Tag: Girmay Zahilay

Elections, King County

County Executive-Elect Zahilay’s Layoff Proposal Shocks Some Longtime Staff

The layoffs aren’t unusual for a new executive, Zahilay’s team says—it’s just that the county hasn’t had a new leader in 16 years.

By Erica C. Barnett

King County Executive-Elect Girmay Zahilay, the first new county executive since Dow Constantine was elected in 2008, reportedly plans to lay off his predecessor’s entire executive staff, along with at least some department heads and deputy directors, as part of a major restructuring of the executive branch of county government.

According to Zahilay’s transition team, the restructure will impact around 100 out of 133 people currently serving in appointed positions.

Some of these appointed staffers will have the opportunity to apply for new positions (Zahilay’s transition website has an open application page), while others, whose jobs are being eliminated, will be encouraged to apply for other county positions. Zahilay reportedly plans to announce a new organizational structure for his office this week and start hiring for new positions in December.

“All current appointees are eligible and encouraged to reapply for new job postings when they come up,” Zahilay transition team spokesman Erik Houser said. “If current appointees are not a fit for the new job postings, the transition is supporting them to find other opportunities in county government.”

The changes, which come after 16 years of relative stability under Constantine, came as a seismic shock to many longtime executive branch staffers when Zahilay’s team announced them at a meeting last Friday. Staff reported feeling disrespected and caught off-guard by the sudden, disruptive change.

Houser said it’s “normal” for a new administration to come in with their own team and priorities. “Appointed staff working in the Executive Department are advised at the time of hire that they serve at the pleasure of the Executive,” Houser said.

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The move, Houser added, “is a structural one based on the strategic shift in direction that a new Executive brings, and not a reflection of how current staff are performing.”

While the mass layoffs have come as a surprise to many county employees, a similar process has become routine in Seattle, where voters have elected a new mayor every four years starting in 2009. Seattle mayor-elect Katie Wilson is announcing more details about her own transition team tomorrow, and is expected to bring in her own executive staff and announce new directors for many city departments.

Because Constantine stepped down early to take over as Sound Transit director, Zahilay’s term will start on November 25, but he plans to continue paying appointed staff who will lose their jobs next year through January 2, which will also keep them on county health insurance through the end of January.

erica@publicola.com

Elections, King County

PubliCola Questions: King County Executive Candidate Girmay Zahilay

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. Continue reading “PubliCola Questions: King County Executive Candidate Girmay Zahilay” →

City Council, Elections, housing, King County, Mayor Harrell

Harrell Opposes Funding Social Housing; County Councilmember Zahilay Seeks $1 Billion Housing Investment

1. Mayor Bruce Harrell told members of the City Council that he opposes Initiative 137, which would fund social housing by imposing a tax on employers who pay workers more than $1 million a year. Instead, he wrote in a Tuesday email, he supports putting a competing alternative on the ballot that would provide no new funding—for example, an alternative proposed by the Seattle Times editorial board that would force the social housing developer to “compete for Housing Levy dollars.”

The housing levy, funded through a property tax, primarily pays for low-income housing built by nonprofit housing developers; the social housing developer hopes to build mixed-income developments where higher-wage workers’ rent would help subsidize housing for lower-income residents.

“Social housing as a concept may prove to have benefits, but the City has also been advised that Initiative 137 comes with legal risk,” Harrell wrote. “Voters interested in exploring the concept of social housing ought to have an option to do so that allows social housing to be established as a successful proof-of-concept before further increasing taxes.”

In the email, addressed to Council President Sara Nelson, Harrell said he had “spoken to you and members of the City Council individually last week and this week.” But Tammy Morales, the council’s most progressive member and a supporter of social housing, was not among them. In an email to Harrell’s deputy chief of staff, a staffer for Morales said Harrell has consistently “iced out” Morales, despite the fact that she is one of the council’s two longest-serving members.

“The Mayor has never returned a phone call from Councilmember Morales, hasn’t reached out to meet with her (at least not this year, I can’t speak to previous years), consistently does not invite us to events, and does not seem interested in even trying to extend an olive branch to our office,” the staffer wrote. “We have been working hard to pass the Mayor’s legislation through Land Use Committee. The very least he could do is meet with her.”

Morales challenged Harrell, then the District 2 council member, in 2015 and lost; she was elected four years later.

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2. King County Councilmember Girmay Zahilay has proposed his own potential funding measure that’s strikingly similar to the social housing proposal, except that it would not require a new development authority or taxing source. Instead, Zahilay’s legislation would ask County Executive Dow Constantine to establish a “regional workforce housing initiative” that would develop a plan to use at least $1 billion of the county’s $9 billion in available debt capacity to build permanently affordable housing at a variety of income levels.

