regional homelessness authority is responsible for important work.
We must do right by the people who are on our streets and in urgent need of shelter.
Every dollar toward that effort needs to be spent wisely.
And unfortunately, we all know that the King County Regional Homelessness Authority has had problems, real problems, for years.
It left contractors unpaid for months in 2023. Leadership has come and gone, and calls for the agency to rework their accounting systems have gone unheeded.
This latest forensic evaluation is just the last straw.
The evaluation shows a pattern of mismanagement of funds that can no longer be tolerated.
It is time to find a different way to make this very important work happen.
Councilmember Domboski and I will be issuing companion resolutions to officially call for the dissolution of KCRHA and a plan for the future that includes all of us, the city and the county, continuing to work together to find a better way.
Councilmember Domboski?
Thank you very much, Council Member Rivera.
My name is Rod Dembowski.
I chair the Budget and Fiscal Management Committee at the King County Council.
You know, they say that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
And the King County Regional Homelessness Authority was set up six years ago with the best of intentions.
to tackle our region's most pressing problem, and that is thousands of unsheltered people on the streets all over King County night after night, with hundreds every year dying.
We wanted at the time to bring a regional approach to this problem, but the tool that was set up has been given more chances than it deserves at this point, and it has failed again and again and again, not only on the finances, not only with respect to the stewardship of public dollars, but with respect to its core mission, to shelter people.
Let's just go through just a little bit of history.
This was a proposal that came from philanthropy.
It was advanced by the former mayor of the city and the former county executive.
It came over to our council and the city council where we modified it.
I worked on that legislation at the time to make sure that we changed it from the proposal that would have had it as a standalone, separate entity governed by folks with lived experience that would be impossible to dissolve to a partnership between the city and the county overseen by elected officials that could be dissolved if it didn't work.
Sadly, after hundreds of millions of dollars put into it and a series of audits in 2023 where the Homelessness Authority, responding to a state audit, a county oversight audit, and federal review, said that they were going to get their house in order, they have not done it.
We have advanced them tens of millions of dollars.
They have overspent their budget.
They cannot account for the dollars on a material basis.
And our problem and challenge with respect to unsheltered people on the streets has not gotten better, it has gotten worse.
There is no justification to continue this organization.
We need to have an orderly transition.
back, devolving the responsibilities to our respective governments, Seattle being the lead in the city, King County as the regional government playing an important role throughout the region, and partnering with our 38 suburban cities.
As Councilmember Rivera said, I have asked our staff to prepare legislation.
We call it a motion, you call it a resolution, and introduce it before our council.
That, under the interlocal agreement, starts a one-year period, or up to a year, to, in an orderly way, dissolve this.
There will have to be some work with respect to the finances.
a partnership to look at that between the city and the county because they're in the hole, and we're going to have to work together to figure out how to get out of that.
But it's time to head in a new direction and to acknowledge that this process has not worked.
It has added an unnecessary, ineffective layer of government that has not been accountable on our region's most pressing challenge, and it's time to end it.
And I'll just add, Councilmember Domboski, that both the city and the county are committed to working together to solve this problem.
That's what led to the original creation of the King County Regional Homelessness Authority.
So thank you for your words.
We'll take questions now, either of us.
What's the big idea in another year?
That's a great question.
We don't have a KCRA check.
That's a great question, Chris, and that will rely on the mayor and the county exec along with both of our council bodies coming together and figuring out what the next steps are to continue to address our homelessness problem.
Yeah, I would say that I think you're seeing a shift from Mayor Wilson in policy, where she is taking the reins, I think with support of her council, to open up a significant number, hundreds of new shelter beds.
King County Executive Zahalai, his very, his second, his first executive order was on accountability, the second on shelter and housing.
So already our governments are, taking the reigns in this policy area and taking action and frankly that's evidence of a failed KCRHA.
And we have our health through housing program, the city runs its stuff, and we have great trusted community partners in this space that know what they're doing.
The Salvation Army, DESC, Lake City Partners Ending Homelessness.
We have folks out there that we can and do partner with.
This is a matter of administration and how to effectively administer the dollars that we have with accountability and with some results.
to taxpayers, especially when they're announcing that their money has not been properly tracked and who should be held accountable for this.
Do you want to take that one first?
