The King County Regional Homelessness Authority released a high-level summary of its biennial “point in time count” of the county’s homeless population Tuesday, after a delay of several weeks that gave the KCRHA time to add more context to the numbers in response to concerns from homeless advocates that the news looked too much like doom and gloom.
The KCRHA applies statistical sampling methods to interviews rather than doing a true “one-night count.” The report includes a housing and shelter inventory, which uses on data from the county’s Homeless Management Information System to determine the number of shelter beds and housing units in the system. Unlike most other jurisdictions, the KCRHA does its estimate every two years, rather than annually.
This year, the KCRHA estimated that there are 18,365 people experiencing homelessness in King County, of whom 11,829 were unsheltered. That’s up from 16,868 and 9,810 in 2024, respectively—a nine percent increase in overall homelessness, but a 21 percent increase in the number of people living unsheltered. Additionally, the report found that “the inflow into homelessness continues to outpace exits.” In other words: More people are becoming newly homeless or returning to homelessness than are getting (and staying) housed.
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Specifically, according to the report, around 17,000 people exit the county’s homelessness system, meaning that they stop using homeless services, while around 18,000 enter it.
The KCRHA changed the way it counts the Hispanic/Latino population this. year, which appears to have resulted in a spike in the Latino number and a reduction in the number of “white” people experiencing homelessness. (We’ve asked what accounts for the change). Twenty-four percent of people living homeless in King County identify as Latino (the same percentage as identify as Black), compared to less than 16 percent in 2024. Every non-white racial group was overrepresented among the homeless population, including Native and Indigenous people, who make up 0.4 percent of the county population but 4.2 percent of all unhoused people in the county.
Overall, the number of shelter beds in the county declined by nearly 12 percent over the past year, going from 5,958 in 2025 to 5,269 in 2026, in part because of a disproportionate reduction in family shelter beds. At the same time, the number of permanent supportive housing units—permanently affordable apartments for people with disabilities, which currently includes severe addiction—increased by 155 last year and 561 in 2025.
A press release from the KCRHA characterized the growth in homelessness as a slowdown in the rate of increase, from 26 percent between 2022 and 2024 to 9 percent between 2024 and 2026. However, as noted above, the increase in people living unsheltered on the streets increased more dramatically than the overall number of people experiencing homelessness, suggesting that the increase in visible homelessness is directly tied to the declining availability of even basic shelter.
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.
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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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.
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.
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.
Earlier this month, King County Council budget chair Rod Dembowski quietly slipped an amendment into a nearly 400-page supplemental budget proposal that would prohibit the county from spending any money buying or distributing safer smoking supplies, such as pipes and foil, to drug users.
The county’s public health department only runs one needle exchange, where drug users can also access services and treatment medication, but the county distributes supplies to nonprofits that provide similar services, making the potential impact far more significant than the small amount—around $14,000— the county has spent so far this year on pipes and smoking supplies.
King County Public Health (KCPH) estimates that staff distribute safer smoking supplies at the downtown needle exchange for 15 to 20 hours a week, “translating to an estimated $83,000 annually for staff time,” according to KCPH spokeswoman Sharon Bogan. “During these interactions, staff are also connecting individuals with tools to prevent overdose, offering connections to treatment, and addressing client needs,” Bogan said.
King County hands out some of these supplies at its own needle exchange, downtown, and also distributes them to other organizations, including the Hepatitis Education Project and the People’s Harm Reducation Alliance.
Dembowski did not respond to several requests for an interview.
Opponents of harm-reduction approaches, such needle exchanges and the distribution of overdose reversal drugs, argue that making drug use safer merely “enables” drug users to stay addicted. The Trump administration has aggressively rejected harm reduction in favor of punitive approaches, including in recent policy guidance for federal shelter and housing funds.
King County, however, has long embraced harm reduction, which reduces the spread of infectious diseases like HIV and attracts drug users who would not otherwise come in contact with health care and treatment providers. The downtown needle exchange, for example, provides treatment referrals and “warm hand-offs” to the Pathways treatment clinic located in the same location; refers people to detox and medication-assisted treatment; provides case management and connections to housing, food and shelter; and hands out the overdose reversal drug Narcan, among other services.
