Category: human services

homelessness, human services, King County, Mayor Wilson, Uncategorized

Regional Homelessness Agency “Right-Sizing” Will Largely Restore Pre-KCRHA Status Quo

The announcement, which will send most homeless service contracts back to the city and county, aims to preserve federal funding at risk after a damning forensic audit and changes in funding priorities under Trump.

By Erica C. Barnett

King County Executive Girmay Zahilay and Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson announced Wednesday that they will transfer the region’s homelessness contracts back to the city and county, respectively, effectively ending the King County Regional Homelessness Authority as it has existed for the past five years.

Most of the region’s homeless service contracts, totaling around $160 million, will transition back to the city and county, where they used to live, by January 1, 2027, with some more complex contracts remaining at KCHRA on at least a temporary basis. As previously announced, the city and county will fund a team of consultants, from a company called Turning Point, to correct some of the major financial issues identified in the audit. The total cost, according to officials, will be under $1 million.

The KCRHA will continue to serve as the region’a Continuum of Care, the entity that applies for and administers federal funds, at least for this year. It will also oversee the Homeless Management Information System, a regional database of homeless people and the services they receive, administer the Point in Time Count of the region’s homeless population, and oversee the region’s severe weather shelters.

“It is not being dissolved, it is being strengthened,” Wilson said at a press conference Wednesday afternoon.

The changes will result in about 20 layoffs at KCRHA right away, officials said, with more to come in the future as the contracts move out. The decision to bring contracts back in-house will also result in some new costs for the city and county, especially while the KCRHA is still providing duplicative staffing, although officials said it’s currently unclear how much and what the impact will be on next year’s city and county budgets.

The KCRHA was recently subject to a damning forensic audit that found the agency had a large and growing deficit and lacked basic accounting standards; since then, the agency has released a “corrective action plan” that the auditors themselves said was  inadequate and failed to address many of their concerns.

The city and county are describing the new proposal as a plan to “stabilize, right size, and reset” the KCRHA.

“This agency was given incredible responsibility without sufficient capacity or authority to really effectively create and drive an overall strategy for addressing the homelessness crisis in our region,” Wilson said at a press conference Wednesday afternoon, “and I think that the audit really reflects this reality—and also, of course, brings to light specific problems that have to be urgently addressed.”

Wilson and Zahilay both said moving all the homelessness contracts back to the city and county does not mean the KCRHA is a “failure” as an agency. “I think the assumption of city and county contracts by the KCRHA was not terribly successful,” Wilson said. “That’s not saying the agency was a failure, but I think that particular part of its function, talking to service providers, that was not a successful function of this work.”

On Wednesday, city and county officials characterized the decision to take back their contracts as a reset that will allow KCRHA to focus on its “true core function” of serving as the Continuum of Care for the region—that is, as the entity that applies for and administers federal contracts.

As PublicCola has reported, the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development issued a Notice of Funding Opportunity this year—the first step in a competitive bidding process for federal dollars—that prioritizes transitional housing and high-barrier programs that include mandatory services over permanent supportive housing and harm reduction.

Because most of the region’s current federal funding (around $67 million) is for low-barrier permanent supportive housing, KCRHA was already likely to lose federal funds; the recent chaos at the agency makes that even more likely. (HUD recently froze all federal funding with LA’s homelessness agency over financial issues that are similar to those at KCRHA).

City and county officials suggested today that moving the contracts back to the city and county would make the city competitive again. “Taking our local dollars back to the county and back to the city really will relieve KCRHA of that additional responsibility of administering those dollars to really focus at this point in time on the changes in the Continuum of Care and that core function,” Wilson’s deputy director for operations, Mark Ellerbrook, said.

The KCRHA was established at the end of 2019 to replace the previous, locally atomized homelessness system with a “regional approach to homelessness.” The agency began administering homeless service contracts in 2022, but never got around to accomplishing its primary stated goal—getting every city in King County aligned behind a coordinated approach to homelessness and issuing new contracts to nonprofit providers as part of a coherent “five-year plan.”  Instead, the KCRHA got mired in a series of ideological arguments and policy missteps, including an aborted pandemic era effort called “Partnership for Zero” that was supposed to end unsheltered homelessness downtown.

