In an announcement that echoed Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson’s proposal to add 500 new shelter units by this summer, King County Executive Girmay Zahilay said Tuesday that he’s launching a new plan to add 500 units of “shelter and housing” in the next 500 days, or by mid-August 2027, and will convene a work group to discuss a potential countywide housing levy. Some of the new shelter or housing could be on county-owned land, similar to the strategy Wilson is using to cut down on the cost of new tiny house villages in Seattle.
Other elements of the “Breaking the Cycle” plan include improving performance metrics, reducing regulatory barriers, and better data collection and distribution.
“We want to know where are people falling through the cracks, where are services not connecting, and which programs are actually helping people stabilize,” Zahilay said at a press event Tuesday morning. “And then we’re going to use that information to make better decisions about how we invest public dollars by shifting resources to more programs that are delivering results.”
The overall plan, which Zahilay is calling “Breaking the Cycle,” consists largely of work groups that will report on ways to improve the responsiveness and effectiveness of existing county programs. Three months into his term, Zahilay is laying out a process, not presenting a finalized policy agenda or proposing legislation.
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But the two marquee elements of Zahilay’s announcement—the 500-bed commitment and the potential housing levy—do raise questions whose answers will determine the success of his plan. Will housing units (and shelter beds) that are already in the pipeline count toward the 500-unit goal, as the Urbanist suggested? How many will be housing, and how many will be shelter? Both these issues came up when former mayor Bruce Harrell promised to add 2,000 “units” of shelter or housing over four years, declaring victory even when the city ended up with less shelter overall, and claiming credit for projects that were begun under his predecessor’s turn. Zahilay’s proposal is, pointedly, for “net” new neds or units, so presumably he’s eager to avoid a “mission accomplished”-style Pyrrhic victory.
During an onstage conversation with Wilson and Housing Development Consortium director Patience Malaba at the HDC’s annual fundraising luncheon on Tuesday, Zahilay noted that the county has to rely on two main revenue sources: Sales and property taxes. (In 2024, Zahilay—then a King County Councilmember—proposed spending $1 billion of the county’s debt capacity on bonds to pay for workforce housing; that plan has not come to fruition).
“We do have to take a hard look at weighing those tradeoffs” between higher taxes and more housing, Zahilay said. “Of course, we need more revenue to fund critical services, especially to our most vulnerable neighbors—and we need to be careful about what kind of impact that has on cost of living.”
King County’s beautiful Brutalist Administration Building, closed since the pandemic. Photo by Another Believer, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
1. The city of Seattle finalized a settlement last week with Seattle police officer Denise “Cookie” Bouldin, a longtime officer who sued the department in 2023, alleging gender and racial discrimination. Bouldin will receive $750,000 in an agreement that also requires her not to sue the city again over the same claims.
SPD has settled a number of discrimination lawsuits in recent years, for amounts ranging from around $200,000 (paid to SPD sergeant John O’Neil, who was himself the subject of multiple discrimination complaints) to $3 million (paid to police captain Deanna Nollette, who claimed former chief Adrian Diaz discriminated and retaliated against her by demoting her and moving her to overnight duty after she alleged discrimination.
Bouldin, best known for her chess club for students in Rainier Beach, claimed in her lawsuit that her fellow officers and SPD officials subjected her to “race and gender discrimination on a daily basis that had “been ongoing and continuous throughout her entire career.” Among other allegations, Bouldin said SPD staff refused to give her a parking pass, mishandled her personal property, and retaliated against her when she complained about officers who allowed their dogs to “roam around” SPD’s south precinct.
The size of the settlement is unclear. Bouldin’s attorneys did not respond to a request for comment.
The City Attorney’s office would not say how much the settlement was for. In the initial tort claim that preceded the lawsuit, Bouldin sought $10 million from the city, according to media reports.
In a statement, City Attorney Erika Evans said Bouldin “is a pioneer at the Seattle Police Department who has been a beloved and deeply trusted presence in our community for decades. The City is thankful this case was able to resolve.”
2. The city council is poised to consider legislation that would make it easier for the city to site and build tiny house villages, but the three bills—sent down by Mayor Katie Wilson without prior conversation with council members or staff—will likely face scrutiny.
