Mayor Bruce Harrell has issued a fusillade of official announcements in the weeks leading up to the November 4 election, including one, last week, about legislation that would prohibit restrictive covenants that limit the size of grocery stores and pharmacies. On this week’s podcast, we discussed the timing and implications of the proposal, which Harrell pitched as one solution to the problem of “food deserts”—areas with few grocery stores (or pharmacies) where residents have to travel long distances to get basic items.
As I noted in my story about the plan, size restrictions didn’t prevent grocery stores from opening in the two locations the city gave as examples of this phenomenon. In one case, a Sprouts organic food store replaced a long-vacant Albertson’s, joining an Amazon Fresh and several cultural grocery stores to create a diverse mini-food hub in North Seattle. In the second, neighbors successfully lobbied for a Trader Joe’s to anchor a development that brought hundreds of new apartments Greenwood; that project replaced a single-story Safeway and a parking lot, and is just four blocks away from a giant Fred Meyer.
The size of grocery stores in Seattle is limited primarily by zoning, not rarely-used restrictive covenants; in the lowest-density neighborhood commercial zones, for instance, grocery stores can’t be larger than 10,000 square feet. And the problem in food deserts isn’t that grocery stores are too small—it’s that there aren’t enough (or any) grocery stores of any size in those areas, while wealthier, whiter neighborhoods like Ballard are almost overrun with options.
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You could argue (and I have) that Harrell’s anti-covenant proposal is a solution in search of a problem. But what about other ideas for enticing grocery stores to open in Seattle, like a separate Harrell proposal to simply exempt all grocery stores from state business and occupation taxes? We were all pretty skeptical of this idea, since tax breaks aren’t free—when the government cuts taxes for one group, they always pass the losses on to someone else.
We also discussed ongoing turmoil at the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, whose CEO, Kelly Kinnison, was recently the target of several toxic-workplace allegations. Kinnison’s only penalty was a round of executive coaching and a written reminder that the KCRHA prohibits retaliation, but the agency itself still faces criticism from all sides—including KCRHA board member Harrell, who has recently been arguing that Seattle spends more than its fair share on the regional authority. Sandeep said it’s time to “write [the KCRHA] off as a failure, because it is a failure.” To which I asked: “But then what?”
Packed Morning Fizz to start the week: Common Power, the Black-led group Mayor Bruce Harrell accused of “darkening” his skin in an email invite to a pro-Katie Wilson debate watch party, responded to the incendiary allegation. A pro-Harrell PAC has raised more than $1 million, mostly from tech and real-estate interests. And Seattle Police Chief Shon Barnes took some time during a city council meeting to let everyone know he doesn’t read PubliCola and won’t answer councilmembers’ questions if they’re phrased in a way that mentions us.
Former city councilmember Cathy Moore quit the council after just 18 months, but she continued to work as a shadow council member, editing legislation and ghostwriting questions for current council member Maritza Rivera, after her departure in July.
On this week’s podcast, we talked about Mayor Bruce Harrell’s short-term election-year budget, which piles on tens of millions of dollars in new spending for his priorities while funding many important (and politically popular) programs with one-time funding, plunging the budget into deficits just in time for the next mayor to take office. Also, King County bans rent-fixing software and Pete Buttigieg says vote for Harrell.
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After an investigation into several complaints alleging that King County Regional Homelessness Authority CEO Kelly Kinnison fostered a toxic work environment and favored white job applicants, the agency’s board, made up of elected officials from around the region, gave Kinnison a slap on the wrist, with just one board member arguing for a more serious response.
Harrell proposed a new law that would ban grocery stores that are closing down from restricting the size of future grocery stores when they sell their land, saying the proposal would help address “food deserts.” The city offered two examples where this has happened; both are currently grocery stores, and neither is in a food desert.
A new US Post Office policy could delay postmarking on mailed-in ballots, invalidating votes cast just before, or on, election day; although most Washington residents drop their ballots off at ballot boxes, elections officials are advising mail voters to send their ballots well before November 4. Also, the mayor’s proposed budget expands the War on Graffiti.
On Friday, the governing board of the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, made up mostly of elected officials from around the county, voted to resolve four workplace misconduct complaints against KCRHA CEO Kelly Kinnison with “a letter reminding her of the organization’s policy on retaliation,” King County Executive Shannon Braddock said during a special board meeting last Friday.
Kinnison will also have to participate in executive coaching through the end of the year. The coach, hired before KCRHA had completed its investigation, will cost KCRHA $67,500 and will also do an organizational assessment of the agency.
