This accountability brief is available to TBC Intelligence members.
Join - $2,500/yearThe King County Regional Homelessness Authority was created in 2019 through an interlocal agreement between the City of Seattle and King County. It became operational in 2021. KCRHA is a government entity, not a nonprofit, which means it does not file 990s, but it is subject to the full range of public records laws that apply to government agencies in Washington State.
KCRHA does not provide services directly. It functions as a funding pass-through, distributing money to contracted nonprofit providers through a system called Coordinated Entry for All. The organizations that receive beds, shelter slots, and housing placements through this system are the same organizations that appear in our other accountability briefs.
~$230 million annual budget
$110 million contributed by the City of Seattle (approximately 53% of total funding)
$53 million contributed by King County
0 services provided directly to people experiencing homelessness
The remainder of KCRHA's funding comes from federal sources, primarily HUD Continuum of Care grants. The agency was designed to consolidate the region's fragmented homelessness response under a single coordinating body. Whether that consolidation has produced better outcomes than the previous system is, at this point, an open question with no public answer.
KCRHA's first CEO, Marc Dones, resigned in May 2023 amid allegations of management failures and organizational dysfunction. Two interim CEOs followed, both of whom dropped out of the permanent search process. The agency's current CEO is Kelly Kinnison, who earns $290,000 per year.
To put that number in context: the median household income in Seattle is approximately $110,000. The average tech salary in the city is roughly $160,000. Kinnison's compensation exceeds both of those figures combined, and it is paid for running an agency under whose watch Seattle ranks as the third-worst city in the nation for homelessness. Three CEOs in three years is not leadership. It is institutional instability at the top of an agency responsible for $230 million in public money.
Partnership for Zero was KCRHA's flagship initiative, launched with the explicit goal of ending unsheltered homelessness in downtown Seattle. The program spent $10 million. It did not achieve its objectives. There has been no public post-mortem explaining what went wrong, no accounting of how the $10 million was spent, and no one has been held accountable for the failure.
The $10 million simply disappeared into the system. For an agency that exists to coordinate the region's homelessness response, the inability to account for the outcomes of its most visible initiative is a fundamental credibility problem.
KCRHA distributes $167.8 million annually to contracted service providers. The top five recipients are organizations that appear repeatedly across our investigation:
| Provider | KCRHA Funding | Brief |
|---|---|---|
| Catholic Community Services | $19.7M | CCS Brief |
| Salvation Army | $17.4M | |
| DESC | $15.6M | DESC Brief |
| LIHI | $14.5M | LIHI Brief |
| Urban League of Metropolitan Seattle | Top 5 |
These organizations are also members of the Housing Development Consortium (HDC), the trade association that lobbies for increased KCRHA funding. The providers receive the money. Their trade group lobbies for more of it. The loop is closed. There is no external pressure in this system, and there is no independent entity measuring whether the money is producing results.
Seattle receives approximately 900,000 911 calls per year for a population of 750,000. That works out to roughly 1,200 calls per 1,000 residents, a staggering volume that overwhelms a police department already 400 officers short of its authorized strength.
A significant share of that call volume originates from facilities funded by KCRHA. A single DESC shelter in Burien generated more than 600 police calls in one year. A single Plymouth Housing facility in Bellevue went from 5 calls to 148 in the span of twelve months. These are not isolated incidents. They are a pattern: KCRHA funds organizations that operate facilities which generate enormous demand on police resources that do not exist.
KCRHA funds the crisis. SPD responds to it. The taxpayer pays for both.
Federal HUD Continuum of Care funding to KCRHA has been cut by 66%, dropping from $68 million to $23 million. KCRHA estimates that 4,490 people will be directly impacted and that 241 employees across contracted providers are at risk of furlough.
The system was built on federal money that is now disappearing. For years, KCRHA and its network of providers expanded programs and headcount on the assumption that federal funding would continue to grow. That assumption was wrong, and there is no contingency plan that has been made public.
KCRHA is planning a 22% staff reduction to address a $4.7 million budget shortfall. The agency that was created to coordinate the entire region's homelessness response is shrinking at the same time the problem is growing and federal funding is collapsing. The original promise of KCRHA was that consolidation would bring efficiency and accountability. The reality is an agency in retreat.
KCRHA does not publish a public outcomes dashboard that tracks what $230 million per year actually produces. The agency tracks inputs: dollars distributed, contracts signed, beds funded. What it does not track, or at least does not make publicly available, are the outputs that matter: how many people moved from homelessness to stable housing, what the cost per successful outcome is, how providers compare against each other on performance, and whether the overall system is making progress or falling behind.
Without this data, there is no way for the public to evaluate whether KCRHA is working. The agency asks for $230 million in public trust every year and provides no public evidence of what that trust has purchased.
Under RCW 42.56, the Washington Public Records Act, KCRHA is required to respond to public records requests within five business days. As a government entity, it has no exemption from this requirement.
TBC has identified nine specific public records request targets, including: all provider contracts and their performance benchmarks, provider performance reports and outcome data, the complete expenditure breakdown for Partnership for Zero, salary and compensation data for all staff, communications between KCRHA leadership and the Housing Development Consortium, Coordinated Entry for All referral data and placement outcomes, the methodology and results of the Housing Triage Tool, all correspondence related to the HUD funding reduction, and internal assessments of provider performance.
These requests are in preparation.
1. Why does KCRHA not publish a public outcomes dashboard showing cost per outcome, provider performance comparisons, and year-over-year progress metrics?
2. Who is accountable for the $10 million spent on Partnership for Zero, and why has there been no public post-mortem?
3. How does KCRHA address the closed-loop funding system in which contracted providers are also members of the trade association that lobbies for increased KCRHA funding?
4. What is the performance gap between the best and worst contracted providers, and why is that data not publicly available?
5. After three CEOs, $230 million per year, and a flagship initiative that failed, why has Seattle not moved out of the bottom three cities in the nation for homelessness?
Plymouth Housing · DESC · Housing Development Consortium · LIHI · Catholic Community Services · Seattle Police & the World's Fair Standard
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