Here is what you need to know about King County Council's guy, Girmay Zahilay. 

First thing, when you say that sentence aloud, it rhymes. 

Second, on Monday, he formally announced his candidacy for King County Executive, running on a platform dedicated to serving King County’s working class families. Zahilay is the third candidate to enter the race to replace King County Executive Dow Constantine, following  Constantine’s mid-November announcement that he would not seek a fifth term. Currently, Zahilay’s opponents include his council colleague, King County Council Member Claudia Balducci, and King County Assessor John Wilson. 

While all three candidates have anchored their campaigns on issues of affordable housing and public safety, each has their own pet issue: Wilson emphasizes lower taxes, Balducci prioritizes transit, and Zahilay focuses on his commitment to supporting workers and labor rights in Seattle. Both Balducci and Zahilay support progressive tax revenue, with Zahilay saying he’d support a payroll tax in King County if the state Legislature ever grants the county the authority to impose one.

Out of the gate, Zahilay has secured the endorsements of not only Governor-Elect Bob Ferguson and Attorney General-Elect Nick Brown, but also Washington’s largest labor union—local United Food and Commercial Workers 3000. He credits their support to his accomplishments on the King County Council, including introducing legislation to increase the minimum wage in unincorporated King County, launching a guaranteed basic income pilot program, and proposing legislation to take on $1 billion in county debt to create workforce housing, though that idea is still in its initial planning phase. 

In an interview with The Stranger, Zahilay pointed to his upbringing to highlight his understanding of the challenges that face King County’s working class. Zahilay’s parents fled to Sudan from Ethiopia before Zahilay was born and later moved to the U.S. through a refugee resettlement program. Zahilay describes their early years in America as highly unstable. They lived in homeless shelters, with sponsors, but eventually found a home in Rainier Vista. Later, they moved to unincorporated King County, where Zahilay and his siblings experienced the struggles of living in an area that lacked the services typically provided by a city. With this experience in mind, he wants to ensure that people living on the outskirts of King County have access to the services they need to succeed and thrive.

A Trip Down MLK Way Memory Lane 

On the Friday before his campaign announcement, Zahilay took The Stranger to the location of the first house his family moved into after years of instability in South Seattle. Although the house no longer remains, he shared a photo of himself as a child, dressed in a Men in Black costume (suit, tie, sunglasses), standing in front of a wire fence lined with roses. Behind him was a single story blue house, with an impeccable green lawn. Zahilay reflected on how affordable public housing gave his family the foundation to rebuild their lives, but he holds mixed memories and feelings about the place.

His mother struggled to pay for even the subsidized housing, and had to work two jobs to stay afloat. After decades of hard work, Zahilay’s mother eventually busted her knees and became disabled, he said. Zahilay described the driving force behind his campaign as trying to help the people in King County who continue to be “stretched to their economic limits.”

Zahilay continued on his tour along Martin Luther King Jr. Way, pointing out the Rainier Vista Boys and Girls Club, which he says playing a pivotal role in his early upbringing. The club provided him with educational programming and structure he lacked at home. Mentors there offered him and his siblings meals, taught them how to play pool and basketball, and offered guidance. Without the club’s support, Zahilay says his life might have taken a vastly different path. Plenty of people who grew up in the same neighborhoods as him now deal with addiction or live on the streets, he says. Zahilay sees early investments in kids as a huge part of how we address public safety. 

When people talk to Zahilay about public safety issues, they often question his stance on investing more in diversion programs, he says, and focus more on prosecution. While he recognizes that accountability should be the focus in some cases, he tries to explain that for kids who grew up in circumstances similar to his, criminal legal consequences often have few deterrent effects—they’re almost an anticipated reality. Kids need to have an alternative, positive vision for their lives to escape a cycle of poverty and incarceration. 

Zahilay hopes a new Youth Achievement Center (YAC) he helped coordinate and launch can help with that. The center is intended to be a housing first and programming center for South Seattle youth, prioritizing those who are housing unstable and affected by the criminal legal system—whether it's because their parents dealing with incarceration, or their own involvement with the system. Many of the kids who end up in youth jail often struggle with trauma, face poverty, and fear returning to their neighborhoods due to potential gun violence. They need a place to go, Zahilay says. He partnered with Creative Justice, Africatown Community Land Trust, and Community Passageways to help first convince Sound Transit to donate the land for the center, and then for other donations and partners to help fund the center. In the end, the YAC would provide housing for 100 kids. 