A four-member panel of KCRHA board members—Braddock, Seattle Deputy Mayor Tiffany Washington, Renton City Councilmember Ed Prince, and Auburn Human Services Director Kent Hay—came up with the disciplinary recommendation.
On Friday, Braddock noted that KCRHA had also retained three outside attorneys to work on the investigation. As we reported in August, Kinnison told the agency’s general counsel, Edmund Witter, that he could no longer work on HR issues shortly after he and other agency staff raised concerns about possible racial bias in Kinnison’s hiring decisions.
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PubliCola has filed records requests for the letter sent to Kinnison, which was not included in the public governing board agenda; the cost to hire three outside attorneys; and the final report on the investigation, also not included in the public agenda packet.
Staffers filed complaints against Kinnison after she proposed creating two new executive positions, with salaries of $200,000, and directly hiring two white men to fill them, including one who was reportedly allowed to write his own job description. Staff questioned whether these two new top-level positions were necessary at a time when the KCRHA could be facing significant cuts lower on the agency’s org chart. They also argued that if the new positions were truly necessary, there were qualified people of color already working at the agency who could take on those jobs.
Deputy KCRHA CEO Simon Foster raised similar concerns in an email to Kinnison, writing that “[b]ringing on additional high salaried executive roles during this time may compromise our fiscal credibility and sustainability.”
Additionally, Foster wrote, the hires could call into question KCRHA’s “commitment to equity, not just in outcomes, but in process and leadership composition.”
At least one of the four complainants—Xochitl Maykovich, who left the agency last month—accused Kinnison of retaliation, which was the subject of disciplinary letter Kinnison received.
Only King County Councilmember Jorge Barón voted against Kinnison’s slap-on-the-wrist discipline, saying, “I agree with the personnel committee’s assessment that disciplinary action is warranted. However, I believe further action is warranted and respectfully disagree with the recommended disciplinary action in this motion.” Barón later clarified to PubliCola that he did not mean that Kinnison should be fired, but that the discipline should have gone further than executive coaching and a sternly worded letter.
On the campaign trail and in his slickly produced Seattle Channel budget video, Mayor Bruce Harrell has been touting a new statistic: “Most of the most of the people that are homeless in Seattle did not become unhoused in Seattle,” he said at a recent debate. He’s made a similar claim at other campaign forums and events.
“About 70% of people experiencing homelessness on Seattle streets became homeless outside of our city, and even with Seattle providing over six providing over 60% of the region’s shelter beds and 85% of the region’s tiny homes, we cannot do this alone,” Harrell claimed in his budget video, adding that it’s time for the rest of the region to step up and take care of their homeless residents. He also called on the King County Regional Homelessness Authority to identify land in areas with “fewer land constraints than we have here” where new shelters could open away from the city.
Leaving aside the fact that unhoused people congregate in cities, rather than far-flung suburbs, for obvious reasons—not only are there services here, there’s also community, opportunity, and access to transit—Harrell’s “they’re not from here” stat is extremely misleading, because it’s based entirely on responses to about 240 surveys with people who showed up at KCRHA’s survey tents over several days in January and February 2024.
A bit of background: Since 2022, the KCRHA has based its Point In Time Count of the region’s homeless population not on a physical count (which generally results in undercounting) but surveys with people who travel to fixed sites to provide demographic data and answer questions. This technique, known as respondent-driven sampling, was used to extrapolate some of the data in the full 2024 report, including an estimate (16,868) of the total number of sheltered and unsheltered homeless people across the county.
However, Harrell’s “about 70 percent” number (actually 69 percent) isn’t based on that sampling method; it’s based on raw data that represents less than a third of about 800 surveys across all parts of King County. In Seattle, the KCRHA interviewed around 240 people.
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This is important, because statistics based on small, self-selected samples of people aren’t generally considered reliable guides to demographic and population-level trends; that’s why KCRHA used statistical sampling for all its top-level data, rather than just extrapolating directly from a few hundred surveys.
It’s also to important to know that Harrell’s new talking point completely ignores the 43 percent of people who said they were last stably housed outside King County, which is one reason the “last housed in Seattle” and “last housed in King County” sample sizes are so small. If the city and county based their “fair share” of homelessness spending on where people were housed most recently, it would make sense for both Seattle and King County to refuse to fund services for nearly half their homeless residents, a heartless policy neither would be likely to adopt.
During a “deep dive” on the PIT numbers on Friday, KCRHA data staffers confirmed that researchers intended for the raw survey information to be taken “at face value,” not used to “make any further inferences” about the homeless population as a whole. The staffers also noted that KCRHA didn’t ask how long it had been since people had stable housing; given that the number of chronically homeless people increased in the 2024 count, people could have been talking about housing they had years in the past, which makes the question of which city or region they “belong” to murkier.
