Advocates and city and Metro staff surround Mayor Katie Wilson at Wednesday’s Denny Way bus lane announcement.
By Erica C. Barnett
It took electing a mayor who knows what it’s like to be on a bus that’s crawling through gridlock traffic to finally address a choke point on Metro’s Route 8 between downtown and Capitol Hill. The bus, which runs from Seattle Center to Mount Baker via Capitol Hill and Judkins Park, gets stuck in traffic as it heads east from Seattle Center toward I-5, where cars stack up for blocks waiting to enter the freeway.
On Wednesday, Mayor Katie Wilson announced a two-phase plan to add a dedicated bus lane along the most congested part of Denny Way and create a new pathway to the South I-5 on-ramp that will divert cars off Denny at Boren, closing down the perpetually clogged pathway at Yale. The first phase, which will conclude later this month, will include a new south- and eastbound bus lane starting on Queen Anne Ave. and ending at 2nd Avenue, where the Seattle Department of Transportation will also add a bus “queue jump” lane to give buses priority.
Work will shut down for the World Cup in June and July and resume in August, when crews will paint nine new blocks of eastbound bus lanes on Dennybetween 5th Ave. downtown and Fairview Ave. N just before the freeway, where they’ll join up with an existing bus lane that will be shifted from its current location in the middle of the street over to the south curb. Yale Street, a notorious choke point, will no longer provide access to I-5; instead, southbound I-5 traffic will be funneled along Boren Ave.
The new bus lanes will be funded with $4 million from the Seattle Transportation Levy. The Seattle Transit Measure, which funds additional Metro service (and will be up for renewal this year), will fund additional service hours on the 8.
Source: SDOT
About 8,000 people ride the 8 every day, and about 26,000 ride the routes that travel along Queen Anne Ave. and Denny way just north of downtown, which include the 1, 2, 8, 13, 24, 33, and the RapidRide D Line.
On Wednesday, Wilson was surrounded by members of the Transit Riders Union, which she co-founded and directed before becoming mayor, and the Fix the L8coalition, which held a “race the L8” event last year in which people—including then-candidate Wilson— easily outpaced the snail-like bus while walking, dancing, unicycling, and hopscotching along the route.
Speaking at Wednesday’s announcement, Fix the L8 organizer Jason Li said he grew tired of hearing people say that Seattle can’t convert general-purpose lanes to bus lanes because we aren’t a big city with a thriving transit network like New York. “The thing is, the city has done this before, and it was a wild success,” Li Said. Just a couple of miles away, Madison Street used to be just like Denny—an arterial with two lanes in each direction that was chronically clogged with both local and I-5 traffic, and it had a slow and unreliable bus, just like route eight.” Think about what happens when you replace 5,000 cars with a fleet of 13 buses.”
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Wilson, the first mayor in recent memory who does not own a car, recalled joining up with other transit advocacy groups to form the Move All Seattle Sustainably (MASS) Coalition to advocate for better mass transit in 2018. “I have to say, being stood up by your bus is honestly one of the most dispiriting experiences that you can have,” Wilson said.
“And I know every transit rider out there, here today and around the city, knows exactly what I mean. There’s just nothing that makes you feel [more] like you’re not valuable, like your time is not valuable. And it’s serious, right? You can lose a job because you’re half an hour late because your bus didn’t come. … This is our opportunity to start fixing this problem.”
As part of the Denny Way improvement exercise, SDOT came up with a list of nine additional congested corridors “where transit investment can deliver high impact benefits for riders and the city overall.” These routes, detailed in an SDOT memo, could be priorities for future investments in transit.
A forensic evaluation into the King County Regional Homelessness Authority’s finances found that the agency could not account for $13 million in public funding, according to a statement from Mayor Katie Wilson that also said “all options are on the table” when it comes to the embattled agency’s future. The city “will be pursuing immediate corrective action,” Wilson said. (The report is not a formal audit, but we’ll be using that term colloquially, with the recognition that it was officially an evaluation.)
