Category: State of Washington

Equity, State of Washington, Tech

Dozens of Digital Literacy Groups Funded Through a Statewide Grant Haven’t Been Paid Since January. The State Says It Isn’t to Blame.
Image by Colin via Wikimedia Commons

As a state program to improve digital equity shuts down, the group that distributes state funds to dozens of small nonprofits and the State Department of Commerce are at an impasse, with millions of dollars in the balance.

By Erica C. Barnett

Terrence Morgan, the CEO of Fresh Start Professional Services, was excited to receive grant funding in 2023 through a state initiative called the Digital Navigator Program. For the first time, Fresh Start would be able to rent an office to hold digital literacy classes and provide a modest monthly subsidy for program participants—people from marginalized communities, including survivors of domestic violence and people coming out of prison or treatment, for whom computer training classes could provide a pathway to higher educat,ion or better-paying jobs.

For more than a year, the state money that paid for the program showed every month, as expected. But then, this past January, the funding stopped.

Fresh Start was able to keep its classes going for a while by spending down its reserves and canceling the stipends that made it feasible for many of its clients to participate in the program, Morgan said. By April, though, “we started really feeling the brunt of it, because our funds were depleted. Our funds are totally completely depleted now.” After six months without any reimbursement for its work, Fresh Start has taken out a line of credit and laid off staff. Morgan and two other top staffers stopped taking pay three months ago.

“We’re doing the bare minimum we can do” until the program ends this month, he said. At this point, he isn’t convinced the state Commerce Department, which funds the Digital Navigator Program, has any intention of paying the dozens of groups that signed contracts for the funding in 2023. “”My guess is—and I’ve been saying this for the last four months—we ain’t never getting paid.”

•••

To understand why Fresh Start and the other organizations have gone unpaid for months requires some background on how the state’s Digital Navigator Program works. In 2021, at the height of the pandemic, the Commerce Department began giving out grants to local organizations to distribute laptops, set up internet connections, and provide digital literacy training to people in underserved communities.

Since then, the Digital Navigator Program has expanded and evolved, granting tens of millions of dollars to dozens of organizations to pay for digital literacy classes, laptops, help lines, and internet service across the state. A dashboard on the EEC’s website documents nearly 230,000 “interactions” made possible by the Digital Navigator Program, which include classes, home visits, calls to technical support lines, and other one-on-one encounters with people who participated in the program.

In 2023, the Commerce Department selected one of those grant recipients, the Seattle-based Equity in Education Center, to distribute more than $20 million in digital equity grants to 39 smaller nonprofits run by and for people of color in marginalized communities—a departure from the department’s previous practice of distributing dozens of grants directly. The EEC headed up the largest of three such “consortiums”; the other two were run by the Community Health Network of Washington and the Nisqually Indian Tribe.

For the first year or so, EEC director Sharonne Navas said, the payments from the Commerce Department came regularly. “We’d submit [invoices] for January, get paid in February, and reimburse our subcontractors by the first week of March,” she said. Last year, the state started asking for additional proof of how the organizations were spending their money, like payroll reports, bank statements, and copies of paper receipts. Navas said the EEC provided all the requested documentation, despite chafing at what they saw as shifting, sometimes arbitrary requirements.

Then, in November, a state audit found issues with 12 of the 62 digital navigator contracts with the organizations heading up the three consortiums. The Commerce Department, according to the audit, had failed to ensure that some forms had signatures, hadn’t verified certain contract requirements, and had paid out a total of $1,510 for “food/snacks that were not approved,” including energy drinks.

Shortly after the audit came out, then-Governor Elect Bob Ferguson appointed a new Commerce Director, former state senator Joe Nguyen, who  started in January. That same month, the department stopped paying the EEC, telling the group in April that it was going back over every invoice they had submitted between August and December of 2024, and would start paying them again once they were satisfied that everything was in order.

After the checks stopped coming, Navas said, she was forced to first run through the EEC’s reserves to pay her own staff and the subcontractors, and then to take out a line of credit, using her own house as collateral.

“We’ve floated nine payrolls. We’ve used up all our savings,” Navas said in early June. “I had to furlough 11 staff, and then we had to let nine of them go this week, because we just don’t have the cash anymore.” According to Navas, the state now owes the EEC more than $3 million, with no guarantee that the organization and its subcontractors will ever get paid.

The Commerce Department doesn’t dispute that they haven’t paid the EEC and its sub-grantees since January, but they say it’s the EEC’s fault—not theirs. According to Commerce Director Joe Nguyen, appointed by Governor Bob Ferguson in the EEC was always supposed to pay groups like Fresh Start out of its own funds, in advance, and then submit receipts and other documentation to the state to get reimbursement for the money, which amounts to about $1 million a month. To get paid, Nguyen said, all the EEC needs to do is show that it has paid each of the 39 organizations that are part of its consortium, then show the state exactly how each group spent the money.

In April, Nguyen told Navas in an email that “there is no freeze on the funds” and that “the delays and issues with reimbursement are not due to Commerce’s actions. We have expedited payment as soon as the proper documentation are submitted.”

“I don’t understand why they can’t produce some of these basic receipts,” Nguyen told PubliCola. “It’s all on a reimbursement basis—you submit the receipts, we pay you back.”

In a recent “listening session” with the organizations that contract with the EEC, Nguyen told the groups it was the EEC’s fault, not the state’s, that they haven’t gotten paid this year. (PubliCola received a recording of the meeting, which was not public.) The old leadership at Commerce, Nguyen said, had been paying the EEC without proper documentation, which was out of line with state policy and law. All he was asking for, Nguyen said, was receipts and invoices—and for the EEC to pay everyone in advance, which he said they should have been doing all along.

Navas said there are two flaws in the state’s position. The first, she said, is the Commerce Department keeps changing its requirements. When the program was set up under the agency’s previous director, Mike Fong, subcontractors were only required to submit invoices showing how they spent their grant funding. When Nguyen took over, the requests grew more and more specific, and rejections more common. “We’ve shown proof of payment throughout this whole entire thing,” Navas said. (PubliCola reviewed many of the documents the EEC submitted to Commerce and confirmed that they included receipts, payroll reports, and other detailed documentation.)

“The goalposts have moved so much that I don’t think they want to pay us,” Navas said. “Personally, I think that they want to show that we’re incompetent and then show that the new leadership at Commerce has saved the state $6 million.”

