After a presentation on a devastating forensic audit that found widespread financial problems and a lack of internal financial controls at the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, a consensus is growing among regional decision-makers that it’s time to start “winding down” the agency. The KCRHA itself would go on to release an FAQ later in the week that took little responsibility for the ongoing issues and suggested fixing them would be a relatively straightforward matter.
Although official SPD policy calls for diversion, rather than arrest and jail, when officers encounter someone violating the city’s laws against using drugs in public and simple drug possession, Police Chief Shon Barnes appeared to criticize the city’s main diversion program, LEAD, at a recent council meeting. Afterward, Councilmember Maritza Rivera suggested the program already has plenty of money.
City Councilmembers Maritza Rivera and Joy Hollingsworth proposed amendments to Mayor Katie Wilson’s proposal to allow larger tiny house village-style shelters around Seattle. Their walk-on amendments would mandate 24-hour security and buffer zones around parks, schools, and child care centers for new micromodular shelters with more than 100 residents.
After an audit revealed potential fraud and waste at King County’s Department of Community and Human Services, County Councilmembers are proposing an office of inspector general to provide a new layer of oversight to receive tips and conduct investigations into claims about contractor misuse of county funds.
More than a dozen King County employees showed up to a King County Council meeting this week to testify against King County Executive Girmay Zahilay’s “return to office” mandate. One person who wasn’t there to hear their testimony in person: The council’s biggest RTO booster, Councilmember Reagan Dunn, who attended the meeting—as he often does—remotely.
Garmon Newsom II, until recently the Burien City Attorney, is running for an open Seattle Municipal Court seat; he defended many of the city’s anti-homeless policies, including a ban on sleeping in public and an attempt to shut down a private encampment at a church. And Mike Solan, the bombastic former Seattle Police Officers Guild president, just bought a house in Gig Harbor and plans to run for Pierce County Council as a Republican.
Why does SPD have an acting assistant chief, rather than a permanent one? As it turns out, they have both. Todd Kibbee, the permanent acting chief, is burning his leave, with full pay, before he retires while Brown does his job.
A recent analysis by the city’s Office of Labor Standards found that despite dire warnings from council members who wanted to overturn the law, a 2023 law guaranteeing higher hourly pay for delivery drivers resulted in higher pay overall, along with less reliance on tips.
Three city councilmembers—Council President Joy Hollingsworth, Debora Juarez, and Eddie Lin—will propose legislation next week that would ban data centers inside city limits. The proposal comes in response to reports that companies were planning five data centers on land owned by Seattle City Light.
City Councilmembers Maritza Rivera and Joy Hollingsworth proposed amendments to Mayor Katie Wilson’s ambitious shelter proposal that would mandate 24-hour security and buffer zones around parks, schools, and child care centers where large new “transitional encampments,” a term that primarily refers to tiny house villages, won’t be allowed. (Seattle has had a few actual temporary encampments, but Wilson’s plan centers around tiny house villages rather than tents).
Last month, Wilson introduced a legislative package that would make it easier to site and build larger tiny house villages. The council’s land use committee is considering the part of her proposal that increases the maximum “shelter census” from 100 to 150 people in most areas, plus a potential 250-person shelter somewhere in the city.
Hollingsworth sponsored the amendments that would impose security mandates and no-shelter zones because Rivera isn’t on the land use committee.
The first of the two Rivera-Hollingsworth amendments, which would both apply to shelters that serve more than 100 people would require the presence of “identifiable security personnel” on site 24 hours a day. The second would prohibit new tiny house villages within 750 feet of all child care centers, schools, and playgrounds, and within 500 feet of most city parks. (Small “pocket parks” under 2 acres would be exempt).
It’s unclear how much of the city would be automatically off-limits under this expansive prohibition. Using an online GIS map creator, I drew a 750-foot radius around every public school in the city as well as a couple dozen child care facilities in a large swath of Hollingsworth’s district. (Child care facilities in private homes don’t count as child care facilities under city code, according to a council staffer.)
Not indicated on the map are the park buffer zones, which would extend 500 feet in each direction from midsize or larger park, and park playgrounds, which would be subject to the 750-foot buffer zone.
Under the amendment, sober shelters and those “that are exclusively for families with children” would be allowed inside the buffer zones. The council expressed its “intent,” in legislation that released funds for Wilson’s initial shelter push, for two of the new shelters to be limited to families with children and one to people in recovery from addiction.
