Tag: Kelly Kinnison

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.

 

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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

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.

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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.

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.”

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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.

City Council, homelessness

Homeless Authority Praises Religious Program, Katie Wilson Plans to Jerk-Proof the Mayor’s Office, and Who Will Be the City Council’s Next President?

1. The King County Regional Homelessness Authority has signed a contract with Barb Oliver, the head of tiny house builder Sound Foundations, to serve as a chief policy advisor to agency CEO Kelly Kinnison. Oliver is a longtime advocate for sheltering people in tiny houses—if you’ve ever read a Danny Westneat column about how there are tons of little freestanding shelters “just sitting around in a warehouse,” waiting to shelter people, you’ve read quotes from her. (The underlying problem isn’t really that there aren’t enough structures for people to live in, but that it’s often incredibly hard to site tiny house villages because of NIMBY objections).

According to Oliver, her title will be Senior Advisor for Special Projects. PubliCola has requested additional information about the contract, including the dollar amount, from KCRHA. Late last month, the agency eliminated 28 positions, including high-level roles like finance director and general counsel, to save money; shortly afterward, Kinnison hired five new people, including one man whose proposed hiring earlier this year led to several internal complaints by people who all ended up losing their jobs in the layoffs.

2. Earlier this month, Kinnison took a trip to Baltimore, MD with The More We Love director Kristine Moreland and Compass Housing Alliance preseident Christopher Ross to learn about a Christian recovery program operated by the Helping Up Mission in that city.

Helping Up, like Union Gospel Mission and other religious missions across the country, is an explicitly Christian organizations that requires recovery program participants to participate in religious services, a controversial practice even among some faith-based homeless service providers. Helping Up’s Spiritual Recovery Program teaches participants “Spiritual 101 through Bible studies, chapel, and discipleship,” according to the mission’s website.

The program also includes mandatory “work therapy.” According to a profile in Baltimore magazine, program participants do 80 percent of the work of running the program.

KCRHA spokeswoman Lisa Edge described Kinnison’s trip to Baltimore as “an opportunity to learn from [Helping Up Mission’s] successes,” and said the group “partners with Johns Hopkins University, are well respected at the federal level, and provide critical resources to people experiencing homelessness.”

Asked if KCRHA hopes to invest local funding in similar groups, Edge said KCRHA already contracts with many faith-based groups, like  Catholic Community Services, The Salvation Army, and Muslim Housing Services. KCRHA’s budget indicates that funding for these groups is generally limited to shelter, not religious programs like Helping Up’s addiction program.

Edge did not respond to questions about whether KCRHA plans to contract with The More We Love. The group, which Moreland started as a for-profit company selling private encampment “sweeps” to landowners, has received contracts for encampment outreach in Burien and for its “high-accountability” shelter program in Renton, which provides temporary lodging to women seeking to leave the sex trade on Aurora Ave. N.

3. Although both Dan Strauss and Bob Kettle have been rumored to be the top contenders to replace outgoing City Councilmember Sara Nelson as council president, the consensus choice appears to be a different person entirely: District 3 Councilmember Joy Hollingsworth.

4. I was on the City Cast Seattle podcast this week, talking about the local impact of federal cuts to funding for permanent housing, the changes coming to city and county government as a new mayor and King County executive take over, and what “Seattle Nice” means to me, as one-third of the Seattle Nice podcast. What does it say about me that when they asked me what I’d do with an extra $51, my brain immediately went to complaining about Seattle’s overpriced, mostly mediocre food?

5. Mayor-elect Katie Wilson is planning to reorg the mayor’s office significantly from the way it’s been run under her last several. predecessors. The biggest change, according to an internal document provided by the transition team, is that Wilson will have just one deputy mayor (and two other direct reports, a chief of staff and a director of departments), as opposed to four deputy mayors under Harrell, a setup that has led to internal power struggles and factionalism in the mayor’s office.

Having a smaller, more “clearly-delieated” team of top staff will mean everyone has a clear role, and putting one person over all the executive departments will help Wilson’s administration empower department directors (another goal outlined in the internal memo), who have often had to accept top-down direction from the Harrell administration instead of collaborating on decisions as policy experts.

My favorite suggestion in the memo, though, is “No drama”—a constant feature of Harrell’s administration. There’s a whole section about how to achieve this, but the bottom line is this: “We don’t think you should hire jerks.” What a novelty!

 

homelessness

UPDATED: Homelessness Authority Cuts 28 Positions, Including Deputy CEO, Finance Director, and General Counsel
KCRHA headquarters in Pioneer Square

By Erica C. Barnett

Editor’s note: This post has been updated to reflect the fact KCRHA is hiring for five newly created positions.

The King County Regional Homelessness Authority made good on its promise to cut dozens of jobs if its funders, primarily the city of Seattle, didn’t provide more funding for staff, laying off 13 people, including Deputy CEO Simon Foster, and leaving 15 positions vacant. In addition to Foster, the cuts include the agency’s general counsel, chief financial officer, and director of data and research.

In an internal email sent to staff on Wednesday, KCRHA director Kelly Kinnison told staff  that “Due to our budget shortfall and after careful consideration, the four executives “have been included in the workforce reductions.”

A few lines later, however, Kinnison wrote that the KCRHA will actually be hiring five new people, including at least three executive-level positions —a budget and administration coordinator, associate director of strategy, director of special projects, director of program policy, and an IT coordinator. Currently, only the associate director of strategy position is listed on the KCRHA’s website, at a salary ranging from $181,300 to $227,920.