Zahilay acknowledged that his vote earlier this to keep the King County youth jail open may have disappointed those who believe he'd backtracked on his 2019 promise to dismantle the jail. However, Zahilay said he’s responding to the needs of the people he represents. In 2019, people told him they suffered from overpolicing and over incarceration, which left their communities broken. Now, five years later, he says people tell him they want more police because they’re afraid of the gun violence in their neighborhoods. In the past, Zahilay argued that more police rarely prevent random acts of gun violence, though they may help in responding to gun violence. 

Zahilay’s position seems to be this: He wants diversion, he wants better conditions for kids in the youth jail, he wants community-led interventions for youth wrapped up in the criminal legal system, and he wants a diversified emergency response that includes police, social workers, mental health professionals, firefighters, and medics when needed. He also still wants upstream solutions. However, despite an early flirtation with abolition, he’s never fully embraced it. At this point, he views it as an untenable position to take with his constituents.

Hopping on the train

Next on his tour, Zahilay guided us to the Columbia City Station. While Zahilay hasn’t made transit a specific plank of his platform, he talked about his frustration with the train design in South Seattle. Along Martin Luther King Jr Way, the train runs at grade in the middle of a four lane street. The four mile stretch of line makes up 70% of all Sound Transit related collisions and more than 70% of the pedestrian deaths that have happened in connection with Sound Transit. And beyond the transit system, MLK Way and Rainier Avenue South remain two of the most dangerous roads in the city. 

Earlier this year, Zahilay proposed a piece of legislation to have Sound Transit study solutions of how to make these stations, and roads safer for people. He said while they came up with some short term fixes, such as painting the crossroads brighter, they failed to come up with long term ideas to try to make these streets more crossable. When he pushed them for longer term solutions, they said they’d study the feasibility of grade separation—meaning either raising the train up, putting it underground—or possibly reducing the number of lanes on MLK Way. 

Regardless of what ideas Sound Transit eventually comes up with, they’ll cost King County a pretty penny. Ultimately, the result of the study may require some tough questions from people in King County: Do you make a system longer and reach farther out, or do you make sure the core of the system is more reliable? He admitted to having no clear answer to this question, but he will argue that a more reliable, safer line in Rainier Valley is better for everyone.

Unincorporated King County

After Columbia City Station, Zahilay took us to New Holly, where he showed us a Safeway, which he called, “just a Safeway,” but he took a second to point out all the different races in the fairly empty store. While it was mostly just a gaggle of older Asian women checking out their groceries, he rightly noted that the neighborhood remains one of the most diverse in Seattle. 

From there, we hopped on the 106 bus, and Zahilay shared a story of his mom finally scraping together enough funds to buy a home in unincorporated Skyway. Our ride ended at the branch of the King County Library. Across the street, he pointed to a space that will soon hold a community center that he helped to get funded, something he said he wished he’d had as a kid in that neighborhood. (Zahilay mentioned that the county convinced US Bank to donate the land to them for the new building.)

Zahilay said in the communities he grew up in, he saw few people who actively participated in county government. Widening the scope of who participates in our political conversation is a big focus of his campaign, he said. People who are undocumented, low income, unhoused, or living in public housing projects, politicians often leave them out of the conversations. He expressed his commitment to reaching out to these groups, keeping them involved, and at the forefront of policymaking.

“I want to make people who were initially skeptical of me, for whatever reason, because I’m younger, or not born in this country, or because I took a vote they didn’t like, or they come from a different political party, feel like, you know what, Girmay, his administration and his team did something for me,” Zahilay said.

Editor’s note: A previous version of the subheadline said that labor loves Zahilay. While UFCW 3000, IBEW Local 46, UNITE HERE Local 8, and Teamsters Joint Council 28 endorsed Zahilay, he’ll still need to swing a couple more union endorsements before we can confirm that labor loves him.