The second issue, Navas said, is that the EEC can’t pay people out of money it doesn’t have. “This grant was created during COVID, when nobody had any money,” she said. “The reimbursement process that we were under was, okay, let’s just be a little bit more flexible with this grant, because we have promised to give out 10,000 laptops and pay 200 digital navigators, and there is no organization that can do that and upfront all the money.”

What Commerce is asking now, Navas said, “is that I pay people before they pay us, and I can’t because I have used all my money to keep the organization open. … It is genuinely impossible” to pay out $1 million a month without having the money in hand, she said.

Nguyen said his only goal is to get the Digital Navigator Program in compliance with state standards that apply to all other contracts. “We have an obligation at the state to adhere to the State Administrative and Accounting Manual,” he said. “We want to make sure that any time people work with Commerce, we are being as supportive as possible, but we literally have [laws] and rules we have to follow.”

During the listening session, which did not include EEC representatives, Nguyen said he was trying to find a way to pay each of the 39 contractors individually, rather than through their contracts with EEC—a deal that would require each contractor to independently cut ties with the Equity In Education Center in the hope that they’d stand a better shot of getting paid by working with Commerce directly. So far, none of the groups have taken him up on his offer.

***

Emails between Commerce and the EEC throughout 2025 show that the relationship between the two is strained, if not broken. The two sides seem unlikely to resolve their impasse by the time the Digital Navigator program ends on June 30. Meanwhile, the nonprofits that received funding through the program are scrambling to figure out how to make up their losses.

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Mission Africa, a Federal Way-based organization that provides case management, mentorship, job training, and other services to immigrant and refugee women and youth, used its Digital Navigator grant to provide broadband access and digital literacy skills to a wide range of participants, from kids in high school to recent immigrants who didn’t need to have computer skills in their home countries.

Since 2022, when Mission Africa first applied for a Digital Navigator grant under an earlier iteration of the program, digital navigation has grown to be the group’s biggest program, according to its CEO, Ndudi Chuku.

“You have people who are medical doctors who come here and they’re not computer literate, maybe they have a serious language barrier. These are the people who are coming her, and we say, ‘This is a mouse. This is a desktop,'” Chuku, who is from Nigeria, said. “And these people end up getting good jobs, and they get a living wage to take care of their families.” In addition to basic digital literacy, Mission Africa teaches classes to train young people in coding, SQL, robotics, and cloud computing—skills that help them access better-paying jobs in the tech sector.

Chuku never stopped paying her staff, she said—”I couldn’t tell them, ‘We can’t pay you because we haven’t been paid,’ because that’s not my agreement with them”—but the loss of regular funding from the state has been “very, very impactful.”

Mission Africa, she said, has given the state no reason to believe they’ve been dishonest about how they’ve spent the money, and they’ve submitted meticulous invoices, including bank and payroll statements that include costs that have nothing to do with the Digital Navigator Program, which Chuku considers “an invasion of our privacy.”

“We did good work, we did it well, with integrity and honesty. We did not cut corners in any way and we did not make up numbers,” Chuku said. “For the past 18 months, Commerce has paid EEC for them to pay us. It has never been the other way around. I don’t know why they won’t pay us now.”

Ana Perera, the CEO of Adonai Counseling and Employment Services, said the Digital Navigator Program has funded four staffers, including one who works one-on-one with migrant workers and other Spanish speakers in Eastern Washington. The group has also provided broadband service to people who are “getting out of prison and going out to places like Omak or Clallam Bay,” Perera said, teaching them how to access their medical records, look for job or entrepreneurship opportunities, and access digital services.

“The heart of our agency is reentry,” Perera said, with a focus on employment, training, and behavioral health. The digital navigator funding has allowed Adonai to expand their work into 31 of the state’s 39 counties, “with a huge focus on rural areas” where broadband access is sparse and where participants lack access to digital literacy and training programs.

Perera, who had to start paying staff out of her own salary, said she thinks Nguyen is trying to drive a wedge between the small community organizations like hers and the EEC, which was previously just one of many organizations receiving direct grants from the state.

“I felt like the listening session was there to make sure to create division among our group so it would break down—’This is all EEC’s fault, they haven’t done thism they haven’t done that,'” Perera said.

Morgan, from Fresh Start, offered a similar assessment. “All they’re doing is stall tactics to get to the end of the grant and say, ‘You didn’t comply, you lost funding.’ At the listening session, they said, ‘We can’t pay you because Sharonne was supposed to pay you all up front.’ But she was paying us up front until you stopped paying her.”

Navas said her organization “absolutely made mistakes,” especially in the early days, when the EEC was a $300,000 organization that rapidly expanded to a budget of $13 million. But none of those errors, she said, justifies cutting off funding to so many small community organizations, including some whose staff have had to go on food assistance, couch surf, or take out personal loans in the months they haven’t been paid.

“When it’s a good day, [I think] it might just be new leadership, under a new governor, trying to come in and trying to enforce internal ways of doing things that should have always been in place,” she said. “On a bad day, it’s hard to give people grace who have so much power, and flippantly say that they’re not going to move any faster.”

The state and the EEC have until July 7 to resolve their impasse. Although the state legislature included an extension of the Digital Navigator Program in its 2025-2027 budget, the governor eliminated the program through a line-item veto, citing “the state’s significant fiscal challenges and funding cuts from the federal government.”

homelessness, King County, State of Washington

As Cuts to Critical Programs Loom, Latest Count Shows Sharp Increase in Homelessness

By Erica C. Barnett

The King County Regional Homelessness Authority’s update on its 2024 “Point In Time Count”—a statistical analysis based on interviews that took place over two weeks in January and February—shows that the number of unhoused people in King County increased by about a quarter between 2022 and 2024, a period when the city of Seattle actually lost shelter beds and had to be forced by the state legislature to allow more housing inside its single-family enclaves.

According to the KCRHA’s new, more detailed report on the count, there were 16,868 people experiencing homelessness in King County in 2024, up from 13,368 in 2022.

KCRHA’s fact sheet on the count says that a statistical analysis based on interviews with a relatively small number of unsheltered people is “better than the traditional volunteer PIT Count” because it results in a more realistic number. “Most people in the data science and homeless services sector agree that this traditional hand count results in an undercount, which may mask the full scale of the problem,” the fact sheet says.

