Sound Transit’s four Seattle representatives: Katie Wilson, Dan Strauss, Girmay Zahilay, and Teresa Mosqueda.
Cops burn through sick time, county official accused of stalking must wear GPS monitor, Sound Transit announces “affordable” ST3 alternative, and much more.
An audit by the city’s Office of Inspector General shows that retiring Seattle police officers routinely hoard sick leave and use it all at the end of their careers, allowing them to accumulate full pay for those days (which would otherwise “pay out” at 25 percent of an officer’s salary) without providing evidence that they’re actually sick. The pervasive practice costs the city millions of dollars a year.
The King County Council is asking King County Executive Girmay Zahilay to conduct an assessment of the the King County Regional Homelessness Authority’s forthcoming “corrective action” plan responding the issues identified in a recent forensic audit, and produce a report on “whether the county should continue, amend, or terminate its participation” in the interlocal agreement that created KCRHA.
King County Assessor John Arthur Wilson tried to convince a judge that PubliCola’s coverage of stalking allegations against him, which he characterized as unfounded opinions on a “personal blog,” was to blame for the negative reaction to his social media posts gloating that he had convinced a judge that he couldn’t wear an ankle monitor. The judge didn’t buy it, and said he’d have to wear a GPS monitor after all.
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On this week’s episode of Seattle Nice, we debated whether Mayor Katie Wilson is, as many pundits have recently argued, a “gaffe”-prone buffoon, or if she’s just saying things they don’t agree with. We also discussed a proposal (later withdrawn) to require shelter-free “buffer zones” around parks, child cares, and schools, and we talked about the fallout last week from a forensic audit of the regional homelessness authority.
A growing rift between the City Council and Mayor Wilson exploded (almost) into the open this week, after Wilson staffers made what many councilmembers and staff described as an inappropriate request to pull the mayor’s legislation to allow larger shelters because she was unhappy with some council amendments. At a meeting the afternoon before the vote, Wilson’s staff reportedly seemed to think they could tell the council, a separate branch of government, what to do.
In his latest Maybe Metropolis column, Josh Feit takes a swing at pundits who are aghast that Mayor Wilson is openly supporting lefty priorities like taxing the rich and painting bus lanes. These things only seem like “gaffes,” Josh writes, to people in denial that Seattle willingly elected a socialist who ran on the exact progressive agenda she’s now espousing.
In my column, I wonder why elected officials from Seattle are playing nice about the latest Sound Transit 3 plan, which defers stations in Seattle (including Graham Street in the Rainier Valley, first promised in 1999) and cuts the entire Ballard line, at least until savings and “new revenue” (i.e. bonds regional taxpayers will still be paying back in the 22nd century) can be found.
The city council’s land use committee approved the final piece of Mayor Katie Wilson’s shelter expansion proposal today, increasing the maximum size of tiny house village-style shelters throughout the city. The bill will allow villages, or “transitional encampments,” with up to 150 people (up from from 100), subject to restrictions that include minimum case management and overnight staffing, good neighbor agreements, and written public safety plans. The bill, which still has to be adopted by the full council, is the final piece of legislation the Wilson administration requested as part of a plan to add 1,000 shelter beds this year.
The shelter vote was clouded by a growing tension between the council and mayor’s office that exploded into the open over the past week.
On Tuesday, less than 24 hours before today’s scheduled vote, the mayor’s council liaison called land use committee chair Eddie Lin to ask him to pull the legislation from today’s agenda because the mayor’s office had problems with some of the changes the council has proposed. Lin said no.
This demand from the mayor’s office was a highly unusual breach of the legislative process in itself. Later in the day, Wilson’s senior advisor on housing and homelessness, Jon Grant, along with at least two other mayoral staffers—Kate Brunette Kreuzer and Nicole Vallestero-Soper—met with council members one on one and continued demanding last-minute changes to the amendments.
The meeting turned into a heated late-afternoon conflict that several sources described as a serious and significant breaking point in the relationship between the mayor and council. Several sources characterized Wilson’s staffers as “disrespectful” and expressed surprise that Wilson’s office seemed to believe they could order the council around.