Like previous point-in-time surveys, the 2024 PIT count suggests not just that people are mobile—relocating around the region for various reasons, including local laws designed to keep them moving—but that “last stably housed” statistics aren’t a a good way of deciding whether people are worth spending local dollars on—even ignoring the obvious anti-humanitarian implications of making policy this way.
The vacant, overgrown lot on Rainier Ave. S that could be a tiny house village instead
By Erica C. Barnett
Plans to open a new tiny house village in Southeast Seattle’s Brighton neighborhood, just south of Hillman City, have stalled over an apparent lease dispute, according to the organization that has been trying to provide shelter at the site since 2023.
Nickelsville, a grassroots shelter provider that has operated sanctioned encampments and tiny house villages around the city for more than a decade, was weeks away from breaking ground at the site, in August 2024, when the city’s Human Services Department abruptly canceled the project.
In a story about the city’s sudden reversal, Real Change reported that Mayor Bruce Harrell’s deputy mayor overseeing homelessness, Tiffany Washington, personally denied the permit, citing a supposed lack of community outreach. “It was just NIMBYism,” a Nickelsville repreesntative told PubliCola last week. “We were saying, ‘Get to know us— we’re not a low-barrier shelter, we require sobriety in our villages—but they didn’t want to give it to us.”
After the Real Change story ran, the city reversed course, telling Nickelsville they could restart the process of getting a permit for the site. As they did the first time, the group went door to door distributing flyers and held a community meeting, this one at the Rainier Beach Community Center. Everything seemed to be going smoothly until early August, when, according to the Nickelsville representative, the city said there was some kind of problem with the lease.
“We finally got a meeting [with the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, which is serving as an intermediary between the city and Nickelsville] on August 5, only to be told that [the city] has no idea how to execute the lease agreement,” the Nickelsville representative said. “We said, ‘What do you mean? How hard can it be?'”
According to HSD spokeswoman Kamaria Hightower, the department can’t sign a lease with Nickelsville’s faith sponsor, Lighthouse Temple Church, until the Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections issues a permit for the property, which “requires an agreement that documents religious sponsorship.”
After PubliCola sent questions about the property to HSD and SDCI, SDCI’s permit portal showed a burst of new activity on the site, including a new permit allowing Nickelsville to move forward with repairs on a side sewer, one of several utilities that will have to be hooked up before the project can move forward.
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However, even if the city allows Nickelsville to start working on electric, water, and sewer connections, that’s no guarantee that HSD will approve, or even be directly in charge of, the lease. According to the Nickelsville representative, the city instructed the group to route all their communications with the city through KCRHA, an unusual arrangement if KCRHA is not going to hold the lease. (As PubliCola reported in May, a similar lease dispute nearly derailed the relocation of Tent City 4, another self-managed encampment that was on track to move to city-owned land until Mayor Bruce Harrell and then-councilmember Cathy Moore almost scuttled the deal).
Hightower said the department considers KCRHA “a critical partner on this project. KCRHA administers Nickelsville’s service contract and has provided support to the Brighton Village project at every stage, from proposal development and site selection to ensuring that community engagement requirements were met.”
However, HSD did not say whether the city or KCRHA will ultimately hold the lease for the tiny house village—a critical, if bureaucratic, hurdle that could further delay the project. “It is still to be determined if KCRHA will be formally represented on an agreement between the City and Nickelsville,” Hightower said. We’ve asked KCRHA for more details about their role in the project.
Elected officials and candidates have embraced tiny houses and other freestanding structures as a consensus, highly desirable form of shelter—unsheltered people are often eager to move into tiny houses because they are the most home-like shelter option available. But in practice, the city often puts up hurdles to construction, especially when neighborhood residents start to complain about the presence of homeless residents.
Partly in response to neighborhood pushback, the Brighton village—in the works for more than two years—has been shrunk down to just 14 units in order to leave a minimum of five feet between each unit, but it still faces significant hurdles. It’s possible it will never get built.
As Nickelsville noted in an action alert earlier this month, more than 800 people have died outdoors since the group started trying to site the Brighton Village project in 2023. “We really want to get started on this, because the weather’s changing and there are things we can do now,” the Nickelsville representative said. “If you’re just fiddling with the language of the lease—if that’s the real reason—let us start moving houses onto the property.”
Kelly Kinnison, the CEO of the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, is currently the subject of an internal investigation into several complaints about her management style and hiring decisions, including one by a high-level staffer who quit the agency last week over what she described as a “toxic work environment.”