KCRHA plans to reduce a more detailed report this summer, staffers said yesterday. But a high-level breakdown of the numbers, comparing the probable number of unsheltered people in each “subregion” of King County, shows that the entire shelter system provides fewer than half the beds needed to accommodate the number of people living outside, dispelling a common canard that there is “plenty of shelter” if only people would “accept” it. The disparity was worst in North King County, where there are about 10 unsheltered people for every available shelter bed.

The numbers reflected the racial disparities that persist in the region’s homeless population—Black, Latino, and Native American people were disproportionately likely to be homeless—and suggest (via pie chart) that two-thirds of the region’s unsheltered people are chronically homeless.

KCRHA’s new chief research and data officer, Timothy Thomas, showed the council a slide indicating that just 10 percent of people leaving the shelter system “exited” back into homelessness, while 27 percent had a “successful exit” into some form of housing. That leaves most of the people percent unaccounted for, Councilmember Claudia Balducci noted. “Where are the other 63 percent?”

Thomas bounced the question to Janelle Rothfolk, KCRHA’s deputy chief community impact officer (these titles!), who responded, basically, that the agency doesn’t know. “This would account for people who are still in in the shelter during that time, and people who were unsuccessful,” Rothfolk said. “So that would be the remaining [people] who were who exited to unknown destinations or back to the streets, or they’re still in the shelter when the year ended.” The average time each person spends in shelter has continued to increase over the past several years, so beds are also turning over less frequently.

Balducci also questioned the KCRHA staffers’ emphasis on the fact that the percentage of people housed through rapid rehousing programs—essentially, time-limited vouchers for market-rate housing—had increased 7 percent. While that number was an improvement, Balducci said, the number of households KCRHA housed through these programs actually declined about 18 percent, so that the apparent 7 percent increase is coming out of a much smaller number.

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“Basically, we’re serving less people, but they are more successful,” Rothfolk acknowledged, noting that the amount KCRHA had to spend on rapid rehousing also declined.

Funding for homeless services, which flows into KCRHA primarily through the city, county, and federal governments, will almost certainly decrease this year and in future budgets. About 11 percent of the agency’s budget, or around $23 million, comes from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Continuum of Care (CoC), which is facing cuts along with the rest of HUD. The Trump Administration has also said it will withhold CoC grants if agencies fail to comply with a number of onerous conditions, such as prohibitions on diversity, equity, and conclusion programs and programs that promote “gender ideology.” For KCRHA, these would include programs for LGBTQ and particularly trans youth, programs that aim to address racial disparities in homelessness, or programs that are aimed at basically any marginalized group.

Meanwhile, the state budget—which largely funds the county’s Department of Community and Human Services, as well as providing direct funds to KCRHA—is facing a multi-billion-dollar shortfall that Governor Bob Ferguson has resisted addressing with new taxes, such as a lift on the 1 percent property tax increase cap or a wealth tax.

A significant chunk of the shortfall comes from a decline in the state’s document recording fee on real estate transactions,, which funds homelessness services; revenues from that fee are expected to be several hundred million dollars short this year, as the housing construction market stalls. In the past, the state has backfilled that shortfall through the Department of Commerce; but, according to King County budget director Dwight Dively, that isn’t happening this year.

“Both the House budget and the Senate budget that came out a few weeks ago did not have the full document recording fee backfill, and, frankly, weren’t even close,” Dively told the council. “So assuming that that’s where the state budget ends up, there will be revenue that we’ve budgeted from the state in the second half of this year for document recording fee backfill that we will not get. … In that circumstance, either we have to immediately cut funding for homelessness services, and we all understand the consequences of that, or we have to find another revenue source to at least temporarily back fill that, and that’s the general fund.”

County Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda suggested another path: If the county, state, and federal government all lack the funding to keep the region’s already inadequate homelessness system intact, the KCRHA should be empowered with its own taxing authority. (The city and county made the explicit decision to deny the KCRHA taxing authority in 2019.) In LA, Mosqueda noted, “they didn’t just stand up a regional homelessness authority. They stood up a funding mechanism” through voter-approved tax measures. “We did not add the ability for KCRHA to have taxing authority. And I think that that was a misstep then.”

KCRHA’s funding model has come under scrutiny from state auditors as well as city and county leaders, many of whom have privately questioned whether the organization has a future. In the years since the city and county created the King County Regional Homelessness Authority in 2019, the authority has been whittled down from an aspirational effort to address homelessness regionally, rather than city by city, into an essentially administrative agency that moves money between its funders and the nonprofit service providers who make up the homelessness “system.”

In presentations last week (to the agency’s governing board) and Tuesday (to the county council), KCRHA staff explained that the authortiy starts each year with no money in its bank account and starts going into the red as soon as the year begins, relying on ongoing what loans from the county and cash advances from the city to pay its contractors. Before last year, the KCRHA frequently paid providers late, prompting widespread complaints; they also failed to bill the city on time for some expenses, according to an October 2023 audit report.

Like other pass-through agencies, KCRHA operates on a “reimbursement model,” which “inherently results in significant cash flow challenges due to the lag between incurring expenses and receiving funds,” according to a February staff report. In February, the state auditor found that this model, which relies on “informal cash advances” and loans, is putting the KCRHA’s “current service levels and future obligations at risk.”

KCRHA pays interest on its loans, which takes away money that could otherwise be spent running the agency. According to the auditor, between January 2023 and September 2024, the KCRHA spent $431,000 on interest alone. On top of that, the KCRHA overdrew its checking account, racking up $35,000 in overdraft fees.

KCRHA spokeswoman Lisa Edge said the agency is now set to receive cash advances from the city every quarter, but it still has no reserves in case the city decides to change the arrangement in the future, or King County stops providing periodic loans.

City Council, homelessness, housing, State of Washington

Head of Anti-Eviction Group Leaves for Job at Homelessness Authority, Ferguson Appointment Could Shake Up Legislature
Photo by Allan Vega on Unsplash

And City Council president Sara Nelson suggests departing Councilmember Tammy Morales was lying about her own experiences. “This is a positive work environment,” she told KUOW.

1. Edmund Witter, the longtime director of the Housing Justice Project, is leaving HJP to become the King County Regional Homelessness Authority’s general counsel—part of a shakeup at the KCRHA under CEO Kelly Kinnison, who became the homelessness agency’s second permanent CEO in June.

