Fighting for the Managerial Class
Too many drug overdose deaths.
The King County Regional Homelessness Authority (KCRHA) is under scrutiny over an audit which found overspending and weak financial controls. There are calls to start “winding down” KCRHA. This is a good idea. I suggest we also wind down the revolutionary rhetoric permeating our government through elected leadership, agency personnel and contractors. I want to know where these elites are redistributing billions of public tax dollars?
Why?
In a September 3, 2025 interview , Seattle CM Alexis Mercedes Rinck was asked, “Why do you advocate for our unhoused neighbors?”
Her answer,
“First of all, homelessness represents a policy failure of many different systems, and that’s part of the challenge with complexity of working in homelessness services. To really be working on solutions, you need to become an expert in understanding the ways in which the health care system fails people and impoverishes people, the foster care system, the school system, the carceral system or our behavioral health system — paired with that immigration system — all of these different systems fail people and push folks into homelessness.
It is hard to stomach the fact that we have not stepped up into bold leadership to actually address this. And the way that we have allowed homelessness to not just proliferate, but also the ways in which we’ve turned towards criminalizing people experiencing homelessness is absolutely unacceptable. And it has to change.”
Nowhere in this answer, and even the article itself, is there any mention of chronic drug addiction. This is a GLARING OMISSION, but first, let’s turn to the question itself.
Why does CM Rinck advocate for unhoused neighbors?
The plight of the chronically addicted serves as a vehicle to propel the word-salad revolution; which seeks to enrich professional administrators that contract with Seattle and King County.
In the wealthiest county in our state, homelessness is a managerial job creator, cloaked in the guise of compassion for our most vulnerable. However, with the numbers of chronically homeless proliferating, it’s clear that KCRHA is not meaningfully helping the people on our streets nor contributing to the common good of residents and small businesses across our city.
The ODs speak for themselves.
It’s the Drugs
Fentanyl, a potent synthetic opioid 50 to 100 times more powerful than morphine, has changed the public health game.
This nasty black market commodity is cheap, ubiquitous and deadly. Unfortunately, people who start smoking fentanyl thinking it is just another high, very soon become addicted to this powerful drug.
Home is not only a roof over your head — it’s a connection to family, friends, community and work. Fentanyl destroys all this. A working family household, already struggling with the high cost of living, now has to deal with the behavioral and financial consequences of a fentanyl addict.
Chronic addicts soon become chronically homeless.
Fentanyl creates an illusion of community. Addicts encamp among other fentanyl smokers. In these kinds of places, it’s also considered normal to fill the tent or RV you sleep in with garbage you've collected.
CM Rinck refers to this as autonomy. That’s ridiculous. It’s actually slavery to a powerful drug. We need proven programs like drug court / deferred prosecutions for real intervention. The stakes are too high to keep waiting for change.
According to easily found 2025 data, two or more people die every day from overdoses in King County.
While our elected leaders contemplate “winding down” KCRHA, the humanitarian disaster continues. Do the math: From the time you read this, by January 1, 2027 — 618 people will die from drug overdoses in King County.
More Managers
While working at KCRHA, CM Rinck developed a plan for growing professional administrator positions in public agencies,
"Another significant challenge is workforce shortages. Human services providers rely on trained and qualified staff, yet recruitment and retention can be difficult due to low wages compared to the standard of living in Seattle, and high burnout rates. Wages for human services workers often do not allow people to be able to remain living in Seattle, driving people to live at times in neighboring counties and forced to commute in. I wrote extensively about the workforce challenges we saw among homelessness service providers in KCRHA’s Five Year Plan and fought to include equitable wages as a key and immediate action item to take up in the first few years under the plan."
It’s key to realize how the King County Regional Homelessness Authority does not provide any services. The agency only serves as a money conduit between public coffers and service contractors. Our leadership conforms to revolutionary rhetoric which only serves to maintain and grow a publicly funded apparatus of managers.
In the meantime, people are dying.
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