Tag: King County Executive

King County

Meeting to Consider County Executive Appointment Canceled, Leaving Shannon Braddock In Limbo at Least Two More Weeks
Acting King County Executive Shannon Braddock

By Erica C. Barnett

Shannon Braddock, the acting King County Executive, will have to wait at least another two weeks to find out if the County Council plans to appoint her to the position through November, after Council Chair Girmay Zahilay canceled the council’s scheduled Tuesday meeting. The council appointed Braddock acting executive on April 1.

Zahilay said he made the decision out of respect for Councilmember Sarah Perry, whose husband, state Sen. Bill Ramos, died suddenly during a trail run on Saturday.

“Lots of our colleagues reached out saying they thought it would better for us to not meet on Tuesday, given that our colleague on the council has experienced such a sudden and tragic loss,” Zahilay told PubliCola. Zahilay said council staff told him there was no “time-sensitive legislative action” on the agenda.

In addition to legislation appointing Braddock (and a competing proposal from Reagan Dunn to initiate a process that could potentially end up appointing someone else), the agenda included an item appointing Braddock to the Sound Transit board, which is currently considering the future of light rail extensions to Ballard and West Seattle. The agenda also included a proclamation declaring April Sexual Assault Awareness Month, and the introduction of this year’s Medic One Levy proposal.

“I think this is one of those situations where our desire to address the human side of this job come into play,” he said. Rod Dembowski, the head of the council’s budget committee, also canceled a meeting on Tuesday.

Zahilay is one of two county council members who’s running for County Executive.

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The other is Claudia Balducci, who—after consulting with Perry’s office—decided not to cancel tomorrow’s meeting of the council’s Committee of the Whole. The agenda for that meeting includes several briefings about the local impact of federal funding cuts and a letter, sponsored by Balducci, supporting a state proposal to raise the cap on property tax increases—currently set at a sub-inflationary 1 percent—to 3 percent, which would allow local governments to raise more funds.

Balducci called the federal funding cuts a “rapidly developing risk to county government and services. We meet regularly once a month and by next month, the info we are being briefed on may have changed dramatically,” she said, so “it seemed important to me to proceed.”

“There are no scheduled major votes, so Sarah won’t miss an opportunity to vote,” Balducci added.

The council will take up Braddock’s appointment again on May 6, along with a counterproposal from Councilmember Reagan Dunn that would set up a “blue ribbon selection committee” to choose a finalist and an alternate for the position from a list of five people Constantine previously designated as potential successors.

The proposal is a long shot—Zahilay said he thinks Braddock has the votes—but it’s an example of the obstacles facing Braddock, who’s the first woman to ever serve as King County Executive.

“I absolutely understand and support” the decision to delay the meeting out of respect for Perry and her family, Braddock told PubliCola. “I’m eager to serve on the Sound Transit Board and I’m closely tracking the upcoming actions and will be prepared once the appointment occurs.”

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” →

Elections, King County

PubliCola Questions: King County Executive Candidate Claudia Balducci

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.

Continue reading “PubliCola Questions: King County Executive Candidate Claudia Balducci” →