Category: human services

City Council, homelessness, human services, Mayor Wilson

Council Budget Fizz: Rinck Wants to Fund Survivor Services, Saka Wants to Defund Restrooms, and Strauss Says the Mayor Is Weak on Homelessness
City Attorney Erika Evans speaks at a press conference about Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck’s budget proposal at City Hall on Wednesday.

1. Seattle City Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck announced Wednesday that she’ll propose adding $8 million to this year’s city budget to restore services for domestic violence and sex trafficking survivors that the council funded on a one-time basis last year, and expand services and shelter for victims of gender-based violence that are losing federal funds due to the passage of HR1, Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.”

The money, Rinck said at a press conference on Wednesday, would help fund legal services, flexible funding for needs like apartment deposits and childcare during court dates, support groups and counseling for survivors and their children, and prevention programs like consent education and bystander intervention.

“Gender-based violence is not inevitable. It is learned, which means it can be unlearned, and it also means it can be stopped before it starts,” Rinck said.

City Attorney Erika Evans said she started her term this year with a backlog of 1,700 domestic violence cases, which has resulted in some victims, like a woman she identified as “Sarah,” waiting years for her case to go to trial. “She said waiting two years made her feel like Seattle didn’t care about what happened to her,” Evans said. Councilmember Dionne Foster said she’ll propose a one-time add to next year’s budget that will help close that backlog; we’ve reached out to her for more details about that separate funding proposal.

HR1 cuts millions of dollars for survivor services and domestic violence prevention programs, impacting groups like the  King County Sexual Assault Resource Center (KCSARC). Meanwhile, changes and cuts to grants made through the US Department of Housing and Urban Development have left local survivor housing programs with less ability to provide shelter and housing to people fleeting abuse.

“The administration has proposed cutting the Office of Violence Against Women by 29 percent. It has moved to terminate millions of dollars in federal grants to hundreds of organizations. It has cut housing assistance,” Rinck said. “Every one of those cuts has an address, and too many of those addresses are right here in Seattle.”

Rinck didn’t offer specific details about her proposal on Wednesday, saying she’ll introduce a detailed budget amendment next week.

2. The city’s Office of Economic and Revenue Forecasts, whose October revenue forecast has recently provided the city council with more (projected) money to play with in its November budget, had sobering news on Friday: The new forecast projects just $7.8 million in additional revenues between 2026 and 2028 compared to previous forecasts. In reality, the true number will be $2.8 million in the negative, city economist Jan Duras told the Economic and Revenue Forecast Council, because the city intends to continue exempting health care providers from the JumpStart payroll tax.

The city also expects revenues to dip below previous forecasts in 2028.

What this means for the council’s budget deliberations is that for all their bluster about funding more police, more surveillance cameras, more Unified Care Team staffers, and more firefighters, they’ll be facing an even tougher budget reality this year. Funding everything council members have said they hope to add to the budget would cost tens of millions of dollars, which would require equivalent cuts to other parts of the budget. So far, no one on the council has said where they plan to cut (or what budget tricks they plan to use on the budget they received from the mayor’s office, which shows a positive balance through 2023) to pay for those additions.

PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you.
CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.

Support PubliCola

3. During one of several all-day council budget meetings this week, City Councilmember Rob Saka took several minutes to rail against Mayor Katie Wilson’s proposal to install 12 new restrooms, including two permanent Portland Loo-style restrooms at parks in Northeast and Southeast Seattle, using both general-fund and King County and Seattle parks levy revenues. Wilson’s proposal would also add 10 new Throne restrooms, like the ones installed in Pioneer Square earlier this year, across the city.

Overall, Wilson’s budget includes about $6.5 million, roughly half of that from the King County and Seattle parks levies, to pay for the new permanent and prefabricated restrooms, along with maintenance and renovations at existing parks restrooms, including at Judkins and Cal Anderson Parks.

Saka, who has previously complained that restrooms in his West Seattle district are poorly maintained and covered with graffiti, characterized the new toilets as a waste of money given the poor condition of the permanent restrooms in other Seattle parks. (His comments came during a discussion of the city’s parks and recreation budget; the restroom spending is spread across several budget areas).