In addition to Witter, Kinnison is bringing on Simon Foster as deputy director and Xochitl Maykovich as his associate deputy overseeing strategy. Foster directs the homelessness, housing, and community development division of King County’s Departmhent of Community and Human Services; Maykovich is his chief strategy and operations officer and served as interim deputy director for much of the past year. The new hires appear to be part of a larger reorganization at the agency.

KCRHA did not respond to a request for an interview with Kinnison.

The Housing Justice Project, a project of the King County Bar Association, provides free legal counsel to tenants facing eviction, who have had the right to an attorney in Seattle since 2021.

Instead of fighting evictions in the courts, Witter said, he’ll be “working on the other side of the equation to help make sure those programs [for people experiencing homelessness] work.”

In the past few months, as evictions have risen and the number of people seeking attorneys has exploded, HJP has been overwhelmed, Witter said. “The court is hearing about 800 cases a month, and we’re [only] contracted to do about 200 cases a month,” Witter said. “In October, we had 608 households who applied for our services and qualified for an attorney, and we were only about to carry about 160 of those” cases.

Instead of providing attorneys for each person, HJP has been “unbundling” its services to provide at least some help to as many people as possible, but “tenants are appearing pro se”—acting as their own attorneys—”in front of judges now. The numbers are as bad as we’ve seen in 20 years, certainly since 2008,” the first year of the Great Recession.

Even compared to the HJP, the regional homelessness authority is hardly an oasis of calm. The agency’s first several years were a period of frequent upheaval marked by unforced errors, abandoned and unsuccessful initiatives, and financial debacles. In the year after the agency’s first CEO, Marc Dones, left, the KCRHA had three interim directors. Now, Kinnison seems eager to overhaul and reorganize the agency.

Witter says he’s hoping to help the KCRHA streamline and improve its contracts with the nonprofits that do the work of addressing homelessness across King County. Many of these groups have complained in the past about late payments that force them to go into debt, dip into reserves, or scale back programs while they wait for funding.

The KCRHA, Witter noted, has “not had a general counsel, ever” in four years of operations, which is practically unheard-of for such a large government entity. “It’s a $253 million organization with tons of compliance” requirements that will likely become more complicated under Trump, Witter said. “Not to mention all the other government issues they have to deal with, [like] open meetings and public records.”

HJP’s Spokane County managing attorney, Renee Ballou, will take over Witter’s job on an interim basis while the group looks for a permanent replacement, Witter said.

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2. Governor-elect (and state Attorney General) Bob Ferguson is considering State Sen. Joe Nguyen (D-34, West Seattle and Vashon) for director of the state Department of Commerce, whose wide portfolio includes affordable housing, energy and climate investments, broadband, gun violence prevention, and local economic development. Nguyen confirmed that he is “under consideration,” but did not know when Ferguson planned to make his decision or announce his pick.

If it is Nguyen, Ferguson will have to act fast. The next legislative session starts on January 13, and the 34th District Democrats and the King County Council will have to appoint a successor, a process that takes weeks.

Commerce director Mike Fong, appointed by Gov. Jay Inslee in 2023, will become Snohomish County’s director of economic development. The role is similar to the one Fong held before his stint at the Commerce Department, when he was Snohomish County’s chief recovery and resilience officer. Prior to that, Fong was a longtime city staffer who rose to the position of senior deputy mayor under Jenny Durkan.

Ferguson has brought over most of his senior staff from the Attorney General’s Office. His transition office said they had no information to share yet on the appointment.

3. After City Councilmember  Tammy Morales announced she’s stepping down because of what she described as bullying and undermining by her colleagues, KUOW—like many outlets—interviewed Morales about her decision. Then they gave one of the people Morales has accused of fostering a toxic workplace environment, Council President Sara Nelson, almost 15 minutes of air time to say Morales was lying.

“I’m frankly shocked and disappointed with the way she has characterized the dynamic on council and what occurs at the dais,” Nelson told KUOW’s Soundside. Morales, Nelson suggested, was just lashing out because she hasn’t done the work of convincing colleagues to support her proposals. “It’s our responsibility to work with our colleagues on our own time and try to build support for our legislative priorities,” Nelson said.

Nelson, who campaigned for Morales’ 2023 opponent Tanya Woo and oversaw her appointment to a citywide council seat after she lost to Morales, thanked KUOW on X for “the opportunity to set the record straight” about her colleague’s experience of working with Nelson and the rest of the council, who Morales also accused of gaslighting—treating her as if she was imagining her own experience. “This is a positive work environment,” Nelson insisted.

She wasn’t quite done shading Morales. On the city’s website seeking applications to fill Morales’ seat, the link in “Tammy Morales (District 2) resigned her seat” goes not to Morales’ resignation announcement but to Nelson’s own terse statement about Morales’ departure.

(Update: The link to Nelson’s statement has been removed as of late Tuesday morning.)

City Council, Crime, Density, Drugs, homelessness, housing, Mayor Harrell, Renters, State of Washington, zoning

Nine PubliCola Predictions for 2024

PubliCola columnist Josh Feit and PubliCola’s hoary original publisher (and Seattle Nice contrarian) Sandeep Kaushik are joining Erica here to kick off the year with some soothsaying.  Specifically tailored for PubliCola’s policy obsessed readership, these aren’t prognostications about 2024’s headlining concerns (like the threat of Trump II), but rather, as you’ve come to expect from the most in-depth local news site in Seattle, this is deep political wayfinding for the year in local politics ahead —The Editors

Sandeep Kaushik:

1. The Real Change, House Our Neighbors crowd announced just before Christmas they will put a measure on the Seattle ballot in 2024 to establish a permanent funding source for I-135, the social housing measure they passed in February. I will take the bait and predict that funding measure will fail.

I say this because I have yet to see any evidence House Our Neighbors has an actual, serious, and detailed proposal (you know, one that includes actual, vetted numbers) to build such mixed-income public housing in a way that is going to be operationally viable and fiscally self-sustaining (which was part of the original promise)—much less one that’s better than the well-established existing model for building affordable housing.

It’s one thing to ask voters to support a gauzily intersectional dream of a new, supposedly self-sustaining form of socialistic self-governing housing when there’s no price tag attached (57 percent of Seattle voters supported I-135), quite another when they’re asking for an endless stream of money before any proof of concept. It also doesn’t help that in developing I-135, its backers spent infinitely more time and thought on calibrating the mix of marginalized identities that are represented on the governing board than on an actual plan showing how this sort of housing would pencil.