In addition to the money that went missing—which includes $8 million the agency couldn’t account for, an administrative overspend of more than $4 million, and a previously reported programmatic overspend of more than $6 million—the report raises serious concerns about the KCRHA’s accounting practices and use of restricted funds, some of which may have been used for unauthorized purposes.
The report found, for example, that KCRHA used a single fund as a repository for earmarked money from various sources, then spent money from that fund to temporarily pay for other things, reimbursing the fund once the money came in for the contractor that received the original loan. A hypothetical example of this would be receiving federal dollars to pay for emergency shelter, using that money to pay for a homelessness diversion program while waiting for money to come in for that contract from the city, then putting the “loaned” federal money back in the pot so it goes to its original purpose.
“We were unable to determine to what extent restricted funds, intended for specific purposes, were used to temporarily cover unrelated costs,” the auditors wrote, “because the accounting records… obscured end-to-end traceability.” In general, they wrote, “we were unable to clearly determine if funds had been commingled or used for purposes other than intended due to traceability issues and use of large, complex reallocations.”
“Without clear tracking of funds, the organization could not easily demonstrate that cash was consistently used for its intended purpose. This increased the risk of potential noncompliance with Funder and contract requirements.”
PubliCola reported on the audit, by the accounting firm Clark Nuber, last week. The investigation, for which Seattle spent more than $600,000, started last August and was extended at the end of the year for additional work.
One issue the audit looked into was KCRHA’s routine negative budget balance, which requires the agency to borrow money, at interest, to pay its contractors every year. This balance, Clark Nuber found, went up and down throughout the year, including at times when the city had just loaned the KCRHA money to pay its bills. At times, the difference between what the agency owed and its cash on hand was close to $80 million.
The problem was caused, in part, by the fact that KCRHA often spent money it didn’t have yet, reconciling its accounts after the fact. The agency’s accounting staff also frequently submitted invoices that had significant errors; correcting those errors meant the agency went longer without getting paid, and relied heavily on borrowed money to pay providers.
“We would have expected that advance funds would have supported ongoing positive cash flow,” the auditors wrote. “However, we also noted that expenditures often occurred well before receipt of advances and were retroactively applied, meaning that expenditures were made before actual advance cash was available.”
“Erroneous invoices were rejected by [the city and county] and sent back to KCRHA for correction. Depending on the issue, the correction process was lengthy and administratively burdensome,” the auditors found. Twenty-five of the 29 sample invoices Clark Nuber inspected included errors, and all failed to include a mandatory authorization form.
According to the audit, had no consistent accounting system and routinely made errors that prevented payments from going out. In a departure from best practices, the agency didn’t reconcile its accounts at the end of each month, and did not use a single accounting system to track corrections, changes, and amendments to accounts.
Instead, the $200 million agency relied on “institutional knowledge,” “manual workarounds,” and “informal processes,” such as emails and “thousands” of edits to widely accessible Excel spreadsheet, to “complete core cash-related processes, including bank reconciliations.” In many cases, the same person was able to enter, revise, and delete individual transactions with no clear oversight.
“Cash position awareness appeared to rely primarily on informal reporting, manual tracking, and point‑in‑time statements provided after the fact by the County, rather than on forward-looking, system‑driven reporting,” the audit found.
“Issues and reconciling items were frequently resolved through informal channels such as chat messages rather than through retained workpapers or system documentation,” the audit found. “Nor did there appear to be standard internal controls to ensure there was no fraud, waste, or abuse.” In one example the audit found, the same person was responsible for entering information about cash flows and certifying that the information was correct.