The city and county, meanwhile, were never willing to let go of control over what the homeless system looked like—whether, for example, the KCRHA should focus primarily on temporary shelter or permanent housing—and the agency ultimately turned into a pass-through entity for contracts chosen and funded by the city and county. With no taxing authority, KCRHA couldn’t direct homelessness policy in any substantive way, taking direction instead from a series of elected officials with differing political priorities.

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PubliCola has reported in recent weeks on the KCRHA’s oddly blithe response to the forensic audit and the mayor and county executive’s response to its corrective action plan. Both agency CEO Kelly Kinnison and William Towey, the KCRHA’s associate director for strategy, have publicly treated the audit findings as little more than a speed bump, and blamed most of the financial and accounting issues on the way the agency’s budget functions (as a reimbursement system, in which the agency pays nonprofit service providers and gets reimbursed afterward) and previous leadership.

On Wednesday, however, Kinnison said, “As it was launched, [KCRHA] is a failed experiment,” she said.

Given that Kinnison and Towey have largely blamed the agency’s problems on decisions made before Kinnison was hired in 2024, I asked if she saw any of the problems that resulted in today’s announcement as her responsibility. “Absolutely, there are always things I would do differently and prioritize differently,” she said. “Being a newcomer to the region, I think”—Kinnison moved here from D.C.—”was more challenging than maybe I even expected it to be.”

Otherwise, Kinnison said, she came in and took charge of a bad situation by hiring administrative staff and getting the agency into financial shape. If she could have done something different, Kinnison said, she would have “been louder” and “more public” about the agency’s financial issues—”I came in when we were not paying providers on time and people were doing payroll on credit cards”—and lack of finance and administrative staffing. “There’s decisions a reasonable person could have made that would have bene different, but this missing money and construction of the back end [financial system] that didn’t  work—that’s an implementation problem.”

Kinnison also reiterated her claim that she had asked the city to initiate a forensic audit into the agency after she arrived and began identifying problems that occurred under her predecessor, Marc Dones. The mayor’s office says that isn’t true, and that the city (under then-mayor Bruce Harrell) and county (under then-executive Dow Constantine) requested the audit. Simon Foster, the former KCRHA deputy CEO, reportedly also raised concerns about the agency’s finances to the city. Foster was laid off by Kinnison last October, as was KCRHA finance director James Rouse, who was not replaced.

City and county officials, as well as as Wilson and Zahilay, were reluctant to say what will happen to the KCRHA after the contracts move. “That’s what the broad stakeholdering is designed to do” over the coming year, Zahilay said. Kinnison’s future at the agency is also up in the air, and she stood at the back of the room, rather than front and center, as Zahilay and Wilson answered questions. In a joint statement after the announcement, King County Councilmember Rod Dembowski and Seattle City Councilmember Maritza Rivera—who both proposed dissolving the agency earlier this year—celebrated the news. “While this is not a complete dissolution of the Regional Homelessness Authority that we may have called for, it is a major step in the right direction,” they said. “This is a much-needed reset of how we manage our homelessness response.”

 

Drugs, human services, King County, Uncategorized

County’s Midyear Budget Sparks Controversy Over Harm Reduction, Human Service Contracts, and Lobbyists

1. After PubliCola reported on a King County Council supplemental budget amendment that would have prohibited spending county funds on safer smoking supplies for drug users, the proposal’s sponsor, Councilmember Rod Dembowski, decided to withdraw the amendment and replace it with one that simply requests more information on the program. It was a significant victory for harm reduction proponents, who pointed to data showing that the program provided access to services, including treatment, to tens of thousands of drug users last year.

The supplemental budget, usually a low-key affair, sparked a number of controversies  this time around.

During a work session before this week’s county council meeting, Dembowski said that in response to “feedback,” his amendment would “modify that language away from a strict cutoff to asking for some more information about the program. You know, how many supplies are being distributed? What is the cost? Who are they going to? What studies are out there? What assessments are out there? Give us some more information, and come back in a few months to let us know about the program.”

As we reported last week, the county spends a small amount—about $14,000 so far this year—on safe smoking supplies, plus some staff time for county employees who distribute pipes and foil at the county’s syringe exchange and to nonprofit groups that run their own syringe exchange programs.