The KCRHA’s governing board, made up of elected officials from across the county, has held multiple closed-door executive sessions to discuss the ongoing investigation, which could result in discipline.
The investigation is expected to wrap up in the next few weeks, according to sources familiar with the board’s deliberations.
The initial spark for the complaints came earlier this year, when Kinnison, who is white, decided to create two new executive positions—a chief of youth programs overseeing Built for Zero work to end youth homelessness and a chief of systems innovation—and direct-hire two white men to fill them, including one who was reportedly allowed to write his own job description. (PubliCola has chosen not to name either man).
The salary for both positions was set at $200,000 a year. The Raikes Foundation would provide partial funding for the youth homelessness position, but the rest of the funds would have to come out of KCRHA’s budget, which faces potential cuts of more than $2 million next year. Emails obtained through a records request show that Kinnison had been directly talking with both men about potential jobs at the agency since 2024.
The proposed new hires, coming at at time when KCRHA was drafting a budget that would eliminate nearly 60 shelter beds and cut as many as 22 positions, struck many on KCRHA staff as irresponsible. Not only would both the new executive-level positions pay more tha most staff were making, there were, according to at least one of the complainants, multiple Black KCRHA employees qualified to fill the two roles if KCRHA management really believed they were necessary.
In a complaint filed on August 7, the staffer who quit last week, then-interim chief program officer Xochitl Maykovich, wrote, “I do not have faith that the current CEO of KCRHA can effectively manage the organization because she does not prioritize the responsibility the agency has to effectively manage tax payer dollars, she has not addressed concerns raised about racial discrimination, and she is making irresponsible financial decisions.
“Since I’ve been in the Interim Chief Program Officer role, I have raised consistent concerns about the appearance of racial discrimination and fiscal irresponsibility, but each time, rather than trying to find a solution, she has dug in and made me feel like she wants to fire me. I feel at very high risk of retaliation from the CEO for raising these concerns.”
Maykovich told PubliCola that when she heard Kinnison wanted to hire the two men, she was already wondering “why did I even get hired?” given that the agency’s budget, at the time, was several million dollars in the red. “I was so aggressive about it because it felt so wrong—this is so much money, we were having budget issues, and we could be in a position of laying people off,” she said. “We don’t have the business justification for this, and morale was so low.”
Maykovich said she told Kinnison, “It’s going to create a lot of feelings if you directly hire a white guy at this level and pay him this much money, when we have at least three Black staff with expertise in youth homelessness who you pay a lot less, and you don’t consider them.”
In response, Maykovich said, “She snapped at me and said, ‘I don’t care about their feelings.” Maykovich included this alleged incident in her complaint.
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KCRHA has not hired either of the two men, and it’s unclear whether they plan to in the future. A KCRHA spokesperson declined to respond to questions, citing the ongoing investigation.
As news of the potential new hires leaked out internally, rumors also spread that Kinnison said it would be helpful to have white men representing KCRHA in discussions with elected officials, including specific Seattle City Council members. According to Maykovich’s complaint, she told Kinnison in a meeting of the executive team that “staff would have a lot of feelings about this decision,” to which Kinnison reportedly replied, “I don’t care about their feelings.”
Emails obtained through public disclosure requests show that KCRHA’s deputy chief, Simon Foster, also raised concerns about the optics and cost of the new hires. On April 16, Foster wrote Kinnison raising concerns about the new positions, including “budgetary alignment,” “mission consistency,” and “team cohesion.”
“We are actively asking our teams to absorb significant reductions, delay hiring, and reassess work plans based on limited resources,” Foster, who is Black, wrote. “Bringing on additional high salaried executive roles during this time may compromise our fiscal credibility and sustainability.”
Additionally, Foster wrote, the hires could call into question KCRHA’s “commitment to equity, not just in outcomes, but in process and leadership composition. Relying on a framing that centers White male representation as a political access point risks undermining the values we have stated publicly and internally.”
Kinnison responded by saying she planned to move forward with the two hires that week.
Two days later, in a separate email thread, Kinnison said she was “shocked” to learn that members of the executive leadership team knew about one of the new job descriptions, and said she was looking into “how this information was inappropriately shared so that we can ensure the integrity of our hiring processes and internal communication protocols.”
Kinnison also rejected “the perception that I feel we need white male representation to get political access. … That is not my belief, nor it is reflected in my hiring practices or guidance to hiring managers.”
