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 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. Today, we’re posting our conversation with Balducci, edited for length and clarity; tomorrow, we’ll run our interview with Zahilay.

PubliCola (ECB): I know that you’ve been thinking about running for this position for a long time. What are some of your top priorities going to be if you win?

Claudia Balducci (CB): Housing is huge. I believe our success as a region depends on us begin able to provide ample housing for people to be able to afford to live here. Transportation is a big priority for me. And of course, I’ve also worked in public safety, which is very top of mind for people today.

Those are the things I have worked on and what I believe are the most important elements of success for the county executive. It’s not to say that everything else the county does doesn’t matter. There are so many things that people don’t think of as playing into safe, healthy communities. For example, we just passed the implementation plan for the Doors Open program.

ECB: What should the county be doing to improve access to housing?

CB: The spectrum of housing goes from supply [to] stability and subsidy. First of all, we have metered the supply of housing through zoning codes and other restrictions for so long that we just created scarcity. We’re working on changing that, with regulatory encouragement from our friends at the state. Some of that comes from HB 1220. Instead of just planning for jobs and housing without regard for how much the jobs pay and how much housing costs, you have to plan for housing at every level, from emergency shelter all the way up to market-rate housing.

I see cities really trying. They are being asked to plan for something they’ve never done  before—to [address] a shortfall in the number of homes that was created over decades—and they’re being asked to do it over one planning cycle.

That’s supply. Stability is: We know the most humane and cost-effective thing, if someone has housing, is to keep them from falling into homelessness, or housing instability, with tenant rental support programs that keep people in their homes. This whole area is being challenged right now. Some of our nonprofit affordable housing providers in east King County, [like] Imagine Housing, are struggling. These are big multifamily building owners who provide apartments at lower levels of affordability, and they’re just having a tough time paying enough staff and meeting their upkeep obligations. It’s is a countywide problem, not just a city problem.

Subsidy is the place where we have some opportunities for people at the end of the housing demand that the market can’t supply. It’s just not profitable to provide housing who make 30 percent of [area median income]. We have surplus land that we’ve been putting to use through Sound Transit [as housing], for example. There’s land use policies we can look at. The city of Bellevue is allowing faith communities to use their land to create affordable housing opportunities.

I’m looking forward to getting a report back on Councilmember Zahilay’s bonding proposal. My gut is that relying on rent paid by people who make 120 percent of AMI will not pay back a billion in bonds. I don’t know how that math will work. The current economic circumstances are not likely to make that pencil. And the downside is pretty far down if we’re wrong.

ECB: The county relies heavily on levies for basic services—Best Starts for Kids, the Doors Open levy you mentioned, the Crisis Care Centers levy, and many more. Do you anticipate the need for additional levies to pay for county priorities, or are we approaching a limit on sales tax increases?

CB: Of course, the levies are first and foremost a response to the 1 percent property tax cap. The county used to pay for much of its services just with the general property tax levy. But as that cap has constrained our ability to have property taxes keep up with costs, we’ve had to find other ways to fund things. That’s how you end up with the human service levy. Those programs would have gone away. That’s how you end up with parks essentially becoming an entrepreneurial exercise, because without that, the parks levy couldn’t have fully funded them.

It’s a really good question as to when this strategy will play itself out. I hear from constituents who are concerned about property taxes. I have constituents in my district who are house-rich but don’t have a lot of income. I hear quite a lot about tax levels. Yet when we ask things like, will you vote for crisis care centers because it’s a desperate need, they are very, very popular. The Harborview renovations and expansions levy was one the of highest victories ever. The voters keep saying yes.

ECB: The King County Regional Homelessness Authority has obviously struggled over the past couple of years. The city of Seattle has taken back control over some local homeless services, while Executive Constantine has basically just kept the agency’s funding the same, so that they can’t realistically expand the region’s homelessness response. Do you think there’s a path to turning KCRHA around, and what do you envision as the future for the agency?

CB: I want to be the optimist here because I’ve seen rational approaches take hold and move the needle. The challenge is to show the benefit to the regional approach. What does it mean to a city like Bellevue, or a city like Auburn, to be able to have a regional approach, so that they see that when you have a problem with homelessness, this is the agency you turn to and we have the resources to address it? The regional cities need to buy in. We’re on our second incarnation, our third executive director.

I want us to find a way to fund some additional progress on encampment resolutions. And encampment resolutions are not sweeps. I was a little skeptical at first, but I have become convinced they are not sweeps. They are not, post a date, show up with a team, and move everybody who’s there. It’s an application of services. You work with the residents of an encampment over a period of time, some weeks, and eventually people are offered housing. They have a high level of uptake of housing and, so far, a pretty high retention of housing.

ECB: What will you do as county executive to address what seem to be spiraling problems at Metro? [Editor’s note: This interview was conducted before the killing of a Metro driver earlier this month]. What do you think is the biggest problem that needs to be fixed there?

CB: The biggest problem Metro has been experiencing is staffing. In 2019, we were having discussions about our transportation benefit district and trying to figure out when and what package to go to the voters with for an infusion of bus funding. Then 2020 came, COVID hit, and we decided to shelve those discussions. And since then, the question comes up, When are you going to use your transportation benefit district? The reality is that since 2020, you could pour money into Metro and they could never use it because of the shortage of drivers and mechanics. That is beginning to turn around—the staffing shortage is shrinking. My anecdotal evidence is that my personal experience of ghost buses has gone way down. It is unusual for a bus to not show up, and for a while there, it was not unusual.

We need to staff up and build back to where our current level of service should be, but ultimately, I want us to reopen our long-term plan. I want to make sure we have a solid plan for the future so that we can make sure we’re providing abundant bus service to the region and figure out what that costs. And then we look at our transportation benefit district and ask the voters to fund that for the future.