Two of the proposals—one that would provide about $5 million in funding for future tiny house villages, and another that would allow the city itself to lease and prepare land for shelters—do not have committee assignments yet. The other, which would increase the maximum size of tiny house villages from 100 people to as many as 250, is sponsored by Councilmember Dionne Foster and will be heard in Councilmember Eddie Lin’s land use committee.
It isn’t the cost of the proposal itself that’s currently raising eyebrows on the council: Most of the funding would come out of this year’s budget, which already includes money for shelter that can be used to build out the first set of 500 beds Wilson wants to add before the World Cup games in June.
Instead, councilmembers are raising questions about the size of the potential shelters (there’s a big difference between 25 to 50 tiny house units and hundreds), the fact that Wilson seems committed to tiny houses, specifically (Jon Grant, her chief homelessness advisor, worked at the city’s main tiny house village provider, the Low Income Housing Institute, immediately before joining Wilson’s office), and the level of services the new shelters will be able to provide for an average cost of $28,000, which is less than existing shelters that provide 24/7 on-site staff and wraparound support for chronically homeless people.
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Behind the scenes, councilmembers have grumbled that Wilson didn’t work with them before dropping her legislation in an announcement that only Rob Saka, whose district includes SoDo and other areas with a large number of unsanctioned encampments and RVs, attended.
3. By June, most King County employees will be required to work from physical offices three days a week, and many employees are pushing back. (Seattle also has varyingin-office mandates that we’ve coveredextensively.) Editor’s note: This sentence has been corrected to reflect that June, not March 30, is the general deadline for Return To Office. According to the county executive’s office, different departments are implementing the new mandate on different timelines.
In a recent internal newsletter, King County Executive Girmay Zahilay expressed his “commitment to building a Better Government includes listening to staff and empowering you to identify challenges and bring forward solutions” [emphasis in original]. Some county employees, taking him at his word, used the newsletter as a forum to express their frustration with the mandate.
King County covers more than 2,100 square miles, and many King County staffers do not live in or near Seattle, where the county’s central office space is located. Several noted that their jobs require them to go to far-flung locations; forcing them to commute to an office downtown will mean sitting in a cubicle and attending meetings remotely instead, they argued.
A number of staffers said the return-to-office mandate takes away valuable family and leisure time, contributes to stress and demoralization, and costs real money. “As a blanket and rigid policy, it disproportionately harms parents and caregivers who must secure new, costly childcare to cover mandated office days,” one staffer wrote. “It places the greatest strain on lower-wage workers and especially single working parents. The mandate forces parents to spend less time with their children, so they can sit in a cubicle alone with a headset, taking the same Teams calls they would at home. It forces employees to budget for new expenses (childcare, gas, parking, etc.) in a burgeoning recession when gas, groceries, and utility prices are on the rise.”
“Many staff moved to more affordable housing when positions were fully remote. That is how many of us are surviving,” another staffer wrote. “The long-term effects of this lowered productivity will negatively impact the work we do and the providers we support.”
Several staffers raised concerns about crowding in the county’s downtown office spaces, including King Street Center and the Chinook Building. The county scaled back on office space during the pandemic, and is now scrambling to find places for workers to sit. One staffer from the Department of Public Defense said staffers will now be forced to conduct client interviews from offices where three desks have been crammed into spaces built for one, compromising confidentiality in the name of “boots on the ground” and office camaraderie.
Asked about the employees’ concerns, Zahilay spokeswoman Callie Craighead said the executive wasn’t taking a “one-size-fits-all approach” and has, for example, allowed employees to meet their return-to-office requirements by working from county offices outside downtown Seattle. “Departments are currently developing plans to meet the three-day in-office expectation while continuing to preserve telework flexibility where possible,” Craighead said. “This includes coordinating in-office schedules and using existing space creatively.”
Responding to concerns about new expenses and the need for work-life balance, Craighead said, “The Executive recognizes that employees are balancing many considerations, including commute times and family responsibilities. As the father of a newborn and a toddler, he understands firsthand how important flexibility is for working families. His goal is to strike a thoughtful balance between maintaining the flexibility we value and strengthening in-person collaboration so the County can continue delivering strong results for residents.”
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.
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”→
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.”
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.
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.”
By Erica C. Barnett
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.
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?'”