“I understand that transitions like this can bring about a sense of uncertainty and apprehension. However, I am incredibly confident in the expertise and resilience of this remarkable team,” Kinnison wrote. “By fostering collaboration and embracing innovative approaches, we are driving meaningful change and uplifting our entire community.”

Earlier this year, the KCRHA painted a dire picture of what would happen if the city didn’t help it fill a $4.7 million budget shortfall. At the time, Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell’s deputy mayor in charge of homelessness, Tiffany Washington, said Harrell would not accept any cuts to services, so the only option, given that the city provides most of KCRHA’s funding, was to cut staff.

“The board, the public, other stakeholders that we’ve been working with have asked us to make cuts that will not affect services,” Kinnison said at a KCRHA governing board meeting earlier this week. “So at the direction of the board, I’ve partnered with HR Interrupted Consulting to get a sense of what someone from the outside who’s an organizational consultant would say about our org structure and how we should move forward with reducing our footprint.”

HR Interrupted is the company the board hired in September to provide “executive coaching” to Kinnison in response to at least four complaints from staff alleging the CEO was racially biased and had created a “toxic work environment” for staff.  The staffers complained about Kinnison’s plan to create two new executive-level positions, each at a salary of $200,000 a year, and direct-hire two white men to fill them, bypassing the usual hiring process.

All four people who complained about Kinnison lost their jobs in the layoffs, as did Deputy CEO Foster, who had frequently clashed with Kinnison and strongly objected to her proposal to hire the two men. In addition to the racial equity concerns raised by other staffers, Foster argued that the new hires didn’t make financial sense and could make morale at the agency even worse than it already was.

At the board meeting this week, Kinnison said the layoffs would get rid of an excessively “top-heavy” structure at KCRHA and eliminate non-essential staff who were hired during a more optimistic time last year. Many of these recently hired staff were in “administrative positions that were sort of newer, when we thought, this time last year, we were going to have more funds and different things that we were going to need to take on with potentially a different federal administration,” Kinnison said.

In addition to Deputy CEO Foster, the 11 people being laid off include the KCRHA’s general counsel, chief financial officer, chief of research and data, emergency operations coordinator, data science director, Emergency Housing and Services division director, and human resources director. These individuals provide legal advice, provide reports on how many people are homeless in King County and who they are, coordinate shelter during weather emergencies, and oversee the KCRHA’s budget.

Kinnison intimated that some of these critical roles could be filled by “in-kind” support from Seattle and King County, but did not offer any details. A KCRHA spokesperson did not respond to multiple phone calls, emails, and texts about the layoffs.

In addition to the 11 outright layoffs, the KCRHA is eliminating 15 jobs that happen to be currently unfilled. HR will lose seven of its 10 employees, including an IT specialist and a payroll specialist, while the other vacant jobs include the agency’s chief program officer, three planners, two positions focused on youth and young adult homelessness, and a senior housing stability coordinator.

homelessness

Homelessness Agency Director Gets Sternly Worded Letter and “Executive Coach” After Investigation Into Racial Bias Complaints

By Erica C. Barnett

On Friday, the governing board of the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, made up mostly of elected officials from around the county, voted to resolve four workplace misconduct complaints against KCRHA CEO Kelly Kinnison with “a letter reminding her of the organization’s policy on retaliation,” King County Executive Shannon Braddock said during a special board meeting last Friday.

Kinnison will also have to participate in executive coaching through the end of the year. The coach, hired before KCRHA had completed its investigation, will cost KCRHA $67,500 and will also do an organizational assessment of the agency.

A four-member panel of KCRHA board members—Braddock, Seattle Deputy Mayor Tiffany Washington, Renton City Councilmember Ed Prince, and Auburn Human Services Director Kent Hay—came up with the disciplinary recommendation.

On Friday, Braddock noted that KCRHA had also retained three outside attorneys to work on the investigation. As we reported in August, Kinnison told the agency’s general counsel, Edmund Witter, that he could no longer work on HR issues shortly after he and other agency staff raised concerns about possible racial bias in Kinnison’s hiring decisions.

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PubliCola has filed records requests for the letter sent to Kinnison, which was not included in the public governing board agenda; the cost to hire three outside attorneys; and the final report on the investigation, also not included in the public agenda packet.

Staffers filed complaints against Kinnison after she proposed creating two new executive positions, with salaries of $200,000, and directly hiring two white men to fill them, including one who was reportedly allowed to write his own job description. Staff questioned whether these two new top-level positions were necessary at a time when the KCRHA could be facing significant cuts lower on the agency’s org chart. They also argued that if the new positions were truly necessary, there were qualified people of color already working at the agency who could take on those jobs.

Deputy KCRHA CEO Simon Foster raised similar concerns in an email to Kinnison, writing that “[b]ringing on additional high salaried executive roles during this time may compromise our fiscal credibility and sustainability.”

Additionally, Foster wrote, the hires could call into question KCRHA’s “commitment to equity, not just in outcomes, but in process and leadership composition.”

At least one of the four complainants—Xochitl Maykovich, who left the agency last month—accused Kinnison of retaliation, which was the subject of disciplinary letter Kinnison received.

Only King County Councilmember Jorge Barón voted against Kinnison’s slap-on-the-wrist discipline, saying, “I agree with the personnel committee’s assessment that disciplinary action is warranted.  However, I believe further action is warranted and respectfully disagree with the recommended disciplinary action in this motion.” Barón later clarified to PubliCola that he did not mean that Kinnison should be fired, but that the discipline should have gone further than executive coaching and a sternly worded letter.