ECB: Sound Transit is facing massive cost overruns on the planned Ballard to West Seattle line. ow do you think the agency should address this problem, and what are you currently advocating for as a Sound Transit board member? Should light rail still go to West Seattle?

CB: It is a real problem that we have to grapple with.  When we went into a revenue spiral because of COVID, we went into a realignment. And I was a realignment skeptic because I thought the revenue might bounce back up, so I pushed really hard for a reform effort, which became the Technical Advisory Committee and change in leadership and a bunch of other things. And now when you look at that cost overrun, we know what’s causing it in more detail than we have in the past. We are now able, in more detail, to take a closer look at where are we causing those problems as an agency, how can we control costs, and how can we get better bids. If you can shave a third off some of those cost increases by being smarter and more efficient and more effective, then it’s a different problem.

I have been pushing for early acquisitions, instead of waiting 10 years between saying we’re going to buy up a bunch of property and buying it. Those kinds of savings multiply. But when we have a sense of what the real magnitude is, then we can have the difficult conservations about timing, scope, station locations, and all the things we’re going to have to talk about.

ECB: Do you think it’s time to start talking about potential cutbacks, like not going to West Seattle?

CB: We absolutely need to be open, once we have done all the work on cost and revenues, to talk about scope. I start with the commitment to build what we committed to the voters to build, and so to me it’s the last resort to say we’re not going to build it. I have been a very loud and consistent advocate for trying to create a hub in the [Chinatown-International District] where all our lines come together. If that’s not possible, it’s not possible, but I want to turn over every single rock before I admit it’s not possible. I am still in the rock-turning-over phase. We’re not tossing whole alignments, but we might have to phase things.

ECB: The county executive expressed support for closing the youth and downtown jails, then reversed his position on both. First, how will you approach the youth jail issue—should the Clark Regional Justice Center stay open, and if not, what would an alternative approach to secure detention look like?

CB: One of the things that’s different about me, having worked in the system, is that I was the jail director when the plan to rebuild the juvenile court facility was created. My position was, if you want to rebuild the court, you need to rebuild the detention center. That, of course, was passed by the voters and controversy ensued. But we built it smaller than the old detention facility because we didn’t want to have a bunch of excess capacity, and we made it to be modular so that if any facility that was not needed in the future could be modified to open to the outside and used for another purpose.

It’s important to remember that our juvenile detention population in a county of this size is very, very low as a percentage of the population. We use juvenile detention sparingly. We have had booking restrictions for decades. We don’t lock kids up for minor things. Yet there has been a massive racial disproportionality, and as the population goes down, it gets worse.

I don’t love the title “Care and Closure” [for King County’s youth jail approach] because it gives people the expectation that the ultimate goal will be shutting down the detention facility. The work Care and Closure is doing is that if we implement community-based strategies, if we invest more in education, if we have diversion programs that work, if we do all the things we should be doing to apply continuous improvements so that we’re getting better all the time, then we will reduce the need for detention. [But] with so much gun violence, so many guns in the hands of our kids, we have to have a place to put them to prevent harm to their communities.

ECB: What about other alternatives to detention, like community-based supervised housing or locked facilities that are more home-like than a jail cell?

CB: I’m not opposed if someone wants to raise their hand and say they want to have a community-based facility in their community. Having sited really controversial infrastructure, like light rail stations, I am skeptical that we are going to be able to afford and succeed in siting various juvenile offender homes in various places around the county. I’ve sited homeless shelters, and it took ten years to get a men’s shelter in Bellevue. I don’t see that as an immediate path to changing things and it’s too urgent to wait. I would focus more on education, mentoring, and job supports, because those are things you can do [on a shorter timeline].

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ECB: Will you want to bring in your own sheriff and jail director?

CB: That is an excellent question and way far ahead of where I am right now.

One of the things I have a great deal of experience at is reforming the jail, [the downtown] jail in particular. When I worked at King County as my day job, I was the labor negotiator, and then eventually was assigned to respond to a US DOJ investigation into our conditions of confinement. I learned a lot about jail operations. We were able to reform the uses of force, uses of solitary confinement, suicide prevention, and medical care. We had the motivation to do so and it was funded. So I feel very, very well equipped to go in and work with the jails to make sure they’re doing what they need to be doing.

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. Do you support this policy, and is it sustainable?

CB: One challenge has been staffing. The jail is [only] full in the sense that we cannot staff to fill the jail further than it is today. That is the main issue with jurisdictions who want to move more folks into the jail. We’re moving in the right direction on staffing.

I think we need to be in close communication and relationship with our jurisdictions and be supporting them and doing the things they want to do to keep their communities safe. If you’ve got these places like 12th and Jackson where it’s terrible, and if it takes arresting some people on misdemeanors to break up that activity, we need to support that. We need to be not allowing open-air drug markets. We need to be stopping people who, for whatever reason, are running around with knives.

We’ve had periods where we have had a judge who like to lock people up. There was a judge who liked to give out 365-day sentences [for misdemeanors]. That was a hanging judge. It was an abuse. We negotiated with the city to have that not happen anymore. We can address overuse. But it’s a service that we need to provide, and we do not get to say arbitrarily that we will not lock people up.

I don’t think we should he objecting to reasonable case standards. We know that cases now are far more complex than in the past. Our public defenders are not defending a lot of shoplifting cases. The numbers that have worked in the past don’t now. The county’s objection to the case law standards is that we can’t afford them. We have to deal with the fact that you can’t impose case standards that are impossible, because people can’t meet them and then they leave. That is something I feel like we can get some support for in Olympia.