Much like the social housing proposal, Zahilay’s legislation anticipates that higher-income renters would subsidize apartments for their lower-income neighbors through higher rents.

“If we are going to have a functioning society, we need our workers, especially essential workers, to live closer to where they work,” Zahilay said.

Instead of creating a new public developer, like the one voters approved for social housing last year, Zahilay’s plan would rely on existing public developers, like the King County Housing Authority, and nonprofits that already develop and operate housing. He said he doesn’t consider his idea a competitor to social housing, although it would fill a similar niche in the market—permanently rent-restricted housing for people making up to 120 percent of the are median income. The rents would be set “at whatever monthly cost it takes to maintain and operate the buildings and pay down the interest and principal on the debt,” Zahilay said.

Also like social housing, the new housing Zahilay envisions would operate essentially outside the housing market, with rents that would remain “constant, other than to reflect interest rate changes on debt service,” according to the legislation. How all this would work, what kind of rents would be required to make the plan feasible, and how much housing the county could fund with $1 billion are all to be determined: Zahilay said he’s “asking [the executive] to do the analysis and create an implementation plan in a way that pencils. I think there would be some pushback if it was directive.”

City Council, homelessness, human services, King County, Mayor Harrell, Mental Health

New Tax Would Fund Behavioral Crisis Centers; Things to Look for in Harrell’s Budget Proposal
King County Councilmember Girmay Zahilay speaks at a press conference on a county proposal to raise property taxes to fund walk-in crisis centers
King County Councilmember Girmay Zahilay

1. King County Executive Dow Constantine proposed a new property-tax levy to fund five behavioral health crisis centers across King County, along with higher wages for health care workers and the restoration of residential treatment beds that have been lost in recent years. The levy, assessed at 14.5 cents per $1,000 of assessed home value—about $121 for a median $694,000 house—could be on a countywide ballot in April 2023, if the King County Council approves it this year.

Currently, there are no walk-in crisis centers anywhere in King County, and the wait for a residential treatment bed averaged 44 days as of July, according to the county. Since 2018, the county has lost more than 110 residential treatment beds and is down to 244 beds countywide. “A question that doesn’t get asked enough to the person who says ‘get people into treatment,'” King County Councilmember Girmay Zahilay said Monday, is “‘get people into treatment where?'”

In a county with 2.3 million residents, Zahilay said, we have one crisis care facility with 46 beds”—the Downtown Emergency Service Center’s Crisis Solutions Center in the Central District, which only accepts referrals from police and other first responders. “If you break a bone in King County, you can walk in and get urgent care. If you’re going through a mental health crisis or a substance use disorder crisis, you have zero urgent care options.”

The nine-year levy proposal would also create apprenticeship programs and other supports for people entering the behavioral health care field, and would “invest in equitable wages for the workforce at crisis care centers,” according to the announcement, plus mobile or co-located crisis services that would operate until the first crisis clinics were open.

“If you break a bone in King County, you can walk in and get urgent care. If you’re going through a mental health crisis or a substance use disorder crisis, you have zero urgent care options.”—King County Councilmember Girmay Zahilay

It’s unclear how many people would see higher wages under Constantine’s proposal, which his office released only in summary form. Pay for behavioral health care workers is so low that many employees qualify for the same services they sign clients up for, said Kristen Badin, a crisis counselor and representative of SEIU 1199NW.

The King County Regional Homelessness Authority has asked the city and county to provide an additional $15.4 million to permanently service providers’ baseline budgets by 13 percent in order to increase provider wages—part of an overall budget request that would add about $90 million to the regional agency’s budget, which is funded by the city of Seattle and King County through their annual budget process.

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That process kicks off for both the city and county tomorrow, when Harrell and Constantine announce their 2023 budget proposals. On Monday, Constantine said he considered the KCRHA’s budget request “aspirational,” and confirmed that he does not plan to provide all the money the authority’s CEO, Marc Dones, requested.

That budget request, Constantine said, “was essentially a statement of need, and that neither the county nor the city’s budget could support that full request.” Harrell added that “we weren’t able to meet all of the requests, but you’ll see [during Tuesday’s budget announcement] the support we have moving forward with RHA and the support we have the people on the ground doing this important work.”

2. In 2019, the City Council passed legislation requiring the Human Services Department to build a cost of living increase into all new or renegotiated contracts with service providers, based on the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (CPI-W). At the time, inflation, as represented by the increase in CPI, was modest—between two and three percent.

“I drew a line in the sand [on the use of the JumpStart tax to backfill the city budget], and I want to make sure that we’re sticking to that, not only because it’s what we passed in statute, but because the agreement to use the higher-than anticipated revenue was to prevent austerity.”—City Council budget chair Teresa Mosqueda.