“We’re a year plus away from an audit, a damning, scathing audit, that revealed can’t get our own house in order—quite literally, bath house in order!” Saka siad. “We can’t even solve the problem of maintaining properly our existing restroom inventory fleet. And how many new bathrooms are proposed for expansion under this? And yes, my council district is the worst off. It’s no secret, in terms of inability to properly maintain because of graffiti and vandalism our existing restroom fleet!. And now we want to expand, create new shiny names, and we can’t take care and look after the things that we have properly today.”

Saka’s opposition to new public restrooms represented a dramatic reversal of his position just one year ago, when he added $1 million in funding to then-mayor Bruce Harrell’s budget for new public restrooms in his district. Citing the exact same “scathing audit,” Saka argued last year that his district should be prioritized for new Portland Loo-style restrooms.

Adding these restrooms, Saka argued, would help “to harden the parks restrooms, to make it more tamper resistant, to make it more vandalism resistant, to make it more graffiti resistant.” Funding restrooms in his district, Saka said, was a way of respecting “the gravity and severity of the underlying problem at issue” in the audit.

Saka’s total reversal on the issue of public restrooms may seem perplexing, but two things have changed. First, this year’s proposed new restrooms are not in his district. And second, the mayor is Katie Wilson, a person many on the council, including Saka, seem determined to oppose even when it means they have to completely reverse positions.

4. For another example, look no further than Dan Strauss’ dark insinuations on Thursday about Wilson’s proposal to move the city’s huge (more than 100-member) encampment sweeps team out of her direct control and into the Human Services Department, which oversees homelessness programs and, until Harrell vastly expanded the city’s encampment removal apparatus, oversaw previous iterations of the team.

Logically, taking the UCT out of Wilson’s office is a way of depoliticizing it, and that’s how a staffer characterized the change. Council central staffer Ann Gorman said, “this was undertaken in order to protect the UCT across mayoral administrations, so that it continues” no matter who is in office. “To someone who is interested in the continuation of the UCT, that’ss good news that would seem to reflect the the achievement of efficiencies.”

Strauss said he took “a little bit of issue” with Gorman’s comments, calling the claim that moving the sweeps team back to HSD would insulate it politically “the largest pile of horse pucky I’ve ever seen occur in my life.” The city needs “executive leadership”—that is, direct control by the elected mayor—for the UCT to be effective, Strauss said.

The real reason Wilson wants to move the team, Strauss continued, is that she doesn’t want to deal with homelessness—quite a thing to claim about a mayor whose budget includes $37 million for new shelter, far more than any of her predecessor’s budgets.

“I believe that that transfer happened because the mayor is likely uncomfortable addressing homelessness, because addressing homelessness requires both a lot of compassion and firm boundaries, and it can be very uncomfortable,” Strauss said. 

Strauss also assailed Wilson for using existing funds—$3.5 million—for an RV safe lot where people living in RVs could access services and shelter and move toward housing. Strauss wants to use that money on his plan to eventually ban RVs from the city, with a transitional period where people currently living in RVs would be required to register with the city and accept services and shelter offers. Strauss said he was “deeply disappointed in the lack of collaboration from the Wilson administration regarding this funding, and my door remains open.” 

 

City Council, City Hall, human services

Council Critics Accuse Wilson of Creating “the Unfund Budget”

By Erica C. Barnett

Mayor Katie Wilson’s centrist critics on the Seattle City Council spent most of Wednesday accusing the mayor of creating a budget that, as Councilmember Bob Kettle put it repeatedly throughout the day, “unfunds” (rather than defunds) critical services, including encampment removals, graffiti and park restroom cleanups, and transportation projects.

The theme of the day was insinuation: Council members complained about things that have supposedly fallen apart that Bruce Harrell is no longer in office, like the state of parks restrooms or the swiftness of encampment sweeps, then blamed them on Wilson and her budget priorities. Dan Strauss, for instance, said a business owner’s complaint about an encampment that stayed in the same spot for three months shows that there’s been “a complete change in how effectively the city is addressing homelessness,” while Rob Saka assailed the mayor for proposing 10 new portable public restrooms when “we can’t even get our own bathhouse in order!”