The audit also found potential issues with prepaid gift cards given out to participants in the agency’s biannual Point In Time count, which relies on volunteer recruitment rather than a physical count of homeless individuals, and the use of purchase (credit) cards by staff. Typically, the report notes, these cards are only used for small, “incidental” spending, but KCRHA staff charged more than $1 million over the approximately four-year audit period, including for office furniture and clothing, raising questions about whether the cards were used properly. The $1.1 million included about $360,000 in expenditures for an ill-fated hotel program run by the Lived Experience Coalition, which PubliCola covered extensively in 2023.
In a sample of 14 “high-dollar” purchases, Clark Nuber found that every purchase raised concerns, including purchases by someone other than the cardholder, missing receipts, and approvals by people who were not authorized to approve such expenses.
King County Executive Girmay Zahilay and Wilson sent a joint letter to Kinnison spelling out steps to establish “clear fiscal controls and accountability for taxpayer funds, and directing KCRHA to “act swiftly to address identified challenges” from the report.” The letter says the KCRHA needs to take specific steps such as separating accounting duties so that the same person isn’t overseeing expenditures and compliance checks; setting strict rules for employee reimbursements and gift cards; and provide a written correction plan for the issues raised in the report.
Late Wednesday afternoon, Kinnison sent a letter to the agency’s governing board late this afternoon, which said that Kinnison had requested the audit “to ensure transparency and establish a clear, independent understanding” of what she called “concerns related to our financial systems and reporting during the agency’s early formation.” (Multiple sources familiar with how the audit came about disputed this characterization).
The audit covers the period through July 2025.
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Shortly after this post originally ran, King County Executive Girmay Zahilay’s office released the audit along with a joint letter from Zahilay and Wilson saying the two executives “expect KCRHA to act swiftly to address identified challenges” from the report, with a response
In her letter, Kinnison said the audit’s negative findings “are concentrated in KCRHA’s early formation period and reflect structural challenges associated with startup conditions, the pandemic response, an initially fragmented governance framework, and a highly complex funding model. Since that time, we have made meaningful progress. Governance has been restructured, and core operations — including contracts, data systems, and provider coordination — are functioning more effectively. Our financial systems have also improved, though additional strengthening is still needed.”
The report noted that although many of the issues arose under earlier CEOs, including controversial founding CEO Marc Dones, many of the problems have not been corrected since current CEO Kelly Kinnison was hired in August 2024. “Weaknesses remain in the current state, including issues related to process workflows, accounting methodology and reporting transparency, invoicing and receivables management, budgeting management, reliable supporting documentation, governance and oversight, and effectiveness of internal controls,” the report found.
The auditors also noted that Kinnison “was absent from most ongoing bi-weekly project update meetings” about the audit, forcing the auditors to work with lower-level managers to answer questions and address issues.
Two Seattle City Councilmembers, Maritza Rivera and Bob Kettle, condemned the agency’s financial failures, and both Rivera and King County Councilmember Rod Dembowski called for the KCRHA’s dissolution.
“The results of the recent King County Regional Homelessness Authority audit are damning,” Kettle said in a statement. “It shows an epic, and consistent, failure of leadership at the top of the agency —especially at its start. It also reveals the failure of leadership of the county and city. The audit reveals troubling systemic issues that can no longer be ignored if we are to address the homelessness and public safety crisis in Seattle effectively.”
Rivera went further. “I am shocked and outraged after seeing the results of the forensic evaluation of the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, which I just received today,” she said in a statement. “It shows an egregious mismanagement of funds and an unacceptable lack of financial accountability.
“KCRHA has a history of dysfunction and inefficiency, and it is time to acknowledge that it has failed in its mission. I am calling for Mayor Wilson to provide a plan for the dismantling of KCRHA as soon as possible, and a commitment to work with City Council to determine how Seattle will move forward in meeting its shelter and housing needs.”
Later on Wednesday evening, City Councilmembers Alexis Mercedes Rinck and Dionne Foster sent a more measured joint statement, saying the audit findings are “serious, unacceptable and demand immediate action and accountability.”
