Candidates to lead King County talk taxes, audits, homelessness, and mental health

The King County executive oversees the sheriff’s department, manages public health, transportation, public housing, and jails. According to the King County website, the executive leads one of the largest regional governments in the United States. And, for the first time in 16 years, there isn’t an incumbent on the ballot.

Two county leaders are vying for the job. Soundside’s Libby Denkmann hosted the two candidates — Claudia Balducci and Girmay Zahilay — for a debate at the KUOW studios.

Claudia Balducci is a member of the King County Council. She represents District 6, which includes Bellevue, Mercer Island, and Redmond. She is an attorney who previously served as mayor of Bellevue, a Bellevue City Council member, and director of the Department of Adult and Juvenile Detention for King County.

Girmay Zahilay is chair of the King County Council, representing District 2, which includes Skyway, Allentown, and the University District. He’s also an attorney and founded the nonprofit Rising Leaders, which offers mentorship and leadership training for middle school students.

What is the defining characteristic of your campaign to be the next King County executive?

Zahilay: My campaign is built around collective action.

King County is going to have to work with Washington state to solve some of our most intractable challenges. Our coalition includes the governor, the attorney general, and more state-level elected officials than any other candidate.

If King County is going to have to work with our federal delegation to protect our region from the federal government, our coalition includes both Pramila Jayapal and Adam Smith.

If we have to work with the King County Council on issues regarding the budget, I'm the only candidate endorsed by any current or former council members.

If we're looking to work with frontline communities who are impacted by the issues that we're seeing on a scale at a national level, whether that is immigrant rights or the assault on reproductive health care or the assault on workers, we have the support of Planned Parenthood Alliance Advocates, Pro-Choice Washington, One America, and MLK Labor.

Fundamentally, my campaign is not about me, it's about us and our ability to work together to solve problems.

Balducci: You're going to hear a lot of promises on the campaign trail about a lot of big challenges. I bring a record of experience and the ability to deliver results. If I'm known for anything, it's fighting and winning the battle of light rail in East King County. That was coalition building, that was politics, that was law, that was getting things passed at the ballot, engineering, delivery, finance, and doing it all with a lot of partners. You can ride it today. I was on that from concept to opening. I had to push the agency to open the starter line in East King County. They wouldn't have done that without my encouragement. I helped — with a coalition — to form the first-ever homeless shelters, permanent supportive housing, and a lot of affordable housing in East King County.

Washington state has a cap on property tax hikes, which means the county can only raise them by 1% per year. Any additional increase requires voter approval. Would you support raising the property tax cap in order to bring in more funding for the county or do you have any alternative proposals for addressing budget shortfalls?

Balducci: That property tax cap has held our spending down below the level of inflation for a very long time, and has been the top legislative priority of this council for many years. So we're [Zahilay and Balducci] both signed off on it. We really need more flexibility there.

However, the county is largely funded by the two most regressive types of tax: sales tax and property tax. We're constantly raising those regressive taxes. I am 100% on board with working with the Legislature. Over 100 local and state elected officials have endorsed my candidacy.

We need to work on a plan that makes our taxation more progressive. I'm agnostic as to which type of tax works and can build enough support to implement it. We're going to have to build public trust to believe that it doesn't mean we just keep raising property and sales taxes. There has to be a trade off. We've got to get our own house in order and be able to show the public that we are making good use of their money, so that they can trust us with more of it.

Zahilay: Yes, I would advocate for lifting that 1% cap while also making sure that we are more effective and efficient with our dollars.

In my view, if you were to rank the 50 states in the United States based on how equitable their tax code is, we would be number 49 out of 50, which means we have a very upside-down tax code, where we fund our governments primarily based on property taxes, sales taxes, and fees. That disproportionately impacts middle-income and low-income people. Whatever we can do to advocate for tax reform would be my top priority, to make sure that we have more progressive options so that we can offset some of these regressive options that continue to burden our working-class families and people.

A recent audit found that King County's Department of Community and Health Services (DCHS) did not properly oversee the recipients of its grants. This resulted in possible fraud and unapproved payments. These were mostly grants related to services for youth, including diversion from the criminal legal system. What will you do differently as a result of what you learned from the audit?