I would say to taxpayers that that's why Councilmember Domboski and I are calling for the dissolution of KCRHA right now is because we are holding both our cities and the county accountable to the taxpayers and because we need to act swiftly this didn't work and to Councilmember Domboski's point this started out with the best of intentions both the county and the city had for years been tackling the homelessness issue and what to do about it separately and we had funding that we had allocated to it and it just made sense to do this regional approach so we did enter it with the best of intentions now that we see via the audit in 23 and 24 and now with this latest forensic evaluation between 23 and now some things had been put in place to try to give the KCRA an opportunity to fix the issues but now we see those have not been fixed so this is why we want to take swift action now to dissolve this entity and continue to work.
And as Council Member Domoski said, both the city and the county are doing homelessness work and helping folks who are unhoused across both the city and the county.
So we want to make sure we are accountable to those dollars that we're using for that purpose and making sure that they are going toward actually helping folks on the ground.
Rod?
Instead of taking a stance like that, can we drill the work that you're doing and that he will do in response to what do you say to taxpayers?
The question is, what do you say to taxpayers who are waking up this morning?
Cost of living is higher.
Affordability issues are what all of you are all campaigning on.
And now, they've learned that up to $13 million of their money has been wasted.
Is the appropriate response, I'm sorry?
Who says I'm sorry?
The response is this is not acceptable.
This is egregious and we need to do something about it and that's why we're calling for the dissolution of this KCRHA.
We agree with the taxpayers.
This is not okay.
It's not okay.
So we found out about this report yesterday.
I did yesterday and that's why I'm calling today for a dissolution of this entity and we need to do something different because the mismanagement of funds is never okay.
Can the city or county manage the money better than what the regional homeless authority did?
That's a great question.
Well, I think both of our governments have, while not perfect, much better track records.
We are audited regularly by the state auditor's office at the county.
We have our own internal auditor.
We have our own structures.
We know how to administer and manage, for the most part, contracts.
And in the housing space, we're pretty good at it.
Look, every now and then there's a stumble or somebody does mess up.
But the challenge with the KCRHA is you had devolved and removed accountability.
We had this federated board of electeds that met once a month, and if you go and look at the minutes, much of the recent meetings seem to be more about internal problems and executive sessions and not about driving a solution toward homelessness.
and helping folks that are on the street.
So, the structure of how you oversee federal, or these dollars, is important, and this was too complicated.
You had two boards, the elected board, you had the implementation board, you saw fighting for years on those boards.
We have more transparency, we have public hearings, we have accountability, more direct connection to the taxpayers.
Do you all have any expectation or either of you looking toward anything close to a criminal investigation?
I've seen nothing yet in the financial reviews that would indicate there's been any criminal conduct.
I can't say that there hasn't been.
uh...
one of the things that was very concerning and i know customer and i talked about this was the state of the record keeping is apparently so bad that they while they didn't find fraud they couldn't assurance that there wasn't any fraud I've got legislation that I'm introducing with Councilmember Dunn and Council Chair Perry to set up an Inspector General's office at the county to make sure that all of our contractors and internal functions can be investigated if necessary, that that'll be a strong office.
The city has one of those already, largely focused on public safety.
But to answer your question directly, we haven't seen any criminal activity yet, but I think there's probably more work to do.
Let me ask you really quickly here.
So this was established in 2019. You just said you've been fighting over the years.
Why has it taken this long after all these systemic failures to come up here and say, let's pull the plug now?
Well, there was that thing called the pandemic that slowed their start.
So it was formed.
It took them a while to stand up the operation.
And so you wanted to give it some time.
It took a little longer than was expected.
You stood it up.
They started their operations.
You were building something from scratch.
We did not, frankly, I think, have the right initial leader.
And there were a lot of problems there.
And then, you know, the first warning shots came, I think, from our providers in the community who said, we're not being paid on time.
We're out here delivering service on the street, and this organization can't get us paid.
There's months and months of delay.
Some audits were done, right?
The state audit, the county audit, federal audit, raised some flags.
They had a response.
They said, here's what we're doing.
We're going to take care of this.
That was 2023. It's now, this audit is through July of 2025. It says they haven't taken care of these things.
Cats get nine lives.
This organization has had ten.
One more than it should have.
It's time for it to go.
Unwinding it would be very complicated and time consuming.
Are you confident that that process will end in a result that will better serve people looking outside?
Is the complicated process of unwinding this going to lead to a better result?
Are you confident in that?
I don't think there's any way to predict that with certainty, right?
But there is one thing that's certain, and that is that this organization has failed.
Failed to manage money responsibly, and failed on the mission to reduce unsheltered homelessness.
Remember, they started their first five year plan with a $12 billion proposal.
It was so outside the realm of any reality that it really, we wondered what was going on over there.
Now recently they reset that, they've refocused.
