The Billion-Dollar Bypass: $900M in White Guilt Tax Passed Through to Unvetted Orgs, Many Criminal
"Damning" KingCo audit shows criminals & fraudsters control billions meant for at-risk youth. Auditor sounds the alarm over internal opposition...as another $1.7B set to disappear out the door
SEATTLE – The Best Starts for Kids levy was a self-assessed voter tax meant to (make up for George Floyd) transfer property taxes from King County tax payers to nebulous categories like “youth non violence” among other things. The voters said yes. A “Racism is a public health crisis” proclamation from Dow Constantine greased the wheels, eliminating oversight and red tape in a rush to get funding to the source of the issue. And organizations like Community Passageways and SE Network Safety Net were ready to receive that funding. Of course, SE Network Safety Net went down when its founder was indicted in the sweeping federal Jackson Drug Trafficking Organization case - they lost their school safety contract after that. And Community Passageways has seen unarmed Black teens murdered in two locations where they were responsible for safety, not to mention the $800,000 their bookkeeper blew on gambling, Nordstrom and personal mortgage payments. Unfortunately these are just two of many examples of the wasted and lost funding distributed by King County DCHS. But it’s the sheer volume that’s so daunting: $500 million in four years was fire hosed out of property value and into the DCHS, to be quickly distributed to pretty much anyone with a non profit and a two sentence mission description that fit somewhere close to the intent of the measure. A King County auditor’s report brought this to light last Fall. J425 revisits the story now.
KING COUNTY DCHS — Hundreds of millions already lost to graft, corruption and theft. Authorized attempts to institute much-needed financial controls are met with internal indifference. As funds blow out the door by the hundreds of millions…
With investigations stalled, safeguards unimplemented and another billion about to go out the door… 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? Read the J425 summary of the audit findings here.
While the King County Auditor sounds increasingly urgent alarms over “stagnated” investigations and “likely fraud,” the county is preparing to distribute a record-breaking $1.71 billion in grant funding this year.
To the casual observer, the Department of Community and Human Services (DCHS) appears to be a department in crisis, struggling to track millions of dollars in taxpayer funds.
But a closer look at the consistent outcomes—and the fierce internal pushback against oversight—suggests a different conclusion: the system is not broken; it is working exactly as designed.
They say you can tell the purpose of any system by its output.
Thus, the theory of “institutionalized patronage” suggests that the primary function of this billion-dollar pipeline is not necessarily the efficient delivery of services, but rather the systematic redistribution of wealth to a specific activist constituency.
In this model, the lack of financial stewardship is not a bug, but a feature that ensures the “spigots of cash” remain open to the political base of those in power.
Outcomes as Evidence
If the purpose of a system is defined by its outcomes, the DCHS outcomes are clear. Despite a “culture” of poor supervision and what the Auditor describes as “improper acts and payments,” the volume of funding only increases.
The department is currently managing a $3.42 billion biennial budget, the largest in the county’s history.
It is impossible to imagine worse stewardship of a billion plus dollars in public funds than the storm of corruption that occurred last year, with multiple former contractors now behind bars, federal, state and local probes currently ongoing, with basic safeguard yet to be implemented and tens of millions in public funds still unaccounted for.
But this year’s tranche of $1.77 billion in funding is already headed out the door before last year’s scandals are sorted out.
The Funds Must Keep Flowing
Two prominent examples illustrate how this system prioritizes fund distribution over accountability:
The Jimerson/Heppard Kickback Scheme: A former DCHS manager – a convicted child murderer, no less – facilitated a $4.8 million grant to a contractor he’d met in prison – a convicted rapist and armed robber who now ran a youth non-violence organization. The two prison buddies worked out some graft: in exchange for $330,000 in kickbacks, Jimerson authorized $4.8 million in “grant” disbursals.
Jimerson was fined $7,000 and fired after whistleblowers came forward – but he kept the rest of the $330,000.
Heppard folded up his non-profit and disappeared with the $4.8 million. A few months later, he opened a new youth safety non-profit and quickly landed a $1.4 million contract.
Despite the clear criminal nature of the arrangement, investigations into the missing $4.8 million have “stagnated,” with the County Auditor reporting internal delays and obfuscation.
As of January 20, internal findings
were marked as “incomplete”, the money remains missing.
The Community Passageways Embezzlement: Nearly $893,000 in public funds were stolen by the finance director for the county’s largest youth service vendor. The finance director pulled hundreds of thousands out from casino ATMs. What she didn’t blow on gambling, she spent at Nordstroms and on luxury travel. CP CEO Dom Davis said he didn’t notice the missing public funds. Nobody inside CP missed almost a million dollars in blown public cash. The FBI arrested the finance director after following her trail from a previous non-profit. While a federal conviction was secured, the money was never returned, questions about internal controls at CP went unanswered. And even after a 17-year-old boy was shot to death inside a county-funded, CP-run diversion meeting that the boy was required to attend, CP’s contract was extended and the amount of money entrusted to Davis’ org tripled. The county’s internal response to attempts to obtain documentation of spending and receipts for public funds was characterized by what Councilmembers called an “explicit resistance to oversight”.
The “Immune Response” to Oversight
The most compelling evidence for this theory is found in the “pushback” reported by King County Auditor Kymber Waltmunson in an October 31, 2025, letter to elected officials requesting assistance.
