Tag: KCRHA

Courts, criminal justice, homelessness

Ex-Burien City Manager’s Excessive Complaints, KCHRA Elaborates on Money Troubles (and Lays off Key Staff) and More

Despite what my Bluesky would have you believe, there is more stuff going on in and around Seattle than just the budget!

1. Three months after we requested a report on the investigation into former Burien city manager Adolfo Bailon’s performance, the city of Burien finally provided a heavily redacted copy of the 24-page document. Although the redactions (of phrases like “city manager” and “city attorney” as well as the names of, Bailon, and former Burien city attorney Garmon Newsom III) make the report a somewhat challenging read, what’s clear is that Bailon was fired not just for poor performance, but for spending much of his time filing frivolous harassment and discrimination complaints about elected officials, city staff, public commenters, and at least one person who wrote a letter to the editor of a local news site.

Bailon’s complaints included one accusing  councilmember Hugo Garcia of making a “verbal threat”  when, as Bailon told it, Garcia said they would have a problem if encampment sweeps started up in Burien. Bailon also complained that Garcia implied the city manager was racist at a council meeting at which Garcia said a council proposal to site a new tiny house village in a low-income, mostly Latino area “reeks of white supremacy.”

To back up his claim that Garcia was targeting him, Bailon complained about an email Garcia sent to Councilmember Rocco Devito (the topic was the Seahawks flag) in which Garcia misspelled Bailon’s first name as “Adolph.” This, Bailon said, “suggests a deliberate attempt to associate me and my legal work with white supremacy and with Adolf Hitler.” Bailon also filed complaints against Garcia over comments he posted on social media and threatened, in comments on a letter to the editor of the B-Town Blog, to request Garcia’s employment file and post it publicly.

On and on the complaints went. Bailon wanted the council to publicly condemn someone who criticized him on social media, then threatened to get HR involved when two councilmembers didn’t respond right away. He demanded a formal investigation into a Burien resident, claiming she made a racist comment about how he should “go back where you came from”; in fact, she had said his lack of compassion for homeless people showed he didn’t understand Burien, but he might “have better luck” in his previous home state of California. He filed a complaint against a constituent who said he had burned bridges with progressives, calling this part of a pattern of harassment. While he was filing all these complaints, Bailon also had plenty of time to call 911 on homeless people, then complain to the police chief when he got put on hold.

As we reported, the city council put Bailon on administrative leave in April, shortly after he fired Newsom, who immediately had his attorney send a letter accusing Bailon of racial discrimination. (Bailon is Mexican American and Newsom is Black). When city staff tried to put Bailon on leave to investigate the allegations, Bailon claimed they were harassing and discriminating against him; the council voted to put him on leave about a week later, prompting more complaints. The council eventually fired Bailon “without cause,” which gave him access to a severance payment of around $120,000. He still lives in Burien.

 

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

Support PubliCola

2. The leader of another dysfunctional government entity, King County Regional Homelessness Authority director Kelly Kinnison, was absent during much of a King County Council committee meeting last week where she and her chief operating officer, William Towey, were scheduled to answer questions about the discovery that the agency overspent its budget by nearly $17 million, with interest on its ongoing debt to King County continuing to accrue.

Kinnison joined the meeting remotely about halfway through Towey’s in-person presentation, in which Towey revealed that the agency brought in about $250 million less, over its five-year lifespan, than it assumed it would. “Classic overspend,” as Towey described it, accounted for about $3.4 million.

Most of that overspending came from three sources: An “unplanned and unbudgeted” decision to use Salesforce to administer grants to homeless service providers; “excessive … fees” to the Robert Half temp agency, which provided financial staffers to do work that would more typically be done by employees, at a cost of $150 an hour plus fees; and interest the agency has consistently owed King County, its lender, because its bank balance has typically been negative (rather than balancing out over the course of the year as funding comes in).

The bulk of the $16.7 million gap, as we’ve reported, resulted from false assumptions about how much administrative funding the KCRHA would receive through its contracts with homeless service providers. Although some, including a certain Seattle Times columnist, have portrayed underspending as a shocking scandal, it’s typical for providers (including nonprofits that contract with the city of Seattle) to be unable to spend all of the money they’re allocated every year; the KCRHA just decided, at some point, that they wouldn’t, and kept using this assumption year after year.

