The King County Council was sworn in on Jan. 8, with three familiar faces and one new face.<\/p>\n
Councilmembers Jeanne Kohl-Welles (District 4), Claudia Balducci (District 6) and Joe McDermott (District 8) were all re-elected in November’s general election. Newcomer Girmay Zahilay (District 2) beat out longtime county council member Larry Gossett and was sworn in with the returning members.<\/p>\n
Throughout his campaign in multiple media interviews, Zahilay refrained from criticizing Gossett’s work and tenure on the council. He followed suit during a brief speech on Wednesday.<\/p>\n
“He is somebody who I look up to and who I have a lot to learn from, and his work is not done,” Zahilay said. “I’m excited to partner with him.”<\/p>\n
Balducci was chosen as the council chair, with fellow members Reagan Dunn and McDermott being selected as vice chairs. Previously, council member Rod Dembowski served as chair.<\/p>\n
Committee leadership was also decided. McDermott will head the Committee of the Whole; Kohl-Welles will head Budget and Fiscal Management; Kathy Lambert will chair Community, Health and Housing Services as well as the Regional Water Quality committee; Pete von Reichbauer will head the Government Accountability and Oversight committee as well as the Regional Policy Committee; Zahilay will lead the Law and Justice committee; Dunn will lead Local Services; Dembowski will head the Mobility and Environment committee; and Dave Upthegrove will lead the Regional Transit Committee.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The King County Council was sworn in on Jan. 8, with three familiar faces and one new face.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":463,"featured_media":43850,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,4,24],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-43849","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-home2","category-news","category-northwest"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43849"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/463"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43849"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43849\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/43850"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43849"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43849"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43849"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=43849"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}