“Distributing pipes and foil allows Public Health to build trust among people who use drugs. By building this trust, we can reduce preventable deaths, interrupt the spread of infectious diseases, and serve as a bridge to treatment and recovery,” Public Health’s Bogan said. “Discontinuing pipe and foil distribution means that we will lose our connections to people in our community who use smoking supplies and do not inject and who rely on our services.”
Caleb Banta-Green, a research professor at the University of Washington’s Addictions, Drugs, & Alcohol Institute (ADAI). said he “was saddened and surprised to see King County do something that appears to be following in the footsteps of the federal government’s really ill-informed approach.” When politicians actually visit harm reduction programs in person, he said, they often change their minds, “because it’s not just giving things to people. It is health promoting and it is literally about engagement and helping people.”
A survey ADAI conducted last year found that in 2025, opiate and meth users overwhelmingly switched from injecting drugs to smoking them, a change (compared to ADAI’s 2015 survey) that corresponded with a dramatic reduction in people showing up at sites that provided clean needles.
In King County, the reduction in injection drug consumption led to a reduction from 25,000 annual visits, or “encounters,” with the public needle exchange program to a low of 12,000 in 2022. After the county began handing out pipes and foil, that number rebounded, from 20,000 in 2023 to 60,000 in 2025, according to the county’s public health department.
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“There has been a dramatic shift in a decade from heroin to fentanyl, and from injecting to smokin—that is how people are consuming substances, and if we want to keep providing public health services for people who consume substances, we have to be adapting to that,” Banta-Green said.
Smoking from dirty or broken pipes, or using cheap, thin foil as a smoking surface, both pose their own safety risks, such as facial wounds and burns—making it a good idea for drug users to replace pipes and only use thick, high-quality foil. But coming in for safer supplies has another benefit, ADAI’s research found: It keeps people from injecting drugs, which is much riskier and can lead to abscesses, infections, and collapsed veins.
At needle exchange sites that didn’t offer smoking supplies, participants were far more likely to have injected drugs (70 percent) than at sites that offered smoking supplies (35 percent), according to the survey. At those same sites, 83 percent of participants said they would “like to get free, clean pipes or foils to smoke opioids, cocaine, or meth,” and 75 percent of the people who injected drugs but were interested safer smoking supplies said they would “inject less often” if smoking supplies were available.
“All of the evidence points to the same thing, which is when you make smoking supplies available, people will inject less, and if you take smoking supplies away, people will start injecting more,” Banta-Green said.
The county council is scheduled to vote on the full supplemental budget next Tuesday.
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.
KCRHA associate director William Towey at last week’s King County Council briefing
By Erica C. Barnett
Seattle and King County owe the King County Regional Homelessness Authority around $8 million, KCRHA associate director William Towey told the County Council’s committee of the whole last week, referring to the $8 million in spending that, according to a forensic audit, “could not be reconciled” by auditors and “may have to be written off.” The $8 million made up the bulk of more $13 million the homelessness agency had either overspent or could not account for when Clark Nuber released its forensic audit in April.
“Basically, these are the funds that we should have billed to King County in the city of Seattle, and that we didn’t, and we are in the process, in phase one, of completing a cash accounting, which will help us identify what the amounts of those funds are and who they accrue to,” Towey said. A KCRHA spokesperson confirmed that the agency doesn’t know the exact amount they failed to bill for and how much they believe they are owed by the city and county, respectively.
Towey attended the council meeting without KCRHA CEO Kelly Kinnison, who was on a family vacation.
Committee vice-chair Claudia Balducci expressed incredulity that King County may be expected to pay KCRHA additional money, on top of its regular funding and whatever it will cost to untangle the agency’s finances and fix the most critical issues outlined in the audit.
Even if the city and county decide to take over control of the region’s homelessness contracts and shut down the agency, they could end up spending millions winding it down; already, the city and county have committed to funding a team of outside accountants, and KCRHA’s finance committee has recommended hiring seven new staff despite a hiring freeze.
