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…