Before Wednesday’s vote, council members thanked each other for their professionalism, speed, and transparency before moving the bill forward Wednesday, and Council. President Joy Hollingsworth alluded to a “lack of communication” about the amendments; only Lin thanked the mayor’s office.
Wilson herself, several people we spoke to emphasized, has always been polite and thoughtful in their interactions. But the mayor herself has rarely been around, according to council sources, sending staffers down to discuss legislation with council members and staff instead.
In response to questions, Wilson’s spokesperson, Sage Wilson, said the mayor’s office will “take our share of responsibility for that [communication] gap,” adding, “we did ask if the committee chair was open to providing more time to continue discussions so we could get to a good place together.”
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Council members have raised concerns about the increasingly fractured relationship with Wilson’s office before; in fact, just last Friday, Council President Joy Hollingsworth met with mayoral staff to express how important it is that they communicate with the council throughout the legislative process. At a council media availability on Monday, before the mayor’s office asked Lin to pull the shelter bill, Hollingsworth said, “I know it’s a big learning curve, but it would just help us … that we’re talking before legislation is being transmitted” in order to avoid “surprises.”
It’s worth a brief digression here about how the city’s legislative process works. Legislation can come from the council itself, or the mayor can “send down” legislation by identifying a sponsor who will carry their bill through the council process and having them introduce it—a step Wilson skipped with her make-or-break shelter legislation. Then the mayor typically works with council allies to shepherd a proposal to the finish line, communicating closely with the sponsor and discussing any concerns as soon as they arise. Legislation is a give-and-take process between coequal branches of government, and mayors typically accept non-fatal amendments as part of the deal.
Instead of raising concerns with the bill and amendment sponsors when they proposed the amendments last week, the mayor’s office waited until the day before the vote to raise specific objections. (There would ordinarily be more time between introduction and a final vote, but the mayor’s office asked for an expedited timeline, designating the legislation as an “emergency” bill.)
Wilson, the mayor’s spokesman, said the mayor “raised concerns since amendments were initially released about the implications of putting policy related to shelter operations into the land use code. … We had good conversations with Councilmembers about how to address those concerns and thought we had come to an understanding, but there seems to have a miscommunication, because the language released Tuesday morning was not in line with what we had expected.”
The amendments Wilson’s office objected to weren’t the ones you might expect. Maritza Rivera’s proposals to create shelter-free “buffer” zones around schools, child care centers, and parks and require uniformed security outside every shelter did not move forward (she could reintroduce it at full council, but it lacks the votes to pass). Neither did language—apparently inadvertent—that would have made shelter providers responsible for unsanctioned encampments and public safety issues in the area around shelter sites.
Instead, the purportedly problematic amendments came largely from Wilson’s own progressive council allies. Alexis Mercedes Rinck, for example, added amendments that would set a nonbinding “goal” of minimum case management staffing and require staffing at night, and bill sponsor Dionne Foster added an amendment, on behalf of Debora Juarez, to require shelters to adopt public safety plans.
Another amendment, from Hollingsworth, stipulates that the new shelters must adopt good neighbor agreements, something many shelter providers already do. (Hollingsworth changed the amendment on Wednesday to remove many requirements she said shelter providers identified as problematic.) And Dan Strauss proposed a new version of an amendment that would require shelter providers to divide larger shelters into distinct, separate “neighborhoods” with controlled access, after Low Income Housing Institute director Sharon Lee emailed the council Monday with concerns about the original, more rigid proposal.
LIHI provides most of the city’s tiny house villages and will likely be one of the biggest beneficiaries of funding to provide the new micromodular shelters. Grant, Wilson’s senior advisor on housing and homelessness, was most recently a longtime staffer at LIHI and frequently testified at council meetings on their behalf.
The shelter bill, a marquee proposal meant to fulfill Wilson’s biggest campaign promise, could represent a turning point in Wilson’s relationship with the council members whose support she will need to move her ambitious agenda forward. Just not in the way she probably hoped.
The King County will take up legislation from Councilmember Jorge Barón this afternoon that directs the King County Executive’s office to take two concrete steps toward addressing the King County Regional Homelessness Authority’s financial issues, which have led local elected officials to start discussing a plan for “winding down” the agency. Shutting the KCRHA down would require either the Seattle City Council or the King County Council to adopt a motion to terminate an interlocal agreement between the city and county, triggering a dissolution process that must last at least one year.