One way or another, the city and county are going to have to split up the cost of the KCRHA’s poor financial decisions. How they will divvy up that expense (and when) remains an open question. Asked about the debt last week, Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson would only say that the city is “in active discussion with the county” about how to fix the KCRHA’s fiscal mess.

3. Although the city and county are taking over almost all the KCRHA’s contracts with homeless service providers, the KCRHA will continue (for now) to oversee a number of federally required functions, including the biennial Point In Time Count of the region’s homeless population (a process that now involves a lot of statistical extrapolation and data analysis rather than a direct count), the annual federal funding process, and the job overseeing the region’s Homeless Management Information System (HMIS) database.

Given these new limitations, many at KCRHA were taken aback earlier this month when Kinnison laid off the agency’s lead HMIS analyst, a person who had been with KCRHA since the beginning and was chiefly responsible for overseeing (and understanding) HMIS. This core function will now go to other staffers who have been doing other work and are less familiar with the complex system. Kinnison also let one of the two remaining HR staffers go, meaning that there will only be one HR staffer left to oversee every aspect of human resources at the agency, which has about 50 employees.

The layoffs were not announced; in fact, according to sources familiar with the discussion, Kinnison told a group of elected officials and others working on KCRHA’s transition that she was not planning additional layoffs as of that morning.

4. Don’t miss our conversation with Seattle City Attorney Erika Evans and Criminal Division Chief Jenna Robert this week. We talked about Evans’ new Connection Court, a diversionary misdemeanor court that pairs access to services with strict requirements for people who opt in. People who accumulate additional criminal charges or fail to participate in services will get kicked out to mainstream court, where they’ll face penalties including potential jail time.

Evans also announced a new program for repeat offenders that will both prohibit them from participating in any diversion program and seek harsher penalties, including “aggravated jail sentences,” for people who meet certain criteria, such as amassing more than three misdemeanor charges in three months or shoplifting at the same place twice.

A quick correction on this episode: Sandeep described San Francisco’s Reset Center, a sobering center where police remove people from the streets involuntarily for eight hours or so until they can receive a certificate of sobriety, incorrectly.

It is not true that the Reset Center offers medication-assisted treatment, such as shots of long-acting buprenorphine. The center gives referrals to outside providers but does not offer treatment.

It is also not really true that people can just get up and walk out of the Reset Center. In fact, according to the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department, which runs the site, only “[once an individual able to care for themselves, they receive a certificate of release (849 (b) PC) and are free to leave.”

homelessness

KCRHA Layoffs Begin, With Executive Positions, Financial Staff Untouched
KCRHA Chief Operating Officer William Towey speaks to a King County Council committee while CEO Kelly Kinnison looks on.

By Erica C. Barnett

The King County Regional Homelessness Authority made its first round of layoffs on Tuesday, six days after CEO Kelly Kinnison sent an email to staff letting them know they might receive layoff notices this week. After waiting in limbo for five days, not knowing if they’d have a job when they returned to work, staffers got another notice on Monday to let them know that the people who would be laid off would receive an invitation to an HR meeting the following day.

When the layoffs finally came, Kinnison and her right-hand man, William Towey, were nowhere to be found. Instead, the agency’s top two executives were at a meeting of the King County Council’s Committee of the Whole, providing a rare two-person update on the work an outside consultant, Turning Point Strategic Advisors, is doing to reconcile the agency’s books and figure out the source of $8 million in “unreconciled funds” the agency failed to account for.

For some current and former staff, it was hard to avoid the conclusion that the executives had decided to attend the meeting together to avoid being at the office while people learned they were losing their jobs.

The missing $8 million—which, Towey revealed Tuesday, could actually be more than that amount—was identified in a damning forensic audit earlier this year; that audit led the county and city to begin clawing back homelessness contracts the KCRHA took over in 2022.

A spokesperson for KCRHA confirmed that 10 people have been laid off, one resigned voluntarily before the layoffs took place, and six vacant positions will remain vacant. (The KCRHA’s governing board approved Kinnison’s request for seven new staffers in June).  In an email to staff this week, Kinnison also noted that two employees, the chief people officer and the chief communications officer, are getting title demotions “from ‘Chief’ to ‘Senior Director’ to reflect reduced team sizes and/or responsibilities.”