Asked about the possible dissolution of the KCRHA on Wednesday night, Rinck said, “I think we can do regionalism without having a whole separate agency” overseeing homelessness contracts. The process of setting up a regional entity has shown that Seattle, King County, and other cities can coordinate and talk to each other about their differing needs without having what amounts to a separate pass-through agency handling all the region’s spending, she said.
Under the interlocal agreement that established the authority, the city and county must take at least one year to dissolve the agency if they decide to dismantle it rather than try to reform and save it. The KCRHA, city, and county would spend much of that time transferring the contracts KCRHA manages back to the city’s Human Services Department and the county’s Department of Community and Human Services.
Kinnison’s letter to the board says most of the money that is unaccounted for is made up of “unreconciled receivables”—services that were delivered but “require further reconciliation within the accounting system.” In general, Kinnison told the board, the agency did not lose or misuse funds.
The KCRHA’s governing board will take up the audit findings at its meeting on Friday.
The Seattle Times failed to credit PubliCola’s original reporting on King County Assessor John Arthur Wilson yesterday in a story titled “King County Assessor In Hot Water After Social Media Post.”
The King County Council discussed our reporting yesterday before voting to send a letter to Wilson demanding his resignation in light of new charges against him for allegedly stalking his ex-fiancée, Lee Keller, and violating a restraining order.
On Monday, April 20, PubliCola broke a story about two Instagram and Facebook posts in which Wilson appeared to flippantly celebrate a judge’s decision that he would not have to wear an ankle monitor, overturning an earlier order after Wilson claimed he had to to fully submerge both his legs every day due to a medical condition called lymphedema. The monitor was supposed to ensure Keller knew right away if Wilson came within 1,000 feet of her.
As we reported, both posts showed Wilson, shirtless and smiling at the camera, in a hot tub. The first, posted on Wednesday, April 15—the day the judge lifted the ankle monitor requirement— read, “What a great night to just soak in the tub and let your cares float away.” The second, posted two days later, said, “Great to soak my legs after a productive and successful week.”
Our story circulated widely on social media and was one among the reasons county council members said it was time for Wilson to step down. Prior to voting on the letter Tuesday afternoon, County Councilmembers Sarah Perry and Teresa Mosqueda both cited PubliCola’s coverage directly. “I want to appreciate the reporting from Erica C. Barnett,” Mosqueda said, “in terms of the journalism that was done after that court hearing.”
The Seattle Times reported on that meeting and the social media posts, presenting the news as their own original coverage, last night, and included a screen shot identical to one of the two PubliCola posted on Monday. They did not link PubliCola’s coverage or credit our work, despite the fact that it had been widely circulated and even cited directly in the meeting the Times was covering.
This was not the first, or even the twentieth, time the Seattle Times has failed to credit PubliCola’s original reporting when writing their own followups on stories we broke.
Editorially, the Seattle Times often complains about the demise of local news reporting in areas outside Seattle, focusing exclusively on the closure of small print newspapers. In their own city, however, they seem more than happy to lift smaller outlets’ work—not just from PubliCola but the Urbanist, Capitol Hill Seattle, and many smaller outlets. Editors at the Times, who are ultimately responsible for deciding whether to credit outlets where stories originated, have ignored every request for a link and credit that I’ve ever sent them, demonstrating that they think it’s fine to run roughshod over local reporters in their own backyard.
While it might sound like a small thing—a series of rude social media posts by a local politician is hardly Watergate—the cumulative impact of the Times’ routine failure to credit small outlets like ours is significant. Compared to PubliCola, the Seattle Times is a behemoth, with revenue from ads, sponsorships, foundation grants, and paid subscriptions to both their print paper and their paywalled online content. When the local paper uses PubliCola’s work without credit, our original reporting becomes invisible—Google results promote the bigger outlet, other outlets link to the Times, and before you know it, it’s their story, even when it was our reporting.
