The agency responsible for tackling homelessness across King County has been under the microscope after an audit found 13 million dollars missing, and now that same agency, the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, is claiming that millions of dollars are actually still owed to it. The twist has landed in the middle of a broader debate over whether the troubled agency should survive at all, with city and county leaders weighing whether it still has a future.
The scrutiny intensified in late April, when a forensic evaluation found that the King County Regional Homelessness Authority had lost track of 13 million dollars and was, at one point, 45 million dollars in the hole. Those findings raised serious questions about how the agency has managed the substantial public funding it has received to address one of the region's most pressing problems.
In the wake of that evaluation, council members at both the city and county level called for the agency to be dissolved. For some officials, the financial gaps were the final straw in a longer story of frustration over whether the authority has delivered results, and they argued that continuing to fund it in its current form no longer made sense.
That frustration was captured bluntly by one council member, who pointed out that the number of unsheltered people has gotten roughly twice as bad in the six years the agency has been around. So it's not working, the official said, adding that when something isn't working and you're in a hole, you stop digging, and arguing that the agency should be shut down rather than propped up further.
Against that backdrop, the agency pushed back with a claim of its own. William Tui, the authority's associate deputy of strategy, told King County council members that the agency believes it is owed 8 million dollars. Basically, he explained, these are funds that the authority should have billed to King County and the city of Seattle but did not, meaning the money never made its way back to the agency.
The assertion caught council members off guard, injecting a new financial wrinkle into an already tangled picture. Rather than take the figure at face value, officials plan to bring in outside help, and an independent financial consultant will verify the claims before leaders decide whether any or all of the 8 million dollars is actually owed to the authority.
Even amid the calls for dissolution, some city and county leaders say the agency still has a future. For its part, the authority says it is focused on strengthening its operations so that it can perform its core functions, including serving as the designated applicant for the region's federal continuing of care funds. How officials weigh that role against the agency's financial troubles is likely to shape what happens next.