In contrast, Towey, who Kinnison hired into a newly created “associate director” job shortly after an earlier round of layoffs last October, got a promotion to Chief Operating Officer. Towey’s elevated title, Kinnison wrote, will “better reflect his ongoing responsibilities for the Finance Department, Research and Data Department, outside legal counsel, and more.”

Staff who were in the office this week said they knew layoffs were coming, but were perplexed by the decision to drag the process out so long, with repeat advance warnings, instead of just making the cuts.

The staff who lost their jobs on Tuesday received no severance and just one month of paid administrative leave. That’s a fraction of the severance 11 staffers received when they were laid off last October: Two months’ pay, plus one month for every year they were at KCRHA, in addition to two months’ paid administrative leave.

Those layoffs included the agency’s chief financial officer, general counsel, chief of research and data, and deputy CEO—along with several people who had complained about Kinnison and successfully accused her of retaliation.

PubliCola has reviewed a list of all 11 staffers who lost their jobs this week. They include data analysts who were working to complete the analysis of this year’s homeless Point In Time Count, a staffer responsible for putting out information about emergency shelters in severe weather, and staff who work on the region’s Homeless Management Information Information System and Continuum of Care, two functions that will remain at KCRHA.

Although current and former staffers said some of the layoffs (which included an ombudsperson, a procurement staffer, and a trainer) made sense, they also found the decision to preserve the agency’s finance staff (and keep the program staff mostly intact) hard to understand, since the KCRHA is no longer developing programs and no longer needs a large finance staff to manage its much smaller budget.

It wasn’t lost on anyone that the people who lost their jobs this week include many long-time staff who have kept the agency going since the beginning.

“These aren’t directors or deputy directors—these are the folks  at the bottom of the food chain,” one recently departed staffer said. Some of the laid-off staffers had been at KCRHA since it first started in 2021; had they received the same level of severance as the executive and director-level staff laid off in October, they would be walking out with seven months’ pay while they search for other jobs. When one staffer who was laid off said, “‘Hey, this severance package doesn’t sound like the one folks got during the last round,’ she was told, ‘This is a different situation,” the former staffer said.

Last week, unionized staff represented by PROTEC17 sent a letter to the KCRHA’s governing board urging them to cut top staff, including Kinnison and Towey, rather than eliminating low-level positions that will continue to be needed as the agency ramps down. During the King County Council meeting, the staffer who signed that letter, data analyst Ben Mathewson, urged the council to demand “accountability from leadership” who got the KCRHA into the current financial mess

“Reform is never about blindly trimming from the bottom up; it is about having the courage and the discipline to occasionally trim from the top down,” Mathewson told the council. “Accountability from leadership is essential in order to protect our experienced, data-driven workforce, and demonstrate to the public that King County values operational competence and fiscal efficiency over executive overhead.”

The same day, Mathewson learned that he was among the 10 staffers whose jobs were cut.

In an email, Kinnison told staff she’ll have more to tell them about “adjustments to our interim organizational structure and workflow” at a meeting on September 1. In a separate note, Kinnison told staff they not expect additional layoffs until after October 5.

homelessness

As KCRHA Begins Layoffs, Union Suggests Cutting Top Executives First
KCRHA associate director William Towey

By Erica C. Barnett

An initial round of layoffs is imminent at the King County Regional Homelessness Authority. Management reportedly informed the agency’s executive leadership team last week which staffers will lose their jobs in late August or early September. Agency CEO Kelly Kinnison told city and county leaders basic details about the layoffs in a weekly meeting last week.

The job cuts are part of a transition plan that will move most of  the homeless service contracts KCRHA currently oversees back to the city of Seattle and King County, which managed them before KCRHA took them over in 2021.

In April, a forensic audit found that the KCRHA lacked basic financial controls and used casual accounting practices to keep track of and balance its budget, lost track of at least $8 million in spending, and had an ongoing, steadily growing negative cash balance that required it to take out ever-larger loans from the county, resulting in interest payments that the agency couldn’t afford.

Since then, agency leaders have downplayed the problems and blamed them on early mistakes by previous KCRHA management, including founding CEO Mark Dones. As Kinnison and her recently hired deputy, William Towey, insisted the problems identified in the audit were fixable, the city and county worked out a plan to largely dismantle the agency. King County and Seattle are now in the process of taking back control of homeless contracts the two governments previously controlled and staffing up with the expectation that KCRHA will dramatically reduce its workforce.

