By Erica C. Barnett

The King County Regional Homelessness Authority made its first round of layoffs on Tuesday, six days after CEO Kelly Kinnison sent an email to staff letting them know they might receive layoff notices this week. After waiting in limbo for five days, not knowing if they’d have a job when they returned to work, staffers got another notice on Monday to let them know that the people who would be laid off would receive an invitation to an HR meeting the following day.

When the layoffs finally came, Kinnison and her right-hand man, William Towey, were nowhere to be found. Instead, the agency’s top two executives were at a meeting of the King County Council’s Committee of the Whole, providing a rare two-person update on the work an outside consultant, Turning Point Strategic Advisors, is doing to reconcile the agency’s books and figure out the source of $8 million in “unreconciled funds” the agency failed to account for.

For some current and former staff, it was hard to avoid the conclusion that the executives had decided to attend the meeting together to avoid being at the office while people learned they were losing their jobs.

The missing $8 million—which, Towey revealed Tuesday, could actually be more than that amount—was identified in a damning forensic audit earlier this year; that audit led the county and city to begin clawing back homelessness contracts the KCRHA took over in 2022.

A spokesperson for KCRHA confirmed that 10 people have been laid off, one resigned voluntarily before the layoffs took place, and six vacant positions will remain vacant. (The KCRHA’s governing board approved Kinnison’s request for seven new staffers in June).  In an email to staff this week, Kinnison also noted that two employees, the chief people officer and the chief communications officer, are getting title demotions “from ‘Chief’ to ‘Senior Director’ to reflect reduced team sizes and/or responsibilities.”

In contrast, Towey, who Kinnison hired into a newly created “associate director” job shortly after an earlier round of layoffs last October, got a promotion to Chief Operating Officer. Towey’s elevated title, Kinnison wrote, will “better reflect his ongoing responsibilities for the Finance Department, Research and Data Department, outside legal counsel, and more.”

Staff who were in the office this week said they knew layoffs were coming, but were perplexed by the decision to drag the process out so long, with repeat advance warnings, instead of just making the cuts.

The staff who lost their jobs on Tuesday received no severance and just one month of paid administrative leave. That’s a fraction of the severance 11 staffers received when they were laid off last October: Two months’ pay, plus one month for every year they were at KCRHA, in addition to two months’ paid administrative leave.

Those layoffs included the agency’s chief financial officer, general counsel, chief of research and data, and deputy CEO—along with several people who had complained about Kinnison and successfully accused her of retaliation.

PubliCola has reviewed a list of all 11 staffers who lost their jobs this week. They include data analysts who were working to complete the analysis of this year’s homeless Point In Time Count, a staffer responsible for putting out information about emergency shelters in severe weather, and staff who work on the region’s Homeless Management Information Information System and Continuum of Care, two functions that will remain at KCRHA.

Although current and former staffers said some of the layoffs (which included an ombudsperson, a procurement staffer, and a trainer) made sense, they also found the decision to preserve the agency’s finance staff (and keep the program staff mostly intact) hard to understand, since the KCRHA is no longer developing programs and no longer needs a large finance staff to manage its much smaller budget.

It wasn’t lost on anyone that the people who lost their jobs this week include many long-time staff who have kept the agency going since the beginning.

“These aren’t directors or deputy directors—these are the folks  at the bottom of the food chain,” one recently departed staffer said. Some of the laid-off staffers had been at KCRHA since it first started in 2021; had they received the same level of severance as the executive and director-level staff laid off in October, they would be walking out with seven months’ pay while they search for other jobs. When one staffer who was laid off said, “‘Hey, this severance package doesn’t sound like the one folks got during the last round,’ she was told, ‘This is a different situation,” the former staffer said.

Last week, unionized staff represented by PROTEC17 sent a letter to the KCRHA’s governing board urging them to cut top staff, including Kinnison and Towey, rather than eliminating low-level positions that will continue to be needed as the agency ramps down. During the King County Council meeting, the staffer who signed that letter, data analyst Ben Mathewson, urged the council to demand “accountability from leadership” who got the KCRHA into the current financial mess

“Reform is never about blindly trimming from the bottom up; it is about having the courage and the discipline to occasionally trim from the top down,” Mathewson told the council. “Accountability from leadership is essential in order to protect our experienced, data-driven workforce, and demonstrate to the public that King County values operational competence and fiscal efficiency over executive overhead.”

The same day, Mathewson learned that he was among the 10 staffers whose jobs were cut.

In an email, Kinnison told staff she’ll have more to tell them about “adjustments to our interim organizational structure and workflow” at a meeting on September 1. In a separate note, Kinnison told staff they not expect additional layoffs until after October 5.