps private business owners clean up graffiti on their buildings.

As a council Central Staff memo put it, “The proposed budget would not continue funding for these services and [Seattle Parks & Recreation’s] ability to offer private property owners graffiti abatement services would be significantly impacted.”

I tend to filter the business-lens on local politics with skepticism, but as a Wilson fan I must say, when the bad-mood example from a bar manager tracks so succinctly with Wilson’s new budget, the mayor’s got a problem. I’m not saying reinstating a graffiti cleanup contract is the answer. I’m saying Wilson’s angle on what’s ailing Seattle’s economy has the wrong emphasis.

Josh@PubliCola.com

City Council, Elections, homelessness, King County, Police

This Week on PubliCola: Council Opponents Bash Mayor’s Balanced Budget, Controversial Cop Gets Slap on Wrist, $17 Million Deficit at KCRHA, and More

By Erica C. Barnett

First things first: We’re hosting a City Council debate! Come to the National Nordic Museum (2655 NW Market St.) to hear from the candidates for City Council in North Seattle’s District 5, Julie Kang and Nilu Jenks. (PubliCola will be running interviews with both candidates, conducted last week, before the debate). The outcome of this election will impact the balance of votes on the council, so it matters to the entire city. Hope to see you there!

On to the week’s news:

Monday, October 12

No, King County Didn’t Write a $10 Million “Blank Check” for Youth Homelessness

Danny Westneat’s latest column for the Seattle Times condemned a proposed sales tax increase of of 0.01 percent, claiming the (maximum) $10 million it could bring in annually amounted to a “blank check” for the county to fritter away on… whatever, we guess. In fact, the county will adopt a spending plan for the money as part of its budget process, and has identified half-dozen specific youth and family homelessness programs to receive the money. That’s not the only thing Westneat got wrong in his column, as we learned from doing some basic reporting.

Tuesday, October 13

Greater Seattle: A Supermajority, a Mistake, and a Chance

In this week’s column, Josh Feit considers what it will mean if progressive Nilu Jenks wins the D5 council election, praises SDOT’s decision to (finally) charge for parking in one West Seattle neighborhood, and has praise for Metro’s workhorse Route 7, which King County is planning to eliminate and replace with a RapidRide with far fewer stops.

Wednesday, October 14

Council Critics Accuse Wilson of Creating “the Unfund Budget”

Councilmembers who opposed Katie Wilson’s election as mayor can’t help themselves, it seems: They’re claiming her proposed budget defunds (or as Bob Kettle puts it, “unfunds”) the police department, encampment sweeps team, and graffiti removal efforts. They also seemed caught off guard by budget problems plaguing SDOT, despite their own adoption of a budget last year that included a large and growing deficit at the department.

Thursday, October 15

Regional Homelessness Authority’s Overspending Grows to $17 Million, According to New Report

Turning Point, the consultant hired to reconcile the King County Regional Homelessness Authority’s budget after a forensic audit found widespread irregularities earlier this year, discovered a nearly $17 million net deficit in the agency’s accounts, the result of excessive administrative spending on staff and the implementation of SalesForce to manage homeless services grants. The money (which includes growing interest on the KCRHA’s massive negative bank balance) will have to be paid, somehow, by the city and county, the agency’s primary funders.

Friday, October 16

Council Budget Fizz: Rinck Wants to Fund Survivor Services, Saka Wants to Defund Restrooms, and Strauss Says the Mayor Is Weak on Homelessness

A week of all-day budget meetings included more convoluted Wilson-bashing, as Rob Saka came out against Wilson’s proposal to add more of the same kind of public restrooms Saka added funding for last year, and Dan Strauss accused the mayor of being “uncomfortable” addressing homelessness after she proposed moving the city’s encampment response team back to the Human Services Department, rather than keeping it under her direct control.

And, earlier in the week, Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck proposed adding $8 million to the budget for organizations that help survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, and trafficking. HR1, Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” drastically cuts funding for these services.

