New Agreement Redefines Power and Purpose of Regional Homelessness Authority

By Erica C. Barnett

The Seattle City Council quietly approved a new interlocal agreement with the King County Regional Homelessness authority on Tuesday that, among other changes, dismantles the agency’s implementation board and hands its powers over to a governing board made up almost entirely of elected officials. The King County Council approved a substantively identical new agreement on Tuesday, and it will go before the Regional Policy Committee, which includes representatives from Seattle and other cities, on Monday.

PubliCola broke the news about the proposed changes to the ILA in August.

Under the original agreement, the implementation board—made up of businesses, affordable housing providers, people with direct experience of homelessness, and advocates—had the authority to make policy, approve budgets, and oversee the functions of the regional homelessness agency. This was by design; when King County and the city of Seattle approved the original agreement, they reluctantly agreed to reduce the power of elected officials in an effort to ensure the authority’s decisions were based on best practices, not political considerations. After a bumpy five years, the city and county changed their minds.

But the changes to the interlocal agreement go far beyond giving politicians more direct power over the agency.

The new agreement redefines the KCRHA, changing it from an authority with the power to shape, consolidate, and establish policies and priorities for the region’s homelessness response into a single regional approach—the entire reason for establishing the new agency in the first place—into a pass-through agency whose main job is “administering” homelessness contracts funded by the city and county.

The changes begin right in the “purpose, mission, and scope” section, which defines what the KCRHA is authorized and expected to do. Instead of “providing consolidated, aligned services for individuals and families who are experiencing homelessness or who are at imminent risk of experiencing homelessness in the jurisdictional boundaries of King County,” the new agreement says the KCRHA’s first job is “administering funding” for those services, turning the KCRHA from a policy agency to an administrator that funnels money according to priorities set by other jurisdictions.

The mission statement for the authority, similarly, has been edited; now, the KCRHA’s main job is “administering an effective, performance-based Homeless Services to support a high-functioning homelessness crisis response system” that decreases homelessness. In this spirit, the agency’s scope of work now consists of 17 bullet points that are largely administrative functions, such as running the county’s Homeless Management Information System (HMIS), collecting data, administering federal contracts, and conducting the annual Point In Time homeless count.

Gone, too, are references to reducing racial and other disproportionalities in the homeless population by addressing root causes, a commitment to “evidence-based, housing first approaches”; instead, the new agreement says the authority should be ” guided by housing first and other approaches,” including traditional “substance use disorder treatment,” a change Seattle City Councilmember Sara Nelson praised during a committee meeting on the ILA earlier this month.

Most references to including people with lived experience of homelessness in decision-making processes are also gone.

The new governing board will still include people “representing” people who are or have been homeless, but they’ll now be hand-picked by elected officials and will have to meet strict new credentials-based criteria to qualify. The minimum requirements for the “lived experience” board members will include things like past experience running business operations in a large public or private agency; experience with direct fiscal oversight of a large agency similar to the KCRHA; and experience conducting academic research on homelessness or performance evaluation.

It’s unlikely that most street-level direct service providers would meet these criteria, much less people who are currently or recently homeless, whose perspectives will now be excluded in favor of people with conventional credentials for high-level management jobs. Effectively, they exclude anyone whose expertise is primarily their lived experience, rather than academic and professional achievements, from representing people with experience actually being homeless. Additinoally, lived experience members’ terms will now last just two years, while elected officials will serve as long as they’re in office, or until they’re removed by their fellow board members.

Finally, the new rules give the county and city explicit authority to unilaterally take money and responsibilities away from the authority and bring them back under city or county control undermining the “regional” nature of the authority. Under the agreement, the city and county must each provide at least as much funding for the authority, not accounting for inflation, as they did in 2019, unless the city or county decides to take programs over themselves; in that case, the money goes back to the city or county along with the programs.

The city of Seattle has already begun doing this: Earlier this year, Mayor Bruce Harrell’s office announced that the Human Services Department would claw back funding for homelessness prevention and outreach into a revived Homelessness Strategy and Investments division, which oversaw homeless services before the KCRHA was created in 2019.

Harrell’s budget expands the city’s encampment removal team while keeping funding for the KCRHA essentially flat; in his speech, Harrell said he was confident that the “reforms” in the new agreement, along with new CEO Kelly Kinnison, would “take this organization to its next phase, from startup to upstart.”

During a committee hearing on the renewal, Councilmember Cathy Moore said the KCRHA’s “current format is highly, highly problematic, and in fact, if it doesn’t renew, I can just stay on the record here, then I’m not sure I would continue funding.” Both Moore and Councilmember Maritza Rivera said it was very important to them that the city can terminate the contract unilaterally, without the county’s approval.