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

Support PubliCola

 

A KCRHA spokesperson would not provide details about the layoffs last week. However, KCRHA staffers have expressed concern that some of the initial job losses will be in areas the agency still needs to do the work it will retain for now, like the “point-in-time count” of the region’s homeless population and the region’s annual application for federal homelessness dollars, rather than the areass where KCRHA staff will soon be redundant, such as the program and finance divisions.

Last week, staff represented by the PROTEC17 union sent a letter to the agency’s governing board urging the board to lay off Kinnison and Towey, whose combined compensation tops $600,000—”the direct financial cost of five to six full-time operational staff,” the letter says. “In a crisis, preserving positions that directly manage vendor contracts, coordinate shelter logistics, and administer Coordinated Entry produces a far higher operational yield than maintaining executive overhead.”

The union members also cited controversies that, they argued, could put the KCRHA’s reputation at continued risk, including bias complaints and allegations of retaliation as well as evidence that Kinnison sought to withhold records from public disclosure, in potential violation of the state Public Records Act.

“In a crisis, preserving positions that directly manage vendor contracts, coordinate shelter logistics, and administer Coordinated Entry produces a far higher operational yield than maintaining executive overhead.”

The finance committee of the agency’s governing board is reportedly scheduled to discuss the layoffs in their meeting on Thursday. However, unlike governing board meetings and a June finance committee meeting, this meeting will not be open to the public. According to the agency spokesperson, a resolution adopted in June making the committee an advisory, rather than decision-making, body meant its meetings no longer have to be public.

KCRHA currently has 73 staff, a number that includes one of the seven new positions the governing board approved, at Kinnison’s request, back in June. (None of the other positions were filled.) The agency has overspent its administrative budget by as much as $1 million so far this year.

“We anticipate there will be further staff reductions in 2026 and 2027 as contracts fully transition back to the City and County,” the KCRHA spokesperson said. “During the transition there will be functional overlap, with KCRHA managing 2026 contracts into early 2027 for closeout—while the City and County hire staff in 2026 and prepare to onboard the 2027 contracts.”

Kinnison will be out of the office later this week and will not be at the finance committee meeting; Towey will (not for the first time) attend in her stead.

Uncategorized

Former Police Chief’s Payout Will Be Higher Than Previously Known; KCRHA Still at Full Staffing as Contract Transition Begins

1. Former police chief Shon Barnes’ $700,000 settlement agreement with the city, which PubliCola received Thursday through a records request, includes a year of paid health care, 18 months’ full salary, the $50,000 “lateral officer” bonus Barnes took when former mayor Bruce Harrell hired him, and a $60,000 relocation allowance for Barnes to move to Seattle from Chicago. (Barnes rented a apartment downtown, listed on Trulia in December 2024 at $3,228 a month, while retaining his family home in Chicago and frequently visiting his family there).

That adds up to $700,000. But the deal also includes a payout for any time off Barnes has accrued but not used. SPD has not responded to any of PubliCola’s questions since last week (except to tell us the chief’s schedule was “locked down” when he left) and the mayor’s office did not immediately respond to our question about how much time Barnes had accrued.  Barnes made $179.54 an hour and his accrued time off was paid out at that rate.

As we reported, Barnes began calling around last Wednesday to tell people he’d been fired (one of our sources was a retired officer who got the news directly from an SPD captain). In reality, Mayor Katie Wilson had asked him to resign and he refused. As a result, rumors swirled for almost a full day before the two sides signed the settlement agreement late Thursday afternoon.

In the agreement, Barnes agreed not to sue the city, and the city agreed not to say anything negative about him to potential future employers. Although Wilson critics have demanded to know exactly what Barnes did wrong (beyond the obvious), the agreement to refrain from badmouthing Barnes likely restricts Wilson’s ability to provide more details about why she fired him. But we can make some educated guesses based on issues that came up before last week, when Barnes confronted a reporter who asked him about PubliCola’s reporting on his frequent travel.