Last year, the CPI-W increased 8.7 percent, meaning that compared to 2021, it cost 8.7 percent more to pay for the same goods and services. Any wage increase that’s lower than the CPI effectively constitutes a pay cut—something social service providers whose wages are funded by the city will likely be watching for tomorrow when Harrell rolls out his budget.

Council budget chair Teresa Mosqueda said she’ll also be watching for any effort by Harrell to transfer additional funds from the JumpStart payroll tax, which is earmarked for housing, small business support, Green New Deal programs, and equitable development. Earlier this year, Mosqueda proposed using excess payroll tax revenues to help close the budget gap; those extra revenues are projected at $71 million and $84 million in 2023 and 2024, respectively.

“I drew a line in the sand,” Mosqueda said Monday, “and I want to make sure that we’re sticking to that, not only because it’s what we passed in statute, but because the agreement to use the higher-than anticipated revenue was to prevent austerity. And part of preventing austerity is keeping our promises, [including] our promises to human service providers.”

Elections, King County, race

Lambert Removed from Leadership Roles After Racist Mailer; Tried to Get Issaquah Voters Removed from Her District

By Erica C. Barnett

The King County Council voted today to remove Kathy Lambert, the East King County Republican facing a difficult reelection battle this year, from all of her leadership roles on council committees.

Earlier this month, as first reported on Twitter by PubliCola, Lambert sent a mailer to voters portraying her opponent, Sarah Perry, as a “socialist…anti-police puppet” being manipulated by the likes of Bernie Sanders, Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant, Vice President Kamala Harris, and her South King County council colleague Girmay Zahilay. The message to white voters—if you elect Perry over Lambert, scary Black and brown leftists (and one Jew) will impose their agenda on your communities—was barely subtext.

The motion, sponsored by council chair Claudia Balducci, who represents Bellevue, said that Lambert’s mailer had “adversely impacted the ability of the council to conduct its business efficiently and effectively.” A related ordinance eliminated the health and human services committee, which Lambert chaired, and combined its duties with that of the law and justice committee, chaired by Zahilay.

“People know Seattle’s not going in the right direction, and they don’t want this to spread to their communities. … I don’t believe that one insensitive item should take away a person’s reputation.”—King County Councilmember Kathy Lambert

In a statement after the vote, Balducci said Lambert’s “mailer and subsequent statements have undermined our ability to work with each other, our staff’s confidence in us as leaders, and our reputation and relationships with outside organizations and agencies. Based on those impacts, it was imperative that we take concrete action quickly.”

Before the vote, the council’s Employment and Administration Committee, which includes all nine council members, held a lengthy executive session to discuss a “Personnel Matter related to Council’s Policies and Procedures Against Harassment and Discrimination. Balducci confirmed in her statement that the council is considering an investigation into whether Lambert’s mailer violated the council’s anti-harassment policy.

Both the motion and the ordinance passed unanimously, but not before Lambert gave a self-pitying, unapologetic speech that minimized the harm the mailer had caused and accused her colleagues of ulterior motives.

The council’s decision to remove her from leadership roles, Lambert said, was “clearly not about race, but about political opportunity to damage my reelection campaign.” Calling the mailer merely “one lapse in judgment” in decades on the council, Lambert accused her colleagues of trying to push “Seattle-centric ideas” by empowering Zahilay to oversee health and human services as part of his committee.

“The people in this county are worried about public safety, crime and response times due to political decisions, people are smart. They see the data and the needs. People know Seattle’s not going in the right direction, and they don’t want this to spread to their communities.”

“I am not going to allow one poorly depicted picture to find who I am,” Lambert said. After the vote, she added, “I don’t believe, as I said earlier, that one insensitive item should take away a person’s reputation, and I hope that for everybody who’s in politics, that you do understand what’s going on.”

Of course, what happens to a politician’s reputation as the result of their own actions is largely out of their control; voters will decide in November whether to reelect a conservative Republican who opposes harm reduction, has floated conspiracy theories about “shredded ballots,” supports anti-choice “crisis pregnancy centers,” and has expressed anti-labor and pro-Trump views, and also sent out a racist mailer. Lambert was on her heels long before the latest controversy, for one simple reason: Her district is changing, as more people move to Issaquah and dilute the power of the white, conservative, rural areas that reliably vote for Republicans.

In late September, Lambert wrote a letter to the chair of the King County Districting Committee, which is in charge of redrawing the lines for county council districts every 10 years in response to demographic shifts, asking that the city of Issaquah be removed from her district, and that the commission shift her district’s boundaries to include more of the rural Sammamish Valley. She added that if the commission needed to move more voters out of her district, they could take some of Redmond as well. Continue reading “Lambert Removed from Leadership Roles After Racist Mailer; Tried to Get Issaquah Voters Removed from Her District” →

criminal justice, Elections, Health, homelessness, King County, Morning Fizz, Police

Lambert’s Colleagues Denounce Racist Mailer, Cops Debate Use of Projectile Launchers, and a Provider Recounts Street Sink Frustration

1. Six members of the King County Council—all Democrats—condemned Republican County Councilmember Kathy Lambert yesterday for a campaign mailing to some of East King County constituents that implied Lambert’s opponent, Sarah Perry, is being controlled by a shadowy cabal made up of Jews, socialists, and people of color.