Complaints Filed Against Pass-Through Campaign Funding Group Created by Former Councilmember Sara Nelson

Former Councilmember Nelson’s new group, Seafor, promises to keep its donors’ identities “private,” funneling money to elections through political action committees that will only show Seafor as the donor. They’re doing a “test run” with Julie Kang, funding a PAC that is spending $30,000 on her behalf. Except—oops—you aren’t actually allowed to conceal the source of campaign funding in this way. A progressive group has filed two complaints against Seafor and its affiliated “news” website, CivicTide.

Cop Who Encouraged Fellow Officers to “F___ People Up” At Pro-LGBTQ Counterprotest Gets Written Reprimand

Seattle police lieutenant Matthew Didier, who was caught on tape encouraging officers to go hard on people protesting a far-right anti-trans rally at Cal Anderson Park, will get a slap-on-the-wrist written reprimand for his actions. Interim police chief Andre Sayles said a critical review of the incident earlier this year “made clear that our department did not understand the depth of concern within the LGBTQ+ community before this event.”

Also this week: I was a guest on CityCast Seattle, where we discussed Rinck’s “Seattle Stands With Survivors” budget proposal, a recent lawsuit filed by a woman who said the University of Washington failed to protect her from the frat member who raped her, Saka’s bizarre 180 on public restroom funding, and our favorite pizza places in Seattle (shout out to Dantini!)

City Council, homelessness, human services, Mayor Wilson

Council Budget Fizz: Rinck Wants to Fund Survivor Services, Saka Wants to Defund Restrooms, and Strauss Says the Mayor Is Weak on Homelessness
City Attorney Erika Evans speaks at a press conference about Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck’s budget proposal at City Hall on Wednesday.

1. Seattle City Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck announced Wednesday that she’ll propose adding $8 million to this year’s city budget to restore services for domestic violence and sex trafficking survivors that the council funded on a one-time basis last year, and expand services and shelter for victims of gender-based violence that are losing federal funds due to the passage of HR1, Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.”

The money, Rinck said at a press conference on Wednesday, would help fund legal services, flexible funding for needs like apartment deposits and childcare during court dates, support groups and counseling for survivors and their children, and prevention programs like consent education and bystander intervention.

“Gender-based violence is not inevitable. It is learned, which means it can be unlearned, and it also means it can be stopped before it starts,” Rinck said.

City Attorney Erika Evans said she started her term this year with a backlog of 1,700 domestic violence cases, which has resulted in some victims, like a woman she identified as “Sarah,” waiting years for her case to go to trial. “She said waiting two years made her feel like Seattle didn’t care about what happened to her,” Evans said. Councilmember Dionne Foster said she’ll propose a one-time add to next year’s budget that will help close that backlog; we’ve reached out to her for more details about that separate funding proposal.

HR1 cuts millions of dollars for survivor services and domestic violence prevention programs, impacting groups like the  King County Sexual Assault Resource Center (KCSARC). Meanwhile, changes and cuts to grants made through the US Department of Housing and Urban Development have left local survivor housing programs with less ability to provide shelter and housing to people fleeting abuse.

“The administration has proposed cutting the Office of Violence Against Women by 29 percent. It has moved to terminate millions of dollars in federal grants to hundreds of organizations. It has cut housing assistance,” Rinck said. “Every one of those cuts has an address, and too many of those addresses are right here in Seattle.”

Rinck didn’t offer specific details about her proposal on Wednesday, saying she’ll introduce a detailed budget amendment next week.

2. The city’s Office of Economic and Revenue Forecasts, whose October revenue forecast has recently provided the city council with more (projected) money to play with in its November budget, had sobering news on Friday: The new forecast projects just $7.8 million in additional revenues between 2026 and 2028 compared to previous forecasts. In reality, the true number will be $2.8 million in the negative, city economist Jan Duras told the Economic and Revenue Forecast Council, because the city intends to continue exempting health care providers from the JumpStart payroll tax.