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

Support PubliCola

2. Seattle and King County provided more details this week about their plans to claw back homeless service contracts from the King County Regional Homelessness Authority as part of the “right-sizing” they announced last month that will dramatically reduce the size and responsibilities of the homelessness agency.

After the contracts return to the city and county, which oversaw homeless services before setting up the KCRHA through an interlocal agreement in 2019, the KCRHA will be in charge of the county’s severe weather shelters (but not the city’s), the annual federal funding process (already at risk due to Trump Administration changes to the funding criteria), and the completion of this year’s Point In Time Count analysis of the region’s homeless population. As the region’s Continuum of Care for homeless services, it will also hang on to a number of administrative functions, like overseeing the region’s Homeless Management Information System (HMIS) database, at least for now.

The city will take back 117 contracts with 40 providers, totaling around $113 million. The county will take back 100 contracts with 40 providers totaling around $46 million.

Seattle plans to hire 23 new staffers in the Human Services Department to administer the contracts, and the county will hire 11 people.

It’s unclear how much staff duplication will occur while the contracts move from KCRHA to the two local governments. Currently, KCRHA has 73 staffers. The “right-sizing” announced more than a month ago included between 20 and 25 layoffs, but so far, none of those layoffs have occurred. The city is facing a budget deficit of at least $175 million, so it will need to cut KCRHA’s budget (and staff) by at least the equivalent of the new staff it’s hiring to avoid paying for double staffing next year.

Almost all of the KCRHA’s $203 million budget comes from Seattle and King County.

public disclosure

KCRHA CEO Sought to Shield Records From Public Disclosure, Emails Suggest
Screenshots from emails between KCRHA CEO Kelly Kinnison and an IT manager, edited for emphasis.

By Erica C. Barnett

King County Regional Homelessness Authority CEO Kelly Kinnison sought to exempt many of her emails from public disclosure last year, emails obtained through a Seattle records request and provided to PubliCola suggest.

In emails last October, Kinnison asked an IT staffer to change her email settings so that only he had “unfettered access” to her emails, directed the same staffer to establish “sensitivity labels” that would ensure they didn’t show up in records requests, and used “protected messages,” accessible only with a password, to communicate with board members and Seattle and King County staff.

The emails indicate that the IT manager gave Kinnison the ability to use labels like “deliberative” in Microsoft Purview in order to exempt emails from public disclosure requests, and that he was asked if it he could change internal search settings so that Kinnison’s email could not be searched at all.

“As I mentioned before, we aren’t able to restrict access in Purview so that only one email address cannot be searched,” the IT manager told the KCRHA’s HR director, Irwin Batara, in an  October 2025 email that Batara forwarded to Kinnison.

“I can, however, set up Sensitivity Labels within Microsoft so that labeled emails and/or documents with a ‘deliberative’ label can be excluded from public record searches (removing the ‘deliberative’ label would subject that file to public records requests as normal). This would allow searches to continue while still remaining compliant with the Public Records Act.”

“Please do have Derke [sic] set up the sensitivity label he proposes,” Kinnison told the HR director. “That seems like a great idea. It won’t address incoming messages though.”

The state Public Records Act requires public agencies, such as the KCRHA, to make almost all records available upon request, with narrow exemptions that include information an agency provides an attorney for the purpose of securing legal assistance and drafts of legislation and internal discussions about policy development. (Such “deliberative” records automatically become public as soon as the deliberation is over.) Beyond the narrow exemptions in the PRA, all public employee emails are public records, and anyone can request any or all of them.

Simply labeling a record “deliberative,” “personnel-related,” or “attorney-client privileged” does not exempt it from public disclosure.

Kinnison’s emails suggest that she attempted to obtain—and may have received—internal exemptions that go far beyond what is allowed under state law. If so, this calls into question the KCRHA’s compliance with the PRA for records requests filed at KCRHA after last October, including several filed by PubliCola.

The KCRHA did not substantively respond to most of the two dozen questions PubliCola sent earlier this week. A spokesperson did say, however, that the agency “complies with the Public Records Act when processing and responding to records requests. We support the public’s right to access records and transparency, while also applying any exemptions required or permitted under the law. We do not automatically or otherwise limit disclosure of responsive records.”