The proposed changes were just two of seven proposed amendments to the original bill, sponsored by Councilmember Dionne Foster. Another amendment, from Councilmember Dan Strauss, would require tiny house providers to separate the new, larger villages into fenced-off “neighborhoods” whose residents would be physically restricted from entering each other’s area.
A fourth, from Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck, would require the new, larger villages to have at least two shelter staff on site 24 hours a day. Other amendments would require good neighbor agreements and public safety plans and request a 1-to-15 staff-to-resident ratios for shelters serving people with high-acuity behavioral health conditions..
Rivera, speaking in favor of her proposal to establish no-shelter zones, said she was trying to protect children from dangerous people who might live at the new tiny house villages. “We know that for shelters that are not sober … there might be drug dealing and other public safety issues, and we don’t want near that near children,” Rivera said. Then, conflating unmanaged encampments with managed shelter, she continued, “I know we’ve had issues with encampments at our major parks.”
Rivera also attempted to link tiny house villages to a recent gunfire incident near a press conference Mayor Wilson held to announce new education and child care investments. “Everybody knows by now that there was a shooting and shots were fired … right into the Yesler Community Center,” Rivera said. “So I’m not saying shots are going to be fired outside of these sanctioned shelters. But again, we cannot say that there won’t be drug dealing outside of these shelters or attempting to be done outside of these shelters, and so we need to make sure that we’re keeping our kids safe.”
Hollingsworth and Rivera introduced their security and buffer zone amendments at the last minute, so the only copies consisted of physical printouts in council chambers. The committee didn’t vote on Tuesday; they’ll meet at least one more time next week before pushing the bill forward to a full council vote.
A consensus appears to be growing among regional decision-makers that it’s time to start “winding down” the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, which received the results of a devastating forensic audit earlier this month, according to people familiar with internal discussions about the agency’s future who spoke with PubliCola over the past few days.
But what that plan, and the path forward for homeless services, will look like, if it happens, remained murky after the weekend, which KCRHA board members, Seattle and King County elected officials, and homeless service providers and advocates spent discussing how to ensure homeless service providers keep getting funded even if the KCRHA no longer exists.
KCRHA’s board, made up primarily of elected officials from around the region, met on Friday to discuss the findings of a forensic review that found pervasive, ongoing financial oversight and accounting problems that resulted in overspending, a persistent negative fund balance, and at least $8 million that could not be accounted for. Between the $8 million and another $4.26 million in overspending (which included $1.26 million in unfunded interest payments on loans), the audit found nearly $13 million in money that was effectively missing from the KCRHA’s accounts.
Kinnison, who made an unusual in-person appearance at Friday’s meeting, cued up a presentation by Mike Nurse, a principal with the auditing firm Clark Nuber, by reading a prepared statement full of reassuring claims. The problems the auditors identified, she said, were “serious” but not fatal, and stemmed largely from decisions made before she arrived in mid-2024—when, she suggested, things started turning in the right direction.
“This audit identifies real weaknesses in KCRHA’s financial systems, controls and reporting, particularly during our early formation period,” Kinnison said. “I want to be clear about one important point. The audit did not find evidence of fraud or misuse of funds. … There are no missing funds.” Finally, whatever problems the audit identified with the agency’s “internal tracking and reconciliation processes,” Kinnison said, all the money was “used on services for people experiencing homelessness.”
Kinnison, who did not attend most of the regular meetings with auditors, concluded by saying she was the right person to get the agency back on track. “I just want to say, I’m a career public servant. I was hired to do this work. It’s what I’ve been doing, it is a passion for me. It’s part of my identity to uphold the public trust, and I am really honored to be the person that’s helping to understand [how] KCRHA can improve to the level that meets public expectation and scrutiny.”
The rest of the meeting might as well have taken place in a different reality.
For the next hour, Nurse made the case that KCRHA’s financial oversight and accounting practices had left the door wide open for waste, financial abuse, and fraud.
“Did we find fraud at KCHRA? The answer to that remains unclear,” Nurse said. “In our testing, we did not identify any direct evidence of fraud.” However, that testing was based on a small sample of KCRHA’s financial transactions, and ” transparency issues on the accounting record between 2021 and late 2024″ made it impossible to track spending on a detailed level.
Many of those “legacy issues,” Nurse said, persisted after that period—meaning that previous leaders, including controversial founding CEO Marc Dones, were not solely to blame for the casual accounting practices and opaque record-keeping that contributed to overspending, negative balances, and opaque financial records. As recently as last year, many different people had access to the spreadsheets KCRHA used to track spending, and various people deleted, and made other changes to “thousands” of financial transactions, the audit found.
