Category: homelessness

homelessness, housing, human services, King County

With the Departure of Founding CEO Dones, What Comes Next for the Region’s Homelessness Agency?

By Erica C. Barnett

When the King County Regional Homelessness Authority’s founding CEO, Marc Dones, announced they were stepping down earlier this month (news PubliCola broke on Twitter from vacation), reactions among homeless service providers, advocates, and agency insiders ranged from sighs of relief to deep concern over what’s next for the beleaguered agency.

Over the past two years, since Dones was hired in March 2021, the KCRHA has struggled to find its footing through a series of pivots, funding battles with Seattle and King County, and internal and public debates over its mission.

Did Seattle and King County create a regional homelessness agency to solve homelessness as quickly as possible, or is the KCRHA merely a clearinghouse for homeless service contracts previously administered by Seattle and King County, its two primary funders? Should the KCRHA set regional policies and spending priorities and expect its member cities to fall in line, or should cities have freedom to establish their own strategies based on their own local politics and context? Is “housing first” a nonnegotiable goal, or is shelter, even basic shelter with mats on the floor, a critical part of the region’s approach to homelessness?

One thing is clear: With Dones out, there is a power vacuum at KCRHA that will be difficult to fill, in a very practical sense: Despite the usual talk of a “thorough national search,” it’s unlikely the agency will be overwhelmed with qualified applicants. Dones, readers may recall, was the second pick for the position, and ascended to the job after the KCRHA board’s first choice, Regina Cannon, turned it down in 2020. The position now comes pre-loaded with two years of baggage and more urgency than ever; a new CEO will need not just a big-picture vision for the region, but a plan to show swift progress on homelessness and get the authority back on track.

Prior to taking the CEO position, Dones was a homelessness consultant whose firm, the National Innovation Service, created the framework for the KCRHA. As the architect of the regional plan, Dones frequently fought efforts to alter it, battling with local leaders over funding priorities, questioning the expertise of longtime service providers, and expending scarce political capital on ambitious plans that didn’t always pan out—like an early proposal to make big investments in safe parking lots for the thousands of people living in their vehicles across King County.

Under Dones’ leadership, the KCRHA established a clear picture of the homelessness problem in King County, but the agency also fell behind schedule on many of its initial goals.

Dones’ supporters praised them as a visionary who emphasized the disproportionate impact of homelessness on people of color,  particularly Black King County residents, foregrounded and empowered people with direct, “lived” experience of homelessness, and never shied away from telling the unvarnished truth about what it would take to truly end homelessness in the region. Critics said Dones elevated lived experience over practical expertise, engaged in unnecessary battles with potential allies like Mayor Bruce Harrell and homeless service providers, and focused on the 10,000-foot view while neglecting ground-level basics, like opening severe weather shelters and paying homeless services providers on time.

Under Dones’ leadership, the KCRHA established a clear picture of the homelessness problem in King County—tens of thousands of people are living unsheltered, in vehicles, and in emergency housing such as hotels and congregate shelters—and housing or even sheltering them all is a problem with a price tag of billions of dollars a year.

But the agency also fell behind schedule on many of its initial goals, including relatively short-term commitments like the plan, announced with great fanfare in February 2022, to end unsheltered homelessness in downtown Seattle in “as little as 12 months” through a public-private partnership with the corporate-backed nonprofit agency We Are In. Although efforts to respond to homelessness continue downtown—including escalated sweeps by the city of Seattle, combined with more thoughtful one-off projects like the Third Avenue Project—unsheltered homelessness remains a pervasive issue in the area.

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The plan, known as Partnership for Zero, was for the KCRHA to use private donations to hire dozens of outreach workers with “lived experience,” who would serve as a single point of contact for people living unsheltered downtown, navigating them “longitudinally” and directly from street homelessness into permanent housing, much of it provided by private landlords motivated by a desire to help solve the homelessness crisis. The coordinating body for this partnership is a “housing command center” that meets daily to discuss clients’ individual cases, with the goal of moving them into permanent housing that works for them.

From inception, there were a number of issues with this approach, chief among them the fact that Seattle—unlike, say, New Orleans and Houston, two cities that have successfully moved people directly from the streets to housing—does not have an abundance of vacant apartments, much less housing low-income people can afford. (The Partnership for Zero plan assumes that, in many cases, people will begin paying full rent after a year or so of subsidy).

The plan also assumes that Medicaid will become the primary funding source for the partnership, an assumption many providers have called premature, given the difficulties existing agencies face securing Medicaid reimbursement even for services that are traditionally covered by the federal program.

By setting up a in-house outreach program that duplicated work the agency’s own nonprofit outreach contractors have been providing for years, the KCRHA also created an unequal system in which government employees receive substantially higher pay, and access to more housing resources, than existing outreach providers. This two-track system has understandably irked some nonprofit outreach agencies, who have protested that setting up a parallel system puts them at a disadvantage when it comes to helping clients and retaining qualified staff, who can earn far more money doing the same job for the KCRHA.

The agency’s initial five-year plan—widely, if somewhat unfairly, criticized for being a “$12 billion plan to end homelessness”—included a number of unforced errors, beyond its eye-popping price tag.

More importantly, the partnership hasn’t produced the results it promised, putting about 200 people so far on a “path” toward housing, according to the KCRHA—one reason agency leaders could sunset the program in the post-Dones era.

One criticism of the KCRHA, under Dones’ leadership, is that Dones’ big-picture proposals have sometimes been at odds with political and practical realities. For example, the agency’s initial five-year plan—widely, if somewhat unfairly, criticized for being a “$12 billion plan to end homelessness”—included a number of unforced errors, beyond its eye-popping price tag.

Under the agreement that established the KCRHA, the five-year plan was supposed to set out practical goals for the first five years of agency operations, with the goal of reducing homelessness among specific population groups. Instead, the initial version of the plan laid out what it would cost, in theory, to eliminate unsheltered homelessness in five years. (The plan does not deal directly with housing, which is the responsibility of other agencies, like the city of Seattle’s Office of Housing.) The plan proposed spending billions of dollars a year on shelter, along with thousands of new “safe parking” spaces for people living in their vehicles—an utterly impractical proposal, given the region’s inability to site even one permanent safe lot in more than a decade of efforts to do so.