In response, Foster confirmed that he was the one who shared the job descriptions, saying he did so as “an effort to surface critical feedback early and ensure that if we move forward, we do so with clarity, buy‐in, and organizational alignment.”
“I want to be clear, the discomfort being expressed within the Executive Leadership Team and throughout the organization, is not merely about an individual hire, but about a pattern of decision making, communication, and lack of clarity that is beginning to erode trust,” Foster wrote. “While you and I may have different perspectives on the intent behind these decisions, the perception among senior leaders is very real, and needs to be addressed head‐on, not deflected.”
In a followup email, which Foster shared with KCRHA’s human resources director Irwin Batara, Foster asked Kinnison to participate in a special meeting with the entire leadership team to discuss, among other issues, “unspoken frustrations, questions, and concerns that haven’t been given proper space for direct engagement with you.”
That meeting apparently didn’t happen. But less than two weeks later, at a meeting of top agency leaders that Kinnison did not attend, Maykovich and at least one other staffer complained at length about her plan to hire two new executive staff at a time when many lower-level KCRHA workers stood to lose their jobs. Two days later, the executive team met again, this time with Kinnison in attendance.
According to multiple accounts, Kinnison told everyone on her team to come out with whatever complaints they had, and each did so in turn. Some raised concerns that Kinnison and Foster were being too public about their internal leadership disputes, while others, including Maykovich, said KCRHA had become a hostile work environment, particularly for people of color. (Maykovich is Latina). In response, Kinnison reportedly said that she has the final say over all KCRHA decisions, including who gets hired.
At the end, Maykovich said, Kinnison told the leaders, “‘If you think you’re in a hostile work environment, bring it on.'”
After the meeting, Batara reportedly recorded the comments of each member of the executive staff as a separate complaint against Kinnison—about a half-dozen complaints in all.
About half an hour after the meeting ended, Kinnison wrote an email to Foster and Batara expressing “concerns about Xochitl’s performance”—effectively an HR complaint against Maykovich. The email described several recent meetings at which, according to Kinnison, Maykovich had been unprepared or spoken out of turn (Maykovich disputes this) and concluded by calling her “combative” and suggesting that “we escalate the coaching we are providing.”
Two days later, after meeting with King County Councilmember Jorge Báron, Kinnison wrote another email to Foster telling him to hold off on disciplining Maykovich; she did not cite a reason, and Báron, citing the investigation, declined to comment.
“I want to hold on taking any action on this until things settle, so no rush on bringing back recommended next steps,” she wrote.
The KCRHA’s general counsel, Edmund Witter, was reportedly among the staff who raised concerns about the perception of racial bias in Kinnison’s hiring decisions. Five days after the meeting where the executive leadership team aired their grievances, Kinnison told Witter he would no longer represent the agency on any HR matters, “so that we have his housing and agency expertise available to the many other things on his plate,” according to an April 29 email. (Witter declined to comment).
As the result of that decision, KCRHA has retained an international law firm, Ogletree Deakins, to represent them on employment matters. In addition to the additional cost of hiring an outside firm, the agency plans to hire a consultant, at an estimated cost of more than $60,000, to do an organizational assessment. It’s unclear if this outside assessment is part of an internal agreement to resolve the complaints; this is one of the questions we posed to KCRHA that a spokesperson declined ot answer.
A report on the investigation into Kinnison’s actions as CEO has reportedly been completed, so it probably won’t be long before its conclusions are public.
Meanwhile, the KCRHA still faces many internal and external pressures. As we’ve reported, the Harrell administration directed the authority to go through an “exercise” of cutting its budget by 2 percent earlier this year; in response, the agency came up with a proposal that it said would result in a $4.7 million shortfall in its administrative budget, which already falls far short of what most government agencies set aside for these positions.
The city of Seattle has tremendous sway over KCRHA’s actions because it provides most of the authority’s budget, along with King County; in recent years, the Harrell administration has used that power to claw back control over homelessness prevention and outreach, which the city restructured earlier this year. Harrell has reportedly not wanted to get involved in the dispute over Kinnison’s management of the agency; a spokesperson for the mayor declined to answer questions, citing the investigation.
Kinnison was chosen after Harrell’s pick to head the KCRHA on an interim basis, Darrell Powell, withdrew his name for the permanent position and stepped down after PubliCola reported statements he made about LGBTQ staffers and allegations that he repeatedly used an ableist slur in the presence of staff, among other issues.
KCRHA’s budget is also perennially in the red, ever since—in an effort to do a better job of paying contractors on time—the agency began taking out loans to fund up-front payments to nonprofit homeless service providers, leaving the agency in debt until all its funding comes in at end of the budget year.