Those programs had fallen largely into disuse as most drug users switched from injecting to smoking; the result was a sharp reduction in the number of people who accessed other county services that are a primary function of the program, such as case management, basic health care and STI testing, and referrals to treatment. Opponents of harm reduction have caricatured and demonized safer smoking programs in the Trump era, claiming that they “enable” drug users and encourage drug use.

2. The supplemental budget, adopted yesterday, also included a modified version of an amendment Dembowski proposed earlier this month that will add another layer of process to every new Best Starts for Kids contract. (Best Starts has been under fire for months after an audit and followup investigation found potential misuse of funds, and possible outright fraud, by some “high-risk” organizations that received contracts during and after the pandemic.)

The amendment adopted Tuesday will require the county’s Department of Community and Human Services to send a “notification letter” to the county council certifying that every new contractor has met a series of requirements— guaranteeing, for instance, that each individual contractor has sound financial systems and “qualified personnel” to administer the contract. Previously, the amendment would have also required such a letter for every contract amendment, which opponents said would have turned routine changes into lengthy administrative nightmares.

The amendment, like Dembowski’s original proposal, also requires contractors to attest that neither they, nor any person in a position to administer contracts, has ever lost a county contract because of misconduct or misuse of funds. But it provides a new out that wasn’t included in the original proposal: If the contractor has taken “all reasonable steps” to recover misused funds and can show that “adequate corrective action has been implemented,” the county can still contract with them.

Dembowski characterized every element of the amendment as “not unusual” or something that “shouldn’t be a challenge.” But critics of his amendment argued in public comment that it still creates more process without providing meaningful oversight, since the council is made up of elected officials, not contracting or financial experts.

Dembowski’s amendment doesn’t include a minimum contract size or explain how small organizations that may be new to government contracting are supposed to prove they already have financial controls and systems in place that will meet the new requirements.

3. Also Tuesday, the county council voted to retain the county’s current federal lobbying firm, Washington2 Advocates, for at least a year while also paying a new lobbying firm, Manatt, Phelps, & Phillips. The contract with Washington2 will be with the legislative branch, while the contract with Manatt will be with the county executive.

Tensions flared over the contract decision after King County Executive Girmay Zahilay hired Manatt through a request for proposals process without telling the council what they were doing, effectively canceling out a one-year option to retain Washington2 Advocates, run by longtime county lobbyist (and personal friend of some councilmembers) Jeff Bjornstad.

During Dow Constantine’s time as executive, the council and executive jointly approved the lobbying contract. So it was a surprise to some on the council when they learned that Zahilay had run a new bidding process and picked a new contractor. (After we published this post, the executive’s office reached out to let us know that the council’s government relations staff was aware of the RFP. “We communicated to all Councilmembers our desire to coordinate with them on this RFP before it went live in April,” the spokesperson said.)

“The renewal came up sort of abruptly—we weren’t notified until there was already an RFP put out by the executive branch to search for another contractor,” Councilmember Claudia Balducci told PubliCola Tuesday. “For a very long time, we hired a lobbyist and worked together across the branches very closely … so this was a little jarring.” It “didn’t help,” Balducci continued, that Zahilay “deleted the council from the RFP” itself, effectively cutting them out of the lobbying contract altogether. “We were told that wasn’t the intent, but this all happened very quickly.”

Zahilay’s office disputes this, saying the council is still “a receiver of the consultant’s services” and saying the contract has always been just with the executive branch.

Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda told PubliCola that the fact that Bjornstad didn’t apply in the executive’s competitive process was “a sign that he wasn’t interested in competing.” Mosqueda argued that the executive had the right to issue a lobbying contract, arguing at a Monday council pre-briefing that the decision “should not be about individual relationships that people have had with a contractor over X number of years. …  This is about how the county can best be represented in these immense times.”

Doubling up on lobbyists for a year will cost the county about $200,000.

Asked about the dustup with the council, a spokesperson for Zahilay said, “we are rebidding and refreshing all federal and state lobbyist contracts. As a new administration, we believe this is good practice.”

