New executive ousts Pierce County’s director of human services. Interim chief named
Under the new Pierce County Executive, the Human Services Department which manages and administers the county’s homelessness services and affordable housing programs will be under new direction as its former director, Heather Moss, no longer holds the position.
On Dec. 12, a press release from Pierce County announced that Moss would “transition” from her role in the county as of Jan. 3 under the new Pierce County Executive’s administration.
Ryan Mello, a Democrat, was elected to be the Pierce County Executive during the November 2024 election.
“As with any new administration and transition, we are making several leadership changes,” Mello told The News Tribune. “Housing and homelessness are among our most urgent priorities and I have deep gratitude for what Heather has accomplished.”
Moss became the director of Human Services in July of 2019. She spearheaded the department through the pandemic and managed a department that from 2020 to 2023 had an average annual budget of over $134 million. As of October 2024, the department had just under 300 employees.
During the pandemic, the department administered hundreds of millions of federal grant dollars under Moss’s leadership. The funds were used to support eviction-prevention programs, homeless services and affordable housing across the region.
Moss told The News Tribune that some of the things she was most proud of during her five-and-a-half year tenure included creating a behavior health division and advisory board, establishing a task force to increase diversity, equity, and inclusion, putting a priority on expanding the departments work to assist those with developmental disabilities, advocating to greatly expand the department’s funding, and establishing a eviction-prevention program during the pandemic.
“We were one of the first agencies in the state — perhaps in the country — to stand up a rental assistance program soon after the COVID pandemic turned our world upside down in 2020,” Moss wrote in an email to The News Tribune. “We spent approximately $150M in federal funds to help thousands of families stay in their homes when they could not work.”
Moss said some of the largest challenges she faced as director of Human Services included making tough decisions about how to spend limited funds, being dependent on funding from sources outside the county and working through tedious government processes.
“Government processes, by design, take a long time and require significant public input. I’m not suggesting that should not happen,” Moss wrote. “But it is often hard to explain why a procurement or contracting process takes so long when the need for services is so visible and immediate.”
In December, Moss said Mello told her he was “going in a different direction” and that her last day with the county would be Jan. 3, 2025.
When asked why she thought Mello had decided to let her go, Moss said: “I suspect he was unhappy with my leadership in our county’s homeless response, or perhaps dissatisfied with how [Pierce County Human Services] managed the procurement and contracting process for providers.”
Pierce County Council Member, Jani Hitchen, D-District 6, worked with Mello to help convene the Unified Regional Approach to homelessness.
“I know he’s had the opportunity to work with Heather in her former role for several years. He was aware of her strengths and weaknesses and made the call best for his cabinet and Pierce County,” Hitchen told The News Tribune when asked if she thought Mello made the right decision.
Pierce County Council member Dave Morell (District 1, Republican) declined to comment on the matter. His Republican colleagues did not respond to requests for comment.
Last year, Mello publicly expressed his frustration with the Human Services Department several times in his role as the chair of the Pierce County Council.
In July, Mello criticized the way the department awarded $17.6 million in funding to local homeless-service providers through the Homeless Housing Program (HHP). He said the process lacked transparency and was “highly flawed.”
St. Vincent De Paul in Tacoma applied for HHP funding to expand their homeless street outreach program. Despite being one of the highest rated outreach programs on the county’s rubric, the organization’s application was not selected for funding.
At the time, Mello pointed out that it did not make sense to him why the organization did not receive the funding applied for.
In an interview with The News Tribune, St. Vincent De Paul executive director Tracy Peacock said she got the sense that Moss might have been “out of touch” with service-provider community based on comments she heard her make.
Several people managing St. Vincent De Paul’s outreach program said they are more hopeful the county’s homelessness response will be headed in the right direction under Mello’s leadership.
In September, Pierce County Executive Bruce Dammeier declared an emergency in order to prevent the collapse of the county’s Coordinated Entry system — which serves as the “front door” for anyone experiencing homelessness in the region. The declaration was prompted by the realization that contracts the county had with service providers doing the work to manage Coordinated Entry were set to expire with no renewals in place.
At the time, Mello told The News Tribune the funding lapse was due to “dysfunction and mismanagement.”
Throughout 2024, Mello also expressed frustration with the department and its delays in the process to establish a homeless stability site which the council had appropriated $2.5 million in federal funding for at the end of 2023.
When asked if there was a specific reason why Mello wanted to move on from Heather Moss, Libby Catalinich, a spokesperson for the executive’s office, told The News Tribune he had no comment.
“Changes in leadership are a normal part of any transition,” she said
Catalinich said Helen McGovern-Pilant began to serve as the Human Services interim director on Jan. 6.
She said the position opening was not posted publicly nor was there an application process for the “temporary” interim role.
“The role will be filled permanently following a public, meritorious selection process. That process will begin in the coming weeks,” Catalinich told The News Tribune in an email. “This process will include public stakeholder involvement, as well as Council confirmation, as is the case with all director positions.”
Catalinich said McGovern-Pilant was chosen for the interim director position because she is “highly regarded” in the community for her many years as a nonprofit leader, an elected public servant on the Lakewood City Council and in her career in the corporate sector.
Previously, McGovern-Pilant has served as the interim executive director of the Tacoma Art Museum, a grant contracts manager for the Washington State Department of Agriculture, and the interim chief executive officer for WorkForce Central. Most recently, she has been the chief executive officer of McGovern-Pilant Consulting, based in Lakewood.
According to Catalinich, her temporary role is an hourly position, paid at $102.71 per hour.
McGovern-Pilant told The News Tribune the Human Services Department needs to be more cooperative and efficient in how they provide services.
“There has been much attention paid to the contracting portion of our work and there is an opportunity to continue working on improvement,” she said.
This story was originally published January 11, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
