The Perfect Patronage Machine or Unparalleled Ongoing Graft? The Multi Billion Dollar Debacle Inside one King County Program
Note: The podcast begins with a 12:30 intro from KTH before an approximate 25:00 show from the deep dive team. You can watch the video version above or listen on your fave pod player.
SEATTLE – Tens of millions are already lost to graft, corruption and theft. Authorized attempts to institute controls are met with internal indifference, as funds flow out the door…With investigations stalled and safeguards unimplemented, is King County running the perfect modern day patronage system? …or are we in the midst of the biggest ongoing public corruption scandal in state history?
Fed by voter-enacted levies funding post 2020 social change, in fiscal year ‘23-‘24, almost two billion dollars poured into a King County department — the Department of Human and Community Services (DCHS) with no experience handling such sums.
Things got crazier when department staff was asked to hand the cash out to the public.
How crazy?
Well, the county hired a convicted child murderer to oversee grant disbursal to youth nonviolence programs. Instead of operating a clean program he took a kickback from a rapist he’d met in prison, then cut the rapist a $4.8 million check. The rapist was now running a youth non violence org. The county saw both men as appropriate stewards of youth programs and funding — so called “credible messengers” — which, if you think about it, is a massive self own by the Karen-ocracy who are effectively saying that even the most debased criminals are better communicators to youth than they are.
Nonetheless, the two criminals weren’t actually helping youth, they stole $5 million, which is still missing. The King County auditor highlighted this and 19 other instances of “probable fraud” in her incendiary report last August. And yet despite showing that DCHS was perhaps the worst steward imaginable for some 1.77 BILLION in annual grant funding passing through, the auditor wrote a series of elected officials in late October saying none of her recommended fixes — later adopted by the County Council — were being implemented, she also said the investigations into the fraud were being stonewalled, even asking for an external investigator to be brought in. Now, as another year’s tranche of $1.7 BILLION flows into this department, it appears fire hosing the cash out the door is more important than chasing down fraud or making sure that murderers and rapists aren’t in charge of decision-making and funding for area youth. A J425 podcast.