Maybe House Our Neighbors will prove me wrong, and come forward in January with a viable proposal rather than just a leap-of-faith money ask. It’s quite possible that famously generous, progressively-inclined Seattle voters will pass the funding even if they don’t. And if that happens, maybe they’ll actually deliver on their dreams and promises. If so, fantastic! I would love to be proven wrong, and would be thrilled to see a new, viable, fiscally defensible model of public housing take root in Seattle. But I’m not holding my breath, and I going to predict that if they don’t have a real plan, Seattle voters won’t hand them a blank check.

2. The King County Regional Homelessness Authority (KCRHA) will die a whimpering death in 2024. It pains me to make this prediction. In theory, a regional approach to homelessness policy makes enormous sense. In practice, though, the promise of regionalizing our homelessness response has—at least so far–face planted.

When KCRHA’s CEO, the charismatic and energetic Mark Dones, came on board in April 2021, and when KCRHA’s signature Partnership for Zero initiative to end visible homeless downtown was announced in February 2022, I was one of the cheerleaders for this promising new model.

But it was all downhill from there.

It soon became apparent that KCRHA had deep problems that seriously curtailed its effectiveness. To begin with, suburban buy-in to the idea of handing off and consolidating homelessness efforts in the KCRHA was nominal at best. Moreover, KCRHA had no independent funding source, and instead relied on pass-through funding from the city and King County, and that funding model quickly became fraught when some of the policies Dones advocated (no sweeps, opposition to tiny homes) ran counter to what some of their funders wanted.

The region’s key agency for dealing with its most serious problem will remain largely rudderless for more than a year, as staff and talent continue to decamp for greener pastures.

The governing structure of KCRHA, with multiple boards and committees, turned out to be an unwieldy mess, and the powers that be made things much worse by ingraining some of the most chuckleheaded aspects of cultural progressivism—for example, the fixation on centering “lived experience” as opposed to, say, prioritizing actual experience running large organizations implementing complex policies—into that governance, leading to several high profile, avoidable scandals. Internal, back office operations were chaotic, and staff turnover high, leading to further credibility-sapping problems.

It all came to a head when Dones announced their resignation in May, and then when KCRHA admitted failure and threw in the towel on Partnership for Zero in September. A huge amount now rests on the search for a new CEO for the organization, and word on the street is there isn’t likely to be a hire for that critical position until the second half of 2024, if it even turns out that anyone with the requisite experience and skill sets wants the job. That means the region’s key agency for dealing with its most serious problem will remain largely rudderless for more than a year, as staff and talent continue to decamp for greener pastures.

Under that sort of slow death spiral circumstances, writing off KCRHA as a misfire—perhaps triggered by the CEO search producing underwhelming candidates—might be best option. Of course, pulling the plug would be a spectacular embarrassment, so maybe the powers that be will allow to KCRHA to limp along in some sort of awful twilight state for at least another year. But I’m going to go out on a limb and bet the end is in sight.

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3. The 2024 governor’s race will be the closest since Jay Inslee won his first term in 2012 by narrowly besting Republican Attorney General Rob McKenna, 51-48. First, Washington State voters are in a pretty sour mood, and Inslee, now exiting after his third term, has middling-to-underwhelming approval ratings. There was even a recent poll showing (relatively) moderate Republican Dave Reichert nipping presumed Democratic frontrunner Bob Ferguson in a head-to-head matchup.

To be clear, I don’t think it’s likely Reichert will actually win, given that he’s strongly anti-choice, but if he gets through the August primary —not at all a sure thing, since he faces a semi-serious challenger on the MAGA right in Semi Bird, and moderate Democrat Mark Mullet is also making a play to consolidate a cross-party middle coalition to leapfrog Reichert in the primary—he could (at least conceivably) make a race of it, particularly if Ferguson veers too far left. Anyway, if it is Reichert in the general, this is a race Democrats can’t take for granted the way they have the last couple of gubernatorial races, even if (as is also likely) Trump is the Republican presidential nominee this November.

Josh Feit:

1. Last year at this time, I predicted that after booting single-family-zone preservationist Rep. Gerry Pollet (D-46, North Seattle) from his powerful position as chair of the local government committee earlier that month, the new wave of young Democrats in the state legislature would finally be able to pass some Yes-in-My-Backyard legislation.

Here’s me on December 22, 2022 writing about Rep. Jessica Bateman’s (D-22, Olympia) plan to authorize fourplexes in residential areas anywhere detached single-family homes were allowed: “With much better odds of passing their bills intact out of [new chair] Rep. Strom Peterson’s (D-21, Everett) committee than under Pollet’s provincialism, pro-housing legislators could bring some necessary state governance to Seattle’s failed local policies.”

Bam, they passed it. I was actually a little surprised. Bateman’s legislation made it legal in places like density-phobic Seattle to build four units per lot in residential zones, six units per lot within a quarter-mile walking distance of a major transit stop; and six units per lot in residential zones if at least two units are affordable housing.

Unfortunately, that’s way too progressive for Seattle. So, here’s my prediction for 2024 as the city updates the document that governs local zoning policy, its Comprehensive Plan: The newly elected slow-growth city council (I’m thinking of Joy Hollingsworth, Bob Kettle, and Rob Saka joining incumbent anti-growther Sara Nelson, along with Mayor Harrell himself) will use the Comp Plan update as an opportunity for undermining urbanism. First, they will come up with rules to minimize lot coverage, require setbacks, and establish height limits, along with levying hefty affordable housing fees that will keep housing developers from building any apartments in Seattle’s touchy neighborhood residential zones.

There’s also a provision that anxious city lobbyists statewide forced into Bateman’s bill that allowed local governments to limit the upzones to 75 percent of single-family areas.  I can see Seattle’s anti-housing faction using that “neighborhood character” card to stall density in hand-picked neighborhoods as well.

2. Speaking of pro-housing bills going awry: Watch for an attempt by state legislators to re-do last year’s stalled Transit-Oriented Development bill—legislation that would upzone land around light rail stations and bus lines—to disappoint pro-housing urbanists this year.

