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!
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.
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.
Kelly Kinnison, the CEO of the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, is currently the subject of an internal investigation into several complaints about her management style and hiring decisions, including one by a high-level staffer who quit the agency last week over what she described as a “toxic work environment.”
The KCRHA’s governing board, made up of elected officials from across the county, has held multiple closed-door executive sessions to discuss the ongoing investigation, which could result in discipline.
The investigation is expected to wrap up in the next few weeks, according to sources familiar with the board’s deliberations.
The initial spark for the complaints came earlier this year, when Kinnison, who is white, decided to create two new executive positions—a chief of youth programs overseeing Built for Zero work to end youth homelessness and a chief of systems innovation—and direct-hire two white men to fill them, including one who was reportedly allowed to write his own job description. (PubliCola has chosen not to name either man).
The salary for both positions was set at $200,000 a year. The Raikes Foundation would provide partial funding for the youth homelessness position, but the rest of the funds would have to come out of KCRHA’s budget, which faces potential cuts of more than $2 million next year. Emails obtained through a records request show that Kinnison had been directly talking with both men about potential jobs at the agency since 2024.
The proposed new hires, coming at at time when KCRHA was drafting a budget that would eliminate nearly 60 shelter beds and cut as many as 22 positions, struck many on KCRHA staff as irresponsible. Not only would both the new executive-level positions pay more tha most staff were making, there were, according to at least one of the complainants, multiple Black KCRHA employees qualified to fill the two roles if KCRHA management really believed they were necessary.
In a complaint filed on August 7, the staffer who quit last week, then-interim chief program officer Xochitl Maykovich, wrote, “I do not have faith that the current CEO of KCRHA can effectively manage the organization because she does not prioritize the responsibility the agency has to effectively manage tax payer dollars, she has not addressed concerns raised about racial discrimination, and she is making irresponsible financial decisions.
“Since I’ve been in the Interim Chief Program Officer role, I have raised consistent concerns about the appearance of racial discrimination and fiscal irresponsibility, but each time, rather than trying to find a solution, she has dug in and made me feel like she wants to fire me. I feel at very high risk of retaliation from the CEO for raising these concerns.”
Maykovich told PubliCola that when she heard Kinnison wanted to hire the two men, she was already wondering “why did I even get hired?” given that the agency’s budget, at the time, was several million dollars in the red. “I was so aggressive about it because it felt so wrong—this is so much money, we were having budget issues, and we could be in a position of laying people off,” she said. “We don’t have the business justification for this, and morale was so low.”
Maykovich said she told Kinnison, “It’s going to create a lot of feelings if you directly hire a white guy at this level and pay him this much money, when we have at least three Black staff with expertise in youth homelessness who you pay a lot less, and you don’t consider them.”
In response, Maykovich said, “She snapped at me and said, ‘I don’t care about their feelings.” Maykovich included this alleged incident in her complaint.
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KCRHA has not hired either of the two men, and it’s unclear whether they plan to in the future. A KCRHA spokesperson declined to respond to questions, citing the ongoing investigation.
As news of the potential new hires leaked out internally, rumors also spread that Kinnison said it would be helpful to have white men representing KCRHA in discussions with elected officials, including specific Seattle City Council members. According to Maykovich’s complaint, she told Kinnison in a meeting of the executive team that “staff would have a lot of feelings about this decision,” to which Kinnison reportedly replied, “I don’t care about their feelings.”
Emails obtained through public disclosure requests show that KCRHA’s deputy chief, Simon Foster, also raised concerns about the optics and cost of the new hires. On April 16, Foster wrote Kinnison raising concerns about the new positions, including “budgetary alignment,” “mission consistency,” and “team cohesion.”
“We are actively asking our teams to absorb significant reductions, delay hiring, and reassess work plans based on limited resources,” Foster, who is Black, wrote. “Bringing 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. Relying on a framing that centers White male representation as a political access point risks undermining the values we have stated publicly and internally.”
Kinnison responded by saying she planned to move forward with the two hires that week.
Two days later, in a separate email thread, Kinnison said she was “shocked” to learn that members of the executive leadership team knew about one of the new job descriptions, and said she was looking into “how this information was inappropriately shared so that we can ensure the integrity of our hiring processes and internal communication protocols.”
Kinnison also rejected “the perception that I feel we need white male representation to get political access. … That is not my belief, nor it is reflected in my hiring practices or guidance to hiring managers.”
In response, Foster confirmed that he was the one who shared the job descriptions, saying he did so as “an effort to surface critical feedback early and ensure that if we move forward, we do so with clarity, buy‐in, and organizational alignment.”