“How many new bathrooms are proposed for expansion?” Rob Saka asked rhetorically, projecting to the rafters. “Now we want to expand, create new shiny things, when we can’t even properly take care of the things we have today? Hmm!”

In general, the day’s two budget meetings (which I covered in detail on Bluesky, starting here) were an opportunity for councilmembers who opposed Wilson’s election to overstate the likely impact of her proposed budget cuts and suggest that she should have made different, unspecified decisions to address a $175 million budget deficit.

Take, for example, the “unfunding” of the city’s Unified Care Team, which would lose two and a half administrative positions—desk jobs—that have never been filled.

This cut, Kettle said, represented a larger “deprioritization” of encampment removals—one that has deprived the Parks Department of the “heavy equipment” it needs to haul tents, trash, and people’s possessions away after encampment sweeps. Piling on, Maritza Rivera claimed Wilson’s “budget renders us incapable” of addressing homeless encampments. And Saka railed against the mayor’s decision to move the city’s Unified Care Team back to the Human Services Department rather than having its duties spread across four separate city departments.

Addressing the mayor (who, quite possibly, could hear him from her office five floors above), Saka said, “Now, this might be a good thing to deprioritize [the UCT] t and bury that work down in a department somewhere. I might be a political bone to throw at your democratic socialist base, but it does our communities harm!”

Last year, Saka sponsored a budget proviso, or spending restriction, that required Wilson to maintain the $30 million, 116-member Unified Care Team and keep spending money on specific priorities, such as $2.2 million for police to be present at sweeps.  “Some people on the far, ultra-left lost their national minds!” when he sponsored the proviso, Saka bellowed. “Calls to employee wellness programs skyrocketed, apparently, in some circles after I did that! But it was a wise and responsible thing to do.”

PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you.
CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.

Support PubliCola

 

Later in the day, during a discussion about how to resolve a growing deficit in the Seattle Department of Transportation’s transportation fund ($41 million on average each month this year), council members suggested this was the first they were hearing about the seriousness of SDOT’s financial problems. (SDOT has said the shortfalls stem from higher-than-anticipated costs and lower-than expected revenues.) “I did not know up until a couple weeks ago, right during the budget, as part of the budget process, that SDOT was operating basically in the red in this way,” Rivera said. “This is a new development for council.”

In fact, a staffer reminded her, the budget the council adopted last year showed a growing negative transportation fund balance starting in 2027. That same budget noted that SDOT had finished paying off a previous interfund loan, unanimously approved by the council in 2020, last year. “I think there was some awareness that the transportation fund was having challenges,” the staffer said. “Now it may not have had awareness that starting in 2026, after the interfund loan was paid off, that we continue to have those challenges, but … I looked at last year’s financial plan, and it was a negative balance, and projected for it to be negative balance for this year and the coming years.” 

The council has the authority to revise the budget to reflect their own priorities. But there’s a difference between expressing genuine concern about cuts and deficits and continually rehashing the last election.

Instead of responding like the business community has to Wilson’s budget (with a tone of surprised approval, since the budget funds centrist priorities, like police, with minimal cuts and no new taxes), the council is spending a huge amount of rhetorical energy this year grandstanding over relatively insignificant cuts (rarely have so many budget speeches centered on the elimination of two vacant administrative positions) without acknowledging that for every program they restore, they’ll have to find commensurate cuts elsewhere in the budget. It’s as if Wilson’s opponents on the council think the mayor made up a mean budget just to spite them, and that their job is to righteously restore funding for all their pet projects without balancing the ledger.

Which is to say: Get ready for tomorrow’s meetings, which will focus on the human services, police, and fire departments, three areas where many on the council have, if anything, even bigger feelings about the mayor’s budget proposal.

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.

PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you.
CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.

Support PubliCola

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.

PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you.
CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.

Support PubliCola

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.”

PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you.
CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.

Support PubliCola

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.