The initial five-year plan also called for reducing funding for tiny house villages, singling out this shelter type (along with the region’s tiny house village provider, the Low Income Housing Institute) as undesirable despite the fact that the city of Seattle, the KCRHA’s chief funder, prefers to fund tiny houses over almost every other form of shelter. Defending the proposal to cut funding for tiny houses while investing billions in other forms of shelter and parking lots for people to live in their cars, Dones said it was “just math,” pointing to a survey the agency conducted of about 180 homeless people that was used to determine the mix of services in the plan.

The proposal antagonized other existing shelter providers, too, by asserting that almost one in four shelter beds are vacant (and, by implication, useless). And it set off alarms among suburban city leaders because it called for the complete elimination of funding for congregate shelters—the only form of shelter that exists in many cities outside Seattle.

Ultimately, the agency adopted a rewritten plan that omitted most of the prescriptive language from the initial proposal, along with language criticizing the purported failures of the existing shelter system. While the original proposal included seven goals and dozens of sub-strategies, the plan adopted by the agency’s boards earlier this month focuses on “one goal”: Reducing unsheltered homelessness and preventing homeless people from dying. More than 30 pages lighter than the original proposal, the new five-year plan meets the bare minimum requirements of the KCRHA’s charter while allowing plenty of room for future leaders to pick their own priorities. Continue reading “With the Departure of Founding CEO Dones, What Comes Next for the Region’s Homelessness Agency?” →

homelessness, King County

County Won’t Participate in Planned Sweep of Burien Encampment Residents
Image via City of Burien

By Erica C. Barnett

An encampment on property owned by the city of Burien could be swept as soon as this week, after a nonprofit animal shelter run by the director of Discover Burien, a local business group, secured the right to lease the property from the city starting on June 1, and—according to Burien City Manager Adolfo Bailon—evict the people living there. The shelter, Burien CARES, has said it plans to “revert” the property, which had been an informal dog park, “back to its most recent use by the community as a dog recreation and relief area.”

The encampment was originally located next to City Hall and the downtown Burien branch of the King County Library system, but was booted earlier this year after the condo association that owns the property, whose sole members are the library and the city, voted to make the area around the building a “no-camping” zone. Encampments are also banned in all city parks, limiting where people can legally sleep to bits of city-owned property like the one Burien CARES now plans to lease.

“If the city had taken the responsibility and said, ‘here’s a spot for the people living at City Hall,’ and put up some boundaries, [the encampment] probably wouldn’t have grown,” said Nancy Kick, a Burien resident and activist who opposes sweeping the encampment. “This was all foreseeable; if you don’t create a solution, then the solution creates itself. It’s going to just be what it is and you can’t control it at all.”

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Although local advocates and outreach groups have asked King County and the King County Regional Homelessness Authority to help secure housing or shelter for the dozens of people who will be forced to move their tents elsewhere in Burien if the sweep takes place, those efforts have been unsuccessful.

Earlier this month, KCRHA director Anne Martens told PubliCola agency staffers have been meeting with outreach, shelter, and advocacy groups, as well as the city of Burien, and “continue to work together to seek housing and shelter placements.” However, as of last week, those talks hadn’t resulted in a solution for the dozens of people who stand to be evicted from the site this week.

Last week, King County Executive Dow Constantine informed the city of Burien that the county sheriff’s department, which provides Burien’s police force, would not help Burien CARES or city officials remove encampment residents from the property.

“Although the City currently owns the City Lot, it has not identified housing alternatives for the persons who live there despite constitutional duties imposed on the City under federal law,” the letter, signed by Constantine’s general counsel, David Hackett, says. “Instead, the City is attempting to circumvent those duties by entering a lease with a private party, who will maintain and continue the use of the City Lot as a public dog park while attempting to use criminal trespass to force unhoused persons from the premises.”

Meanwhile, the Burien City City Council has scheduled a special meeting for Tuesday, May 30 to discuss—among other combatively worded agenda items—”the best response to the fact that Burien is one of the few, if not the only, jurisdiction other than Seattle to welcome a DESC facility, and yet King County refuses to help Burien help the unhoused” and “the value of the contract for King County Sheriff’s Office services since the Sheriff’s Office refuses to provide police services.”

Under a 2019 federal circuit court ruling called Martin v. Boise, governments can’t force people to move from public property if there is no suitable shelter available. Burien’s approach of leasing out its land and having its tenant evict encampment residents represents an attempt to “evade the holding in Martin,” Hackett wrote, because the land is still city property—and the city hasn’t offered the homeless people living there anywhere else to go.

Burien disagrees with this, arguing that the city doesn’t have an ordinance banning people from sleeping on city property in general, just parks, and that the city is “not asking for or seeking criminal penalties, fines, or even arrests” for the people it wants the sheriff’s department to assist in removing from its property.

Gallagher, a spokesman for Constantine, said the county has “continuously engaged with the City of Burien throughout the past few months to help the city identify a solution that meets the needs of our shared residents. Homelessness is a regional problem, and every jurisdiction plays a part in finding solutions. But that regional aspect doesn’t alleviate cities from the responsibility of serving their residents and taking action directly in their community.”

Last year the Burien City Council approved a new Downtown Emergency Service Center project that will provide 95 units of permanent supportive housing, with 30 percent of the units reserved for Burien residents. However, that building won’t come online until next year.

Meanwhile, the Burien City City Council has scheduled a special meeting for Tuesday, May 30 to discuss—among other combatively worded agenda items—”the best response to the fact that Burien is one of the few, if not the only, jurisdiction other than Seattle to welcome a DESC facility, and yet King County refuses to help Burien help the unhoused” and “the value of the contract for King County Sheriff’s Office services since the Sheriff’s Office refuses to provide police services.”

homelessness, human services, King County, Uncategorized

Homeless Service Providers, Many Unpaid Since Last Year, Demand Reforms
The Low-Income Housing Institute, which runs tiny house villages around the region, is one of more than a dozen agencies to sign the letter asking for reforms to KCRHA’s contracting process.