RELATED: King County officials call for accountability following 'damning' audit of community, family services

Zahilay: The results of that audit were unacceptable. As a government, we have a paramount duty of protecting taxpayer dollars, and in that instance, we clearly saw that taxpayer dollars were not being protected. We need stronger financial controls. We need more accountability, we need more oversight, and we also need to be fair to the people who work at DCHS who do this hard work of distributing resources, because a lot of the issues were policy decisions.

I released a plan called King County Delivers, which is a plan exclusively dedicated to government accountability, efficiency, and transparency because that would be a central theme of my administration. I have supported Councilmember [Reagan] Dunn's legislation to strengthen oversight and accountability, and even included some additional amendments. Through this budget season, whether I'm elected King County executive or not, I will be fighting for things like an Office of Internal Audit so that we can proactively audit all of our departments to make sure money is being used wisely. I'm calling for proactive quarterly reports so that we can show [taxpayers] what their money was spent on and what were the outcomes. We should be celebrating at the point of outcomes, not at the point of spending.

Balducci: This audit covered 36 contracts out of almost 600 contracts in this particular human services bucket. We do not yet know the extent of the problem, so we are not in a position to promise or scale up solutions that will work yet.

Job one of the next executive has to be a full audit of all of the contracts and this was something that I proposed. It has not yet gotten traction, and I will continue to push for it, because I don't know how we solve a problem we don't fully understand yet. The second thing I will say is I was very proud to be praised by The Seattle Times, for calling for action immediately. Because that was not happening when this audit first hit. We cannot achieve our goals unless we are transparent and accountable to the public. We have to be willing to own it and to really lean into action, not just words.

King County's Department of Community and Health Services is overseeing five new 24/7 crisis care centers, the 988 response line, and the mobile crisis responders. What would you change about how the county is approaching mental health and addiction services?

Balducci: The crisis-care centers are a really wonderful innovation that is filling a need for people who are on the streets and need help. I'm very proud [to be part of] a coalition of East Side and North End cities who helped to fund [the centers], initially. We still have to deliver and the speed of delivery is a problem with King County, something the next executive has got to fix. There's a piece missing to speak about the system. When [people] are unable to manage their behavior or their crisis, we have the jail and we have Harborview [Medical Center]. I've been proposing — and as executive will pursue — a third place where you can get clean, you can get connected with housing or whatever you need to stabilize so that we can help move people who are chronically on the streets out of that revolving door. When I was the director of the county jail system, this [sharing information between services] was a huge issue, because we deal with a lot of medical records and mental health records. We need to fix that gap so that people are warmly handed off and always being served regardless of where they are in their transition.

Zahilay: We hosted one of my first policy town halls, called “breaking the cycle,” and we talked about breaking the cycle of addiction, homelessness, crime, incarceration. I brought together some of the experts on the ground who see what the issues are. They told us that there is a need for more permanent supportive housing, more health care and more mental health services. All of these assets need to be talking to each other more. We need to close the gap so that when somebody leaves jail, they're not just discharged. We know that the vast majority of people who we call “repeat offenders” have overlapping substance use disorder and mental health issues. There needs to be a warm handoff.

In 2020, former County Executive Dow Constantine, pledged to close King County's Youth Detention Center by 2025. That date was later pushed back to 2028. Last year, the King County Council voted to maintain the Youth Detention Center indefinitely. Councilmember Zahilay originally ran for County Council with a promise of ending youth detention. Last year, he voted in favor of maintaining the Detention Center. Can you talk about why your position changed? Would you end youth detention if you became King County executive?

Zahilay: We have two important goals on this topic: to keep our community safe and make sure that we set our youth up to succeed.

In 2019, I advocated for moving away from this big, centralized secure facility and opening smaller, decentralized secure facilities. I think some people misinterpret that to mean that I was against secure buildings. That has never been my position.

When we had the opportunity last year to clarify that position, I seized it. We still need a secure building and we need to reform what happens inside. I do not want a youth jail that is just a baby version of an adult jail. We need to make it more therapeutic, educational, and integrated with community services. I think we can do that with the existing building that we have now.