“Under current conditions and without corrective action, the challenges I’m talking about are likely to continue, including ongoing cash shortfalls and the reliance on advances in borrowing to meet funding requirements,” Nurse said. Without any formal financial controls, he continued, the KCRHA is at risk of having to pay back federal funding they’ve already spent. Several past audits, including county and state reports in 2023 and a second state audit in 2024, both unearthed many of the same issues, Nurse noted, but KCRHA did not take any apparent actions to fix the problems, and “these issues still remained” as of last July, when the audit began.
In a separate but related issue, KCRHA staffers spent more than a million dollars using agency credit cards and reimbursing staff without providing detailed justifications for their purchases, which included clothes, office furniture, and $13,000 in relocation costs for a chief program officer who lasted less than a year. Payroll records and receipts, obtained through a records request and provided to PubliCola, show that the KCRHA paid nearly three times that much—more than $38,000—to relocate Kinnison to Seattle from Washington, D.C.
Nurse also knocked down one of the KCRHA’s chief justifications for its persistent negative cash balances—the fact that the agency uses a “reimbursement” framework, paying providers first and refilling their bank account when money comes in from outside funders. (The KCHRA switched to this system after providers complained about payments that were often months late, an especially severe financial burden for small and less-established nonprofits.)
Many agencies use a reimbursement model, Nurse said, results in accounts whose balances dip into the red and back into the back on a consistent monthly basis, like a “sine wave”; in contrast, the KCHRA’s balance has been inconsistent and mostly in the red, with a negative balance that actually grew from $44.7 million in July 2025 to nearly $63 million this March. On the chart above, which is included in the report, “you can see the receivables continue to grow, grow, grow, and the cash continue to decline, so that is not what you would expect to see.”
Implementing all the recommendations from the audit, Nurse said, could cost the KCRHA “potentially in the millions of dollars” and take a year or more. It could also lead to a disruption in homeless services, since the agency would need to use existing staff and resources to work exclusively on correcting all the problems the report identified.
Currently, there seems to be little enthusiasm for that option. After Friday’s meeting, board member and King County Executive Girmay Zahilay said he wanted to work “methodically and thoughtfully” while deciding what happens next. “We have to make sure that anything that we do moving forward is going to be better than the status quo.”
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Board member and Seattle Councilmember Dionne Foster told PubliCola after the meeting that she thinks it’s important to create a “strong foundation” for the future homelessness system by not acting rashly and immediately moving to the nuclear option—a shutdown process that, under the agreement that established the KCRHA, be required to last at least one year.
“When the auditor talks about this being something that was built over time because of the poor foundation of the agency, that’s something that we have to take into account in how we respond,” Foster said. “I want to make sure that as we’re thinking about how we address these audit findings, we do not pivot so quickly that we have another poor foundation.”
During a City Council briefing on Monday, Seattle Councilmember and KCRHA board member Alexis Mercedes Rinck said she is introducing a resolution that will lay out “nextstepsforourcontracts,staffing,Continuumof Care … andhowwewillensureacontinuityofserviceswithorwithout KCRHA.”
On Monday, King County Councilmember Rod Dembowski—one of the first elected officials, along with Seattle Councilmember Maritza Rivera, to explicitly call for shutting down the agency—told PubliCola he’s started working with other council members on a plan to “take back, in an orderly way” some of the functions KCRHA oversees and revert to a system where the county, Seattle, and other cities run their own homelessness systems the way they did before the KCRHA existed. That option couldn’t happen overnight, because HSD no longer has a formal homelessness division or the staff to manage large, complex grants.
“I know we’ve used this phrase ‘homelessness is a regional problem that requires a regional solution,'” Dembowski said, “but I think there’s an opportunity to ask, is that really the case? It’s certainly a regional challenge, but I think this trite statement that it requires a regional response deserves some assessment and reflection, because I don’t think that’s what we’re doing.”
Most smaller cities decided not to contribute funding to the KCRHA, preferring to keep funding local homeless service providers directly, and the KCRHA eventually moved toward “subregional” planning that takes the different political and financial realities of different parts of the region into account.