By Erica C. Barnett

More than a dozen homeless service providers have written a letter to the King County Regional Homelessness Authority’s implementation board, as well as agency CEO Marc Dones, asking for action after the agency has failed, for a second year, to sign contracts and pay agencies on time.

The letter, which is signed by the leaders of Solid Ground, YouthCare, the Multiservice Center, and other housing and shelter providers, says the KCRHA needs to undertake “major reforms and changes in procedure … to ensure that our critical human services infrastructure doesn’t break under pressure, and that service agencies can be adequately supported to make progress on our shared goals of ending homelessness in our community.”

Providers also showed up at the KCRHA’s implementation board meeting Wednesday to make it clear that their concerns have not been addressed.

In response to the letter, KCRHA spokeswoman Anne Martens said, “we appreciate the thoughtful recommendations from providers and are reviewing how to best integrate their feedback.”

The KCRHA oversees more than 300 contracts totaling more than $110 million. As of May 9, the authority had signed just over 150 of those contracts and paid invoices worth a total of around $15 million, according to Martens. The Seattle Times wrote last week about the contract delays.

In internal emails, the KCRHA has attributed the contract delays, in part, to providers requesting changes to their new, non-negotiable “boilerplate” contracts, as well as a complex new software system called Fluxx that has “bugs”—for example, it doesn’t notify providers when it’s their turn to look at a document they’re working on with KCRHA staff, and deletes users’ work if they have to go back and make a change. Martens said providers can set up notifications through Fluxx, but said the KCRHA is “actively working on stabilizing Fluxx to improve provider experience, and will also be evaluating other potential systems.”

The providers are asking the implementation board to delay plans to rebid and re-procure all homeless service provider contracts, planned for 2024, for at least a year “so that the KCRHA can demonstrate that it can manage its existing workload and normalize invoice and payment practices and timelines.”

The new form contracts reportedly include a reduction in the amount the KCRHA will pay for agency operations, or overhead (from 15 to 10 percent of the overall contract budget) and changes to contract requirements that could impact agencies’ ability to secure funding from other sources to do work that is partly funded by the KCRHA. Update: After publication, Martens contacted us to say this information, which came from a homeless service provider, was incorrect and that the new contracts do not limit indirect costs to 10 percent.

PubliCola has asked KCRHA for a copy of its new boilerplate contract language.

For more than four months, service providers big and small have been using up their reserves, even going into debt, to keep programs going; the Low-Income Housing Institute, for example, has “floated” more than $3 million, while YouthCare, a smaller agency, used up most of its existing $1 million line of credit to pay staffers and keep programs going. The Downtown Emergency Service Center and Compass Housing, which decided last year it would no longer contract with KCRHA to provide emergency shelter during freezing weather, also experienced payment delays.

“Operating reserves exist for emergencies, like responding to the Covid-19 pandemic; they are not there to cushion what should be a straightforward administrative function from KCRHA,” the letter says. “For some small organizations it could result in layoffs, or worse, put them out of business.”

Late payments to service providers are not strictly a KCRHA phenomenon. Before the KCRHA took over the region’s homelessness system, service providers that contracted with the city’s Human Services Department often operated without contracts for months as well; in May 2021, for example, outreach providers that had already gone unpaid for months declined to sign contracts that included new requirements that were incompatible with their organizational missions.

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In their letter, the providers ask the implementation board to delay plans to rebid and re-procure all homeless service provider contracts, planned for 2024, for at least a year “so that the KCRHA can demonstrate that it can manage its existing workload and normalize invoice and payment practices and timelines.” In April, the Seattle/King County Coalition on Homelessness called the KCRHA’s timeline for re-procuring its contracts plan “high risk, and said it “should only be initiated once core functions for contracting are solidly in place at KCRHA.”

The letter also requests immediate actions to make sure that providers will get paid in future years, regardless of whether KCRHA has finalized their contracts. For example, they write, “KCRHA should automatically extend all contracts through the first quarter of each year,” replacing these first-quarter contracts with the final contract once it’s signed. In addition, they write, the authority should pay 75 percent of invoices up front, instead of waiting until they’ve gone through a detailed review that one provider said can amount to a type of audit.

For delays that require providers to take on debt to stay in operation, the letter continues, the “KCRHA should compensate providers for these financial losses that are tied to administrative delays.”

In the long run, the providers say, the KCRHA should take on the responsibility for proactively contacting providers to let them know about delays, update the implementation board regularly about contract execution and delays, allow providers to consolidate contracts that are similar or duplicative, such as contracts for the same type of shelter in different locations, and include cost of living pay increases in all contracts,

Crime, homelessness

Board Overseeing Federal Homelessness Funds Erupts Into Shouts Over Nomination of Sex Offender

By Erica C. Barnett

The King County Regional Homelessness Authority has asked a member of its Continuum of Care board to step down after she yelled at a fellow board member who objected to the appointment of a proposed new board member, pointing out that he is a registered sex offender and accusing him of behaving inappropriately toward her in the past.

In an email to KCRHA staff and board members last Thursday, KCRHA chief program officer Peter Lynn said he was formally asking the board co-chair, Shanéé Colston, to resign after she “shouted down committee member Kristina Sawyckyj for identifying that one of the prospective AC nominees was a registered sex offender, which is public information. Ms. Sawyckyj was also shouted down by Chair Colston when she spoke of her experience being inappropriately touched by the nominee.”

The continuum of care board plays an important role in securing homelessness funds from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development. It reviews and approves applications for federal funding, oversees annual funding renewal requests and performance metrics for homeless service providers, and creates a prioritization tool to judge funding applications.

During a flurry of overlapping shouts, another board member interjected that she had had “nothing but good experiences with [the nominee]” and told Sawyckvj she should contact the police, which Sawyckvj said she had. Sawyckyj went silent, and eventually left the meeting.

