“Knowing how much institutional knowledge is going to be walking out the door—it’s going to have an impact,” one employee said.

By Erica C. Barnett

At 11:30 am on Friday, November 14, more than 100 King County employees, including some who had worked at the county for decades, were called into a meeting about the future of their employment with the county.

The message they received from an HR representative was simple but alarming: The new King County Executive, Girmay Zahilay, would be reorganizing the entire executive branch, starting with the roughly 150 positions that answer to him. If you get a call by the end of the day on Monday, you still have a job. If not, you can apply for a different position, along with the roughly 1,200 people who have already submitted applications.

A followup email, from interim Chief People Officer Megan Peterson, explained that “all positions will be new” in the new executive office structure. “Because these are all new roles, your interest may not align and you will have the opportunity to decline and still stay in your current role until January 2nd.”

“If you do not receive outreach and are interested in joining the administration, we encourage you to fill out a form of interest on our transition website and/or apply when specific positions of interest are posted, which is estimated to be in early December,” Peterson’s email continued. “Based on external interest in joining the Executive elect’s team, these positions will be highly competitive.”

After what several described as a tense, stressful weekend, about 70 staffers waited for a call on Monday that never came. That’s how they learned they would be “affected by the restructuring,” as Zahilay spokesman Erik Houser put it.

Zahilay’s transition team has told reporters, including PubliCola, that they aren’t doing any “layoffs”—they’re just replacing executive staff, the same way any new executive brings in their own people at the start of their term. Change is hard, but normal, they say—it’s just that all these political appointees have been in their jobs so long, they forgot what happens when a new administration takes over.

“Throughout the campaign, Executive Zahilay was clear that he was running on a platform of change,” Houser said. “He pledged to reshape county government so it is more responsive, more present on the ground, and more focused on the issues that matter most. Executive Zahilay was not elected to continue business as usual, he was elected to deliver the change that voters demanded. Now that Executive Zahilay has taken office, he and his team are beginning the work of implementing this change agenda.”

PubliCola spoke to a half-dozen employees, all outside Zahilay’s immediate executive staff. All of them said most of the people whose jobs are being eliminated aren’t political appointees in the traditional sense—they’re public servants doing the technical and bureaucratic work that keeps the county functioning. The employees who are losing their jobs in January include economists, regional planners working on the county’s comprehensive plan, grants and contracts managers, and the county’s demographer.

“There’s the executive’s office, the folks immediately around the executive—those are political folks and senior everyone expects to turn over,” said one longtime staffer who is losing their job in the shakeup. “But we’re all, like, worker bee analysts—just public servants. We’re the biggest part of the executive department.”

“Yes, we’re appointees, in that we’re not civil service and we’re not represented by a union, but it doesn’t mean we’re political appointees because Dow chose us,” another staffer said. “We are bureaucrats and we do the work of bureaucrats.”

Every person we talked to, including those who will retain their jobs, used the word “layoffs” to describe what happened to them or their colleagues this month. They described what one called a “cloak-and-dagger” atmosphere in which decisions are being announced without explanation. “Nobody feels good when it feels like things are happening to you rather than with you,” one staffer said.

The staffers said they understand the need to replace executive staff—the 3o or so people who work directly for the county executive. But they questioned Zahilay’s decision to dismantle and reorganize the county’s Climate Action Office, the Office of Equity and Racial Justice, and the Office of Performance Strategy, and Budget, which includes regional land use planners, policy analysts, and other career professionals who are technical experts in their fields.

“They said it with such disdain in their voice—like, ‘We already have people lined up,’ or ‘We’re wanting to go in a new direction,'” another longtime employee told PubliCola, describing how they felt when they heard the news. “It [felt] like, ‘We want young whippersnappers from Amazon,’ not people who understand how the county works.'”

Executive department staffers called the notices impersonal and disrespectful of their expertise. “We’ve gotten nothing from the executive himself,” the longtime county staffer said. “One of our county values is ‘Respect all people,’ and it feels like they are not doing that.”

“This department has had the best culture of anywhere in the county,” the staffer said. “It’s a fantastic place to work. It feels like that culture has been completely destroyed overnight. … No one is standing up and taking responsibility for the chaos they’re creating. And knowing how much institutional knowledge is going to be walking out the door—it’s going to have an impact.”

A fourth executive staffer described the mood around the office as “melancholy,” while a fifth said the transition team should have done more to acknowledge the value of career public servants doing specialized internal oversight and policy work.