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of steadily increasing negative balance kcrha has experienced publicola is supported entirely by readers like you click below to become a one time or monthly contributor support publicola the deficit grew steadily and consistently over time which is the signature of a management process failure rather than an external shock or an inherent feature of reimbursable funding the evaluation found one of the main issues the auditors wrote is that kcrha has routinely submitted invoices late up to 16 months which has prevented the agency from getting reimbursed on time the kcrha spokesperson said the agency accepts responsibility for internal weaknesses that contributed to the problem of negative balances those are within kcrha s control and are being addressed through the cap at the same time resolving the interest obligation and preventing recurrence will require coordinated work with funders on reimbursement timing advances working capital structure and treatment of accrued interest the root causes of the negative balance included internal factors the absence of a formal monthly close process inconsistent invoice preparation and submission a lack of real time cash monitoring inadequate budget oversight and insufficient internal controls the auditors wrote these are organizational management weaknesses not consequences of the funding model itself overall clark nuber found that the corrective action plan had not fully met any of seven key dimensions laid out in the forensic audit including kcrha understanding of issues achievability accountability and risk the kcrha spokesperson said several of the issues raised in the assessment are already being addressed the governance items referenced by the city and county including spending controls hiring controls and a pause on new agreements that increase cost or liability have been taken up directly with the kcrha governing board and are in place additionally they said the corrective plan says nothing about 6 4 million in overspending on programs the most significant omission in the cap and the growing amount of interest it owes the king county investment pool from which it routinely borrows money as we noted in our initial coverage the 6 4 million is on top of 8 million in spending the kcrha could not account for 4 million in administrative overspending and 1 26 million in interest that is still growing the kcrha spokesperson said the agency already addressed the 6 4 million in overspending in late 2025 and early 2026 clark nuber also noted that the kcrha has put off establishing internal financial controls until the far off phase 3 of the plan even though these controls are not an aspirational best practice but required by federal law this means kcrha will be administering significant public funds including federal awards without the required control structure throughout the period that is supposed to represent its most intensive corrective action effort the report includes ten short medium and long term recommendations for the city and county it s unclear whether either government will take the auditors adivce to heart ten days after clark nuber published its report seattle mayor katie wilson and king county executive girmay zahilay jointly announced plans to embed and pay for an outside consultant to ensure the corrective actions in the kcrha s plan are being implemented with urgency wilson s office did not respond to questions wednesday zahilay s office referred us to his statement about the decision to hire a consultant the new finance committee of kcrha s governing board one of the steps outlined in the cap will meet thursday morning at 10am publicola is supported entirely by readers like you click below to become a one time or monthly contributor support publicola share this publicola post email a link to a friend opens in new window email share on facebook opens in new window facebook more share on linkedin opens in new window linkedin share on reddit opens in new window reddit share on x opens in new window x like this like loading leave a comment filed under kcrha city council june 10 2026 june 10 2026 new council legislation could make your utility bills cheaper by erica c barnett city councilmember dan strauss along with council president joy hollingsworth is proposing legislation this week that would expand access to the city s utility discount program by expanding eligibility in two stages one in 2027 and one in 2029 to include people making 60 percent and then 80 percent of seattle s area median income the discount program provides a 60 percent discount on city light bills and a 50 percent discount on seattle public utilities bills currently eligibility for the discount program is is limited to people who make 70 percent or less of the state s median income which is much lower than seattle s around 73 000 for a single person compared to about 102 000 in seattle according to an analysis from the mayor s office about 31 000 more households would become eligible for the program if the city bumps eligibility up to 60 percent of median income and another 48 000 would become eligible if that s expanded to 80 percent earlier this month strauss said he was surprised recently to learn that someone he considered well off had signed up for the program when they lost their job that just reinforced for me that is absolutely the seniors the parents of the kids that i grew up with who need the discount program strauss said this is an important affordability program for everyone in the city and we have to have that safety net if they need to use it available and easy to sign up for publicola is supported entirely by readers like you click below to become a one time or monthly contributor support publicola according to a fiscal note increasing the threshold for the program to 60 percent of area median income would cost about 5 million for seattle city light and 13 9 million for spu the money would have to come from a rate increase of 0 5 percent for city light and 0 1 percent for spu strauss said or an average increase of about 77 cents a month city light is currently considering separate increases to pay for among other things a maintenance backlog enrolling eligible ratepayers in the discount program has always been a challenge currently about 36 percent of eligible residents or around 39 000 people are enrolled strauss and hollingsworth s legislation does not directly take on this problem the program is also not available for renters without their own city light accounts whose landlords use ratio utility billing systems or rubs a type of third party billing that allows landlords to pass the cost of a building s overall utilities on to tenants and does not reflect how much service a tenant actually uses the council s governance and utilities committee which hollingsworth chairs will take up the utility discount legislation at its meeting on thursday share this publicola post email a link to a friend opens in new window email share on facebook opens in new window facebook more share on linkedin opens in new window linkedin share on reddit opens in new window reddit share on x opens in new window x like this like loading 2 comments filed under utility discount program homelessness king county mayor wilson june 9 2026 june 9 2026 city county plan to embed consultant to address financial issues at homelessness agency by erica c barnett mayor katie wilson and king county executive girmay zahilay both announced that they plan to