The mailer showed three unrelated elected officials of color—Vice President Kamala Harris, Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant, and Lambert’s own colleague, King County Councilmember Girmay Zahilay—along with US. Sen. Bernie Sanders, looming above a Photoshopped image of Perry as a marionette, a classic anti-semitic trope. Harris, Sanders, and Sawant appear to be laughing while Zahilay pulls Perry’s strings.

The message to white Eastside voters is as clear as an “OK” hand sign: If you don’t reelect Lambert, brown, Black, and Jewish Democrats will take over the Eastside and impose their left-wing values on you and your family. But just in case the dog whistles were too subtle, the mailer is emblazoned: “SARAH WOULD BE A SOCIALIST PUPPET ON THE EASTSIDE PUSHING THEIR AGENDA. SARAH PERRY IS BACKED BY SEATTLE SOCIALIST LEADER GIRMAY ZAHILAY WHO WANTS TO DEFUND THE POLICE.” The flip side calls Perry an “ANTI-POLICE PUPPET.” 

Lambert is currently fighting for her political life in a diversifying East King County district where 60 percent of primary-election voters supported one of two Democrats over the 20-year Republican incumbent.

“Put simply, this is a racist piece of political mail. It has no place in any public or private discourse here in King County,” the six council members said. “Planning, authorizing and mailing a communication like this betrays ignorance at best, deep seated racism at worst. Regardless, it demonstrates disrespect for the fundamental duty that the residents of King County give to all of their elected representatives—the duty to respect and serve everyone who resides in King County, regardless of race or ethnicity.”
The council members—Zahilay, Claudia Balducci, Jeanne Kohl-Welles, Dave Upthegrove, Joe McDermott, and Rod Dembowski—demanded that Lambert apologize to Zahilay and Perry “for subjecting everyone, especially our friends, families and constituents of color, to this hurtful and painful communication.”
PubliCola first posted the full mailer on Twitter Wednesday morning.

“Although it’s led and orchestrated by the city, the city is not interested, really, in bringing anyone to help us… They’re looking for partners like nonprofit organizations that have direct access to water that would be able to make their water available. So it’s like—now you’re relying on us.”—David Sauvion, Rainier Beach Action Coalition

2. The Rainier Beach Action Coalition, which works to promote affordable housing and equitable development in Southeast Seattle, was one of many organizations that expressed an interest in setting up a street sink to help prevent the spread of communicable diseases, particularly among people experiencing homelessness.

But, according to RBAC Food Innovation District strategist David Sauvion, the organization decided against installing a sink after the city informed them that they would be wholly responsible for providing water to the location, making sure it was ADA compliant, and maintaining the sink, all without any direct support from the city.

“Although it’s led and orchestrated by the city, the city is not interested, really, in bringing anyone to help us… They’re looking for partners like nonprofit organizations that have direct access to water that would be able to make their water available. So it’s like—now you’re relying on us.”

Sauvion said RBAC wouldn’t have minded paying for the water; the problem was that RBAC wanted to install a sink where it would actually get some use, next to a bus stop on the southeast corner of South Henderson Street and MLK Way South, rather than directly in front of their office, which is in a house on a quiet corner across the street. “It’s just not a place where we see a lot of homeless people,” Sauvion said.

As for the city’s insistence that nonprofit groups should be willing to provide ongoing maintenance, including graywater disposal, without help from the city, Sauvion said, “why don’t we do that? Why don’t we just rely on everybody else to provide the services the city should be providing?”

The founders of the Street Sink project, Real Change, spoke to about 100 organizations about hosting a street sink. Of those, just nine met all of the city’s requirements, and only five told the city they were interested in moving forward. Since the Street Sink project started in May 2020, just one sink has been installed.

3. During Seattle’s Community Police Commission (CPC) meeting Wednesday, Mark Mullens—the sole police officer on the commission—revisited an ongoing point of tension between the Seattle Police Department’s command staff and its rank-and-file.

“Is it not true that the 40 millimeter launcher is banned?” he asked Interim SPD Chief Adrian Diaz, referring to a gun that fires large rubber projectiles as an alternative to live ammunition.

“That is not true,” replied Diaz, who was attending the meeting to answer questions from the commission. Continue reading “Lambert’s Colleagues Denounce Racist Mailer, Cops Debate Use of Projectile Launchers, and a Provider Recounts Street Sink Frustration” →