Drugs, education, homelessness, human services, King County, LGBTQ+

This Week on PubliCola: June 20, 2026
KCRHA associate director William Towey

KCRHA says the county and city owe it $8 million, county councilmember plans to eliminate successful harm reduction program, and much more.

By Erica C. Barnett

Monday, June 15

Regional Homelessness Agency Says King County and Seattle Owe It $8 Million

In a comment that came as a surprise to many on the county council, King County Regional Homelessness Authority associate director William Towey said the city and county owe the KCRHA $8 million—the same $8 million an audit found the agency couldn’t account for and that may need to be “written off.” KCRHA CEO Kelly Kinnison couldn’t be at the meeting because she was on vacation.

Tuesday, June 16

County Human Services Director Calls Councilmember’s Contract Approval Proposal an “Overstep”

King County Councilmember Rod Dembowski has proposed a budget amendment that would require the county’s Department of Community and Human Services (DCHS) to submit a letter for county council review every time they execute or make any amendment to a contract in the Best Starts for Kids program, which was subject to an audit that found potential fraud and abuse in a subset of “high-risk” contracts. DCHS director Susan McLaughlin said the idea was a vast “overreach” that would not improve oversight.

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Wednesday, June 17

County Councilmember Dembowski Wants to Defund Successful Harm Reduction Program

In a separate amendment, Dembowski has proposed eliminating all funding for a county program that distributes safer smoking supplies to drug users. Opponents of harm reduction have targeted the program, which the county credits with more than quadrupling the number of people who come in to clinics where they can (and do) access other services, including case management, STI testing, and treatment.

Thursday, June 18

Right-Wing Activist Accused of Assaulting Security Guard While Trying to Force His Way Into Pro-LGBTQ Event

Jonathan Choe, a former KOMO reporter who now works for the Discovery Institute and Turning Point USA, showed up to the campaign kickoff for No Hate in WA State and tried to force his way inside, allegedly hitting a security guard in the back of the head, according to a police report. The campaign is working to combat two anti-LGBTQ+ statewide initiatives, including one that would ban trans kids from playing sports.

Friday, June 19

Here’s What Being a “Child Care Candidate” Actually Means

In an op-ed directed at all the candidates who say they support universal child care, SEIU 925 political and legislative director Erin Haick lays out a road map for what that means in practice—standing firm against additional cuts, paying child care workers like the professional educators they are, and right-sizing subsidies so they actually make it possible for people to pay for child care.

Also this week:

  • On Seattle Nice, we interviewed DCHS director Susan McLaughlin about how DCHS is addressing the findings of a damning audit that found potential waste and abuse in programs aimed at helping youth, among other topics—like the future of the King County Regional Homelessness Authority.
  • I went on KUOW’s Week In Review this week, where KUOW reporter Scott Greenstone, Republican former city attorney Ann Davison, host Bill Radke and I discussed the news of the week, including a report from a downtown business group that says downtown is struggling and it’s all the fault of taxes on big business (spoiler: It isn’t.)
  • ICYMI, I was also on Crystal Fincher’s Hacks and Wonks podcast last week, where we talked about the city’s data center moratorium, the latest light rail ridership numbers, ongoing challenges the CARE Team of unarmed first responders face, mostly from the Seattle Police Department, and more.

 

human services, King County

County Human Services Director Calls Councilmember’s Contract Approval Proposal an “Overstep”
King County Councilmember Rod Dembowski

By Erica C. Barnett

King County Councilmember Rod Dembowski has proposed an amendment to the county’s budget that Department of Community and Human Services director Susan McLaughlin said will have “devastating impacts” on the county’s ability to deliver services through Best Starts for Kids, a countywide levy that pays for child care subsidies, mental health support, after-school programs, and other services for parents and kids.

An explosive audit last year found poor financial oversights, waste, and potential fraud in four Best Starts programs, and a followup investigation by the county’s ombuds office found that fraud, waste, and abuse “in some cases likely occurred” and that conflicts of interest were common.

Many of the community groups DCHS decided to contract with during and after the pandemic were considered “high risk” because were completely new to government contracting; the audit focused on these programs, according to DCHS Director Susan McLaughlin, “because issues had been raised around them” within DCHS. In April, the county auditor found that DCHS had made significant progress on audit recommendations, improving training and awareness.

