Harger: King County’s homelessness agency couldn’t find $13 million. Its records officer says she couldn’t see the CEO’s emails

Brianne Bagby was hired to find the emails. For almost a year, she said, she wasn’t allowed to look at them.

Bagby was the public records officer at the King County Regional Homelessness Authority. As The Seattle Times reported Monday, she said executive staff cut off her access to the email system, then made her wait while the CEO’s chief of staff and the communications director screened messages before she could see them. In at least one case, she said, the chief of staff told her she’d pulled CEO Kelly Kinnison’s emails from the results. Bagby has since quit.

Every dollar this agency touches was supposed to buy one thing: A way off the street. A shelter bed. A counselor. A shot at recovery for somebody fighting addiction, mental illness, or a run of bad luck that ended with an eviction notice. That’s the deal taxpayers signed up for. When the money goes poof, two people get robbed. The taxpayer who fronted it, and the person on the sidewalk who never got the help.

This region has spent years trying to fix this agency. New CEOs, new boards, new plans. At some point, the mechanic stops quoting you repairs and tells you it’s time to shop for a new car. I think we’re there. And I have an idea for what comes next: something that answers to the people paying for it, with a name on the ballot and a clock on the wall.

The homelessness authority’s records officer says Kelly Kinnison’s emails were off-limits

Every government agency in Washington has a public records officer. When a reporter, a taxpayer, or a laid-off employee asks for emails or spending records, that person runs the search, decides what the law allows the agency to withhold, and gets the rest out the door. The job only works if the records officer sees everything first. Bagby did the same job in Pierce County and at a state facility. She told The Seattle Times she’d never seen anything like this.

That matters more here than almost anywhere. The homelessness authority is its own agency, created by an agreement between Seattle and King County and run by its own board. No mayor or county executive runs it day to day, and nobody on the ballot answers for it directly. For an agency like that, public records are one of the few windows the public gets.

Bagby said the trouble started last fall, when she ran what she thought was a routine search tied to records requests about layoffs. Kinnison wrote that she had “concerns that the (public records) search request was used to explore my email.” IT then cut Bagby’s access. For months, she said, her job mostly consisted of telling people their records would be late.

That same month, according to emails reported by PubliCola, Kinnison approved a plan to put “deliberative” labels on emails so they could be excluded from public records searches. Her reply to IT: “That seems like a great idea.”

Lisa Edge, the agency’s spokesperson, told The Seattle Times the authority doesn’t “automatically or otherwise limit disclosure of responsive records.” Edge is also the communications director Bagby said screened the emails first.

Colette Weeks, executive director of the Washington Coalition for Open Government, told The Seattle Times: “I don’t know why they would not want their public records officer to do the job they were trained to do, unless they’re trying to hide something.”

The agency that couldn’t account for $13M

This spring, a forensic audit found the authority couldn’t account for $13 million and was sitting on a deficit of about $45 million. The record-keeping was so bad, King County Councilmember Rod Dembowski said, auditors “couldn’t assure us that there wasn’t any fraud.”

Agency purchase cards ran up $1.1 million over about four years, including office furniture and clothing. Auditors sampled 14 high-dollar purchases. Every one raised concerns.

Kinnison took over in August 2024, inheriting an agency that couldn’t keep its books. Two years later, the auditors who found the mess warned funders not to rely on her cleanup plan’s self-reported progress, and the person hired to release her emails said she couldn’t get near them.

Meanwhile, this year’s count found 18,365 people homeless in King County, up 9% from two years ago.

Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson and Executive Girmay Zahilay chose ‘reset’ over shutdown

After the audit, Dembowski and Seattle Councilmember Maritza Rivera called for shutting the agency down. They had it right.

Wilson and Zahilay went another way. They’re pulling back nearly $160 million in contracts to city and county departments but keeping the agency alive to handle federal grants and data. Zahilay called it a plan to “stabilize, right-size, and reset,” and said they would “not maintain the status quo just because change is hard.”

Wilson argued the agency “was given incredible responsibility without sufficient capacity or authority.” Fair enough. Homelessness doesn’t stop at the Seattle city limits, and somebody has to coordinate across 39 cities in King County and chase the federal money.

But the same executive team is still running it. That includes the people Bagby said decided which emails she could see. Wilson, Zahilay, and the council members who oversee the agency all declined to comment to The Seattle Times.

Seattle and King County promised to end homelessness in 10 years. That was 2005

In 2005, King County and its cities signed on to a 10-year plan to end homelessness. Ten years became 20. The problem got worse.

Put King County homelessness policy on the ballot

We spend a lot of time in this region arguing and complaining about homelessness. So I’ll offer one idea to make it better: Shut this agency down and build something new, with accountability baked in three ways.

Make it an elected body, like a port district or a school board. Right now, homeless policy gets set by ideologues and bureaucrats nobody voted for, and when it fails, nobody’s name is on it. An elected board lets voters decide homeless policy and fire the people who botch it. If the public doesn’t like the job a board member’s doing, they can be voted out of office.

Bind it with strict ethics rules and disclosure laws from day one, including a records officer nobody can lock out of the inbox.

And give it a clock. A hard sunset date with measurable targets that show whether people are getting well: how many are in addiction recovery and staying sober, how many are in mental health treatment and sticking with it, how many land a job, how many move into housing and stay there, and how many dollars reach services instead of overhead. A door key is a start. The goal is a person who’s healing, instead of one warehoused in a free apartment down the hall from their dealer. Hit the marks, and voters can renew the agency. Miss them, and it ends.

The state’s Public Records Act said it in one line: “The people, in delegating authority, do not give their public servants the right to decide what is good for the people to know.”

Let this one go, let voters pick who runs the next one, and give them a deadline. That’s how you’d run anything you cared about.

Charlie Harger is the host of “Seattle’s Morning News” on KIRO Newsradio. You can read more of his stories and commentaries here. Follow Charlie on X and email him here. 

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