embed an independent financial analyst in the agency as a statement from wilson put it yesterday according to zahilay s announcement this analyst will provide more transparency into financial practices improve payment processes and ensure corrective actions are being implemented with urgency wilson s announcement referred to the analyst or analysts as a financial services team that will shore up financial and internal controls at kcrha the decision came after a flurry of discussions late last week about how to respond to the kcrha s corrective action plan which laid out a series of steps to respond to a damning audit that found the agency lacked basic financial controls overspent its administrative budget and could not account for 8 million in spending the audit also found that kcrha had a consistent and growing negative budget balance around 45 million when the audit concluded an amount that had increased to 65 million by the time the auditors presented their results the announcement represented a slowdown of what had been growing momentum to wind down the agency quickly and send the contracts it manages back to the city and county agencies that used to oversee them it was also a reversal of a plan set in motion last week as recently as last friday wilson and zahilay were planning to announce on monday that they were taking back the homelessness contracts and distributing them to the city s human services department and king county s department of community and human services according to accounts from people familiar with the discussions zahilay rather than wilson was reportedly leading the charge to pull the plug homeless advocates city council members and some members of the business and philanthropic community reportedly urged caution and cooler heads apparently prevailed publicola is supported entirely by readers like you click below to become a one time or monthly contributor support publicola under the scenario the city and county were contemplating last week the kcrha would continue to exist at least temporarily as a shell of itself serving as the region s continuum of care for federal funding purposes and administering the point in time count of the region s homeless population this may still happen the decision to fund an accounting team to address the problems identified in the audit does not preclude shutting down the agency but as of now that will no longer happen on an accelerated timeline as we reported last week kcrha ceo kelly kinnison and associate deputy for strategy william towey have asked for 500 000 to hire a fnancial consultant as kinnison put it a cfo type role through the staffing firm robert half which charges hefty recruitment fees on top of their temporary staffers salaries the kcrha laid off its most recent chief financial office last october and never replaced him a spokesperson for zahilay s office said the county does not know yet how much the consultant will cost or how the city and county will split the spending wilson s office did not respond to questions share this publicola post email a link to a friend opens in new window email share on facebook opens in new window facebook more share on linkedin opens in new window linkedin share on reddit opens in new window reddit share on x opens in new window x like this like loading 1 comment filed under kcrha guest contributor mayor wilson police privacy june 9 2026 june 9 2026 seattle turned on the surveillance cameras before it wrote the rules screen shot of footage from a police camera that was looming over a planned parenthood clinic on aurora avenue n obtained by our seattle through a records request by phil mocek on friday mayor katie wilson activated the stadium district surveillance cameras for the duration of the fifa world cup reversing the pause she announced in march invoking a briefing from seattle police and the fbi her late afternoon public announcement identified general but credible threats to justify the deployment two days earlier at a seattle cityclub event she had defined a credible threat narrowly information that a specific person has the intention to cause harm and that it is believable that they might be able to carry it out a general threat at a large event is not the narrow thing she defined it is the ambient condition of hosting a mega event present at any gathering of this scale identified by no one in particular aimed at no one in particular as a justification for recording crowds of people suspected of nothing it has no natural limit and will return every time the city hosts the world the standard wilson set on wednesday did not survive even until friday what she conceded in the same breath as her announcement matters as much as her reversal even as the cameras go on wilson said the city will continue honing our policies and protections to safeguard the data these videos capture those protections have not been written the cameras are on anyway recording everyone who passes by without any suspicion of wrongdoing that is the entrance built before the exit the sequence that quietly turns a temporary emergency measure into permanent infrastructure the city already has a working example of the alternative spd has suspended its patrol car license plate readers while it works out how to comply with a new state law restricting collection near schools clinics and courts rules first then the system for the stadium cameras though the city reversed that order the debate that produced this was flattened into a single question on or off but on or off was always the wrong question the consequential questions are who controls the switch under what written rules where the footage goes how long it is kept and who can access it on friday the city answered on and left the rest blank strip away the world cup urgency and the case for the cameras rests on one claim that the footage might help after something goes wrong wilson acknowledged as much at cityclub where she said cameras are less useful for preventing or deterring crime than for solving it that concession should end the prevention argument the camera hawks on the city council are making but investigative usefulness was never the test almost any sufficiently invasive practice is useful to investigators door to door searches would be document checkpoints would be unfettered access to medical records would be we restrict those not because they don t work but because a free society does not make its residents prove their innocence to a camera the burden is on the government to justify watching a population suspected of nothing it might help does not carry that burden by turning the cameras on wilson added to a system that already sits in constitutionally uncertain territory washington s constitution forbids disturbing anyone s private affairs without authority of law and the state supreme court reads that guarantee as broader than the federal fourth amendment broad enough to require a warrant before police track a car s movements state v jackson and explicit that the protection does not shrink merely because people have grown accustomed to being watched federally the u s supreme court held in carpenter v united states that assembling a record of a person s movements over time can constitute a search even when each movement happens in public while declining to decide whether ordinary security cameras cross the same line a permanent recorded searchable network trained on public crowds sits squarely in the space tho...
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