Zahilay, along with Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson, sent a letter to Kinnison giving the agency until May 8 to present a plan to address some of the “high-risk findings” in the audit, and until May 23 to come up with a corrective plan to address the other audit findings. Wilson, through her deputy mayor, Brian Surrat, also added amendment to a resolution creating a finance committee with the authority to approve or reject new agreements, discretionary spending, and new hires; the changes effectively put KCRHA under a hiring and spending freeze for the indefinite future.
A forensic audit finds widespread problems at the homelessness agency, county workers rally against in-office mandates, and a ton of other stories you may have missed this week.
The Seattle Police Department put out a video congratulating officer Albert Khandzhayan for apprehending a man who had kidnapped his wife’s three children by breaking the window of her car, dragging her out, and driving off with the kids inside. The video includes disturbing audio from the woman’s panicked 911 call; when we contacted SPD, they expressed “regret” for posting the audio without asking the victim’s permission.
Update: After we posted about the video, SPD removed it from Youtube and their website, replacing it with a note said in part: “Recognizing the potential harm this post may have caused, we have removed the video originally posted here.”
King County Assessor John Arthur Wilson posted multiple photos of himself in a tub, shirtless, on Instagram and Facebook Stories, with captions flaunting the fact that a judge ruled he did not have to wear a previously ordered ankle monitor because of a medical condition he claimed requires him to soak both legs every day. His next hearing is May 5, when PubliCola hears he may be asked to address the flippant posts.
On our first of two Seattle Nice episodes this week, we interviewed land use and housing consultant Natalie Quick and the city’s former chief operating officer Marco Lowe about why developers are asking holiday from Mandatory Housing Affordability fees, which pay for affordable housing but are bringing in less money as housing development slows.
Members of the PROTEC17 union, including King County employees, protested King County Executive Girmay Zahilay’s three-day-a-week return to office (RTO) mandate, which county employees have called punitive, expensive, and counterproductive. Many of the county’s far-flung workers have never been to physical offices, so “return to office” is a misnomer.
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The Seattle Times failed to credit PubliCola’s original reporting on County Assessor Wilson’s disappearing social media posts, instead representing the find as their original reporting. This is not in keeping with bare-minimum standards for crediting other news sources when doing followup coverage of a story another media outlet broke.
A devastating forensic audit found multiple serious issues with the way the regional homelessness authority ran its finances, including casual accounting practices, commingling of restricted funds, consistent negative balances, and millions of dollars in overspending and money that the agency was unable to account for. The audit led local officials to issue statements calling for accountability and, in some cases, the immediate dissolution of the agency.
Mayor Katie Wilson announced a two-phase plan to add a dedicated bus lane along the most congested part of Denny Way, between Lower Queen Anne and Capitol Hill, and create a new pathway to the South I-5 on-ramp. The two-phase plan will fulfill a campaign promise to address chronic delays on the bus route known derisively as the “L8.”
In our second podcast this week, we discussed the implications of the KCRHA audit for the future of the long-embattled agency. The audit, I argued, is most concerning for what it reveals about the agency’s lax financial controls and casual accounting practices, which included allowing the same person to oversee expenditures from approval to validation that the expense was appropriate and calculated and logged correctly.
I previewed the KCRHA board meeting to discuss the audit, including the agency’s own preemptive efforts to suggest things were well under control.
Also this week: On Friday, I covered the KCRHA board meeting in detail, including CEO Kelly Kinnison’s insistence that the audit didn’t find fraud and that no money went “missing.” In a presentation, the auditor corrected those claims and added texture to some of the dry details in the audit, including the KCRHA’s extensive use of a private temp staffing agency that charged large commissions and the widespread use of credit cards without clear authorization or line-item receipts.
Coming up: On Monday, I’ll be on City Cast Seattle discussing the audit findings and what they mean for the future of the agency. Tune in!
The King County Regional Homelessness Authority’s governing board, made up of elected officials from around the region, will meet today for a briefing and discussion on a damning forensic evaluation into the agency’s finances. The audit found potential misuse and commingling of restricted funds, spending that could not be accounted for, casual accounting practices, and lack of oversight and internal controls to protect against waste, abuse, and fraud.
The report covered a period ending in July 2025, when the agency’s cash balance was negative by $44.7 million. A few months after the audit began, agency CEO Kelly Kinnison laid off 13 staff, including the general counsel and chief financial officer. Neither position has been filled. At the same time, Kinnison hired five new staff, including three top executives, offsetting some of the savings from axing the agency’s attorney and the executive overseeing its finances.
