King County's New Leader Makes Big Changes

From his office window in downtown Seattle, King County Executive Girmay Zahilay can see a building that housed a homeless shelter where he once lived. His family came to Seattle fleeing war in Ethiopia; Zahilay was born in a refugee camp in Sudan.

His life trajectory took him from extreme hardship to a Stanford degree, law school and a career focused on helping others rise above their troubles.

In 2024, after five years on the King County Council, Zahilay prevailed in a special election called when Dow Constantine — King County executive since 2009 — announced he was leaving the job. (Constantine is now the CEO of Sound Transit.) At 38, Zahilay is the youngest person to serve in this position.

King County is home to 2.4 million, higher than the population of 15 U.S. states. It’s one of three counties within the Seattle metropolitan area, and home to more than half of its residents. The county is the nation's biggest hub of aerospace activity, with more than 400 aerospace companies employing a workforce of 45,000. It has both income above the national median and a large homeless population of more than 40,000.

About 18,000 people work for the county, 170 or so in the office of the executive. After his swearing-in, Zahilay's team announced a restructure of the executive office, which came as a “seismic shock” to some longtime staffers, even sprouting rumors he had “fired everyone.” In the end, Zahilay says, it was mostly a matter of moving people to different jobs.

In a conversation with Governing, Zahilay sets the record straight and offers insight into the ways his life experience has prepared him to meet the challenges of a troubled urban community. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How do you think the “fired everyone” narrative got started?

A couple of outlets reported it that way. In King County we're not used to administration changes. In Seattle they haven't had a two-term mayor in what seems like a couple of decades, but in King County we've had the same executive for 16 years.

I restructured the executive office and am bringing in my people. In some corners that has been narrated as some kind of layoff situation, but it's just a new administration.

In large part, in terms of the prior administration's staff and structures, we moved people from the executive office to other departments to bring those functions closer to operations. For example, we had an office of climate and something like 26 people were moved to our department of natural sources to bring them closer to operations and not the executive office. [All told, about xx workers were replaced or had positions eliminated.]

Why did you think you needed to restructure your office?

I want my office to reflect the priorities that I ran on. They all start with “b’s”: breaking the cycle of addiction and homelessness and violence and trauma and incarceration; building for affordability, building the infrastructure and economy that we need for our growing population; putting more boots on the ground, meaning being more present in the community; and finally, better government — more transparency, more accountability, more efficiency.

The last administration had one external relations position. We are going to have 15 people in that office, to really push us out into the community. We're going to have a chief performance officer with an internal audit function which did not exist in the last administration. We're going to hold ourselves accountable to performance metrics.
What led you to a career in government?

I always knew I wanted to do public service because of the life I lived — growing up experiencing poverty, experiencing homelessness, seeing more and more people work harder and harder every day, and being able to afford less and less.

My first job after college was at an anti-poverty, anti-hunger program. Then I went to law school with that belief that I was going to go into something related to public service.

I ended up doing corporate law, which was a great way to pay off my school loans and make good relationships in the legal world. But during law school I got to do an internship at the office of the White House Counsel. I saw the Obama administration up close and how they were able to translate grassroots energy into big federal legislation like the Affordable Care Act. That was really inspiring, and it was the first time I thought about public office as a subset of public service.

When I came back to my hometown of Seattle in 2017, I was able to get involved locally, volunteer on some campaigns and ultimately launch my campaign for the King County Council in 2019.

You’ve lived through some of the big problems that affect urban communities. How does that inform your approach to your job?

It gives me an urgency to solve problems. I don't want us focusing on performative or symbolic gestures. I know the power of government to put roofs over people's heads, to increase service hours of buses so people can get to where they need to go, to put more public safety strategies out into our streets. Those are all things that I know we're capable of, and we need to continually hold ourselves accountable.

When I look outside my executive office window, I can see the homeless shelter that my family stayed in when I was a child. It's become a hostel, but back then it was a shelter run by the Union Gospel Mission.

Being able to look outside and see that every day absolutely grounds me in the possibilities of what government can do and should be doing in terms of keeping people housed, making sure that everybody has the opportunity to be safe and excel and find a good job and provide for their families.

You’re the youngest person to have this job. Does that affect how you approach it?

I don’t know that it’s my age, but I think that it’s that I’m relatively new to the political scene. That newness allows me to try new things and take the hits that come with trying something new.

These restructures to our executive office are already producing. People feel us out in the community more, they see the policy agenda that we are advancing with urgency, not taking anything for granted, not just rolling things over that have been done by past administrations but saying that we’re really going to have a reset. 

Do you have priorities within the four "b’s"?

For many years, King County has been one of the leading population growth centers in the nation, if not No. 1. Our infrastructure hasn't kept up and that has led to a supply and demand issue, which has resulted in a really unaffordable cost of living here and a homelessness crisis.

We are also No. 1 in the country in terms of unsheltered homelessness per capita. We have to do everything we can to put roofs over people's heads with emergency housing, housing that can be stood up very quickly, and colocate that housing with essential behavioral health services. We need to make sure all the systems that have a role in getting somebody back on their feet are integrated, so that we have a strong continuum of care and nobody is getting pushed out of one part of the system.

One big example is that King County operates the jails. We cannot have a situation where people with all these overlapping issues come into our jail and are discharged without a plan, without the support that they need to get back on their feet.

Those are the two very top issues. To address them effectively, we have to be more customer service oriented and more visible and out in the community. That's the boots on the ground. We have to be more accountable. We have to be performance oriented. We have to track our metrics. We have to make sure that every single dollar is being used to its maximum capacity.