It’s a chilly mid-March evening in 2024 and King County Councilmember Claudia Balducci is sitting at a dinner table in a large house a stone’s throw from South Bellevue Station, the southernmost light rail stop on the initial version of the 2 Line. But instead of a meal, the table has laptops and planning documents, and unlike most dinners, it was officially noticed as a public meeting of the Beaux Arts Village town council, a tiny 315-person jurisdiction tucked into Southeast Bellevue.
Balducci is at the meeting to give town councilmembers an update on the policy areas she’s working on, and take questions. Briskly running through a list of topics, Balducci gives updates on public safety, housing, and transit. When she gets to traffic safety — an issue area that she has treated as a priority going back to her days on the Bellevue City Council, where she served from 2004 to 2015 — she references the narrow streets outside that run through Beaux Arts Village, giving the former artist’s colony its cozy, tree-lined feel.
Noting the design of the streets themselves encourages slower speeds, Balducci connects their design to systemic solutions that will help to reduce serious traffic crashes, and then just as quickly, moves on to the next topic.
The moment illustrated something that becomes clear after even a small amount of time observing Claudia Balducci at work — a combination of wonkishness, dedication, and attention to detail that she carries across all of the subject areas her work on the County Council touches. Now Balducci is hoping to carry that work into the County Executive’s office, running to become the first Eastside resident elected to lead Washington’s largest county in an office that’s been filled by Dow Constantine since 2009. Constantine announced he was not running for reelection last month.
In a field that’s already becoming crowded well ahead of next August’s primary election, with King County Assessor John Wilson and fellow County Councilmember Girmay Zahilay also announcing runs, Balducci is making the case for herself as someone who has been able to get things done during her years in elected office.
In the weeds on housing and transportation policy
If there’s been a countywide transit or housing initiative over the last decade, chances are Balducci has had a hand in it. A member of the Sound Transit Board of Directors since 2010, she has shepherded light rail on the Eastside from the planning stage, through alignment debates and lawsuits, all the way to the opening of the 2 Line earlier this year.
While Balducci is no stranger to a flashy ribbon cutting on a new rapid transit line, most of the policy work around transportation and housing that she’s been directly in the middle of over the past decade or so has been much less high-profile.
As president of the Puget Sound Regional Council in 2021 and 2022, she pushed the four-county planning body for central Puget Sound to adopt a regional transportation plan that centers traffic safety, equity, and climate work, a move that is leading to a regional safety plan being created now. Since then, she’s pushed for the network of departments within King County government all working on transportation to adopt a shared “Safe Systems” strategy to reduce deadly crashes.
“I’ve been in this business for a while, and it is really easy to think in terms of election to election to election, and elected officials, if we’re lucky, we have four-year terms. If we’re not lucky, we have two-year terms,” Balducci said in a recent interview with The Urbanist. “And it’s really easy to think about, what do I put on the checklist to prove that I’ve been making a difference now. It leads to short-term and very sort of program-specific thinking. ‘I did this thing, I did this new program,’ when we need to be thinking about systems and how our systems work better together to deliver better results.”
As the first chair of the King County Affordable Housing Committee, an offshoot of the county’s Growth Management Planning Council, Balducci helped to lead an unprecedented review of draft Comprehensive Plans, ensuring that the plans created by local cities and plans are aligned with countywide policies intended to foster equitable access to affordable housing. The letter that the committee wrote about Seattle’s draft plan helped push the city to open up additional areas of the city for denser housing, rather than doubling down on maintaining lower density zones across most of the county’s largest city, and is one of more than 20 comment letters that the committee has sent since early 2024.
With the state legislature’s approval of House Bill 1220 in 2021, urban jurisdictions across the state have to plan for the income levels of new residents expected over the next two decades, something that has never been required before. The change is leading to a lot of intense conversations in cities large and small, but Balducci has pointed to it as an example of how local control can still work for the benefit of communities.
“We’ve got 39 cities and King County all for the first time trying to plan for affordability in their housing plans,” Balducci said. “That’s never been done before, and they’re all really trying. How well we are succeeding, I will leave to you and your readers to judge us, but we’re trying to make a difference and turn the boat.”
A tumultuous time to take the helm at King County Metro
The next Executive will take office at a pivotal time for King County Metro, the 10th busiest transit agency in the entire country. With federal relief dollars starting to be exhausted and significant capital projects planned to start to electrify Metro’s fleet and its bus bases, Metro faces a potentially devastating fiscal cliff if things continue on their current trajectory.
Whether the current slate of fleet electrification projects makes sense in this new budgetary reality will face scrutiny over the coming months and years. But Balducci suggested that the County should start to explore an additional revenue source for transit funding: a countywide Transportation Benefit District (TBD). The County briefly considered pursuing its own dedicated TBD in late 2019 and early 2020, but abandoned those plans amid the pandemic. In contrast, Zahilay has opposed a county TBD, citing tax fatigue and higher priorities for new revenue, as noted in his responses to The Urbanist questionnaire in 2023.
“We, unlike Seattle, have never used that tool, and I think we need to start having discussions about it,” Balducci said. “These are public discussions we should be having. We should be asking the public, if we’re putting out a product that you like and that you want more of, would you be willing to consider using the TBD funding to increase that product? But that we need to build to that discussion over the next several years.”