The argument began a little more than 45 minutes into the meeting (viewable on the board’s website, which contains a trigger warning for the meeting), when board member Kristina Sawyckyj objected to the appointment of a man who has been convicted for multiple sex offenses involving teenage girls.

In 2010, when he was 25, he was convicted of harboring a minor, a 13-year-old runaway with whom he had a sexual relationship, according to court records. Two years later, the nominee was charged with raping a minor in a case involving a 15-year-old girl; he ultimately pled guilty to communicating with a minor for immoral purposes, a felony sex crime. In 2018, Seattle police found him living in a tent near the Seattle waterfront with a 17-year-old girl, whose mother picked her up and took her home, according to Seattle court records.

Also on the agenda at the delayed meeting: An update to the charter for the Continuum of Care Board, which the board has proposed amending to specify that all 19 members must have lived experience of homelessness or housing instability.

“[He] is a sex offender, a repeat sex offender, and I have had [a] bad experience with him,” Sawyckyj said, adding that the nominee had “touched me” inappropriately in the past.

At that point, Colston cut her off, yelling, “we don’t do that here” and saying it was against board rules to “out” someone who was convicted of a sex crime. During a flurry of overlapping comments, another board member interjected that she had had “nothing but good experiences with [the nominee]” and told Sawyckvj she should contact the police, which Sawyckvj said she had.

Sawyckyj went silent, then left the meeting, while Colston continued. “I’m telling you that you cannot talk like that in this meeting. I will not have that here!” Colston said. “If anyone wants to talk like that you will be muted and removed from this meeting,” she said. “This is about equity. And everyone—everyone— deserves housing. I don’t care if they’re a sex offender! … This is an inclusive space, and we are equitable to all.”

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The new board members were supposed to be confirmed during a special meeting last Friday, but the KCRHA canceled the meeting on Thursday. “This unacceptable behavior by leadership of the CoC Advisory Committee has created a hostile environment for KCRHA staff and committee members,” Lynn wrote in his email. “I will be working with KCRHA leadership and our attorneys to determine the next steps to ensure the safety of all those involved in the [board].

Also on the agenda at the delayed meeting: An update to the charter for the Continuum of Care Board, which the board has proposed amending to specify that all 19 members must have lived experience of homelessness or housing instability. The board, which is required by federal policy, predates the KCRHA. In its pre-KCRHA iterations, the board included elected officials, homeless and human service providers, and government staff, in addition to people with direct experience of homelessness.

homelessness, housing, human services, King County

Will Voter Approval of Crisis Centers Spur a More Ambitious Vets and Human Services Levy?
Revenue breakdown for a levy at 10 cents per $1,000; via King County

By Erica C. Barnett

The King County Regional Policy Committee—a group of regional leaders that makes policy recommendations to the King County Council—voted narrowly on Monday to put off a decision about the size of the Veterans, Seniors, and Human Services Levy proposal, which will be on the ballot in August, until after Tuesday’s vote on a countywide behavioral health-care levy.

The crisis centers levy, which is currently winning by a 10-point margin, will create five new behavioral health crisis centers and fund new residential mental health care beds. A wide margin of victory for the crisis centers levy could provide a gauge of voters’ appetite for new taxes to fund human services; the last time the veterans’ levy was renewed, in 2017, it passed with 69 percent of the vote. The levy pays for housing, domestic violence prevention, senior centers, and supportive services for low-income and homeless veterans, seniors, and other King County residents.

The debate for the RPC and the county council itself comes down to how large the levy should be. Some committee members representing the suburban Sound Cities Association, including Auburn Mayor Nancy Backus, supported renewing the levy at the current rate of 10 cents per $1,000 of property value, which Backus called a “true renewal,” rather than raising it to 12 cents, as the county council’s budget committee recommended last week.

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Others, including King County Councilmember Claudia Balducci, who represents Bellevue, said a higher rate would help offset inflation, which has eroded the impact of the levy. “A straight rollover—even though, because of the way property tax calculations work, it would generate more dollars—… would not keep pace with the needs, and in fact we would be falling behind,” Balducci said.

Last week, after what Balducci called a “robust discussion,” the county council’s budget committee recommended boosting the initial levy in light of analysis showing that thanks to inflation, a flat renewal at the 10-cent level will significantly reduce the amount of housing the levy will build, and force outright cuts to housing operations and rental assistance.

Renewing the levy at the original, 10-cent initial level would cost the owner of a median (in 2024), $838,000 home just under $84 a year—an increase of about $17 a year from the current levy, whose rate has declined over time as property values have skyrocketed. (By law, the amount of funding the levy produces can only increase by 3.5 percent a year, so property value growth higher than that rate results in a reduction to the “effective rate” of the tax, which is currently just over 8 percent.) At that rate, the levy will raise about $564 million over six years.

A 12-cent rate, for comparison, would cost the same homeowner about $100 a year and raise around $678 million a year.

In previous levy discussions, opponents of a larger levy have suggested the higher levy could overburden homeowners who are struggling to make ends meet. In an RPC meeting earlier this month, Backus said, “I fear tax fatigue, and I want to make sure that both of these levies pass. I would love to see them go higher. But I just don’t think right now is the time when so many people are struggling.”

The RPC will hold a special meeting on Friday afternoon to vote on the levy, and the county council is scheduled to vote on a final ballot measure at its meeting Monday.

homelessness, human services, legislature

In Last-Minute Bailout, State Provides $6 Million to Pay for Hotel Shelters That Ran Out of Money Last Month

By Erica C. Barnett

In the final days of the state legislative session, Seattle lawmakers quietly bailed out a hotel-based homeless shelter program that ran out of money in early April, using $6 million in “underspend” from a program that addresses encampments in state-owned rights-of-way to keep the hotels open while the King County Homelessness Authority tries to find places for hotel residents to go.

The KCRHA has until the end of June to spend the money, which can only be used to “maintain the operations of, and transition people out of, as appropriate, a hotel housing more than 100 people experiencing homelessness that is at imminent risk of closure due to a lack of funding,” according to language state Rep. Nicole Macri (D-43, Seattle) and Sen. Joe Nguyen (D-34, Seattle) inserted into this year’s supplemental budget.