In 2024, the county announced a plan to end youth detention by replacing the detention center with a receiving center and group homes. Councilmember Balducci said at the time that, “We ended up with recommendations that are actionable and implementable and likely to work.” Why do you think those recommendations ultimately were not a solution for replacing the Youth Detention Center?

Balducci: I have served as the director of the Department of Adult and Juvenile Detention. My belief is that jails, like law enforcement, like courts, are all necessary infrastructure that we need in order to have a safe community when crime is happening, when people are harmed, when there's violence. But that is not how we get to a healthy community.

You get to a healthy community by investing upfront, by investing in young people and education and jobs and the things that make people successful and remove desperation. We built in the incentive to make it smaller, and I believe that that is what we should do.

Zahilay: I want to reiterate that I agree that the biggest investments have to be upstream before young people come into contact with our criminal justice system. As somebody who grew up in South Seattle public housing, I've seen the many checkpoints for intervention in a young person's life that could have redirected them to a healthier path, whether that's more after-school activities or more job opportunities or more mental-health services or family reunification programs after a young person leaves their home. Those are all things we need to invest in.

Balducci: I have observed that my colleague did run for office on closing down the juvenile detention facility and redirecting funding from police. However you feel about where those policies or the politics were at at that time, he has changed tremendously.

I heard him say, “I just held my first town hall with some experts.” My colleague is in learning mode. I am in performing mode. I have been performing for over two decades. I do not need to learn on the job, and this is a big job to be learning on the job.

How would you evaluate the effectiveness of the King County Regional Homeless Authority, and would you change anything?

Zahilay: If we don't have enough roofs on a supply side issue, that entity is never going to be successful. We have to continue to work to scale up all of those options. At the same time, we can't go out and ask the public and our regional partners to scale up those resources if they've lost trust in this agency. We need to proactively audit the entity to show that every dollar spent is resulting in a measurable outcome like more people leaving the street and getting the services they need and into stable housing. Those are the types of outcomes we need to look at.

It's not going to be successful if our regional partners, private sector, nonprofit sector, and the public are feeling like all they see is chaos and more HR issues. We need a regional response. We need to go on a countywide tour and make sure that all of our stakeholders have had their say on what needs to be involved to make this a success.

Balducci: I believe that this is one of the top issues the next executive has got to do something about. I am proud to have spearheaded a regional effort that created lots of homeless shelters, permanent supportive housing, and services in East King County, where there was none before I became mayor [of Bellevue].

Regionalism is the right approach, but we need to have agreement on the same goals, how to get to them, and accountability on getting there. We haven't had any of those things. When I was the chair of the County Council and one of our first board members for KCRHA stepped off, I assigned myself.

I am not sure if this agency as constructed can deliver. I don't blame the people there. I blame the fact that we spun it up very fast and we said, “Deliver,” as opposed to being thoughtful and deliberative and setting that agency up for success.

I want to take the experience I have of succeeding in another part of the county, and build on those partnerships and success to make KCRHA what it should be.

Lightning Round Questions

How is Sound Transit doing on a scale of one to 10?

Balducci: Ten on getting across the I-90 bridge. I would say we are doing a three on long-term financing for the rest of the program.

Zahilay: Six because they are delivering a lot of very popular services.

Do you support low-barrier supportive housing?

Balducci: Yes

Zahilay: Yes

Does the King County Sheriff's Office currently receive sufficient funding?

Balducci: No

Zahilay: Yes

The Seattle Mariners are headed into the playoffs. Reportedly, a fan hired an Etsy witch to help break the late season slump. What is one local curse that you would like to fix with a spell all of the Etsy witch?

Balducci: I actually helped the Mets win the World Series in 1986 by burning a series of articles about the Boston Red Sox. So, been there, done that.

Zahilay: The Curse of the Sonics leaving. I want to break that. Bring back the Sonics.

Will the light rail across I-90 make Bellevue cool?

Zahilay: Yes, and shout out to my colleague [Balducci] for all her hard work and making it happen.

Balucci: As a former mayor of Bellevue I cannot concede that Bellevue is not cool, but the light rail is going to make it so much cooler.