Barón’s motion, co-sponsored by Rod Dembowski and Steffanie Fain, asks King County Executive Girmay Zahilay to conduct an assessment of the KCRHA’s forthcoming “corrective action” plan responding the issues identified in a recent forensic audit, and produce a report on “whether the county should continue, amend, or terminate its participation” in the interlocal agreement that created KCRHA.
The legislation sets a June 15 deadline for the briefing, which will cover the corrective plan (due May 23) and options for covering the KCRHA’s shortfall. The longer report, which the legislation says should include an outline for how to “transition contracts and activities currently managed or carried out by the authority,” is due August 1, a few weeks before the council is set to take up a separate proposal, sponsored by Dembowski and Reagan Dunn, to start the process of dissolving the homelessness agency.
“We need to be very thoughtful about this,” Barón said. “We don’t want to make the situation worse by trying to do something quickly and without a lot of thought for the people on the street and those who are getting services right now.”
Talking to PubliCola last week, Dembowski said he considers the KCRHA “a failed agency, by design and also in its implementation. … I don’t see the necessity or value of having the KCRHA continue.” But, Dembowski added, he wants to dismantle the agency “in an orderly way.”
Barón’s proposal comes in response to a forensic financial review that found the KCRHA had a growing negative balance, could not account for at least $8 million of its budget, and has few internal controls over its own budget and finances. A little over a week ago, the KCRHA’s governing board (on which Barón sits) learned from the auditors that just getting KCRHA’s finances to a baseline standard could cost millions of dollars and take years.
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There appears to be little enthusiasm for that option. While Dembowski (along with Seattle City Councilmember Maritza Rivera) has been the most vocal proponent for shutting down KCRHA as quickly as possible, his isn’t the only voice of resignation. County Councilmember Claudia Balducci, a former member of the KCRHA’s governing board, told PubliCola last week, “I think it’s really time to figure out a different path forward. It’s time to admit this isn’t working.”
But Barón told PubliCola the process can’t move forward until after the county know exactly what’s involved in fixing the agency’s financial issues, determine how much it will cost the city and county to pay down the agency’s overspending and debt, and he figure out how to handle the $200 million or so in homeless service contracts the KCRHA administers, most of them funded by the city and county.
If the KCRHA loses its authority to administer contracts, some have suggested that it could serve as a regional body that brings Seattle, King County, and suburban cities together to coordinate regional homelessness policy, while Seattle and King County resume control of homelessness contracts (something Seattle has already started doing with Mayor Katie Wilson’s shelter push).
Barón was cautious when asked what the future of the KCRHA might look like. I don’t want to say this is the end or that it definitely is headed in that direction, because KCRHA hasn’t had a chance to respond to the evaluation yet” or present its corective action plan, Barón said. “For me, the question is, is that where we want to spend resources, or do we want to put those resources in a transition? I am not prepared to make that decision now.”
Whatever the county and city decide about the future of the regional homelessness agency, Barón said they’re going to have to figure out how to pay for any funds the KCRHA can’t account for, including overspending and the interest on loans it took out with the county. “Both of us were funders and I think there should be equitable and fair distribution of responsibility for those issues,” Barón said.
After a presentation on a devastating forensic audit that found widespread financial problems and a lack of internal financial controls at the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, a consensus is growing among regional decision-makers that it’s time to start “winding down” the agency. The KCRHA itself would go on to release an FAQ later in the week that took little responsibility for the ongoing issues and suggested fixing them would be a relatively straightforward matter.
Although official SPD policy calls for diversion, rather than arrest and jail, when officers encounter someone violating the city’s laws against using drugs in public and simple drug possession, Police Chief Shon Barnes appeared to criticize the city’s main diversion program, LEAD, at a recent council meeting. Afterward, Councilmember Maritza Rivera suggested the program already has plenty of money.
City Councilmembers Maritza Rivera and Joy Hollingsworth proposed amendments to Mayor Katie Wilson’s proposal to allow larger tiny house village-style shelters around Seattle. Their walk-on amendments would mandate 24-hour security and buffer zones around parks, schools, and child care centers for new micromodular shelters with more than 100 residents.
