Girmay Zahilay announces run for King County executive, says public safety is key issue

SEATTLE — King County Councilmember Girmay Zahilay is running for county executive and touting two key endorsements and labor support as he launches his campaign.

The 37-year-old has been touted as a rising star in Democratic party circles after he beat the legendary Larry Gossett for a Council seat in 2019, with a compelling back story as a child who grew up in south Seattle public housing, before graduating from Stanford and Penn Law.

His King County Council colleague Claudia Balducci and King County Assessor John Arthur Wilson have already announced they too will seek the seat to be vacated by Dow Constantine in 2025 and have filed as such with the state’s Public Disclosure Commission.

Zahilay appears to have been gathering support for a run for months, with Governor-elect Bob Ferguson and Attorney General-elect Nick Brown both featured prominently on his website’s list of endorsements. Several unions have also signed off on his campaign, including UFCW 3000, Teamsters Joint Council 28, IBEW Local 46 and Unite Here Local 8.

Zahilay acknowledged that the key issue would be restoring public safety and talked at length about it in a sit-down interview with KOMO News, his first TV interview of his new campaign. Zahilay has been the chair of both the Law and Justice and Budget committees at the County Council. He also supported shutting down the youth jail but has now voted to keep it open after public concerns.

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When asked about shutting down the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, Zahilay said, “I would not shut it down. I continue to think that we need a strong regional response to this regional problem. When I just hear you want to repeal the entity without saying what you would replace it with, that tells me that you want to go backwards to where we were before this entity was formed, which is lots of different cities, lots of different agencies doing their own thing, many different contracts for the same provider, and a fragmented system where people are falling through the cracks. I continue to think that we need a centralized location for our homelessness response.”

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Zahilay was also pressed about changing his position on the youth jail.

“I wanted to make sure that what we were doing was effective, and what I advocated for is saying that we close that jail and open smaller secure facilities all around the county,” Zahilay told KOMO News about changing his position on the youth jail. “I still think that the status quo is unacceptable. I go and talk to those young people in that confinement, they tell me they leave there feeling dizzy and disoriented and unable to manage their emotions, and that's probably why we see such a high rate of recidivism when it comes to young people impacted by our criminal justice system. At the same time, we have to acknowledge that we cannot have a system without a secure building. We absolutely need secure buildings, and so what I'm advocating now is to make sure that we have secure buildings, but also, let's transform what happens within those secure buildings. Let's make it more transformative. Let's make it more therapeutic. Let's make it more integrated with community-based services.”

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Zahilay also speaks in broad terms about a reliable first responder system and the infusion of money coming from the Crisis Care Center levy, which he claims will help dramatically expand mobile crisis response teams.

When asked how he would be different than Constantine, Zahilay responded, “These issues are personal for me. I have a personal stake in this. I understand the issues better, and that means I'm going to have a requirement and a demand of outcomes because it's life and death for me and my community. What people would see for me is move away from any kind of performative gestures, or, equity and social justice movements that tell people what words they can use in conference rooms, and instead boots on the ground.”