PubliCola Questions: Girmay Zahilay
Zahilay is one of two King County Councilmembers seeking the County Executive seat.
By Erica C. Barnett
The coming year will mark a major change in King County government: For the first time in 16 years, King County Executive Dow Constantine will not be on the ballot. The two leading contenders to take his place—Democrats Claudia Balducci and Girmay Zahilay—are both lawyers; both members of the King County Council and Sound Transit board; and both Democrats with similar political views. But Zahilay, 37, and Balducci, 57, bring very different life and professional experiences to the table. King County Assessor John Arthur Wilson has also filed for the position.
Balducci, a former Bellevue mayor and longtime transit advocate (going back at least to her time on the Bellevue City Council), has represented the Eastside on the county council since 2016; previously, she was director of the county’s Department of Adult and Juvenile Detention, which runs the adult and youth jails.
Zahilay, the son of Sudanese refugees who grew up living in public housing in Seattle, worked for the Seattle-based global law firm Perkins Coie before defeating South King County council veteran Larry Gossett in 2019. He’s viewed as a rising star in the Democratic Party, with early endorsements from Governor-Elect Bob Ferguson and several statewide unions.
PubliCola recently spoke to both candidates about why they’re running, their priorities if they win, and how they differ from each other and Constantine. Our interview with Balducci ran on Monday.
PubliCola [ECB]: Before we get into specific policy areas, tell me a bit about why you decided to run for this job and what your priorities will be.
Girmay Zahilay [GZ]: I'm running because I know that King County can be a place of safety and opportunity for all, and I know this because of my personal story. I grew up in South Seattle in public housing projects like Rainier Vista and New Holly, and then in unincorporated Skyway. I was the son of a single mother who had to work many jobs make ends meet—many minimum-wage jobs—and I watched her work to the point of disability. Those experiences are a driving force for me.
I know that working families are stretched to their economic limits, and at the same time, I know that thoughtful public policies can help people live stable, healthy lives. That worked for me. I had affordable public housing. I had quality public schools. I graduated from Franklin High School. That gave me the educational foundation to go on and reach higher education. We had jobs that eventually helped us pay the bills, and I want that for everyone in our region. I want everybody to live safe. I want everybody to have the opportunity to succeed. And I think the King County executive is the most powerful role in our region for accomplishing those goals.
ECB: You've been on the county council for a little over one term so far. What are some of your key accomplishments—things that you proposed, led on, and passed—in your time on the council so far?
GZ: I've started initiatives like Build the Bench to train the next generation on how to run and advocate for themselves. I've started Civics 101 town halls and [created] videos to just meet people where they are and make them even know what King County government is. During the pandemic, I was the guy setting up tables outside of Safeways and other grocery stores, handing out masks to people and telling them where they could get vaccinated. When I was budget chair, I was holding Budget 101 town halls, and helped lead on participatory budgeting so communities could help advocate for themselves.
[Focusing] on communities most impacted by the issues is something that I've done and that I plan to continue doing. Things like increasing the minimum wage, the Regional Workforce Housing Initiative, helping to transform the working-class neighborhood of Skyway, championing the Crisis Care Centers Initiative for people who don't have access to the health care that they need to live a healthier life, the guaranteed basic income pilot program, and a lot of gun violence prevention efforts as well.
When I hold my town halls in New Holly or Rainier Vista or Skyway, the top issue that they tell me about is public safety. They want to feel safer, and one of the top ways they don't feel safe is shootings. And so I've led on a number of gun violence prevention strategies, [like] funding the Regional Office of Gun Violence Prevention, organizing public safety work groups in key neighborhoods around my district, and the five-prong comprehensive gun violence prevention strategy that I proposed earlier this year.
ECB: In interviews since announcing your campaign, you've frequently mentioned the need for inclusivity, and criticized the county for taking "performative actions" rather than having “boots on the ground.” Can you talk about how you would increase inclusiveness, and how you think the county has been performative?
GZ: This is not a criticism of the executive specifically, this is a criticism of almost every government that I've seen. Whenever I see “equity and social justice,” it doesn't feel like boots on the ground to me. It feels like, let's get people in a conference room and tell them how they should speak. And that is not the approach that I want. There have been many equity initiatives and departments where I ask, have you done an analysis of where the lowest-income neighborhoods and apartment complexes are? What is your plan for outreach to those community members? What is your resource deployment plan? How are you going to coordinate with lots of different levels of governments and nonprofits and the private sector to deliver outcomes for those communities? And I don't hear sufficient answers back, and so I would be much more aggressive about the idea that equity means solving problems out in the community.