With the original senate TOD champion, Sen. Marko Liias (D-21, Everett), deciding not to sponsor the bill this year—I’m guessing he was frustrated by the overemphasis on inclusionary zoning (mandatory affordable housing quotas) that House Democrats tried to work into the bill last year—anti-developer lefties like Rep. Julia Reed (D-36, Seattle) are now in control of the legislation. Count on minimal upzones near transit (say five stories as opposed to eight) and steep affordability requirements that will chill development.

TL;DR: The very thing the lefties say they want, lots of housing, won’t get built.

3. I’m going to be vague about this one, but here’s what I will say: Even though Mayor Bruce Harrell got the conservative council he wanted, look for new D-3 council member Joy Hollingsworth—who appears to share Harrell’s brand of homily populist politics (even more so than the others)—to begin clashing with him behind the scenes. By year’s end, her frustrations with Harrell will be evident at City Hall.

Erica C. Barnett: 

1. The pundit class (looking at you, Sandeep) may have convinced voters that a local law governing minor drug offenses, like using drugs in public, was the most critical issue in the 2023 election, when moderate candidates denounced lefties who opposed it. But 2024 will prove that the impact of the drug law will be minimal.

As we’ve reported, the city’s new law does not actually criminalize low-level drug offenses; the state legislature did that already, when it passed the so-called “Blake fix” earlier this year. Instead, it empowers City Attorney Ann Davison to prosecute people for using or possessing drugs in public; without the new law, only the King County Prosecutor’s Office could do so, and they have historically shown little interest in spending scarce county resources on these relatively minor offenses.

While Davison has reportedly been eager to prosecute drug users, the jail isn’t booking people on misdemeanor drug charges alone, making it hard for Seattle’s Republican city attorney to pursue this law-and-order approach to addiction. Meanwhile, as we predicted, putting drug offenders on the “diversion” track—which was supposed to appease progressives— has just meant that other people who would have received help through the city’s main diversion program, LEAD, are being displaced by people who get arrested first.

Seattle always rolls out supposedly transformative (but, in this case, totally unfunded) new initiatives with a big burst of energy, only to let them fizzle—remember “Operation New Day”?

It’s notable, too, that the city has done exactly one big, flashy event to show off its new authority to arrest people for using drugs in public, then send them immediately to LEAD, with no public follow-ups since October. The mainstream press dutifully reported on the event, noting that it resulted in ten people going to jail on outstanding felony warrants (my question: Given that SPD could have located, interrogated, and arrested this group for their serious offenses at any point, why didn’t they?) and 13 entering diversion.

The biggest reason you haven’t seen a spate of similar headlines about drug arrests leading to diversion since that initial push is that the city didn’t provide any additional funding for diversion; as we’ve reported, LEAD—which is no longer accepting community referrals, just referrals from arrests—will run out of money to accept new clients by May. A secondary reason is that Seattle always rolls out supposedly transformative (but, in this case, totally unfunded) new initiatives with a big burst of energy, only to let them fizzle—remember “Operation New Day”? We don’t either.

2. One area where the new council may throw its weight around is by reversing outgoing council members’ renter protection laws, including the $10 maximum late fee, 180-day notice for rent increases, bans on winter and school-year evictions, and the “first-in-time” law that requires landlords to rent to the first qualified applicant. As I reported this week, small landlords complained about the first-in-time law more than any other renter protection. The law, sponsored by outgoing Councilmember Lisa Herbold, was intended to help reduce the potential for landlords to discriminate against prospective tenants based on factors like race, gender, and sexual orientation.

Although most of the city’s renter protections passed before his term, Harrell opposed the $10 maximum late fee, allowing it to pass into law without his signature earlier this year.

3. We may be entering a newly cozy era of mayor-council relations (with Harrell’s picks triumphing in nearly every 2023 council race), but camaraderie alone won’t solve the structural problems facing the city: Fentanyl addiction, a city budget deficit of nearly $220 million, the city’s inability to hire police despite generous financial incentives and a homelessness crisis for which Seattle is on the hook, at least financially.

The candidates who won this year talked a lot about resetting the culture at City Hall, finding fat in the budget and cutting it, letting police know they’re valued and trusted, and using a carrot (diversion) and stick (arrest and jail) approach to the addiction crisis. But the problems these platitudes purport to address are structural, and don’t respond readily to legislation: Every dollar of “waste” in the budget has a constituency (want to cut back on permitting times? Good luck doing that and instituting a hiring freeze) and many of the issues councilmembers brought up during their campaigns are structural and even nationwide, like police hiring. It’s one thing to denounce people for supporting proposals to reduce police funding three years ago, and quite another to solve a nationwide lack of interest among young people in becoming cops.

homelessness, housing, King County, Mayor Harrell, State of Washington

Homelessness Authority Rolls Out 2023 Budget and Five-Year Plan to Shelter and House 62,000
Slide from KCRHA presentation: More than 62,000 people in King County experienced homelessness at least once in 2022.
Source: King County Regional Homelessness Authority Five-Year Plan Presentation

By Erica C. Barnett

The King County Regional Homelessness Authority released the agency’s 2023 budget this week along with a long-awaited five-year plan that agency director Marc Dones said will put the region on a path toward sheltering, then housing, tens of thousands of people over the next several years. But some elements of the road map remain unclear, including how the authority plans to fund its ambitious plans.

The budget KCHRA presented to its implementation and governing boards this week (and which the governing board approved unanimously on Thursday) adds up to $253 million. Much of that total, however, consists of pass-through funds, such as $28 million for the Housing and Essential Needs assistance program for people with disabilities, one-time federal COVID relief funding, and leftover money from this year’s budget.

The budget also includes more than $49 million in grants from the state to resolve encampments in state-owned highway rights-of-way, plus $1.2 million the Seattle City Council added to its KCRHA budget contribution this year to move encampment outreach from the city’s HOPE team to the homelessness authority.

The primary funding sources for the KCHRA are the city of Seattle and King County, which both declined to fund most of the KCRHA’s big budget requests this year. To add services, the authority has turned to funds that comes with strings attached—like the $49 million state contribution for highway cleanup, or a $5 million donation from downtown businesses for cleaning up encampments downtown.