The city also expects revenues to dip below previous forecasts in 2028.

What this means for the council’s budget deliberations is that for all their bluster about funding more police, more surveillance cameras, more Unified Care Team staffers, and more firefighters, they’ll be facing an even tougher budget reality this year. Funding everything council members have said they hope to add to the budget would cost tens of millions of dollars, which would require equivalent cuts to other parts of the budget. So far, no one on the council has said where they plan to cut (or what budget tricks they plan to use on the budget they received from the mayor’s office, which shows a positive balance through 2023) to pay for those additions.

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3. During one of several all-day council budget meetings this week, City Councilmember Rob Saka took several minutes to rail against Mayor Katie Wilson’s proposal to install 12 new restrooms, including two permanent Portland Loo-style restrooms at parks in Northeast and Southeast Seattle, using both general-fund and King County and Seattle parks levy revenues. Wilson’s proposal would also add 10 new Throne restrooms, like the ones installed in Pioneer Square earlier this year, across the city.

Overall, Wilson’s budget includes about $6.5 million, roughly half of that from the King County and Seattle parks levies, to pay for the new permanent and prefabricated restrooms, along with maintenance and renovations at existing parks restrooms, including at Judkins and Cal Anderson Parks.

Saka, who has previously complained that restrooms in his West Seattle district are poorly maintained and covered with graffiti, characterized the new toilets as a waste of money given the poor condition of the permanent restrooms in other Seattle parks. (His comments came during a discussion of the city’s parks and recreation budget; the restroom spending is spread across several budget areas).

“We’re a year plus away from an audit, a damning, scathing audit, that revealed can’t get our own house in order—quite literally, bath house in order!” Saka siad. “We can’t even solve the problem of maintaining properly our existing restroom inventory fleet. And how many new bathrooms are proposed for expansion under this? And yes, my council district is the worst off. It’s no secret, in terms of inability to properly maintain because of graffiti and vandalism our existing restroom fleet!. And now we want to expand, create new shiny names, and we can’t take care and look after the things that we have properly today.”

Saka’s opposition to new public restrooms represented a dramatic reversal of his position just one year ago, when he added $1 million in funding to then-mayor Bruce Harrell’s budget for new public restrooms in his district. Citing the exact same “scathing audit,” Saka argued last year that his district should be prioritized for new Portland Loo-style restrooms.

Adding these restrooms, Saka argued, would help “to harden the parks restrooms, to make it more tamper resistant, to make it more vandalism resistant, to make it more graffiti resistant.” Funding restrooms in his district, Saka said, was a way of respecting “the gravity and severity of the underlying problem at issue” in the audit.

Saka’s total reversal on the issue of public restrooms may seem perplexing, but two things have changed. First, this year’s proposed new restrooms are not in his district. And second, the mayor is Katie Wilson, a person many on the council, including Saka, seem determined to oppose even when it means they have to completely reverse positions.

4. For another example, look no further than Dan Strauss’ dark insinuations on Thursday about Wilson’s proposal to move the city’s huge (more than 100-member) encampment sweeps team out of her direct control and into the Human Services Department, which oversees homelessness programs and, until Harrell vastly expanded the city’s encampment removal apparatus, oversaw previous iterations of the team.

Logically, taking the UCT out of Wilson’s office is a way of depoliticizing it, and that’s how a staffer characterized the change. Council central staffer Ann Gorman said, “this was undertaken in order to protect the UCT across mayoral administrations, so that it continues” no matter who is in office. “To someone who is interested in the continuation of the UCT, that’ss good news that would seem to reflect the the achievement of efficiencies.”

Strauss said he took “a little bit of issue” with Gorman’s comments, calling the claim that moving the sweeps team back to HSD would insulate it politically “the largest pile of horse pucky I’ve ever seen occur in my life.” The city needs “executive leadership”—that is, direct control by the elected mayor—for the UCT to be effective, Strauss said.