After an audit revealed potential fraud and waste at King County’s Department of Community and Human Services, County Councilmembers are proposing an office of inspector general to provide a new layer of oversight to receive tips and conduct investigations into claims about contractor misuse of county funds.
More than a dozen King County employees showed up to a King County Council meeting this week to testify against King County Executive Girmay Zahilay’s “return to office” mandate. One person who wasn’t there to hear their testimony in person: The council’s biggest RTO booster, Councilmember Reagan Dunn, who attended the meeting—as he often does—remotely.
Garmon Newsom II, until recently the Burien City Attorney, is running for an open Seattle Municipal Court seat; he defended many of the city’s anti-homeless policies, including a ban on sleeping in public and an attempt to shut down a private encampment at a church. And Mike Solan, the bombastic former Seattle Police Officers Guild president, just bought a house in Gig Harbor and plans to run for Pierce County Council as a Republican.
Why does SPD have an acting assistant chief, rather than a permanent one? As it turns out, they have both. Todd Kibbee, the permanent acting chief, is burning his leave, with full pay, before he retires while Brown does his job.
A recent analysis by the city’s Office of Labor Standards found that despite dire warnings from council members who wanted to overturn the law, a 2023 law guaranteeing higher hourly pay for delivery drivers resulted in higher pay overall, along with less reliance on tips.
Three city councilmembers—Council President Joy Hollingsworth, Debora Juarez, and Eddie Lin—will propose legislation next week that would ban data centers inside city limits. The proposal comes in response to reports that companies were planning five data centers on land owned by Seattle City Light.
City Councilmembers Maritza Rivera and Joy Hollingsworth proposed amendments to Mayor Katie Wilson’s ambitious shelter proposal that would mandate 24-hour security and buffer zones around parks, schools, and child care centers where large new “transitional encampments,” a term that primarily refers to tiny house villages, won’t be allowed. (Seattle has had a few actual temporary encampments, but Wilson’s plan centers around tiny house villages rather than tents).
Last month, Wilson introduced a legislative package that would make it easier to site and build larger tiny house villages. The council’s land use committee is considering the part of her proposal that increases the maximum “shelter census” from 100 to 150 people in most areas, plus a potential 250-person shelter somewhere in the city.
Hollingsworth sponsored the amendments that would impose security mandates and no-shelter zones because Rivera isn’t on the land use committee.
The first of the two Rivera-Hollingsworth amendments, which would both apply to shelters that serve more than 100 people would require the presence of “identifiable security personnel” on site 24 hours a day. The second would prohibit new tiny house villages within 750 feet of all child care centers, schools, and playgrounds, and within 500 feet of most city parks. (Small “pocket parks” under 2 acres would be exempt).
It’s unclear how much of the city would be automatically off-limits under this expansive prohibition. Using an online GIS map creator, I drew a 750-foot radius around every public school in the city as well as a couple dozen child care facilities in a large swath of Hollingsworth’s district. (Child care facilities in private homes don’t count as child care facilities under city code, according to a council staffer.)
Not indicated on the map are the park buffer zones, which would extend 500 feet in each direction from midsize or larger park, and park playgrounds, which would be subject to the 750-foot buffer zone.
Under the amendment, sober shelters and those “that are exclusively for families with children” would be allowed inside the buffer zones. The council expressed its “intent,” in legislation that released funds for Wilson’s initial shelter push, for two of the new shelters to be limited to families with children and one to people in recovery from addiction.
The proposed changes were just two of seven proposed amendments to the original bill, sponsored by Councilmember Dionne Foster. Another amendment, from Councilmember Dan Strauss, would require tiny house providers to separate the new, larger villages into fenced-off “neighborhoods” whose residents would be physically restricted from entering each other’s area.
A fourth, from Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck, would require the new, larger villages to have at least two shelter staff on site 24 hours a day. Other amendments would require good neighbor agreements and public safety plans and request a 1-to-15 staff-to-resident ratios for shelters serving people with high-acuity behavioral health conditions..
Rivera, speaking in favor of her proposal to establish no-shelter zones, said she was trying to protect children from dangerous people who might live at the new tiny house villages. “We know that for shelters that are not sober … there might be drug dealing and other public safety issues, and we don’t want near that near children,” Rivera said. Then, conflating unmanaged encampments with managed shelter, she continued, “I know we’ve had issues with encampments at our major parks.”
