The King County Regional Homelessness Authority is likely to have a third leader since its creation in 2019. The interim CEO will replace the current interim, during a slow search for a permanent leader and in the midst of increased tension about the authority’s future.
The agency’s implementation board unanimously voted to approve L. Darrell Powell, the former chief finance officer of the YMCA of Greater Seattle and chief operating officer of United Way of King County, as the new interim CEO in a meeting Monday. The governing committee will also have to approve Powell in a later meeting.
“I’m honored to be considered for the role of Interim CEO for KCRHA,” Powell said in a written statement through the authority. “This is an opportunity to collaborate with partners, drive change, and make a positive impact for our community.”
If approved by the governing board, Powell would join the authority on Feb. 14 and overlap for two weeks with Helen Howell, the authority’s former deputy CEO who has been its interim CEO since May.
Powell would serve as the authority continues its search for a permanent CEO, a position that came open when its founding leader, Marc Dones, resigned. The authority has been slow to find a permanent replacement. The executive search firm that was hired posted a job description for the position only earlier this month, eight months after Dones resigned. The posting describes the authority as being at a “critical inflection point” and advertises the job’s salary as between $250,000 and $300,000.
Powell would take the reins amid a major political transition in Seattle, by far the authority’s largest funder. Seattle repeatedly clashed with Dones over issues including encampment removals, funding and personality, and members of the new City Council majority, as well as newly emboldened Mayor Bruce Harrell, have raised questions about whether Seattle’s dollars are being spent wisely.
The authority under Dones denounced displacement of unsheltered people despite Harrell’s pledge to keep streets, parks and public spaces “open and clear of encampments.”
Dones also repeatedly called for more funding, at one point saying the authority needed billions of dollars, which Harrell said was unrealistic or a “wish list” approach, with progressive City Council members at the time largely siding with Harrell and dismissing those requests as well.
Dones resigned in May after a particularly tumultuous few months, during which the authority got caught in the middle of a hotel shelter program meltdown and lost the trust of major homelessness service providers after repeatedly failing to pay them on time.
With a new City Council that’s friendlier to the mayor, Harrell’s scrutiny and skepticism of the KCRHA is likely to ramp up over the next two years.
“This year, with the help of the council, I think that a whole level of scrutiny is warranted now,” Harrell said in an interview last week. “If we are funding it between 50% to 70%, how are those Seattle tax dollars being used for people who live and work in Seattle?”
Seattle provides $113 million in funding to the Regional Homelessness Authority, 50.5% of the agency’s 2024 budget.
In particular, Harrell views the authority’s three separate oversight bodies — its governing committee, implementation board, and its continuum of care board — as cumbersome.
“Between those three entities, you’re looking at over 35 people that have a governing role in an organization,” he said. “That is dysfunctional. But that is the model that I inherited. So I think we have to explore all of this.”
When Howell took over as interim leader, she abandoned the confrontational advocacy approach of her predecessor and said she would reestablish trust by emphasizing basic administrative functions. But Howell indicated from the outset that her tenure would be short, citing the difficulty of the job. The six months she said she would serve as interim CEO have stretched to nine.
“Moving from the early days of start-up through a variety of adjustments and improvements, I believe the agency is back on the right track,” Howell said in a statement. “I continue to believe that homelessness is solvable, and that the solutions must match the scale of the challenge, with shared responsibility and a regional approach.”
Powell’s decades in administration and finance in the nonprofit sector would likely extend Howell’s focus on the agency’s basic operations.
The authority has multiple vacancies in key leadership positions. Former chief program officer Peter Lynn, who previously led the Los Angeles equivalent of the Regional Homeless Authority, left in November. Director of subregional planning Alexis Mercedes Rinck, who most closely managed relationships with other cities in King County, also left. And its chief financial officer is serving in an interim capacity.
Plus, morale at the organization has suffered following the termination of signature project Partnership for Zero, an effort to end homelessness downtown, and the layoffs of dozens of staff, most of whom had experienced homelessness or were homeless at the time.
If Powell is selected to be the new leader of the authority, he will likely have to hit the ground running to implement a five-year plan that was finalized last year. The chief item in that plan will begin with a redistribution of more than $100 million in homelessness funding that the authority has said it wants to use to better serve groups disproportionately affected by homelessness and to spread services throughout King County. The authority had previously said it would start this process this year.