The real reason Wilson wants to move the team, Strauss continued, is that she doesn’t want to deal with homelessness—quite a thing to claim about a mayor whose budget includes $37 million for new shelter, far more than any of her predecessor’s budgets.

“I believe that that transfer happened because the mayor is likely uncomfortable addressing homelessness, because addressing homelessness requires both a lot of compassion and firm boundaries, and it can be very uncomfortable,” Strauss said. 

Strauss also assailed Wilson for using existing funds—$3.5 million—for an RV safe lot where people living in RVs could access services and shelter and move toward housing. Strauss wants to use that money on his plan to eventually ban RVs from the city, with a transitional period where people currently living in RVs would be required to register with the city and accept services and shelter offers. Strauss said he was “deeply disappointed in the lack of collaboration from the Wilson administration regarding this funding, and my door remains open.” 

 

homelessness, King County, Mayor Wilson

Regional Homelessness Authority’s Overspending Grows to $17 Million, According to New Report
KCRHA CEO Kelly Kinnison

By Erica C. Barnett

The city of Seattle and King County will be on the hook for at least $16.7 million in previously unreported costs accrued by the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, city and county officials said Thursday afternoon.

The additional shortfall, a combination of excessive administrative spending and growing debt, was revealed in a new report from Turning Point, the consultant hired to reconcile the agency’s finances after a damning forensic audit found widespread, longstanding accounting irregularities earlier this year.

In a joint statement, King County Executive Girmay Zahilay and Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson said, “The $17 million unrecoverable balance is unacceptable, and the County and City are working together to address repayment while protecting critical services for people experiencing homelessness.”

Elected officials who previously called for the KCRHA to shut down immediately, including King County Councilmembers Reagan Dunn and Rod Dembowski and Seattle Councilmember Maritza Rivera, issued statements calling the latest news “shocking” (Rivera) and “outrageous” (Dembowski) and describing the KCRHA as a “failed experiment” in a regional approach to homelessness (Dunn).

Tough talk aside, city and county taxpayers are now on the hook for the KCRHA’s overspending; according to deputy county budget director Aaron Rubardt, paying back the KCRHA’s unpaid debts will likely take several years.

According to Turning Point’s report, as of July 31, the KCRHA had a net negative balance of more than $31 million, which was offset by money it was owed by the city and county, resulting in an overall negative balance of $16.7 million as of that date. Here’s the high-level breakdown:

For context, KCRHA has long blamed its persistent negative balance on its reimbursement-based model, in which the agency pays homeless service providers for their annual contracts and gets reimbursement from its funders, chiefly the city and county, after the fact.

However, if this was the only reason for the negative balance, the homelessness agency’s bank account should end up with a positive or zero balance once all those reimbursements come in; instead, the KCRHA’s negative balance grew larger and larger over time. “This was an argument for needing large cash advances to avoid those negative cash balances,” City Budget Office director Aly Pennucci said on Thursday. “However, even after those cash advances were approved, the cash position remained negative, raising further concerns.”

The overall net deficit of $16.7 million is what will remain after every entity that owes KCRHA money has paid everything they owe.

The bulk of the shortfall resulted from KCRHA overspending the amount of administrative funding they had coming in. That excessive spending included lavish outlays on high-priced temporary staffing firms like Robert Half, which charges hefty recruitment fees to do work that would more typically be done by regular full-time employees. It also includes the salaries of KCRHA CEO Kelly Kinnison and recently promoted Chief Operating Officer William Towey, who make a combined total above $600,000, according to the union that represents many KCRHA employees.

The largest portion of the KCRHA’s overspending resulted from errors in calculating how much money the agency would receive as the result of grants to homeless service providers.

Every dollar of funding the KCRHA receives and sends to service providers in the form of grants comes with an “administrative allowance”—a percentage of the contract amount that enables the KCRHA to administer the contracts. But that allowance is based on how much of the money actually gets spent—if a provider can’t use all the money it receives in a certain year, the amount the KCRHA receives to administer that money also decreases.