Dembowski’s amendment would require DCHS to send a “notification letter” to the county council every time the department executes or amends any of the hundreds of Best Starts for Kids grants and contracts. Amendments can involve contract extensions, additional funds, or changes to underlying “boilerplate” county contract documents that require edits to many contracts at once.

Each letter would have to certify that the contractor has adequate staff and systems to both administer county programs and report back regularly on outcomes; that the grant advances BSFK goals and has measurable outcomes; and that neither the agency receiving the grant nor of its leaders or managers has ever been involved in financial misconduct, among other requirements.

McLaughlin, who was appointed permanent DCHS director this afternoon, called the proposal an “overstep” that would likely add months of additional process to each Best Starts for Kids contracts without meaningfully increasing oversight of the programs.

“I can certainly understand what the intention is behind this kind of legislation, but honestly, that amended amendment is not only unprecedented, but would really have devastating impacts on DCHS, on Best Starts for Kids, and our ability to deliver on the work,” she told me on the latest episode of Seattle Nice, where we interviewed the DCHS director about the audit and other issues.

“The administrative burden alone would be enormous. I mean, we’re talking about hundreds of contracts, because it includes not only new contracts, but any amendment. … So you’re talking about delays of potentially up to a couple of months in the work, for in my opinion, very little gain.”

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Although Dembowski’s specific proposal did not come up during a public hearing on McLaughlin’s appointment last week, Councilmember Claudia Balducci pushed back on Councilmember Rhonda Lewis’ suggestion that the county is currently overcorrecting in response to the audit and investigation findings. “I just feel I have to say in this moment that we have a problem with how the public perceives us right now, and I don’t believe we should be talking about overcorrection when we have not yet corrected that problem,” Balducci said.

Earlier this year, Dembowski proposed adding a new layer of oversight for DCHS by funding an Office of the Inspector General—in addition to the county auditor and ombuds—to investigate and look into complaints about contractors themselves.

Dembowski did not respond to requests for comment Monday and Tuesday, but we’ll update this post if we hear back.

human services, King County, labor

County Considers New Contract Oversight Office; Return-to-Office Booster Calls In Remotely as County Employees Criticize Three-Day Mandate
Two recent views of King County Councilmember Reagan Dunn, a return-to-office proponent who frequently calls in to council meetings from remote locations.

1. In the wake of an audit that 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. A new inspector general’s office would cost around $800,000 a year, according to a presentation by the county auditor’s office last week.

County auditor Kymber Waltmunson said last week that an independent inspector general could augment the work the auditor and ombuds are already doing by setting up a hotline for anonymous tips, investigating fraud (the auditor does analyses but does not investigate), and actively monitoring contracts.

Rod Dembowski, one of the councilmembers who’s pushing for more oversight of county contracts, told PubliCola a new inspector general would “fill in a gap that we’ve identified” between the ombuds office, which oversees complaints about county employees, and the auditor’s office, which comes up with a work plan every year and conducts audits based on that plan.

“I’m trying to cover that gap where somebody believes something is being improperly done by a contractor or recipient of county funds,” Dembowski said. The IG would be “able to look at the actions of contract and grant recipients and see if there’s malfeasance or misfeasance there.”

County Councilmember Claudia Balducci said she agreed with Dembowski’s intention to encourage more active investigations into complaints about misuse of county funds, but isn’t convinced yet that the county needs to add a whole new office for that purpose. “I do think whatever happens needs to be nested within our current oversight [system.] I want to avoid creating overlaps and confusion.

She also isn’t convinced that the damning DCHS audit, which looked at a subset of contracts, necessarily indicates there are similar issues in other county contracts.

“I was hoping after the audit uncovered real lapses in oversight in a small number of our contracts, that someone would raise their hand and say, ‘Is this a bigger problem?'” Balducci said. “It might be. Or is it contained to some areas? But nobody in the system came out and said we should look more deeply.”

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2. 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, which would require most county employees, including those who were hired as remote workers, to commute to offices in downtown Seattle three days a week.

The mandate will require King County to rent a substantial amount of private office space in downtown Seattle, since the county does not have enough room for all its employees. Last week, county employees delivered a giant blank check to Zahilay’s office, representing the millions of dollars they estimate it will cost to rent office space so that everyone can have a desk downtown.