“Generally speaking, a request of that amount coming this late would not have had the sympathy that it did. At that point, I was like, ‘I don’t want 300-plus families to be unsheltered.'”

—State Sen. Joe Nguyen[/perfectpullquote]

“[KCRHA CEO] Marc Dones reached out, saying they had discovered this crisis several weeks [earlier], saying they had been trying to figure out how to transition people” out of the hotels, Macri said. At the time, the KCRHA estimated there were more than 300 people living in rooms at six hotels, a number that has since dwindled. “They said this is an urgent need—it’s an immediate need right now.”

“Generally speaking, a request of that amount coming this late would not have had the sympathy that it did,” Nguyen said. “At that point… I was like, ‘I don’t want 300-plus families to be unsheltered.'”

Because it was so late in the session, Macri said, it wasn’t possible to just move the underspent dollars from one year’s budget to the next. A change like that would require legislation to reallocate the funds, which are earmarked for the highway encampment program. Instead, the state Department of Commerce provided supplemental budget language that allowed the KCRHA to use the leftover money, which would otherwise have gone back to the state’s general fund, to pay for the hotels.

As PubliCola reported exclusively earlier this month, the Lived Experience Coalition received a total of $1.3 million in federal grants through the United Way of King County, but the money ran out earlier this year, forcing a scramble to save the program.

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The LEC, formed in 2018, is a group of people who have direct experience with homelessness or systems that homeless people frequently encounter, such as the mental health care system. Until last year, they had never been in charge of a shelter or housing program. The LEC has blamed the hotel crisis on its fiscal sponsor, a nonprofit called Building Changes, which denies responsibility for financial errors.

We Are In, the funder for Partnership for Zero, stepped up to pay for the hotels through the first week of April. (According to a spokesman, the two We Are In board members who are affiliated with the LEC recused themselves from the vote.) The KCRHA is planning an investigation into what happened with the hotels, which will be paid for by the Campion Advocacy Fund, one of We Are In’s funders. Later this month, the authority reportedly plans to discuss the hotels during a joint meeting of the agency’s governing and implementation boards.

Meanwhile, Dones has said the regional authority only recently became aware of the hotel funding crisis and had nothing to do with the LEC’s contract to run the hotels. However, the KCRHA’s own downtown outreach workers, known as systems advocates, placed dozens of people in the hotels this year as part of the Partnership for Zero, a public-private partnership aimed at ending unsheltered homelessness downtown.

It’s unclear why the KCRHA asked for so much spending authority. “I really left it to the executive branch to vet it and to determine, ‘is this a reasonable thing to do?'” State Rep. Nicole Macri said. “I didn’t get a clear accounting.”

At its peak, the hotel shelter program was spending more than $1 million a month to pay for about 250 hotel rooms, including rooms in two last-chance hotels for people who had been kicked out of other locations due to behavioral issues. If the KCRHA uses up the entire $6 million between April and the end of June, it will have spent $2 million a month.

It’s unclear why the KCRHA asked for so much spending authority. “I really left it to the executive branch to vet it and to determine, ‘is this a reasonable thing to do?'” Macri said. “I didn’t get a clear accounting. … It seems like a lot.” A Commerce Department staffer did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.

When PubliCola inquired about the hotels this week, a KCRHA spokeswoman said “our team is continuing to match people to resources” and that it would be a day or two before they could provide details about plans to wind down the hotels and how much it will cost. “We’re still finalizing some of the locations and ensuring that everyone is taken care of,” the spokeswoman said Tuesday.

In a joint statement sent to PubliCola after this story was published, the offices of Gov. Jay Inslee, King County Executive Dow Constantine, and Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell said, “This hotel voucher program was launched and operated independently from any city, regional, or state effort. When our teams were alerted to the situation, we worked with partners in the public and private sectors to identify potential solutions and coordinate with the King County Regional Homelessness Authority (KCRHA).”

“Without continued funding, hundreds of individuals that include families with children and seniors with significant health issues would likely return to living outside. Because of the vulnerability of this population, the Legislature approved the governor’s request for $6 million to further support this transition effort.”

Sharon Lee, the director of the Low-Income Housing Institute, said the KCRHA asked LIHI for access to some of its tiny houses, including units that are ordinarily reserved for referrals from the city’s HOPE Team, which offers shelter to people living in encampments. Many of those living at the hotels will need shelter that can accommodate special needs, including women and families fleeing domestic violence and well as people with debilitating mental and physical health issues.

In addition to her work as a legislator, Macri works as a deputy director at the Downtown Emergency Service Center, which provides shelter, health care, and housing. She said Dones initially asked for six months to move people out of the hotels, but that she suggested a quicker time frame “because of the high cost.” However, she noted that it can be challenging to find shelter and other resources for people with high needs, especially in a city with so few available shelter beds.

In 2021, DESC had to relocate 130 people from an emergency COVID shelter at Seattle Center to other locations when that shelter shut down. “Of course, DESC does operate other shelters, so we were able to slowly refer people to beds at DESC and other providers,” but even that took three months, Macri said. To make it work, “we had to redeploy staff [and] stop taking referrals”—a tradeoff that meant people living unsheltered were unable to access those shelter beds.

The right-of-way cleanup program, originally proposed by Gov. Jay Inslee to reduce the number of encampments on property owned by the Washington State Department of Transportation, funds JustCARE, a program headed up by the Public Defender Association that shifted its focus last year to provide case management and shelter exclusively for people living on state-owned rights-of-way. According to the Department of Commerce, the program was fully or partly responsible for sheltering or housing more than 300 people in King County. The The reallocation,  reduces the KCRHA’s 2022-2023 budget for right-of-way work from $45 million to $39 million.

Health, homelessness, housing, human services

Marquee Plan to End Unsheltered Homelessness Depends on Federal Funding Source Some Call Risky
Image via We Are In.

By Erica C. Barnett

Last week, the King County Regional Homelessness Authority’s implementation and governing boards approved a 2024 budget proposal that assumes the agency will receive significant future funding from Medicaid to keep the Partnership for Zero program, which aims to end unsheltered homelessness in downtown Seattle, going. Currently, the program is funded by corporate and philanthropic donations through a public-private partnership called We Are In.