What the KCRHA did, according to the report, was assume that 100 percent of every grant it administered would be spent each year, and spent the administrative allowance that would apply if that was true. This resulted, over time, in an administrative “overspend,” based on contractor underspending of $259 million, of $15.7 million by July 2026. On top of that, the KCRHA overspent what it was bringing in by another $3.3 million on top of the amount that resulted from that miscalculation. And the KCRHA owed an outstanding $4.4 million in interest on its debt to King County, which serves as the KCRHA’s bank.

“The general idea is because they didn’t have the [necessary] financial practices in place, it was difficult for KCRHA to see this happening,” King County’s Rubardt said. “We have asked for a followup on the timing of all the accumulation, but my sense is that’s been occurring over the entire time the KCRHA has been in existence.”

Pennucci said the total amount of outstanding administrative debt will probably “come down” by the end of the year, as grantees spend more money. Interest payments, meanwhile, will keep accruing on the KCRHA’s negative bank balance, resulting in a larger interest balance by the end of the year.

The KCRHA’s governing board, made up of elected officials from across the region, will discuss the findings of the report at its meeting on November 6. When I asked whether anyone will be held accountable for the agency’s expensive errors, Wilson’s director of city governance and human services, Mark Ellerbrook, said it will be up to the governing board “to work on and wrestle with” that question.

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homelessness, King County, Media

No, King County Didn’t Write a $10 Million “Blank Check” for Youth Homelessness

By Erica C. Barnett

On Seattle Nice last week, we briefly discussed a column by the Seattle Times’  Danny Westneat, titled “Another ‘blank check’ program passes at King County.” I had just read the column the morning we recorded, and—never a good idea—assumed that Westneat had his facts basically correct.

Silly me.

The program Westneat spent several hundred words deriding as a $10 million “blank check”—which, side note, is not what a “blank check” is—is a 0.01 percent sales tax, which works out to about $4 a year, to fund youth homelessness programs. Westneat, acknowledging that the tax would provide “rather tiny amount—just $10 million per year for three years”—nonetheless says the county can’t be trusted to pass a tax without a predetermined spending plan, because of  “a series of blunders and mismanagement that have focused a Klieg light on local social services funding.”

Specifically, Westneat claims, the Best Starts for Kids program was designed to let county workers decide what to fund “on the fly,” resulting in “chicanery,” improper payments, and possible fraud. Because of this, Westneat argues, all county human services programs (and only those programs) deserve special scrutiny. Targeting the unrelated Health Through Housing program, which provides permanent supportive housing in existing buildings, Westneat claims that operating costs have “soared,” and that the program will never reach its goals.

“[C]an we at least admit we have a problem?” Westneat kvetches. “Why these councils don’t just flesh out a clear spending plan with goals and oversight from the beginning is beyond me, but it’s probably because there’s no fallout with the voters when they don’t.”

“Until then, it seems the blank checks are only going to keep on coming.”

Much as I wish Westneat’s dashed-off ragebait didn’t have an impact, he’s influential—pundits and elected leaders routinely cite his columns as evidence to support their own positions, even when they’re full of half-truths and outright errors, like this one.

Wanting to know more about what the sales tax for youth homelessness will actually fund, I called the proposal’s sponsor, King County Councilmember Jorge Barón. To my surprise, given how much coverage the tax plan has received, he told me I was the first reporter to contact him about his bill.

“It’s not a blank check,” Barón said, sounding exasperated. (I get it—it’s not the first time the Seattle Times has run an error-riddled opinion piece about the tax without talking to its sponsor). To begin with, “there are already guardrails in the state legislation” that created the new taxing authority, limiting spending to “child care; perinatal support services;  before-school and after-school based youth services that address mental, social, behavioral, and physical health; workforce capacity building; shelter and rental assistance; and client transportation.”

“The state has given us clear direction on what this money can be used for, which is very limiting,” Barón said.