Rivera also attempted to link tiny house villages to a recent gunfire incident near a press conference Mayor Wilson held to announce new education and child care investments. “Everybody knows by now that there was a shooting and shots were fired … right into the Yesler Community Center,” Rivera said. “So I’m not saying shots are going to be fired outside of these sanctioned shelters. But again, we cannot say that there won’t be drug dealing outside of these shelters or attempting to be done outside of these shelters, and so we need to make sure that we’re keeping our kids safe.”
Hollingsworth and Rivera introduced their security and buffer zone amendments at the last minute, so the only copies consisted of physical printouts in council chambers. The committee didn’t vote on Tuesday; they’ll meet at least one more time next week before pushing the bill forward to a full council vote.
A consensus appears to be growing among regional decision-makers that it’s time to start “winding down” the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, which received the results of a devastating forensic audit earlier this month, according to people familiar with internal discussions about the agency’s future who spoke with PubliCola over the past few days.
But what that plan, and the path forward for homeless services, will look like, if it happens, remained murky after the weekend, which KCRHA board members, Seattle and King County elected officials, and homeless service providers and advocates spent discussing how to ensure homeless service providers keep getting funded even if the KCRHA no longer exists.
KCRHA’s board, made up primarily of elected officials from around the region, met on Friday to discuss the findings of a forensic review that found pervasive, ongoing financial oversight and accounting problems that resulted in overspending, a persistent negative fund balance, and at least $8 million that could not be accounted for. Between the $8 million and another $4.26 million in overspending (which included $1.26 million in unfunded interest payments on loans), the audit found nearly $13 million in money that was effectively missing from the KCRHA’s accounts.
Kinnison, who made an unusual in-person appearance at Friday’s meeting, cued up a presentation by Mike Nurse, a principal with the auditing firm Clark Nuber, by reading a prepared statement full of reassuring claims. The problems the auditors identified, she said, were “serious” but not fatal, and stemmed largely from decisions made before she arrived in mid-2024—when, she suggested, things started turning in the right direction.
“This audit identifies real weaknesses in KCRHA’s financial systems, controls and reporting, particularly during our early formation period,” Kinnison said. “I want to be clear about one important point. The audit did not find evidence of fraud or misuse of funds. … There are no missing funds.” Finally, whatever problems the audit identified with the agency’s “internal tracking and reconciliation processes,” Kinnison said, all the money was “used on services for people experiencing homelessness.”
Kinnison, who did not attend most of the regular meetings with auditors, concluded by saying she was the right person to get the agency back on track. “I just want to say, I’m a career public servant. I was hired to do this work. It’s what I’ve been doing, it is a passion for me. It’s part of my identity to uphold the public trust, and I am really honored to be the person that’s helping to understand [how] KCRHA can improve to the level that meets public expectation and scrutiny.”
The rest of the meeting might as well have taken place in a different reality.
For the next hour, Nurse made the case that KCRHA’s financial oversight and accounting practices had left the door wide open for waste, financial abuse, and fraud.
“Did we find fraud at KCHRA? The answer to that remains unclear,” Nurse said. “In our testing, we did not identify any direct evidence of fraud.” However, that testing was based on a small sample of KCRHA’s financial transactions, and ” transparency issues on the accounting record between 2021 and late 2024″ made it impossible to track spending on a detailed level.
Many of those “legacy issues,” Nurse said, persisted after that period—meaning that previous leaders, including controversial founding CEO Marc Dones, were not solely to blame for the casual accounting practices and opaque record-keeping that contributed to overspending, negative balances, and opaque financial records. As recently as last year, many different people had access to the spreadsheets KCRHA used to track spending, and various people deleted, and made other changes to “thousands” of financial transactions, the audit found.
“Under current conditions and without corrective action, the challenges I’m talking about are likely to continue, including ongoing cash shortfalls and the reliance on advances in borrowing to meet funding requirements,” Nurse said. Without any formal financial controls, he continued, the KCRHA is at risk of having to pay back federal funding they’ve already spent. Several past audits, including county and state reports in 2023 and a second state audit in 2024, both unearthed many of the same issues, Nurse noted, but KCRHA did not take any apparent actions to fix the problems, and “these issues still remained” as of last July, when the audit began.