This, of course, is the part where I encourage you to support PubliCola, and also all the other scrappy local outlets that are out here busting our asses to report news the big daily paper is more than happy to ignore—or scoop up a day after we publish and present as their own. With rare exceptions, we all see each other as part of an ecosystem, covering stories and neighborhoods that the big daily paper and TV stations ignore. The Seattle Times’ management has shown over and over again that they don’t see itself as part of this same ecosystem, which is a shame. If they’re the only one left standing, think of all the stories that won’t get covered.
Members of the PROTEC17 union, including King County employees, held a demonstration in the lobby of King County’s Chinook building on Tuesday to protest King County Executive Girmay Zahilay’s three-day-a-week return to office (RTO) mandate, which county employees have called punitive, expensive, and counterproductive.
Carrying signs with slogans such as “Communities not cubicles,” “King County is Bigger than Seattle,” and—memorably—”I don’t have a desk,” the staffers showed up with a giant “blank check representing the expense King County will incur to rent private office space so that employees, including many who were hired as fully remote workers, will have a place to sit downtown.
A staffer for Zahilay showed up in the lobby to accept the check and said she would make sure he gets it.
The county gave up much of its office space during the pandemic and agreed to allow many employees to work from home indefinitely under an agreement called “Green Where You Work.” Now, many county employees don’t have desks to “return” to as part of the “return to office” plan—a misnomer for county employees who were hired over the past six years and have never had a physical office downtown.
David Dahl, a capital projects manager for the Department of Natural Resources and Parks, was hired as a remote worker for a job that takes him to sites across King County. Living in Seattle, he said, might make it relatively easy for him to come downtown to meet the three-day mandate, but for many of his coworkers, the extra trip would add hours of unnecessary commute time to jobs they could previously do from the part of the county where they lived.
“We have a lot of people who have projects in the south end and live in Auburn or Kent or Tacoma, and they can easily get to those projects in a very short amount of time,” Dahl said, “whereas if they have to come into an office and then go back to a park site, that’s a ton of driving to do something that should be pretty simple.”
King County is much larger than the city of Seattle, where many workers also chafed at return-to-office mandates. The county covers more than 2,100 square miles, and many staffers live far away from Seattle, in areas where housing is more affordable.
Moving more than 1,000 employees into “a space with maybe 80 desks” would be impossible, Dahl said, and the new spaces the county has come up with at the King Street Center aren’t up to ergonomic standards. “It frankly should be the bare minimum that if you’re asking someone to work in an office, you should provide them an ergonomic place to sit and to do their work,” Dahl said.
Another DNRP employee, Brad Moore, said requiring county employees to travel to downtown Seattle for work would lead an “extremely high and unknown cost” for office space “that we feel could go towards much better things—for example, the public service that we’re all supposed to be providing.”
Moore, who lives in Shoreline with his extended family and was hired as a fully remote staffer, said the mandate will add a one-way transit commute of between 45 minutes and an hour to every work day. That will make it harder for Moore to help take care of kids in the family and help his wife, who has mobility issues, get to work.
But Moore added that the situation is much worse for some of his coworkers, who live in places like Everett and “are being told that they have to come into the office two or three days a week. I mean, in the morning, it could take two hours,” Moore said.
Photo by Joshua T. Garcia, via Wikimedia Commons. Creative Commons CC0 1.0 license.
By Erica C. Barnett
On Seattle Nice this week, Sandeep and I brought on two special guests to explain why developers want a holiday from Mandatory Housing Affordability fees, which are added on to of the cost of every new multifamily residential building in Seattle. The fees pay for affordable housing (or a developer can skip them by building affordable units on sight), but they’re bringing in less money than ever as housing development slows.
Since MHA passed, in 2019, Seattle has undergone a political evolution on housing. Density, which neighborhood activists and most political leaders once saw as having an entirely negative impact on neighborhoods, is increasingly seen as a necessity as Seattle’s renter majority grows. Many people no longer agree that the city should segregate renters from property owners by restricting them to dirty, polluted arterials far from parks, libraries, and tree-lined streets. There’s a growing consensus that to reduce the cost of housing, you have to build more of it.