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Moreover, Barón said, the county is going to adopt a spending plan—the thing Westneat claims they have no plan to do—in November, once they know how much money they can actually expect from the tax. Although Westneat wrote that the tax will net the county $10.3 million, the actual amount could be significantly less, Barón explained, because other cities within King County also have the authority to pass the same tax. The county has to credit every city that passes their own sales tax increase for its portion of the total, so they’re waiting to find out how much they’ll actually have to spend over the three-year life of the tax.

“There is going to be a spending plan. The details are being finalized,” Barón told me.

Spending plans aren’t the same thing as dictating specific agencies the county will fund, which means the spending plan the county adopts will probably be less prescriptive than Westneat seems to be suggesting it should be—that is, they set general parameters around how the money should be spent but give local officials the ability to select specific projects over the life of the tax.

This is standard practice. The six-year Seattle transit levy that’s on the November ballot, for instance, lays out nine broad spending categories, including bus service hours and transit “safety supports,” but keeps those categories general to allow the city to decide on specific projects in the future.

For this more targeted, three-year levy, though, the county already has a half-dozen specific youth and family projects in mind, including a Seattle shelter operated by Mary’s Place that is slated for closure; Friends of Youth’s Eastside shelter program; the ROOTS youth shelter in the University District; and the YMCA’s Social Impact Center in South King County.

Zooming out from the sales tax plan, Westneat also exaggerates the findings of a high-profile audit of grants made during the pandemic as part of the county’s Best Starts for Kids levy. Westneat claimed the audit found the $900 million program was “awash in improper payments and possible fraud.” (The aforementioned error-riddled op/ed claimed the county “lost untold millions of dollars” to waste and fraud, an inaccurate claim that a first-year fact checker would have flagged immediately.)

In reality, the audit looked at 19 grants, totaling about $12 million, that included funding for community groups that had never previously held county contracts. Ultimately, the audit found $320,000 in improper or questionable payments, including a little over $10,000 in potential fraud, although the county never actually paid out that money. All told, the county is working to recover about $58,000 in potentially improper payments. The county absolutely screwed up by failing to closely monitor these programs. But that hardly makes the entire levy program “awash” in fraud.

Westneat’s cheap shot at Health Through Housing is wrong, too. Citing his own previous column about problems at one of the former hotels King County tried to convert into housing, Westneat suggests the entire enterprise has failed. The program, he claims, “has never reached its goals” and “likely won’t now,” since the county has stopped buying up old motels.

In terms of the total number of units, Westneat’s correct—the program’s goal was to “create and operate” 1,600 units, and the county only reached 1,423, including nearly 1,000 units of permanent supportive housing. Rising costs have stalled building acquisition, and NIMBY opposition has also slowed down specific projects.

In terms of success at getting chronically homeless people into permanent supportive housing—housing for people with physical and mental disabilities that includes wraparound services and minimal barriers to entry—Health Through Housing is an indisputable success. Of the hundreds of formerly homeless people living in permanent supportive housing through the program (768 as of the end of 2025, a number that has grown since then with the full and partial openings of three more buildings), 93 percent remained housed, meaning they didn’t return to homelessness.

Being housed, as the name of the program suggests, resulted in dramatic reductions in emergency room visits, hospitalizations, and jail bookings. Improving people’s health and stability, and reducing involvement in the criminal legal system, are also key Health Through Housing goals, which the program has achieved year after year.

Although Westneat is scandalized that the average operating cost for these units was $3,400 last year, that number represents the cost of providing supportive services that make it possible for homeless people with long-term disabilities to stay in their housing instead of sleeping on sidewalks and in encampments. In other words, it’s not $3,400 in “rent” per month, but an all-in number that include the “wraparound services” Seattle liberals like Westneat always say we need in order to keep people from living on the streets.

We’ll be discussing the new tax again on this week’s Seattle Nice. We also got into the details on KUOW’s Week in Review last week, where a fellow guest called my work to report this story out “adorable” before dismissing everything I said.