In a separate but related issue, KCRHA staffers spent more than a million dollars using agency credit cards and reimbursing staff without providing detailed justifications for their purchases, which included clothes, office furniture, and $13,000 in relocation costs for a chief program officer who lasted less than a year. Payroll records and receipts, obtained through a records request and provided to PubliCola, show that the KCRHA paid nearly three times that much—more than $38,000—to relocate Kinnison to Seattle from Washington, D.C.
Nurse also knocked down one of the KCRHA’s chief justifications for its persistent negative cash balances—the fact that the agency uses a “reimbursement” framework, paying providers first and refilling their bank account when money comes in from outside funders. (The KCHRA switched to this system after providers complained about payments that were often months late, an especially severe financial burden for small and less-established nonprofits.)
Many agencies use a reimbursement model, Nurse said, results in accounts whose balances dip into the red and back into the back on a consistent monthly basis, like a “sine wave”; in contrast, the KCHRA’s balance has been inconsistent and mostly in the red, with a negative balance that actually grew from $44.7 million in July 2025 to nearly $63 million this March. On the chart above, which is included in the report, “you can see the receivables continue to grow, grow, grow, and the cash continue to decline, so that is not what you would expect to see.”
Implementing all the recommendations from the audit, Nurse said, could cost the KCRHA “potentially in the millions of dollars” and take a year or more. It could also lead to a disruption in homeless services, since the agency would need to use existing staff and resources to work exclusively on correcting all the problems the report identified.
Currently, there seems to be little enthusiasm for that option. After Friday’s meeting, board member and King County Executive Girmay Zahilay said he wanted to work “methodically and thoughtfully” while deciding what happens next. “We have to make sure that anything that we do moving forward is going to be better than the status quo.”
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Board member and Seattle Councilmember Dionne Foster told PubliCola after the meeting that she thinks it’s important to create a “strong foundation” for the future homelessness system by not acting rashly and immediately moving to the nuclear option—a shutdown process that, under the agreement that established the KCRHA, be required to last at least one year.
“When the auditor talks about this being something that was built over time because of the poor foundation of the agency, that’s something that we have to take into account in how we respond,” Foster said. “I want to make sure that as we’re thinking about how we address these audit findings, we do not pivot so quickly that we have another poor foundation.”
During a City Council briefing on Monday, Seattle Councilmember and KCRHA board member Alexis Mercedes Rinck said she is introducing a resolution that will lay out “nextstepsforourcontracts,staffing,Continuumof Care … andhowwewillensureacontinuityofserviceswithorwithout KCRHA.”
On Monday, King County Councilmember Rod Dembowski—one of the first elected officials, along with Seattle Councilmember Maritza Rivera, to explicitly call for shutting down the agency—told PubliCola he’s started working with other council members on a plan to “take back, in an orderly way” some of the functions KCRHA oversees and revert to a system where the county, Seattle, and other cities run their own homelessness systems the way they did before the KCRHA existed. That option couldn’t happen overnight, because HSD no longer has a formal homelessness division or the staff to manage large, complex grants.
“I know we’ve used this phrase ‘homelessness is a regional problem that requires a regional solution,'” Dembowski said, “but I think there’s an opportunity to ask, is that really the case? It’s certainly a regional challenge, but I think this trite statement that it requires a regional response deserves some assessment and reflection, because I don’t think that’s what we’re doing.”
Most smaller cities decided not to contribute funding to the KCRHA, preferring to keep funding local homeless service providers directly, and the KCRHA eventually moved toward “subregional” planning that takes the different political and financial realities of different parts of the region into account.
Zahilay, along with Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson, sent a letter to Kinnison giving the agency until May 8 to present a plan to address some of the “high-risk findings” in the audit, and until May 23 to come up with a corrective plan to address the other audit findings. Wilson, through her deputy mayor, Brian Surrat, also added amendment to a resolution creating a finance committee with the authority to approve or reject new agreements, discretionary spending, and new hires; the changes effectively put KCRHA under a hiring and spending freeze for the indefinite future.