“There’s really not a lot of discretion in our budget, because we’re funded by Seattle and King County. So how are we going to get to a place where we actually have a revenue stream that we can use in our way that we want to use it that implements that five year plan and that vision?”—KCRHA implementation board member John Chelminiak

This year’s legislative session could offer new revenue sources—this week, Gov. Jay Inslee said he would seek voter approval to spend $4 billion to build or preserve about 10,000 affordable housing units statewide—but the outcome of such a vote is far from certain, and it’s unclear how much of that funding would end up going toward homelessness in King County.

“There’s really not a lot of discretion in our budget, because we’re funded by Seattle and King County,” implementation board member (and former Bellevue councilmember) John Chelminiak said Wednesday. “And they’re basically telling us, as you would expect them to, how to spend the money that they’re allocating to us. So how are we going to get to a place where we actually have a revenue stream that we can use in our way that we want to use it that implements that five year plan and that vision?”

Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell raised similar questions at the agency’s governing board meeting the following day. (The implementation board, made up of stakeholders and people with lived experience of homelessness from around the region, is responsible for making decisions that the governing board, which includes elected officials, is supposed to adopt.) The agency’s ambitious five-year plan, Harrell noted, is “going to come with a price tag, and … we’re going to have to have that conversation” about new sources of funding.

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The KCRHA plans to release the full details of that plan between now and January, when each board will meet again. A PowerPoint presentation about the plan focused on seven broad goals (among them: “dramatically reducing unsheltered homelessness,” ending homelessness among families, youth, and young adults, and restructuring the homeless service system) but contained few details about how the KCRHA plans to achieve them.

One area of ongoing debate is how much effort the agency should focus on getting people into shelter (“temporary housing”) versus permanent housing. While the Housing Command Center, spearheaded by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, is focused on moving people living unsheltered downtown into permanently housing quickly, the KCRHA now estimates that temporary housing will make up about 43 percent of the region’s need over the next five years.

The KCRHA now estimates it will need to find temporary shelter for 23,000 people a year, along with 48,000 permanent housing units, and that the gap between the existing system and the current need amounts to about 19,000 temporary beds and more than 45,000 permanent homes.

At Wednesday’s implementation board meeting, Chelminiak said that unless the authority can show it’s reducing the number of people on the streets, “I don’t think anyone is going to give us any money to spend.” But Sara Rankin, a Seattle University professor and longtime advocate for people experiencing homelessness, said it was more important to offer people meaningful, lasting places to go than “prioritize expediency and the fastest, cheapest ways of moving people out of sight without any long-term sense of what’s going to happen to them.”

The need for both housing and temporary shelter, according to the KCRHA, has grown dramatically. According to the five-year plan presentation‚ 62,000 people in King County were homeless at some point in 2022—a 50 percent increase from an estimated 40,000 who were homeless at some point last year. According to a KCRHA spokeswoman, the 62,000 figure is “the number that the state Department of Commerce is using for the housing modeling that they’re doing for the state and for King County.”

PubliCola has reached out to Commerce for more information and we should have an update Monday.

The KCRHA now estimates it will need to find temporary shelter for 23,000 people a year, along with 48,000 permanent housing units, and that the gap between the existing system and the current need amounts to about 19,000 temporary beds and more than 45,000 permanent homes.

Elections, State of Washington

PubliCola Questions: Secretary of State Candidate Julie Anderson

By Erica C. Barnett

The Secretary of State has historically been a mostly administrative position; the primary duties of the office are to oversee and certify elections, manage the state’s physical and digital archives, and register corporations and nonprofits. In recent years, though—perhaps you’ve noticed—the mundane job of overseeing elections has become fiercely contested ground.

Despite Washington’s blue-state status, we’re still susceptible to disinformation and misinformation campaigns that threaten to erode voters’ trust in the entire voting system. Cyberattacks are becoming more aggressive and sophisticated, forcing the secretary of state’s office to keep up with evolving technology, and even benign changes to elections, like moving local races to even-year elections and implementing ranked-choice voting or other alternative systems, require a level of technical knowledge unheard of even 20 years ago.

In other words, it’s a good time to pay attention to who’s running for secretary of state. Incumbent Steve Hobbs, a longtime state legislator and moderate Democrat appointed to the job last year, says his military background (he’s a lieutenant colonel in the Washington Army National Guard), on-the-job education, and enthusiasm for innovation has earned him a full term; if elected, he would be the first Democrat elected the position in more than 60 years. Challenger Julie Anderson, the Pierce County auditor, says her years of experience as a local election official makes her a better fit; she’s running without a party label for a position she believes should be above partisan politics.

PubliCola spoke to both candidates for secretary of state earlier this month.

PubliCola (ECB): Running as a nonpartisan candidate has been a big part of your campaign. What risk do you see in the fact that this position is technically partisan, and if you’re elected, how will your lack of partisanship be reflected in the way you run the office?

Julie Anderson (JA): A good portion of the reason I’m running as a nonpartisan is personal. We’ve had two notable secretaries of state who did the same thing I’m doing—coming up through the ranks [of election officials] to hold the office. And they were both Republicans, and I believe did a good job and made decisions with integrity. So the obvious question is, what’s the problem, Anderson? The problem is, as Kim [Wyman] saw on her way out, one of her last decisions as secretary was to support a proposal to make the office nonpartisan. So clearly, she saw that partisanship was a distraction because hyper-polarization and partisanship has become more extreme and more influential in how decisions are made.

I see the same thing now. I have been a nonpartisan auditor in Pierce County for nearly 13 years. Our voters made it that way by a change to our city charter because they believed that their chief election administrator should be nonpartisan, and that has really benefited me and my ability to earn trust with both political parties. And it certainly has freed me of awkward or stressful situations where I’m expected to participate in party politics.

“What I’m excited about, and where my election experience comes into play, is that we need to start looking at alternatives to signatures. Young people haven’t had the same opportunities to perfect a signature though repetition, so they tend to sign things different ways. It’s also important for adults with disabilities.”

ECB: Do you think this position should ultimately be elected or appointed?

JA: I think we should look toward other international models of appointment, but let me be quick to say: Not the kind of political appointments we currently are experiencing, but one step at a time. My goal is to hold the office as a nonpartisan, get some breathing room, do a good job, build trust, and if the state legislature would like to start a conversation about a constitutional amendment to create a appointment process, I’m open to that and they would find a willing partner in me.

ECB: You’ve criticized the incumbent for a lack of experience in election administration. Can you give me an example of a scenario where your own experience running elections for Pierce County would make you better prepared than him?

