Photo: Seattle City Council
A forensic audit found KCRHA cannot account for $13 million and operates with a $44.7 million negative cash position.
A forensic audit released Wednesday found the King County Regional Homelessness Authority cannot account for $13 million in public funds and operates with a $44.7 million negative cash position, with no basic internal accounting controls. By Thursday, Seattle Councilmember Maritza Rivera and King County Councilmember Rod Dembowski had filed companion resolutions to formally dissolve the agency. Mayor Katie Wilson said “all options are on the table.” The KCRHA board met Friday to begin a corrective response. The agency has until May 23 to deliver a written remediation plan to the city and county; dissolution itself, if approved, would take up to a year.
The audit, commissioned jointly by the city and county, examined six fiscal years of KCRHA records. It identified roughly $12.26 million in expenditures the agency cannot match to source documentation, a $44.7 million cumulative cash deficit, and the absence of basic internal controls — segregation of duties, transaction-level review, vendor verification — that would normally catch errors before they accumulated. The agency’s funding model, which routes city, county, state, and federal dollars through the same accounts without categorical separation, was described as structurally vulnerable to losing track of expenses. “The supporting information isn’t there,” auditors told the KCRHA board on Friday, adding that tracing the missing $13 million will be difficult.
KCRHA was created in 2019 as a regional consolidation experiment: a single authority absorbing the city and county’s separate homelessness response systems, with an equity-centered mandate to give people closest to the problem decision-making power over services. Founding CEO Marc Dones resigned in 2023, two interim leaders followed, and Kelly Kinnison was named permanent CEO in 2024. The agency has faced chronic budget shortfalls throughout. Earlier this month, before the audit’s release, the City Council passed a shelter acceleration plan that committed $5 million toward 1,000 new shelter units by year-end and explicitly routed the work outside KCRHA. The audit confirmed an institutional judgment the administration had already made. The question on the table is not whether to address homelessness regionally — it is whether the existing agency is capable of delivering on its mandate.
Rivera and Dembowski announced their companion resolutions Thursday morning at a joint press conference. Council President Bob Kettle called the audit’s findings “egregious” and said it was time for “a different pathway” on the city’s investment in the agency. Mayor Wilson’s office stated that all structural options remain open, including direct city-county takeover, a restructured regional model with stronger oversight, or full dissolution. The KCRHA board, made up of elected officials from across the region, met Friday to discuss the audit and authorized immediate spending controls. The agency’s leadership has not indicated whether it will contest dissolution or focus on the May 23 corrective action plan.
Outreach contracts, shelter operations, and food programs continue regardless of the dissolution timeline. If the council resolutions advance, formal dissolution would take up to a year, during which KCRHA would continue to operate under tightened controls while the city and county prepare to absorb the work directly or through a restructured successor. The accountability investigation will outlast the agency itself: tracing the $13 million in unaccounted-for expenditures is expected to take months at minimum, and the financial record will be examined by the state auditor and likely external investigators for years to come.
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The Trump administration rejected the state's Hazard Mitigation Grant Program application — the prevention funding that would finance projects like Mount Vernon's flood wall — with no explanation beyond "not warranted"; Washington has 30 days to appeal the denial.
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The clinic’s patient population spans the full range of the coverage gap: the uninsured, the underinsured, and people whose coverage exists on paper but not in practice. Lisa Beck, a Marine veteran, said she hadn’t seen a dentist in over a decade; she described the clinic’s first-come, first-served model as a genuine point of access. Jeff Allison has dental insurance, but his deductible is high enough that using it isn’t financially worth it. For patients like Gabriel Mayorga, the clinic is not supplemental — it is primary care. “It’s become my main source of medical care,” Mayorga said, “because it’s the only thing I can afford.” More than 3,000 licensed clinical and non-clinical volunteers staff the event annually, donating an estimated 40,000 hours of labor. All services are free; all supplies are donated.
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Mayor Katie Wilson announced Wednesday a $4 million project to install dedicated bus lanes along Denny Way and permanently reroute drivers seeking southbound I-5 access — a specific campaign promise from the 2025 mayoral race. Construction begins in May on the Queen Anne to downtown segment; a second phase covering nine blocks on the Fairview-to-5th stretch begins in August. The project is funded by the voter-approved Seattle Transportation Levy and targeted for completion in fall 2026.
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Wilson signed an executive order directing SDOT to develop the bus lane plan two weeks into her term, in January 2026, setting an April 17 deadline. The previous administration had declined to add lanes during a 2024–2025 repaving of Denny Way and formally ruled out the Fairview-to-5th stretch in August 2025, citing a study projecting 17 to 34 additional minutes of peak-hour car travel time. Wilson replaced the SDOT director who made that ruling. Fix the L8 — a grassroots coalition pushing to make Route 8 reliable — began campaigning for bus lanes on this corridor in 2009. “Since 2009, we’ve had six mayors,” said co-founder Nick Sattele at the April 22 announcement. “Six mayors that haven’t acted on making Route 8 fast, frequent and reliable.”
Seattle gig worker average pay — 18 months after the minimum pay law
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Washington's gray wolf count
The state’s 2025 survey confirmed 270 wolves across 49 packs — the highest tally since annual monitoring began in 2008, up 17% from 230 wolves the prior year. Twenty-three packs were confirmed breeding pairs.
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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, 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.