The federal funding would come through a statewide program for Medicaid clients called Foundational Community Supports that funds “pre-tenancy” services for chronically homeless people—everything from getting an ID to negotiating an apartment lease.

“Based on current research, we estimate that Medicaid will reimburse 85% of Partnership for Zero (PfZ) costs,” or about $5.2 million, the KCRHA’s 2024 budget says. In 2022, a group of corporate and philanthropic donors pledged $10 million to fund the initial downtown Seattle “demonstration project,” which pays case managers known as system advocates to connect people living downtown to services, shelter and housing. Over the next five years, KCRHA plans to expand Partnership for Zero countywide.

Several members of both boards, including Auburn Mayor Nancy Backus, expressed reservations about relying on a federal program that the KCRHA has never used before to fund one of the agency’s marquee initiatives. “I’m just concerned about approving [a budget] where you don’t have the money,” Backus said. “As someone who provides our budget to the council every two years, we never put anything in the budget … that’s aspirational.”

“I think that there were some estimates that were like, ‘this will make it rain money,’ and then there were other estimates that were like, ‘this will get you two nickels.’ We feel confident that this is a capturable amount of revenue.”—KCRHA CEO Marc Dones

“I would love not to spend more money than we have,” KCRHA CEO Marc Dones responded. “So what we’re doing is a number of dry runs with Medicaid billing while we’re still entirely grant- funded”—essentially, submitting invoices for real services to see what gets rejected and approved.

“Our current conservative estimate [is] an 85 percent reimbursement,” Dones added. “I think that there were some estimates that were like, ‘this will make it rain money,’ and then there were other estimates that were like, ‘this will get you two nickels.’ We feel confident that this is a capturable amount of revenue.”

But providers and advocates familiar with Foundational Community Supports, speaking to PubliCola on background, said that although the concept behind FCS is extremely forward-thinking—the six-year-old program treats housing as a form of health care, which is new for Medicaid—relying so heavily on FCS to fund a costly, high-profile effort like Partnership for Zero is a significant risk.

To understand why, it’s helpful to understand a bit about how nonprofits use the program to fund services for unsheltered people in King County.

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Foundational Community Supports is a fee-for-service program; it pays $112 for every documented “encounter” between a service provider and a client, up to a maximum of six encounters a month. (In the case of KCRHA, the government itself, rather than a nonprofit, will be the service provider). If a case manager has a dozen clients and manages to document six encounters with each of them every month for a year, that adds up to about $95,000. The starting salary for KCRHA’s system advocates—formerly homeless peers who serve as case managers and outreach specialists for Partnership for Zero—is $75,000, so a $95,000 reimbursement would more than pay for both’ salaries and benefits, with some to spare for administration and other costs.

So far so good. Except, service providers say, that it’s almost impossible to “max out” on providing services to unsheltered people this way. Case managers must document each encounter with an unsheltered person in detail, with case notes that demonstrate what service they provided and how that encounter got the person closer to their housing goal.

Opportunities for “wasted” time abound. If a case worker goes out looking for a client and doesn’t find them—a common situation when trying to find unsheltered people, especially in a city that sweeps encampments—that time doesn’t count. If a case manager is new and still in training, or in the process of convincing someone to sign up for the program, that time doesn’t count. And if everything goes perfectly but the case notes are too short, or too long, or don’t include the right kind of details to convince the third-party administrator reviewing a person’s forms, that time doesn’t count either.

Because Foundational Community Supports isn’t a reliable source of funding, service providers don’t typically rely on it to fund entire programs; instead, they “braid” FCS with other funding sources to create a stable foundation for ongoing programs. The constant documentation and pressure to monetize every interaction with unsheltered clients can make it harder to build relationships with unsheltered people. According to one experienced homeless service provider, FCS is “just not really how rapport-based type outreach services relationships work, or how they’re usually delivered.”

Multiple people with Medicaid billing experience mentioned the concept of the “golden thread”–  a consistent narrative through every piece of documentation that explains why the person needs specific services and how each of those services are helping them achieve their self-determined goals. Failure to convincingly document that “thread” is “why a lot of claims get denied,” one former service provider said.

“We are comfortable that that’s a good number, but we’re not going to know until we start doing it and we’ll build a better and better understanding of what a successful reimbursement package is.”—KCRHA Chief Administrative Officer Meg Barclay

Facing pushback from board members last week, Dones pointed that the agency still has money left over from We Are In’s original $10 million commitment to pay for the program through 2023 and potentially beyond, if getting funds through Medicaid proves more challenging than the agency anticipates. And, KCRHA Chief Administrative Officer Meg Barclay noted, the KCRHA is consulting with the Corporation for Supportive Housing, which trains service providers to do Medicaid billing, to learn how to maximize their reimbursements.

Even so, Barclay added, Medicaid is “kind of a black box—sort of strange. So we are comfortable that that’s a good number, but we’re not going to know until we start doing it and we’ll build a better and better understanding of what a successful reimbursement package is.”

Debbie Thiele, CSH’s managing director for the western United States, told PubliCola last year that FCS is “designed to be as user-friendly as possible to a group of providers who are not health care providers.”

One implementation board member, Simha Reddy, said he saw the KCRHA’s effort to fund Partnership for Zero through Medicaid as an experiment that could be helpful to other nonprofit providers who could “jump on the bandwagon” and “learn alongside us.”

And Dones pointed out that the KCRHA won’t be the only government entity to rely on Medicaid funding to run a homelessness program—Spokane, they said, “funds a huge portion of their system” with Foundational Community Supports.

“I do think that the discussion around the difficulty of these dollars is not actually borne out by even our neighbors in Washington,” Dones told the implementation board last week. However, service providers who spoke with PubliCola said Spokane is both smaller (with a homeless population of around 1,800) and more affordable than King County, making it easier to house people in private-market housing and help them stay there.