What I think most electeds here want is a focus on unsheltered individuals living on the streets to get them inside, not a bunch of bigger picture social issues that this organization tried to take on in the beginning, I think that when you have more direct lines of authority from the county executive, the mayor, and the two councils, we can drive a better result than what we're seeing here.
Without 100 staff layered in to administer 200 contracts and $150, $200 million.
No, I don't think it's been a waste.
Look, they have done some good.
We have delivered shelter.
We are housing people.
We have saved lives.
That work has gone on.
It just has not gone as effectively and efficiently and with the right levels of accountability as we should have, and it's not a close call.
From the city and the county perspective, seeing everything that's kind of gone down, how likely or hesitant will you be after KCRHA is dissolved, should it head that way?
Are you guys likely to allocate funds for homelessness?
We'll continue to allocate funds for homelessness.
The question is whether we do it in-house at the city and the county, or we continue this regional approach.
I think a regional approach, and I think Councilmember Domboski and I agree, a regional approach is warranted, and we should continue to work together.
I mean, to me, this just shows there was an effort.
We tried this particular effort in this particular way.
This is why I'm always calling for audits, and I think audits are so important.
They are report cards.
How well are we doing?
If we're not doing well, then we need to shift gears into something else.
And that's what you're seeing here, and that's what we're calling for.
We've got to change the approach because we can't keep throwing good money after bad.
Because we do need to do homelessness work.
We do need to house folks on the street.
We have a lot of needs in this city.
and there isn't a person in the city that doesn't want to help folks that are living unsheltered in the street.
It is just simply not compassionate.
And we need to make sure that the money we allocate for that is actually going to house folks and help folks.
Well, part of that, you two are here right now, but lots of other councilors, both in the city and the county, with different perspectives and priorities.
How do you ensure that if the city and the county separate, this leads to dissolution, that the city and county are going in different directions or overlapping services in spending.
Would that create another RHA with just a different name in a year's time?
I'll say prior to King County Regional Homelessness Authority both the city and the county were doing their own work with their you know in our case it was the mayor and our City Council at the county was the executive and the council so we have been doing this work prior to KCRHA So now it's a matter of do we take it in-house, and that's what I mean, again, or do we continue to do a regional approach?
Because that's what was different about and what was supposed to be different about KCRHA was us pooling our resources together and doing this regional approach.
So the question now is how do we do the regional approach without this particular entity so that the dollars are going to the efforts that our joint legislative bodies are interested in doing.
How do you ensure that the city and county work together on that?
Well, I would say from the county's perspective, again, the modern version of the King County was stood up in 1968 with our current charter as the regional government to work across city boundaries.
And so we have strategies, structures, practices, and a history of doing that.
Just by way of example, we have something called the Regional Policy Committee.
The Regional Policy Committee consists of King County Council members, Seattle City Council members, and Council members from the suburban cities.
It meets every month.
It works on policies of a regional nature.
Seattle and the county jointly operate our public health department.
That's by choice.
We don't have to do that, but we work together.
And I think that we've got regional government structures in place.
The response to homelessness will still be regional.
it just won't be through a kind of an unconnected separate entity with unworkable governing strategies and structures and a repeated track record of failing to watch out for the public dollars and I'll say simply I do want to address that you'll see I mean we have the city and the county we're here together we have a great relationship I have a great relationship with the King County Council members that represent the district that I represent across the board you're seeing a lot of collaboration between the county and the city councils and the mayor and the exec for that matter so I am actually I think that you're going to see us to continue to work together toward finding the right solution I don't have reservations about that.
I just wanted to ask how the dissolution would technically work.
Do you need to persuade your colleagues on the Board of Governors, a majority of them, to vote to dissolve, or can your resolutions accomplish it?
Yeah, as I understand the terms of the interlocal agreement, if our motions are adopted by our respective city and county councils, that will start the process.
So the work is with our colleagues.
dissolution process?
It's not rhetorical.
It's a legal document envisioned in the agreement that established it as a way to unwind it.
And have you been in touch with Executive Zahilai, and have you been in touch with Mayor Wilson?
You want to go first on that?
I've reached out to the mayor's office, so I've started that conversation, and they know we're doing this press conference, so I don't...
Have you heard back from the mayor's office?
I talked to them this morning, but I'll say that.
and I've been in touch with the executive Zahilai's office he issued a statement yesterday I think along with the mayor Wilson with some interim first steps about what needs to be done so this is the beginning of the process and I think there's a great interest in making sure if there is a decision if folks agree with us to unwind it that it's done in an orderly way and a transparent way
that's right thank you so much everybody we're going to have to end here thank you very much for coming thank you so much