Audit of homelessness authority should be a wake-up call | Commentary

Published 1:00 pm Wednesday, May 13, 2026

Where did the money go?

The recent forensic audit involving the King County Regional Homelessness Authority should be a wake-up call for our entire region.

At a recent Federal Way City Council meeting, I spoke publicly about findings revealing approximately $13 million in expenditures that were unaccounted for, in other words, they are missing. That should concern every taxpayer.

Residents frequently ask me as a local elected what I believe needs to change in our approach to homelessness. My answer has remained consistent: accountability has to be at the center of any serious solution because without accountability, public trust collapses, and so do the systems we rely on to help people. Accountability is not separate from compassion. It is what ensures resources reach the people who need help.

For years, taxpayers have been told that if we spent more money, expanded programs, centralized authority, and continued investing in the current homelessness model, we would see meaningful progress. Instead, homelessness in King County has continued to grow year after year while the system overseeing the response has become increasingly expensive, bureaucratic, and disconnected from measurable outcomes. At some point, results matter more than intentions.

KCRHA was presented to the public as a coordinated regional solution that would improve accountability and outcomes. Instead, the agency has been plagued by controversy, leadership turmoil, financial concerns, and declining public confidence almost since its inception. Now a forensic audit has raised even more serious questions about oversight and accountability, and the public is growing weary of excuses.

Families across our region are struggling with rising costs trying to afford groceries, property taxes, gas, and electricity while paying taxes into systems they are repeatedly told are working. Meanwhile, many residents look around and see homelessness worsening and people continuing to cycle through systems that do not appear to be delivering long-term stability or addressing root causes.

People are rightly frustrated because they were promised results. And when government asks the public for hundreds of millions of dollars to address a crisis, accountability is not optional.

Every dollar that is lost, wasted, or unaccounted for is money that did not go toward helping someone get off the streets, into treatment, into recovery, or into stable housing. The people hurt most by failed homelessness policies are the very individuals these systems were created to help.

Increasingly, local leaders and residents alike are questioning whether the current approach is working. Communities across the King County region have invested heavily into low-barrier and housing-first models, yet we continue to see little measurable evidence that the overall trajectory is improving.

The people of this region are compassionate. They want solutions that actually help people reclaim stability and dignity. But compassion does not require accepting dysfunction, financial disorder, or systems that cannot demonstrate results and they have every right to demand answers when an audit reveals millions of dollars that cannot be properly reconciled while the crisis itself continues getting worse.

This conversation is bigger than one audit. It is about whether public trust still matters. It is about whether government agencies entrusted with enormous sums of taxpayer money will be held to the same standards of accountability expected anywhere else.

The answer cannot simply be to continue demanding more funding while dismissing legitimate public concern. The answer must be real oversight, measurable performance standards, accountability, transparency, and an honest evaluation of whether the current regional homelessness structure can deliver the results taxpayers were promised. Because if an agency cannot reliably account for public money, the public has every right to question whether that agency should continue operating in its current form.

Taxpayers deserve better. The people government was supposed to be helping deserve better. It’s time to consider dissolving the King County Regional Homelessness Authority and find a better path forward.

Melissa Hamilton is a member of the Federal Way City Council.