“Did I hear you correctly to say that KCRHA believes that King County and Seattle owe the agency money, and if so, how much?” Balducci asked.
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“Yeah, you heard me correctly,” Towey responded. At some point between 2021 and mid-2025, the years the audit covered, “a situation occurred where we expended funds to providers and failed to bill either the city of Seattle or King County for those expenses,” Towey said.
It’s “not great,” Balducci responded, “that there was an $8 million that was unaccounted for, that now will have to come out of the backs of our taxpayers.”
A spokesperson for King County Executive Girmay Zahilay told PubliCola KCRHA has not provided a bill breaking down what the county “owes” the homelessness agency, but is supposed to complete an initial calculation of its outstanding accounts receivable by June 22.
“Failing to properly bill the city and county does not result in the city and county owing KCRHA $8M,” the spokesperson said. “Because the receivables have not yet been validated or tied to specific costs, it is too early to determine whether there is an existing County funding source or account available to pay any portion of the amount.”
Towey suggested that the $8 million that remains accounted for is as much the county and city’s responsibility as the KCRHA’s, because the two governments should have noticed that KCRHA wasn’t billing them and taken action to make them do so.
“Again, I tend toward being generous, but if I have a great relationship with a vendor, and I want them to come work on my business regularly, and they bill me every month, and I notice that they fail to bill me for some funding, I would probably try and correct that myself,” Towey said. “Now, that is in no way meant to say that this is not our fault,” he added.
As he and Kinnison have done previously, Towey downplayed the audit findings, saying that since Kinnison was hired, the agency has addressed or is in the process of addressing most of the major issues Clark Nuber identified, such as poor financial management and potential misuse of “cash-equivalent” funds, as credit cards and gift cards. “In the grand scheme of what this is about, these are relatively small dollar amounts,” he said. (Clark Nuber has strongly disputed the KCRHA’s positive spin on its findings, and urged the city, county, and KCRHA governing board to closely verify every claim from the agency, given its history of failing to follow through on commitments.)
Towey also suggested that the vast majority of the problems the auditors identified were long in the past, resulting largely from inept past leaders, early mistakes, and efforts to respond to homelessness quickly during the COVID pandemic. In “hindsight,” he said, people will look back and say, ‘”Gosh, that could have been done a bit more efficiently, but again the expenses are clearly to the right people for the right things.”
Balducci was taken aback by at the blithe tone of Towey’s presentation, which she called “completely at odds with where my constituents are,” Balducci said. “My constituents think that we are done with this organization. … As policymakers, we all own part of how we got here today. We made some decisions that in retrospect we probably should have done differently. But here we are, and I’m just afraid that this is a sinking ship, and regardless of all the work that’s going in, it feels like fiddling on the Titanic.”
Balducci was “shocked,” she added, that Kinnison didn’t make time to attend the meeting of “one of the organizations that’s going to decide the future” of the agency she leads. “That’s not a good look.”
Committee member Rod Dembowski, who was among the first councilmembers to call for dismantling the KCRHA, seemed more impressed by Towey’s presentation, noting that he had worked with Towey when he was head of Lake City Partners, a North Seattle homelessness agency.
“And so I would just say, William, I’m glad you’re over there at KCRHA, and I hope that your time there is short, and that we can get you over here at the county when that’s done,” Dembowski said.
In response to PubliCola’s questions about whether and how the city will pay the money KCRHA says it owes, a spokesperon responded, “The City, County and KCRHA are in conversation about how to resolve this and other on-going financial management issues at the agency, starting with embedding a financial firm this summer.”
Editor’s note: This post has been updated to include KCRHA’s responses.
By Erica C. Barnett
Clark Nuber, the firm that conducted a damning forensic evaluation of the King County Regional Homelessness Authority in April, has responded to the agency’s “corrective action plan” (or CAP) with an equally scathing assessment that lays out seven “red flags” that, according to the auditors, the homelessness agency failed to address in its plan to correct systemic financial issues.