JA: Having an understanding of the impact and capacity of local county administrators when you’re thinking of new programs and initiatives, understanding the constraints and capacity of county elections officials, and having a good rapport with them, is extremely important.

I also understand the technical systems that we use. Votewa.gov [the state’s voter information portal] is a very powerful tool that I was involved in creating—I was on the steering committee building that, creating the parameters and the minimum deliverables in that whole IT project and helping it go online.

Another dimension of practical experience is public records. I’ve been managing documents, indexing them, and making them publicly accessible for 13 years as the county auditor and it’s something I feel very passionate about. The Washington state archives were the second in the world to have a digital archive program, but since then, we’ve failed to keep up the pace of records. Local government and state government have created a huge number of records that are digital-native—what are we doing to prepare for the myriad of different types of formats and ingesting those in a n efficient way at the highest volume and turning around and indexing in those in a way that they’re accessible to the public?

All of the records that were created during the latest redistricting process, those GIS files and Census files were highly interactive. That’s a public record that is going to reside in the state archives. Is it being preserved as a flat file or is it interactive and preserved so that it’s most useful to the public? Those are the kind of questions I want to dive into, in addition to playing catchup on the paper files that local government keeps sending up the food chain.

We’ve also got regional archives, in addition to the new state library that is being built. Those regional archives and the Sand Point National Archives all have buildings that are less than adequate for what they’re doing, especially when you’re looking about paper records. I want to do an assessment of all those facilities to make sure that we are able to preserves properly all the historic records that we have.

ECB: If you’re elected, what would you do to combat disinformation campaigns by foreign and partisan actors? Have you run into disinformation campaigns at Pierce County, and if so, how did you combat them?

JA: It’s a problem across the state, and we’re not exempt from it. I think that everything that is happening in battleground states rolls like a tidal wave over into Washington. We already work with federal agencies to help them detect election misinformation and disinformation on election nights.

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I would improve civic education, and there are some great groups under the superintendent of public instruction that are working hard on that. I would join forces with them and find out what their best practices are. I would be fully engaged with the social studies teachers in high school, as well as community groups who have a role in civic education. I would also lean into organizations that are focused on critical thinking and media literacy.

ECB: What cybersecurity system improvements need to be made to ensure that all of the information under the purview of the Secretary of State is protected from data breaches or similar threats?

There have been no breaches that I’m aware of, and certainly no breaches of voting systems in Washington state. They have been scanned, yes, have they been probed, they have been subjected to denial of service attacks. We work with our Homeland Security partners and all the cyber information security officers in each county to continuously monitor our firewalls, and Homeland Security notifies us instantaneously if there’s a vulnerability and we get on it and patch it.

What I would do is pay more attention to county governments, which doesn’t necessarily mean the election offices. Elections offices depend on county information and IT staff to support their security. We do things like absolutely use two-factor authentication, absolutely make sure we’re monitoring data, but when it comes to the desktops that we use, when it comes to our physical security, that’s all at the county level.

Penetration testing is the thing that you do to test your system security, and right now Homeland Security has about an 18-month waiting period to make sure you get pen tested. And so I’m going got do an audit to see which counties have been pen tested and get all the counties on a schedule to do pen testing. I also want to make sure every county is doing an air gap test so we know that the system is not only connected to the internet, it can’t be probed or penetrated by a cellular device or by a Wi-Fi device.

ECB: What would you do to reduce racial disparities in ballot rejections? Are there better ways to track ballots or inform voters when their ballots have been rejected?

JA: I suspect that there are other things in elections that have the same disparate impacts, whether it is completing a registration or filing for office. I’m super happy that the legislature provided funding to the University of Washington to start collecting election data so that we can be looking at this holistically and geographically. We need to make sure that when we’re sending out those cure notices [so voters can make sure an improperly rejected ballot is counted], or we’re sending instructions to voters to ensure that their vote is counted, that they’re easily understandable. I would do usability testing, which is kind of like a focus group where you get randomly selected participants and see how they interact with your materials and test whether it is easily understood and actionable.

What I’m excited about, and where my election experience comes into play, is that we need to start looking at alternatives to signatures. Young people haven’t had the same opportunities to perfect a signature though repetition, so they tend to sign things different ways. It’s also important for adults with disabilities. I don’t have a solution, but I know that the commercial sector has found solutions in this digital age. It’s not going to replace signatures. We’re going to do what we always have done, which is create alternatives so that voters can choose what’s best for them and allow it to migrate over time.

“Consolidating elections would focus voters, but there are a lot of downsides that really concern me. I can tell you that every county auditor has to go begging and scraping to their county council to fund their programs, and county councils that are economically distressed are going to say, ‘You’re only funding elections every other year—why should I fund a year-round program?'”

ECB: What would you do to increase voter turnout, especially in non-Presidential election years?

JA: Voter turnout is very cyclical, and it’s the very lowest in local elections following a Presidential election. There’s not as much money being spent, but also there’s a lack of engagement and stickiness between the electorate and local government, I really want to help locate governments get local voters more engaged in their local elections. The secretary of state’s office can make it easier for [local elections offices] by helping  get into this cadence of boosting people’s awareness of those local off-year elections. That can help, but it’s going to require everybody grabbing an oar and pulling in the same direction.

ECB: Can you give me an example of what would that look like in practice, and how you would go beyond standard get-out-the-vote campaigns?

JA: I like the idea of pooling philanthropy dollars with government dollars and then granting them out through the secretary of state’s office, in a very neutral fashion, to local organizations and individuals who know their community the best and will use those funds for turnout. The strategies are going to be very different among different populations. It’s the local community members who know what’s going to be most effective. Our job would be making sure that our outreach campaigns are politically neutral and are using best practices and are low-barrier.

ECB: Would moving all local elections to even years improve turnout and engagement, as advocates for eliminating odd-year elections have argued?

JA: Consolidating elections would focus voters, but there are a lot of downsides that really concern me. I can tell you that every county auditor has to go begging and scraping to their county council to fund their programs, and county councils that are economically distressed are going to say, “You’re only funding elections every other year—why should I fund a year-round program?” The other problem is that the way that we keep voters engaged is by constantly mailing things to voters, and if they don’t respond or keep getting returned, we can get them back in active status. If we’re only voting every two years, given that 10 percent of the population moves every year, we’re going to be in a world of trouble.