ECB: The Trump administration is almost certain to target King County and Seattle with raids, deportations, and attacks on the region’s status as a sanctuary county and city. What will you do as county executive to prepare for and fight against these kind of efforts?
GZ: I think it begins with strengthening our partnerships across every level of government. I would work really closely with the attorney general's office and the governor's office, and I'm proud to have their early sole endorsements. So we're beginning those working relationships now as we speak, and we would use every legal tool in our tool kit to protect the residents of King County from overreach from the federal government. That means working with the attorney general's office to file lawsuits, it means working with the governor's office to make sure that we deploy every resource that we need to keep our residents safe.
Number two, it's partnering with the impacted communities to find out what they're experiencing, where our gaps are as government and how we can best [provide] support, whether that is immigrants and refugees, whether that's people who need reproductive health care, whether that is protecting the different agencies and departments that are going to lose federal funding and creating a plan for how they continue to deliver critical services.
We need to keep scaling up all of the things that we don't have enough of in our region, because things are just going to get worse. We need more affordable housing, we need more behavioral health services, we need more social workers. We need more language access, and we need to plan for the future. We can't have a system where we keep responding to emergency after emergency. Instead, we need to work with the state and the federal government and create a long term plan for how we support the number of refugees who are going to be coming into our area.
ECB: The influx of immigrants and refugees to this region is going to continue and will probably escalate under the new administration. The county is facing a budget deficit. I don't know that the state has a lot of money to give. How can the county respond to a humanitarian crisis in a humane way without enough money to fund everything?
GZ: I think the first step is having just an organized a point of of communication and organization. And by that, I mean we need one central place that is responding to this issue, because right now, what's happening is that there's a lot of finger pointing. You know, “That's not my jurisdiction. They're one block north of my jurisdictional line.” So I think we need some kind of department at the county that's going to respond to this issue in a focused way and bring in all of our different partners, whether it's different levels of government, different nonprofits, and just have one point of entry for the whole region.
ECB: Do you think there will need to be additional levies to pay for county priorities, or are we approaching a limit on tax increases?
GZ: We need to be way more accountable with the dollars that we have. Because what I hear from my constituents is not just, "We're tapped to our economic limit, and we can't deal with any more levies." That is definitely a sentiment I hear. But they also are saying, if we felt like the money that was being spent was actually solving the problems that it was going toward, we would have much more confidence in the government and much more willingness to help pitch in to solve these problems. But they don't feel like they're seeing problems being solved. And so I begin with a far more performance- and outcome-driven approach to show people that, hey, you spent this dollar on this initiative and you received this outcome. And if we can't show that, we need to dial those dollars back and give our residents the savings.
ECB: Does that include the King County Regional Homelessness Authority?
GZ: Absolutely. They need to prove their performance. They would need to show how every dollar spent results in how many people removed from the street into a stable next step, and until they can show that, I don't think they should go out asking the public for more money. And they need to communicate it better, because the communication piece has been terrible, in my opinion. You know, KCRHA has actually housed thousands of people, and yet I don't think you would know that based on their communications.
ECB: Your opponent and county council colleague Claudia Balducci is skeptical that your $1 billion bonding proposal for housing will pencil out. Do you think it will be possible to pay back a $1 billion bond with people's rent payments alone?
GZ: I hope it's viable. What my motion asked is for the executive to conduct that feasibility analysis and what the mix of incomes would need to be to make it pencil. So time will tell how feasible it is. But absolutely, we need to leave no stone unturned when it comes to giving our nonprofit and private developers access to capital so they can actually construct as many homes as possible. And I don't want to leave this financial tool unexplored, because the county does have billions and billions of dollars of debt capacity, and we can borrow money at much better rates than most other entities. And so if it does pencil, we're going to be having a much different conversation, which is that we have billions of more dollars that we could spend in a sustainable way to help workers live close to their jobs.
ECB: A lot of affordable housing providers are saying they're having to sell off buildings, or are at risk of doing so, because not enough tenants are paying their rent. Does the county bear any responsibility for helping out affordable housing providers who say they don’t have sufficient revenues from rents to keep paying their mortgages?
