Homelessness Agency Says They'll Cut 22 Jobs if City and County Don't Increase Administrative Funding

The job cuts would amount to a fifth of the agency's staff.

By Erica C. Barnett

Kelly Kinnison, the director of the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, sent an email to agency staff on June 6 outlining a broad set of potential cuts, including up to 22 staff positions that amount to 21 percent of the agency's administrative budget. Kinnison presented a proposed budget that included those staff cuts, along with a 2.1 percent across-the-board cut to homeless services, this week, although she did not publicly mention the possibility of cutting 22 jobs.

Staff morale at KCRHA was already low before Kinnison told staff about the potential that one in five staff would lose their jobs, according to multiple people who work at the agency, and the internal announcement did not improve matters. Kinnison did not announce which positions could be on the chopping block, leaving agency staffers in the dark about whether they're about to lose their jobs.

Kinnison previewed the potential budget cuts in a budget presentation to the KCRHA's governing board, which is made up of elected officials from across the county. The budget proposal, which the agency drafted as part of a budget-cutting "exercise" required by the city of Seattle, includes a 2.1 percent across-the-board cut to homeless services, which would result in the loss of 58 emergency shelter beds and 20 rapid rehousing vouchers.

The budget saves money by eliminating an annual inflationary adjustment for 2026 and including an increase of just 1 percent the following year, which is below the likely inflation rate.

The proposed cuts are widely viewed as a strategic effort by KCRHA leadership to show the city how damaging it would be to cut 2 percent of the homelessness authority's budget.

Seattle Deputy Mayor Tiffany Washington reportedly pushed back privately against the proposed cuts to homelessness programs themselves, saying the mayor would not accept cuts to services. In this week's public meeting, she interjected to say that Harrell "has not approved this budget, nor has he seen—until this meeting—any recommendations for a service cut." Later, Washington added that "the mayor and council would never, ever consider programmatic cuts without deeply understanding the administrative rates and how an organization or department can be lean."

The KCRHA's proposed budget for next year includes $13.7 million for administration, which—according to high-level budget documents presented at the board meeting—is about $4.7 million shy of what the agency actually needs to retain all its staff. Administrative costs account for about 7.4 percent of next year's budget, which Deputy CFO Tiffany Brooks said is far short of the 10 to 20 percent most government agencies set aside for this purpose. The gap isn't just because of staff costs, however; the KCRHA is replacing its Fluxx grants management software with Salesforce, at significant cost; Fluxx, though reviled for its clunky interface, is widely used, including by the city of Seattle.

Another cost that falls under "administration": Interest payments on the loans KCRHA takes out periodically to pay its contractors, thanks to a reimbursement-based system that leaves the agency with no money in the bank at the beginning of every year. According to the budget presentation, this interest amounts to more than $1.2 million a year, or a quarter of the $4.7 million shortfall KCHRA has identified in its administrative budget.

Kinnison's email to staff attribtues the shortfall to "historical budget practices." Marc Dones, Kinnison's predecessor as permanent CEO of the agency, took pride in the agency's low administrative overhead, a posture that some KCRHA staffers now say set the organization up for its current trouble paying for enough staff to operate.

Unlike other government agencies, KCRHA has not done any public outreach or held public hearings before proposing its budget. Board member Claudia Balducci, who represents the King County Council, noted that "when we do budgets at the county, we have public hearings, we engage with stakeholders, and ... it doesn't appear that there's any public process whatsoever associated with setting the budget of KCRHA, so there's some there's something missing here. ... Even when there are tight times, we have options. We have to make choices. There are tradeoffs, and I don't know how we make those without seeking input from our key stakeholders and the public."

The KCRHA is funded almost entirely by the city of Seattle and King County, with no ability to raise funds on its own—a foundational flaw that puts its budget almost entirely at the whim of other jurisdictions and their budget priorities. Last year, the agency signed a new interlocal agreement that reduced the agency's authority further, reducing it to a "pass-through" organization for local funds and removing most of the agency's ability to shape homelessness policy for the region. The city of Seattle clawed back control over outreach and homelessness prevention, programs that had been within the KCRHA's purview, last February.

Dones, the former director, vowed to put the entire homelessness system through a rebidding process in 2022, but that never happened; Dones was pushed out in 2023.

Kinnison is currently the subject of an investigation into complaints that she retaliated against one least one staff member, a person of color, who pushed back against her efforts to hire two white men to high-paying new positions, including one that was partly grant-funded, instead of promoting people of color from within the agency. Ultimately, neither of the men were hired.

The governing board has held two executive sessions so far under the portion of state law that allows government agencies to hold closed meetings "to receive and evaluate complaints or charges brought against a public officer or employee."

Over its five-year existence, the KCRHA has been through numerous destabilizing upheavals, including an abandoned attempt end unsheltered homelessness in downtown Seattle, a parade of interim CEOs, unpaid service providers, and many other controversies.