“I want to be clear, the discomfort being expressed within the Executive Leadership Team and throughout the organization, is not merely about an individual hire, but about a pattern of decision making, communication, and lack of clarity that is beginning to erode trust,” Foster wrote. “While you and I may have different perspectives on the intent behind these decisions, the perception among senior leaders is very real, and needs to be addressed head‐on, not deflected.”
In a followup email, which Foster shared with KCRHA’s human resources director Irwin Batara, Foster asked Kinnison to participate in a special meeting with the entire leadership team to discuss, among other issues, “unspoken frustrations, questions, and concerns that haven’t been given proper space for direct engagement with you.”
That meeting apparently didn’t happen. But less than two weeks later, at a meeting of top agency leaders that Kinnison did not attend, Maykovich and at least one other staffer complained at length about her plan to hire two new executive staff at a time when many lower-level KCRHA workers stood to lose their jobs. Two days later, the executive team met again, this time with Kinnison in attendance.
According to multiple accounts, Kinnison told everyone on her team to come out with whatever complaints they had, and each did so in turn. Some raised concerns that Kinnison and Foster were being too public about their internal leadership disputes, while others, including Maykovich, said KCRHA had become a hostile work environment, particularly for people of color. (Maykovich is Latina). In response, Kinnison reportedly said that she has the final say over all KCRHA decisions, including who gets hired.
At the end, Maykovich said, Kinnison told the leaders, “‘If you think you’re in a hostile work environment, bring it on.'”
After the meeting, Batara reportedly recorded the comments of each member of the executive staff as a separate complaint against Kinnison—about a half-dozen complaints in all.
About half an hour after the meeting ended, Kinnison wrote an email to Foster and Batara expressing “concerns about Xochitl’s performance”—effectively an HR complaint against Maykovich. The email described several recent meetings at which, according to Kinnison, Maykovich had been unprepared or spoken out of turn (Maykovich disputes this) and concluded by calling her “combative” and suggesting that “we escalate the coaching we are providing.”
Two days later, after meeting with King County Councilmember Jorge Báron, Kinnison wrote another email to Foster telling him to hold off on disciplining Maykovich; she did not cite a reason, and Báron, citing the investigation, declined to comment.
“I want to hold on taking any action on this until things settle, so no rush on bringing back recommended next steps,” she wrote.
The KCRHA’s general counsel, Edmund Witter, was reportedly among the staff who raised concerns about the perception of racial bias in Kinnison’s hiring decisions. Five days after the meeting where the executive leadership team aired their grievances, Kinnison told Witter he would no longer represent the agency on any HR matters, “so that we have his housing and agency expertise available to the many other things on his plate,” according to an April 29 email. (Witter declined to comment).
As the result of that decision, KCRHA has retained an international law firm, Ogletree Deakins, to represent them on employment matters. In addition to the additional cost of hiring an outside firm, the agency plans to hire a consultant, at an estimated cost of more than $60,000, to do an organizational assessment. It’s unclear if this outside assessment is part of an internal agreement to resolve the complaints; this is one of the questions we posed to KCRHA that a spokesperson declined ot answer.
A report on the investigation into Kinnison’s actions as CEO has reportedly been completed, so it probably won’t be long before its conclusions are public.
Meanwhile, the KCRHA still faces many internal and external pressures. As we’ve reported, the Harrell administration directed the authority to go through an “exercise” of cutting its budget by 2 percent earlier this year; in response, the agency came up with a proposal that it said would result in a $4.7 million shortfall in its administrative budget, which already falls far short of what most government agencies set aside for these positions.
The city of Seattle has tremendous sway over KCRHA’s actions because it provides most of the authority’s budget, along with King County; in recent years, the Harrell administration has used that power to claw back control over homelessness prevention and outreach, which the city restructured earlier this year. Harrell has reportedly not wanted to get involved in the dispute over Kinnison’s management of the agency; a spokesperson for the mayor declined to answer questions, citing the investigation.
Kinnison was chosen after Harrell’s pick to head the KCRHA on an interim basis, Darrell Powell, withdrew his name for the permanent position and stepped down after PubliCola reported statements he made about LGBTQ staffers and allegations that he repeatedly used an ableist slur in the presence of staff, among other issues.
KCRHA’s budget is also perennially in the red, ever since—in an effort to do a better job of paying contractors on time—the agency began taking out loans to fund up-front payments to nonprofit homeless service providers, leaving the agency in debt until all its funding comes in at end of the budget year.
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.