The budget both boards approved last week isn’t a final spending plan. The KCRHA will send it to its two primary funders, King County and the city of Seattle, later this year, and adopt a finalized budget in December. What the votes represent is a bet on Dones’ plan to fund Partnership for Zero, which will otherwise run out of funding next year.

Editor’s note: Due to a transcription error by the author, the original version of this story incorrectly attributed Backus’ quote to Seattle Deputy Mayor Tiffany Washington.

City Council, homelessness, Transportation

Turns Out the City Will Remove Anti-Homeless Eco-Blocks After All—But Only For Their Own Projects

By Erica C. Barnett

On Tuesday, Seattle Department of Transportation crews removed some of the dozens of concrete “eco-blocks,” including many originally installed by Fremont Brewing to prevent homeless people from setting up tents or parking their RVs there, that abut a patch of mulched dirt known as the Leary Triangle.

They did not, however, remove any of the dozens of blocks that still surround the brewery, which is owned by Seattle City Councilmember Sara Nelson and her husband Matt Lincecum. The blocks have sprung up all around the city to prevent people who live in their vehicles from parking in industrial areas, which are the only parts of the city where RVs and oversized vehicles can park overnight. Fremont’s eco-blocks occupy two full block faces and prevent anyone, including neighborhood residents and visitors, from parking on either street without being in the roadway.

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Placing obstructions in the public right-of-way, including sidewalks, curb space, and parking strips, is unambiguously illegal under the Seattle Municipal Code, which authorizes the city to order property owners to remove obstructions at their own expense. However, the city has chosen not to enforce the law; when PubliCola asked about the proliferation of eco-blocks last year, SDOT director Greg Spotts said the department wouldn’t prioritize removing eco-blocks, a point he reiterated later on Twitter.

SDOT is also a partner in the city’s Unified Care Team, a group of city workers that removes homeless encampments and RVs from public spaces.

A spokeswoman for SDOT said the department removed the blocks “as a part of a larger City of Seattle project to reopen Leary Triangle.” After the city is done with its work on site, she said, the area where the blocks once stood will become a four-hour parking zone, to “make it easier for people visiting Leary Triangle and nearby businesses to park for a short period of time.” Removing the eco-blocks from the surrounding streets would create more parking spaces, but turning the area around the new dog park into a four-hour parking zone will have the effect of permanently banishing people who live in RVs or other vehicles.

PubliCola asked SDOT why they didn’t remove the other eco-blocks that surround Fremont Brewing, since they, too, are preventing “people visiting Leary Triangle and nearby businesses” from parkingfor any period. “The concrete blocks were removed in this location due to construction from a larger project to reopen Leary Triangle,” the spokeswoman said. “The circumstances are unique to this location.”

 

homelessness, housing, human services

Hotel Crisis Overshadows Other Pressing Issues for Homelessness Authority, Including Upcoming Budget Vote

By Erica C. Barnett

After an emergency meeting last Friday, the King County Regional Homelessness Authority sent dozens of its downtown outreach workers, known as system advocates, to four hotels where the majority of people temporarily sheltered by the Lived Experience Coalition have been staying, to assess what their needs are and where they can go now that funding for the LEC hotels has run out.

As PubliCola has reported, the LEC—an advocacy group made up of homeless and formerly homeless people who also appoint members to the KCRHA’s implementation board—received federal grants to move people from the streets into hotels across King County through a partnership with the nonprofit Building Changes, but ended up spending far more money than they had. Money from a philanthropic group called We Are In paid for the rooms, which recently totaled over 200, through April 7.

The KCRHA’s CEO, Marc Dones, has distanced the authority from the hotel debacle, saying they only “recently became aware” of the situation. However, KCRHA’s own system advocates used the LEC program this year to shelter dozens of people as part of an effort to end unsheltered homelessness downtown, which is partly financed by We Are In.

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People living in least 55 of the LEC-funded hotel rooms are participants in the state-funded Recovery Navigator program, which provides resources for people with addiction, including co-occurring mental health disorders; that program is now responsible for those residents.

The KCHRA is reportedly trying to place other hotel residents in shelter through the United Way, Salvation Army, and other nonprofit agencies.

“KCRHA, with the support of King County, the City of Seattle, and We Are In, has moved into an active emergency response to address the financially unstable LEC motel shelter program,” a KCRHA spokeswoman told PubliCola Monday.

The challenges are significant: Hotel residents include people with significant physical and mental impairments, including a number of amputees, along with people staying in the hotels anonymously because they are fleeing domestic violence. People who can’t be placed in another shelter or housing will be “exited” to the streets, including several dozen the LEC said were planning to “self-resolve” by leaving without shelter or services.
“At this time, we have verified that there are a significant number of families with young children, seniors, and medically fragile individuals, and these groups are prioritized for placement in shelter and housing with appropriate care,” the KCRHA spokeswoman said.

“There Will Always Be a Crisis”

Dones was at the KCRHA’s emergency meeting on Friday, and did not attend a long-planned, all-day implementation board retreat at the same time. Portions of the retreat were audible at a publicly accessible Zoom link on Friday. During their discussion about an upcoming vote on the agency’s 2024 budget, board members expressed frustration that Dones didn’t show.

Dones has no formal contract or job description, board member Ross added, which will make it hard for the board to conduct a credible evaluation of their performance.

“[The hotel emergency] is one crisis, with up to 300 people, but there are thousands more out there,” board member Christopher Ross said. “There will always be a problem [or] a crisis. You should be able to have other people step up. And this crisis, by the way, has been going on for several weeks, so to miss the one day where you need to bond with your bosses—they are creating a hole by not being in this room.” Dones has no formal contract or job description, Ross added, which will make it hard for the board to conduct a credible evaluation of their performance.

Dones has suggested that the budget vote should be a pro forma matter, since the agency adopted a biennial budget last year, but the proposal includes an expansion of the agency to include 11 new staff positions (two of which are currently grant-funded). Board member Ben Maritz questioned the budget’s focus on adding administrative staff, including three human resources officers. “This budget ask doesn’t reflect our shared goal of getting as many more people inside as possible,” he said.