The CAP, Clark Nuber wrote, completely ignored several directives from the city and King County, including orders to put a freeze on hiring and spending, and relies on “trust us” assurances that the KCRHA will fix other serious deficiencies. Given the KCRHA’s repeated failure to meet its prior commitments, “funders should not rely exclusively on KCRHA’s self-reported progress,” the auditors wrote. The plan includes “pervasive use of potential hedge language, like: “‘has begun,’ ‘has initiated,’ and ‘will include'” throughout, the assessment found.
“KCRHA also agrees that progress should be independently verified,” a KCRhA spokesperson said. “That is why the CAP itself recommended external stabilization support, and why we welcome the City and County’s intent to embed external financial expertise to support validation, documentation, and implementation. KCRHA is not asking funders or the public to rely on management assurances alone.”
The KCRHA, Clark Nuber found, also continues to insist—inaccurately—that its deficit (currently around $65 million, up from $45 million last July) is the inevitable result of its funding structure, in which the agency pays homelessness nonprofits and gets reimbursed by the city and county. Many large nonprofit and quasi-governmental organizations use reimbursement-based systems, the auditors pointed out, without the kind of steadily increasing negative balance KCRHA has experienced.
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“[The deficit grew steadily and consistently over time, which is the signature of a management process failure rather than an external shock or an inherent feature of reimbursable funding,” the evaluation found. One of the main issues, the auditors wrote, is that KCRHA has routinely submitted invoices late—up to 16 months—which has prevented the agency from getting reimbursed on time.
The KCRHA spokesperson said the agency “accepts responsibility for internal weaknesses that contributed to the problem” of negative balances. “Those are within KCRHA’s control and are being addressed through the CAP. At the same time, resolving the interest obligation and preventing recurrence will require coordinated work with funders on reimbursement timing, advances, working-capital structure, and treatment of accrued interest.”
The “root causes” of the negative balance “included internal factors: the absence of a formal monthly close process, inconsistent invoice preparation and submission, a lack of real-time cash monitoring, inadequate budget oversight, and insufficient internal controls,” the auditors wrote. “These are organizational management weaknesses, not consequences of the funding model itself.”
Overall, Clark Nuber found that the corrective action plan had not fully met any of seven “key dimensions” laid out in the forensic audit, including “KCRHA understanding of issues,” “achievability,” “accountability,” and risk.
The KCRHA spokesperson said, “Several of the issues raised in the assessment are already being addressed. The governance items referenced by the City and County—including spending controls, hiring controls, and a pause on new agreements that increase cost or liability—have been taken up directly with the KCRHA Governing Board and are in place.”
Additionally, they said, the corrective plan says nothing about $6.4 million in overspending on programs—”the most significant omission in the CAP”—and the growing amount of interest it owes the King County Investment Pool, from which it routinely borrows money. As we noted in our initial coverage, the $6.4 million is on top of $8 million in spending the KCRHA could not account for, $4 million in administrative overspending, and $1.26 million in interest that is “still growing.”
The KCRHA spokesperson said the agency already addressed the $6.4 million in overspending in late 2025 and early 2026.
Clark Nuber also noted that the KCRHA has put off establishing internal financial controls until the far-off Phase 3 of the plan, even though these controls are “not an aspirational best practice,” but required by federal law. “This means KCRHA will be administering significant public funds, including federal awards, without the required control structure throughout the period that is supposed to represent its most intensive corrective action effort.”
The report includes ten short-, medium-, and long-term recommendations for the city and county. It’s unclear whether either government will take the auditors’ adivce to heart; ten days after Clark Nuber published its report, Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson and King County Executive Girmay Zahilay jointly announced plans to “embed” (and pay for) an outside consultant to “ensure [the] corrective actions” in the KCRHA’s plan “are being implemented with urgency.”
Wilson’s office did not respond to questions Wednesday; Zahilay’s office referred us to his statement about the decision to hire a consultant. The new finance committee of KCRHA’s governing board—one of the steps outlined in the CAP—will meet Thursday morning at 10am.