Elected officials issued a flurry of statements ranging from alarm to calls for the KCRHA’s dissolution on Wednesday. Four Seattle-area leaders who expressed grave concerns—King County Executive Girmay Zahilay, Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson, and Seattle City Councilmembers Alexis Mercedes Rinck and Dionne Foster—are on the governing board.
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In advance of today’s meeting, KCRHA’s Associate Director of Strategy, William Towey—who was among the new executives Kinnison hired last October—sent an email to KCRHA staff assuring them that the agency has “made meaningful progress [to] bring transparency to where we needed to improve and to help guide the work ahead.”
“Core operations are stronger, invoicing is now completed on time with significantly improved accuracy, we have implemented regular monthly financial close processes, and we have strengthened oversight of spending, including purchase cards”—spending by individual staffers that was done with little accountability or oversight, the audit found. “At the same time, the audit makes clear that more work is required, and we are already taking action to address those areas.”
Towey’s letter to staff emphasized that, “[i]mportantly, the audit did not find evidence of fraud or misuse of funds.” However, the audit explicitly says that the failure to find “large-scale fraud in the samples reviewed” does not mean a clear bill of health; “due to limitations in internal controls, the risk of fraud, waste, and abuse remains,” the audit notes.
Towey told KCRHA staff Kinnison herself requested the audit, a claim that sources inside the city as well as former KCRHA staff have disputed, saying that Kinnison’s former deputy, Simon Foster, requested it after discussions with the Seattle Human Services Department. (Foster was among the 13 laid-off staff.)
In a formal complaint last August, then-CFO James Rouse (one of the 13 staff let go last October) said Kinnison had not initiated the review and seemed unaccountably dismissive about the implications of a forensic audit, which is typically done when there’s a suspicion of wrongdoing, such as fraud.
Ordinarily, an agency under audit would have the opportunity to respond in writing to the audit and have the response released as part of the audit itself, but that didn’t happen in this case. Kinnison is expected to respond to the audit findings verbally at the KCRHA’s board meeting this afternoon.
One question that’s unlikely to come up at the meeting is what responsibility the elected officials on the board, as well as the KCRHA’s two main funders, the city and King County, had for ensuring its spending was in order and its accounting practices met basic standards. In 2024, the city and county gave the governing board more authority, but the officials on the board never took a particularly active role in questioning or overseeing the agency or its budget. Instead, the board generally rubber-stamped the budget after viewing a PowerPoint presentation, effectively ceding authority to the CEO and staff to hold themselves accountable.
On this week’s 🚨emergency episode🚨 of Seattle Nice, we discussed a damning new forensic report into the King County Regional Homelessness Authority’s finances, which revealed that the agency could not account for millions of dollars in public funds.
As I reported earlier today, the audit revealed that the KCRHA couldn’t account for $8 million; it also revealed an “administrative overspend” of more than $4 million, on top of a previously reported programmatic overspend of more than $6 million. Beyond the missing money, the repord raises serious concerns about the KCRHA’s accounting practices and use of restricted funds, some of which may have been used for unauthorized purposes.
We discussed what Sandeep described as the “overlapping failures” early in the agency’s history, when the founding CEO, Marc Dones, established a culture in which lived experience of homelessness took primacy over traditional government qualifications, a practice that pushed many of the people who had been managing homelessness contracts at the city of Seattle out and set the agency on a path of lackadaisical record-keeping, few formal financial controls, and accounting practices that included reconciling funds over chat, email, and constant revisions to Excel spreadsheets, rather than traditional government accounting practices.
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A number of elected officials at the city and county have already called for the dissolution of the KCRHA, expressing outrage at the audit findings. That process, if it happens, will be long and arduous, and could spell the end of the much-touted “regional approach to homelessness,” which was the ostensible reason the KCRHA was created in the first place.
But as we also discussed, the city and county—the KCRHA’s two primary funders—also bear some responsibility for letting the agency’s finances and accounting get so out of hand and allowing their bank accounts to fall so far into the red. The KCRHA has long served as a bit of a punching bag for its primary funders, but it was it set up to struggle from the very start, when the city and county signed an agreement creating the agency that did not give KCRHA its own funding source, making it basically a pass-through agency that was occasionally allowed to do side missions—like the ill-fated “Partnership for Zero,” which was supposedly going to end unsheltered homelessness downtown.
The KCRHA’s board will meet at 3:00 on Friday, when it will hear from both agency CEO Kelly Kinnison and Clark Nuber, the agency hired by the city and county to do the forensic report. The public can tune in to the meeting on Zoom.