The budget also assumes that the KCRHA will be able to continue the Partnership for Zero project after private funding runs out. The agency plans to use $5.2 million in Medicaid funding through a program called Foundational Community Supports, which pays for “pre-tenancy services,” like case management, for Medicaid enrollees people with complex health problems that make it difficult to keep housing or hold a job.

Also during the retreat, the implementation board decided to have a special meeting Tuesday evening to go over the budget in more detail before approving it and passing it on to a separate governing committee made up largely of elected officials from around the region. That board, whose job is mostly limited to approving policies and strategies the implementation board recommends, is scheduled to meet this Thursday and pass the budget.

homelessness, housing

No Clear Solution for Hotel Evictions After Chaotic Homelessness Board Meeting; Budget Decision Postponed

By Erica C. Barnett

Update 11am April 15: This morning, the KCRHA reportedly sent its own outreach workers, known as system advocates, to the hotels where the Lived Experience Coalition has been paying for rooms through a federal emergency grant to figure out who is in the rooms and what their needs are. The KCRHA did not immediately respond to a request for more information about what the goal of this outreach is and whether funding has come through to pay for the rooms or provide other accommodations to the people living in them.

An unusually chaotic meeting of the King County Regional Homelessness Authority’s implementation board yesterday left unanswered questions about the fate of at least 165 people who remain in hotel rooms administered by the Lived Experience Coalition, which ran out of federal grant money to pay for the hotels earlier this year. As PubliCola reported exclusively on Monday, a public-private partnership called We Are In provided $1 million to pay for the hotel rooms through last Friday, but the KCRHA itself has said it can’t provide ongoing assistance for any hotel residents other than its own clients, who numbered about 30 (of as many as 250) as of last week.

In a conversation with PubliCola, Lived Experience Coalition director LaMont Green expressed confidence that no one at the hotels would end up back on the street. “A majority of the folks [who have left the hotels so far] have been accessing diversion, noncongregate shelter, shared housing, and some just regular permanent housing” using rapid rehousing subsidies, Green said.

However, it’s unclear whether the LEC will be able to continue moving people out successfully on their own; a majority of the people who have left so far are KCRHA’s own clients, and if the agency and local funders wash their hands of the situation, the LEC, an advocacy group that is made up largely of volunteers, will be on its own.

“The KCRHA recently became aware of an LEC program that has some financial difficulties . … We need to step away, frankly. I will again clarify for the public, the program is not operated by KCRHA, is not being funded by KCRHA, and has no formal connection to the KCRHA leadership level.”—KCRHA CEO Marc Dones

City officials, including the mayor’s office, did not respond to requests for comment earlier this week. However, on Tuesday, Deputy Mayor Tiffany Washington said in an email addressed to “funders and partners” that the “LEC seems fully capable of winding down the work without assistance from KCRHA. I propose that we release KCRHA leadership and staff to focus on other work and key initiatives like partnership for zero”—a reference to the Partnership for Zero effort, funded by We Are In, to eliminate homelessness in downtown Seattle.

Although the KCRHA’s own downtown outreach workers, known as system advocates, were directly responsible for placing dozens of KCRHA clients into the LEC hotels, agency CEO Marc Dones has maintained that the KCRHA knew little to nothing about the hotel program or its funding.

“The KCRHA recently became aware of an LEC program that has some financial difficulties and we are currently evaluating with the city, county, state, and private funders to determine how to fund the program and support residents of it,” Dones said during Wednesday’s implementation board meeting. “We need to step away, frankly,” Dones added. “I will again clarify for the public, the program is not operated by KCRHA, is not being funded by KCRHA, and has no formal connection to the KCRHA leadership level.”

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The board meeting included other signs of the growing schism between the LEC—a coalition that advocates for people with lived experience, which the authority has described as “an independent organization that appoints representatives to the KCRHA Implementation Board and Governing Committee, and is a partner in our efforts to end homelessness”—and the KCRHA. Three positions on the board reserved for people with lived experience of homelessness remain unfilled, and a simmering debate over who should fill those roles bubbled to the surface as part of a separate discussion about bylaws, whose details the board is still debating after three years in existence.

Dones said the process for appointing the lived experience positions has been haphazard and “needs to be rethought,” and that the nominees should include “people who are not members of the LEC.” However, members of the advisory committee that appoints people to the board the nominations have tried to call a special meeting to make their nominations, and claim the KCRHA is blocking them from doing so by refusing to post a meeting notice on their website, as required by law. In short: It’s a mess.

With the clock running down on Wednesday, the board had just a few minutes to ask questions about a 2024 supplemental budget proposal they had received less than 24 hours before the meeting (and that still isn’t posted publicly on the KCRHA’s website).

With the clock running down on Wednesday—the KCRHA ordinarily caps its board meetings at two hours, but this one went long—the board had just a few minutes to ask questions about a 2024 supplemental budget proposal they had received less than 24 hours before the meeting (and that still isn’t posted publicly on the KCRHA’s website). Dones said it was “alarming” that the board wasn’t familiar with the proposal, and noted that the board already approved the agency’s biennial budget in 2023, suggesting that this was just a continuation of that budget.

During a brief discussion, board members argued that biennial budgets still deserve scrutiny, and often change from year to year; both the state of Washington and the city of Seattle, for example, operate on a biennial system but still go through a lengthy annual budget process. The KCRHA just proposed a revision of its new five-year plan that would refocus the agency on immediate shelter under a new mission statement—“To Bring Unsheltered People Inside as Quickly as Possible to Prevent Death and Further Harm”—that could, board member Ben Maritz argued, require the agency to change its spending strategy as soon as next year.

Additionally, the 2024 budget proposal includes requests for funding for nearly a dozen new KCRHA staffers, including three new HR staffers and a new “Housing Central Command Manager” for the “housing command center” that opened as part of Partnership for Zero last year. A memo on the budget that outlined the new positions is available on the KCRHA’s website.

The board decided to postpone approving the budget until its next meeting, which hasn’t been scheduled yet, and the meeting ended abruptly after several members dropped off the Zoom call, depriving the meeting of a quorum.