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

Support PubliCola

 

On October 16, Kinnison sent an urgent email to the personnel committee of the KCRHA’s governing board, along with a KCRHA attorney, Batara, and IT manager Derek Montes titled “Possible System Breach.” In it, she suggested that the agency’s public disclosure officer went beyond the bounds of the public disclosure act when reviewing an anonymous public records request (PRR) for emails about layoffs that were then forthcoming.

In processing the request, Kinnison wrote, the public disclosure officer—who was not included on any of the emails we reviewed— “pulled a very large export file of my emails.” (Emphasis in original). The search also “included key words that were not part of the PRR, such as ‘budget cuts’ and ‘leadership structures.'”

For these reasons, Kinnison wrote, “I have concerns that the PRR search request was used to explore my email beyond the public request and to download my emails, and also that the public request was limited to my inbox.” Public records requesters are not required to provide keywords and public disclosure officers are supposed to fulfill requests as liberally as possible, using their expertise and training to determine how to respond to each request.
√

The emails PubliCola reviewed provided no evidence that the public disclosure officer downloaded emails unrelated to the records request in order to “explore” them. The KCRHA spokesperson declined to explain further, calling the exchange a “personnel matter” that “does not have an impact on the specifics of PRA responses which are fully compliant with the statute.”

In the same email, Kinnison referred to a “directive” from the KCRHA governing board’s personnel committee “to limit unfettered access to my email to Taj Wallace (Chief of Staff to the CEO) and Derek Montes (IT Manager),” a decision that appears to have locked the KCRHA’s public disclosure officer out of the CEO’s email account. The KCRHA did not respond to questions about the to limit access to Kinnison’s emails, but denied that the public disclosure officer has been completely cut out of the public records response process.

In the same thread later that evening, Kinnison wrote, “I have taken the step of securing our data by limiting system access to the IT Manager. We will continue to gather information on what may have occurred.”

If an IT manager or Kinnison’s chief of staff was (or is) in charge of doing initial searches to determine which emails are subject to, or exempt from, disclosure, it would raise questions about how records were excluded and why. Any restriction that limits a public disclosure officer’s access to a public agency’s emails would raise similar questions. IT managers may have the technical ability to search through emails using keywords, but they do not have the specialized expertise of public disclosure officers, who must be certified (and routinely recertified) to serve in that position.

The Washington Association of Public Records Officers includes a guide on its website for conducting a thorough public records search.

In a followup email to Batara on October 22, Montes responded to several questions, which appear to have originated with Kinnison, about the records search that initiated the seeming scramble to restrict access to Kinnison’s emails.

The IT manager, apparently serving as a go-between for the KCRHA’s public disclosure officer, confirmed that the Public Records Act requires public disclosure officers to interpret requests liberally, rather than limiting themselves to specific staffers or keywords provided by a requester. He also said the public disclosure officer’s search returned such a large number of emails because she had to come up with search terms that might produce emails about layoffs. “Once records were reviewed, they were deleted from her computer,” Montes wrote.

The emails PubliCola reviewed also included a “protected message” from Kinnison to personnel committee members on October 23  titled “PREDECISIONAL DRAFT RE: Budget and Organizational recommendations.” If this “protected” email was deliberative, it would likely no longer be so, since KCRHA adopted its 2026 budget in February. The KCRHA spokesperson did not respond to questions about why Kinnison used password protection or how widespread the practice has been at the agency, saying only that the KCRHA did not believe such emails are exempt from disclosure.

A final email from Kinnison, about the resignation of staffer Xochitl Maykovich last August, was labeled “CONFIDENTIAL-ATTORNEY CLIENT COMMUNICATION.” The August 25 email is directed at the governing board and a handful of staffers. It includes Maykovich’s resignation email and Kinnison’s description of the email, which warns that Maykovich “has gone on the record with journalist Erica Barnett and we are expecting a story to be published today.” (And so it was.) The email does not request or contain legal advice or assistance—the standard for attorney-client privilege—but it is cc’d to two attorneys. Maykovich has not taken any legal action related to her resignation, though she did sue the agency in June—for alleged violations of the Public Disclosure Act.

homelessness, Mayor Wilson, Police, Privacy

Wilson Turns Off Stadium Surveillance Cameras, Homeless Authority Director Tells Staff Not to Trust the Media

1. As PubliCola first reported on Bluesky yesterday, Mayor Katie Wilson is turning off the police surveillance cameras around the downtown stadiums now that the final World Cup match in Seattle is over. In an official announcement this morning, Wilson said the decision “follows through on the commitment I made last month that these particular cameras would only be turned on for the duration of the FIFA World Cup in Seattle, because of its high global profile and the unique circumstances surrounding the event.”