Our guests this week, land use and housing consultant Natalie Quick and former Seattle Chief Operating Officer Marco Lowe, don’t go so far as to call for a total repeal of MHA, but they do make a strong case for its eventual replacement with an incentive-based approach called funded inclusionary zoning. FIZ, which we’ve covered at PubliCola before provides tax breaks, similar to Seattle’s existing Multifamily Tax Exemption program, in exchange for a requirement that developers build affordable units on site. Instead of charging a fee for housing, which drives up rents, FIZ makes it possible for affordable and market-rate housing to coexist.
As Marco points out, housing slowdowns don’t just lead to a shortage of housing, driving up rents. They also deplete city resources, because when developers decide it’s too expensive to build, the city loses out on all other kinds of non-MHA revenues, from sales taxes on materials to taxes on real estate transactions to property taxes on the housing itself.
This one’s a wonky episode, but one well worth listening to if you want to understand why so little new housing—particularly larger units—is getting built right in Seattle right now and what the city could do to reverse the trend.
Editor’s note: This story originally identified Marco Lowe as the former Office of Economic Development director. This error has been corrected.
On Tuesday, the King County Council will take up a motion to send a letter to King County Assessor John Arthur Wilson demanding his immediate resignation. Wilson was charged late last month for allegedly stalking his ex-fiencée, Lee Keller. This will be the second such action by the council, which unanimously passed a resolution calling for Wilson’s resignation last year after Keller provided new evidence of Wilson’s harassment in a petition for a protection order and dissolution of their domestic partnership.
Wilson, who refused to step down, was arrested less than a month after that vote for showing up at Keller’s house in violation of the protection order. He’s now facing gross misdemeanor charges related to stalking and under a five-year no-contact order.
Last week, a judge reversed an order that would have required Wilson to wear an ankle monitor to ensure that he stays at least 1,000 feet away from Keller. The decision came after Wilson argued that he has a medical condition that requires him to soak both his legs every day, which would damage the ankle monitor.
Just hours after his hearing, Wilson appeared to brag about the ruling by posting a photo of himself, shirtless and in a tub, on Instagram and Facebook. The caption read: “What a great night to soak in the tub and let your cares float away”—an obvious reference to his victory in court hours earlier.
Three days later, Wilson did it again, posting another semi-nude photo of himself in the hot tub under the taunting caption, “Great to soak my legs after after (sic) a very productive and successful week.”
Wilson has claimed that a medical condition called lymphodema requires him to completely submerge both legs in water every day. In court, Keller said that for the four years they were together, he never had the condition in both legs. After deciding Wilson could go without the ankle monitor, Seattle Municipal Court Judge Andrew Simon advised Keller to figure out how record any calls from Wilson and to take screen shots if he contacts her by text or email.
The county council’s letter demanding Wilson’s resignation reads, in part,
You have been embroiled in a domestic violence dispute for over two years, accused of stalking and harassing a King County resident. The King County Superior Court found enough evidence to issue a temporary protection order as well as a restraining order to prevent you from contacting that same King County resident due to your repeated stalking and harassment. The petition for the restraining order also alleged that you improperly used county resources to engage in the stalking, which would be a violation of the public trust and unacceptable.
These allegations and court orders have caused irrevocable harm to the public’s trust and faith in you as a public servant and elected official. You have fully lost our confidence in your judgement and ability to perform the duties of your role. It is for this reason that the King County Council unanimously passed a motion calling for your resignation on June 10th, 2025.
When an elected official breaks the public trust like this, it’s not possible to effectively serve the public and execute the duties of their office free from distraction. Our residents rely on the Office of the Assessor to provide critical County functions and, at this point, they would be best served by your resignation.
The county council has no power to remove Wilson, an independently elected official; only the voters can do so, by holding a recall election.
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