One of the most vocal advocates for a strict return-to-office policy has been Republican Councilmember Reagan Dunn, who went on KIRO Radio this week to declare, “There’s a new sheriff in town bringing employees back to King County so they can hang out around the water cooler and collaborate and do the people’s work.”

The county staffers, represented by PROTEC17, had a minute each to explain why commuting to a desk downtown would not make them more effective or efficient. Dunn, who lives 35 miles away from downtown Seattle, wasn’t around to listen, though. Instead, as he often does, he had called in to the meeting from a remote location.

 

City Council, human services

Councilmember Wants “Audit of Human Services Contracts.” That’s a Big Ask.

By Erica C. Barnett

City Councilmember Maritza Rivera wants the City Auditor to do an audit of all Human Services Department contracts, she announced this week, in light of a damning King County audit that found evidence of waste, misuse of funds, and potential fraud in a 36-contract sample of King County Department of Community and Human Services contracts for youth services.

Rivera, one of several councilmembers whose 2023 campaigns included a generalized demand for the city to “audit the budget” (an overbroad campaign demand that, of course, never happened) said in a press release that “in light of the issues at the County, we would be remiss if we did not conduct our own due diligence.”

Many of the contracts the county’s auditor reviewed were with new organizations with little or no prior government contracting experience, landing them in the “high risk” group that made up about half the contracts DCHS signed with providers between 2019 and 2024. The audit found that DCHS “had not prioritized resources for financial stewardship” of these contracts and failed to catch instances of noncompliance, waste, and fraud.

Rivera’s office did not respond to detailed questions sent Thursday morning, including why she believes HSD contracts are more likely to be problematic than other city contracts (such as those at the Department of Transportation or SPD) and whether she planned to limit the scope of any future audit to city contracts with specific groups identified in the county’s audit. HSD has more than $300 million in contracts; the bulk of that is funding for the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, which has its own separate contracting process.

Typically, the city auditor’s office, which currently has five audit staff, does limited audits of programs and initiatives, not far-reaching audits of entire city departments. Recent audits have looked at the Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections’ final building inspection process, Comcast’s compliance with the city’s Cable Customer Bill of Rights, and the city’s approach to maintaining and cleaning restrooms in parks.

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The city’s acting auditor, Arushi Thakorlal, said her office is currently “at capacity” through the fall, but said they’ll work with Rivera to figure out the scope of a general HSD contract audit if it moves forward. (The auditor is appointed by the council but functions independently).

The previous auditor, David Jones, established a method for prioritizing audits that Thakorlal said she’s continuing to follow: First, any audits that are required by law, such as annual reviews of non-police surveillance technology, have to be performed no matter what. Then, the office prioritizes audit requests from the council president and the head of the committee overseeing the subject of the proposed audit, in that order. Rivera is neither the council president nor the head of the council’s human services committee.

“If multiple council members support something, it moves toward the top of the list,” Thakorlal said. “Right now, I haven’t heard from other council members about this.” Thakorlal said she encouraged Rivera to work Alexis Mercedes Rinck, who heads the human services committee. Rinck told PubliCola she asked Rivera “for clarification on her request for an audit and shared what I understood about current contracting and auditing processes.”

Most of HSD’s contracts are reimbursable fee-for-service contracts: Contractors get paid after they spend money and submit invoices to the city. Most of the DCHS contractors in the King County audit, in contrast, received fixed monthly payments from the county and were supposed to reconcile what they spent the county by submitting detailed expense reports after the fact.

A spokeswoman for HSD, Caitlin Moran, said the department’s standard contract monitoring provides “improved levels of accountability and oversight” and said the department “routinely undergoes external audits by our federal and state funders as part of their standard fiscal oversight”; in 2025, a state audit requested by former city councilmember Sara Nelson looked at two years of contracts in HSD’s Community Safety division and did not identify any concerns, Moran said.

HSD’s internal controls, “as well as ongoing staff training and continuous improvement efforts to both our procurement and contracting processes, enable HSD to responsibly contract with community organizations who are critical partners in helping the City of Seattle build a strong social safety net that connects our most vulnerable residents to resources and services during times of need,” Moran said.