In March, Wilson approved the installation of the cameras but said she would not have them turned on, and connected to the Seattle Police Department’s Real Time Crime Center, unless there was a “credible threat.” After months of pressure to tur.n the cameras on before the World Cup, Wilson announced that there had been a credible threat and she was ordering SPD to turn the cameras on.

Anti-surveillance activists, who had planned a rally and press conference today demanding Wilson to turn the cameras off today, praised the decision. But they said they were still skeptical that the cameras are fully off, posting video showing a camera unit near the stadium still plugged in. Asked to clarify what Wilson meant by “off,” a spokesperson for her office said, “The cameras were turned off via a PoE (Power over Ethernet) switch. As the cameras are not receiving power, they are not operational, and not capable of recording.”

For some anti-surveillance activists, that isn’t enough; they want visual evidence that the cables have been disconnected, which would require workers to go up to each camera unit and physically disconnect the lines. Noah Williams, a Transit Riders Union member who works in cybersecurity, said one of the challenges with camera systems like SPD’s is that technical specs vary from system to system, and SPD has not shared how its cameras, which are provided by Axon, work. (The TRU, which Wilson co-founded, is part of a coalition called Community Not Cameras, which planned today’s press conference and rally).

“It is really hard to verify that the mayor’s intent is being carried out because of the nature of the way these systems are designed and installed,” Williams said.

Wilson’s spokesperson said there are “other electronics in the camera cabinets (router/modem, Linux box, a cooling fan, etc.)” and that shutting these electronics down would require the city to send out bucket trucks, costing time and money. “Regardless of the power status of any of those devices, the cameras themselves are not operational,” the spokesperson said.

Wilson said she still plans to wait until the NYU Policing Project completes its data and security audit of the surveillance camera system later this year before deciding whether to turn on the stadium cameras and put other neighborhphoods, including parts of Capitol Hill and the Central District, under camera surveillance. Cameras have remained on in other areas, including Aurora Ave. North and downtown.

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

Support PubliCola

 

2. Late last month, Mayor Wilson and King County Executive Girmay Zahilay announced that the city and county will be taking over almost all of the region’s homeless shelter and service contracts, a change that will result in an initial 20 to 25 layoffs, according to city and county officials who briefed reporters on the “right-sizing” effort late last month.

In an all-staff email about the announcement on Friday, KCRHA CEO Kelly Kinnison didn’t focus on her employees’ understandable concerns about their jobs. Instead, she suggested that the press were wrong about the number of potential layoffs, noting that she was the only person who had control over how many people would lose their jobs.

“A lot of information is floating around in the media and among various levels of our partner organizations,” Kinnison wrote “In particular, there is much speculation about the number and timing of a KCRHA reduction in force.”

But Kinnison assured staff: They shouldn’t trust the media. “Please remember that the media frequently get facts slightly or very wrong,” she wrote. “Especially outlets with low journalistic standards with a history of one-sided, agenda-driven, or incorrect reporting.” As the outlet that has covered the KCRHA longest and most doggedly (going back to the “One Table” meetings that eventually led to the KCRHA’s formation), PubliCola stands by our years of reporting on the agency.

“As I said yesterday,” Kinnison continued, “my actions to reduce our workforce will come from discussions with Department Chiefs, HR. Protec17, and our partners and funders. I have full authority to manage our workforce to align with our budget and labor agreements short of a new resolution passed by our entire Governing Board that curbs that authority.”

A reduction of 20 to 25 staffers would represent about one third of the agency’s current 73 staff, leaving around 50 people on the agency payroll.

It seems unlikely that the layoffs will stop with the initial round. After the local contracts that made up the vast majority of its work go back to the city and county, KCRHA will be left with just a handful of official duties: Serving as the organization that applies for federal contracts, overseeing the emergency “activation” of overnight winter shelters, and conducting the Point in Time Count of the region’s homeless population next year. All Home, the organization that previously did all this work except the winter shelters, had between 7 and 10 people on staff.