By Erica C. Barnett
On Seattle Nice last week, we briefly discussed a column by the Seattle Times’ Danny Westneat, titled “Another ‘blank check’ program passes at King County.” I had just read the column the morning we recorded, and—never a good idea—assumed that Westneat had his facts basically correct.
Silly me.
The program Westneat spent several hundred words deriding as a $10 million “blank check”—which, side note, is not what a “blank check” is—is a 0.01 percent sales tax, which works out to about $4 a year, to fund youth homelessness programs. Westneat, acknowledging that the tax would provide “rather tiny amount—just $10 million per year for three years”—nonetheless says the county can’t be trusted to pass a tax without a predetermined spending plan, because of “a series of blunders and mismanagement that have focused a Klieg light on local social services funding.”
Specifically, Westneat claims, the Best Starts for Kids program was designed to let county workers decide what to fund “on the fly,” resulting in “chicanery,” improper payments, and possible fraud. Because of this, Westneat argues, all county human services programs (and only those programs) deserve special scrutiny. Targeting the unrelated Health Through Housing program, which provides permanent supportive housing in existing buildings, Westneat claims that operating costs have “soared,” and that the program will never reach its goals.
“[C]an we at least admit we have a problem?” Westneat kvetches. “Why these councils don’t just flesh out a clear spending plan with goals and oversight from the beginning is beyond me, but it’s probably because there’s no fallout with the voters when they don’t.”
“Until then, it seems the blank checks are only going to keep on coming.”
Much as I wish Westneat’s dashed-off ragebait didn’t have an impact, he’s influential—pundits and elected leaders routinely cite his columns as evidence to support their own positions, even when they’re full of half-truths and outright errors, like this one.
Wanting to know more about what the sales tax for youth homelessness will actually fund, I called the proposal’s sponsor, King County Councilmember Jorge Barón. To my surprise, given how much coverage the tax plan has received, he told me I was the first reporter to contact him about his bill.
“It’s not a blank check,” Barón said, sounding exasperated. (I get it—it’s not the first time the Seattle Times has run an error-riddled opinion piece about the tax without talking to its sponsor). To begin with, “there are already guardrails in the state legislation” that created the new taxing authority, limiting spending to “child care; perinatal support services; before-school and after-school based youth services that address mental, social, behavioral, and physical health; workforce capacity building; shelter and rental assistance; and client transportation.”
“The state has given us clear direction on what this money can be used for, which is very limiting,” Barón said.
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Moreover, Barón said, the county is going to adopt a spending plan—the thing Westneat claims they have no plan to do—in November, once they know how much money they can actually expect from the tax. Although Westneat wrote that the tax will net the county $10.3 million, the actual amount could be significantly less, Barón explained, because other cities within King County also have the authority to pass the same tax. The county has to credit every city that passes their own sales tax increase for its portion of the total, so they’re waiting to find out how much they’ll actually have to spend over the three-year life of the tax.
“There is going to be a spending plan. The details are being finalized,” Barón told me.
Spending plans aren’t the same thing as dictating specific agencies the county will fund, which means the spending plan the county adopts will probably be less prescriptive than Westneat seems to be suggesting it should be—that is, they set general parameters around how the money should be spent but give local officials the ability to select specific projects over the life of the tax.
This is standard practice. The six-year Seattle transit levy that’s on the November ballot, for instance, lays out nine broad spending categories, including bus service hours and transit “safety supports,” but keeps those categories general to allow the city to decide on specific projects in the future.
For this more targeted, three-year levy, though, the county already has a half-dozen specific youth and family projects in mind, including a Seattle shelter operated by Mary’s Place that is slated for closure; Friends of Youth’s Eastside shelter program; the ROOTS youth shelter in the University District; and the YMCA’s Social Impact Center in South King County.
Zooming out from the sales tax plan, Westneat also exaggerates the findings of a high-profile audit of grants made during the pandemic as part of the county’s Best Starts for Kids levy. Westneat claimed the audit found the $900 million program was “awash in improper payments and possible fraud.” (The aforementioned error-riddled op/ed claimed the county “lost untold millions of dollars” to waste and fraud, an inaccurate claim that a first-year fact checker would have flagged immediately.)
In reality, the audit looked at 19 grants, totaling about $12 million, that included funding for community groups that had never previously held county contracts. Ultimately, the audit found $320,000 in improper or questionable payments, including a little over $10,000 in potential fraud, although the county never actually paid out that money. All told, the county is working to recover about $58,000 in potentially improper payments. The county absolutely screwed up by failing to closely monitor these programs. But that hardly makes the entire levy program “awash” in fraud.
Westneat’s cheap shot at Health Through Housing is wrong, too. Citing his own previous column about problems at one of the former hotels King County tried to convert into housing, Westneat suggests the entire enterprise has failed. The program, he claims, “has never reached its goals” and “likely won’t now,” since the county has stopped buying up old motels.
In terms of the total number of units, Westneat’s correct—the program’s goal was to “create and operate” 1,600 units, and the county only reached 1,423, including nearly 1,000 units of permanent supportive housing. Rising costs have stalled building acquisition, and NIMBY opposition has also slowed down specific projects.
In terms of success at getting chronically homeless people into permanent supportive housing—housing for people with physical and mental disabilities that includes wraparound services and minimal barriers to entry—Health Through Housing is an indisputable success. Of the hundreds of formerly homeless people living in permanent supportive housing through the program (768 as of the end of 2025, a number that has grown since then with the full and partial openings of three more buildings), 93 percent remained housed, meaning they didn’t return to homelessness.
Being housed, as the name of the program suggests, resulted in dramatic reductions in emergency room visits, hospitalizations, and jail bookings. Improving people’s health and stability, and reducing involvement in the criminal legal system, are also key Health Through Housing goals, which the program has achieved year after year.
Although Westneat is scandalized that the average operating cost for these units was $3,400 last year, that number represents the cost of providing supportive services that make it possible for homeless people with long-term disabilities to stay in their housing instead of sleeping on sidewalks and in encampments. In other words, it’s not $3,400 in “rent” per month, but an all-in number that include the “wraparound services” Seattle liberals like Westneat always say we need in order to keep people from living on the streets.
We’ll be discussing the new tax again on this week’s Seattle Nice. We also got into the details on KUOW’s Week in Review last week, where a fellow guest called my work to report this story out “adorable” before dismissing everything I said.