GZ: There are many reasons why these nonprofits are hitting economic cliffs when it comes to generating enough operating revenue to sustain themselves. And part of that could be the amount of resources coming from the county. We should explore how we can get more capital invested into affordable housing. And part of it could be our court system. A lot of the nonprofits are saying that there are a lot of tenants who are not paying their rent or who are not being good-faith actors when it comes to their partnership with the nonprofit, and the backlog in our court system, which has been caused by the pandemic, is leading to a very slow resolution process. That is under the jurisdiction of the county, and so that's another place where we are accountable, and we need to have a functioning criminal justice system where these kind of disputes can be resolved quickly and efficiently.
ECB: The city of Seattle and King County agreed to new booking standards that allow the city to book more people into the jail for misdemeanors such as using drugs. Do you support this policy?
GZ: I think it's absolutely the county's responsibility to help resolve problems on the ground, and so if there are people doing things out in our community that we don't want them to continue doing, that needs to be resolved, and no instance of that should go without some form of intervention. Where I fall is, what is the right intervention for the right situation? You know, if somebody is out clearly in a mental health crisis, unless they are being an active violent threat to the community, I think their next step needs to be some kind of care that can help them resolve that issue. If somebody is going through an addiction crisis, I think we need a mobile crisis responder to come out on site and help resolve that issue.
If somebody is posing an actual physical threat to the community, yes, I think jail could be an option for that person. But we need a way of making contact, making a determination of what the next step is, and taking people to whatever the right drop-off zone is. We need more crisis care centers. We need more community-based alternatives. And we should have a functioning jail for people who are being a public threat. So one of the things that I want to help create is a non-jail receiving and triage center somewhere where we could actually take people off of the street, but then determine where their next step is going to be.
ECB: Sound Transit's preferred alternative for a station in the Chinatown International District bypasses the neighborhood in favor of a station in SoDo and a second station in Pioneer Square, but that decision is not set in stone. What’s your view on the best station option—do you support the Fourth Avenue option, or the “South of Chinatown” option down in SoDo?
GZ: My position is that there's a clear best transportation option, and that's the Fourth Avenue location. I don't think anybody could argue that it wouldn't be ideal to have one central, mega-hub of transportation. What I'm looking to learn more about is the technical aspects of making Fourth Avenue happen. When I talk to the engineers or the experts at Sound Transit, they are saying that it's technically not feasible for engineering reasons at that location, and so I'm not at the point of knowing enough to override their technical position.
ECB: At the same time, Sound Transit is facing massive overruns on the Ballard to West Seattle line. How should the agency address that problem, and should the West Seattle line be deferred or cut?
GZ: I'm in favor of extending to West Seattle, despite the cost overruns. And we need to do way more to predict and respond to these overruns and make sure that we're not going over overboard with costs. I think that happens through better oversight. When there's more oversight and more checkpoints and more reporting-out requirements regularly and early enough, we are more accountable with our costs and our dollars.
I think that we need to be much more effective in our partnerships with local governments. Part of what I hear leads to these overruns is delays and additions that are requested by the local government. I think having a stronger lobbying department so that we can lobby the state and federal government for more resources is also key.
ECB: What solutions will you to propose to address the addiction and mental health crises that we’re seeing in conjunction with the homelessness crisis, beyond building the crisis centers?
GZ: The crisis centers are a far-downstream solution to this problem. I would want to spend a lot of time going upstream and asking why that there is more addiction in the first place, and what I hear when I talk to people who are close to these issues is that, well before somebody gets addicted, there's often a broken heart, there's often separation from family, there's often lack of purpose, there's often loss of a job, loss of a home. And so I would want to put far more resources into building a sense of community for people who are vulnerable to this issue, building more of a sense of connection, building more of a sense of purpose, in addition to the clinical responses that we're talking about. And I know it's probably unusual for a government to legislate community and legislate connection and legislate love and things like that.
ECB: Yeah, how do you do that as a government?
GZ: I think there are ways that we can go out to populations that are vulnerable to this, like the unhoused community, and invest in a sense of connection, whether that's using food or having communities who look like the people who are on the streets come out and bring them indoors to community activities, having people come in and train people on different skills and trades. I just think we need to sit down and create a strategy around building community and connection and not just exclusively rely on the clinical response. And by the way, the clinical response is integral. I'm not diminishing that, but I am interested in going upstream a little bit more.