Balducci also wants a potential funding plan for Metro to take into account the ambitious Metro Connects plan, which envisions a dramatic expansion of King County’s bus network, including increased frequencies on routes across the board and dozens of new routes to provide connectivity that doesn’t exist yet. According to the County, it would take 100,000 to 120,000 in additional service hours every year to reach the goals of that long-range plan, a tall order.
“I would like to see us think about updating our long-range plan early enough to be able to have a reasonable funding potential discussion,” Balducci said. “And it all has to go together. You have to have your plan. You have to truth test it by analyzing how the system is actually working and whether it’s serving people in the places where the demand is. And then you have to target your funding to that.”
Keeping Sound Transit projects moving forward
On top of pending financial issues at Metro, alarm bells are also starting to go off for many transit advocates when it comes to the Sound Transit 3 light rail program. The latest blow was news that the West Seattle Link Extension is set to cost approximately 75% more than cost estimates from just a few years ago had suggested.
“With the kind of numbers and increases we’re seeing, I can only say that people are right to be concerned and to be paying close attention and asking hard questions — that is absolutely legitimate,” Balducci said.
Since 2019, Balducci has chaired the Sound Transit Board’s Systems Expansions Committee, where issues with capital projects are digested before being sent to the full board with recommended actions. She referenced work that the Sound Transit board had to complete in 2021, when pandemic-related revenue shortfalls were dealt with by delaying projects, some significantly.
“I pushed back pretty hard on the notion that the only lever we had at that time to deal with cost overruns was delay,” Balducci said. “That was the only proposal on the table, delay the projects so that we can afford them. And of course, if you delay over long enough, you can cash flow a project, but the cost just increase, right? Like we’re paying more and we’re getting it later. And so that, to me, was not very satisfying.”
Balducci is hopeful that the work occurring as a result of the recommendations of Sound Transit’s Technical Advisory Group (TAG) can make a difference in stemming the tide against significant cost increases — strategies that the agency’s new Deputy CEO for Megaproject Delivery Terri Maestas has been bringing up consistently since she was hired earlier this year. Those are things like finding more efficient ways to build stations, and copy proven designs from one part of a project to another.
“In the great pie chart of things that drive our costs, maybe a third are things within our control, and we can marginally decrease the cost of those things, which we should do,” Balducci said. “So there are things that we can do, even in the market space, and then we’re into hard discussions about scope, about timelines, but I want to see us do everything we can do to scrub that number as low as we can get it, and then have those discussions about scope and timeline and more difficult stuff.”
She remains optimistic a path forward exists that doesn’t sacrifice outcomes.
“Basically the two biggest cost and ridership ST3 projects are West Seattle and Ballard,” Balducci continued. “And so if we can do that for West Seattle first, and we have some success, then we can run that play again for Ballard and beyond.”
Unlike Constantine, who has pivoted to backing a Ballard Link alignment that skips the Chinatown-International District (CID), Systems Expansion Chair Balducci has been vocal about building a world class transit hub in Chinatown, if at all feasible. Unfortunately, the agency and its outside consultant recently effectively ruled out the 4th Avenue alignment that had been the main hope for the hub next to the existing CID light rail station and neighboring Amtrak and Sounder commuter rail stations. Not building that hub could bake inconvenient transfers into the DNA of Sound Transit’s network.
State law empowers the King County Executive to appoint the remaining nine members of the King County delegation on the 18-member Sound Transit Board. It’s the most pivotal position at the agency tasked with building out the region’s voter-approved network of 116 miles of light rail 45 miles of bus rapid transit. Who is King County Executive in 2026 and beyond, will ultimately hold the most sway over those expansion decisions.
Not giving up on a regional approach to homelessness
King County’s next leader will also have to decide how to approach the issue of homelessness, and how they’ll continue Constantine’s ardent support for a Housing First investment strategy that focuses on standing up emergency shelter, transitional shelter, and permanent supportive housing.
A central issue in next year’s campaign is sure to be the future of the King County Regional Homeless Authority (KCRHA), which was created in 2019 to ensure a coordinated strategy to get people into housing. In the wake of struggles to get the agency stood up and recent reforms that change its governance structure, many have argued that it should be abolished, including Balducci’s opponent, John Wilson.
“I’m here to say I think, absolutely, we should continue to try to make the regional approach to homelessness work, because it is the definition of a problem that knows no boundaries,” Balducci said. “I am committed to trying to make regional, cross-sector, cross-jurisdictional approaches work.”
It remains to be seen whether Balducci and other advocates will be able to successfully make the case for those long-term systems and the investments needed to stand them up over coming years if not decades. On some projects, though, King County residents have been able to see some of those investments start to pay dividends, in areas like affordable housing, regional trails, and public transit projects.
“I am a big believer in local and regional governments and our ability to make people’s lives better,” Balducci said. “I’ve dedicated my professional career to that proposition that if we do the right things at the local level and work together and are ambitious in our attempts to improve people’s lives, we can make a huge difference.”
Ryan Packer lives in the Summit Slope neighborhood of Capitol Hill and has been writing for the The Urbanist since 2015. They report on multimodal transportation issues, #VisionZero, preservation, and local politics. They believe in using Seattle's history to help attain the vibrant, diverse city that we all wish to inhabit. Ryan's writing has appeared in Capitol Hill Seattle Blog, Bike Portland, and Seattle Bike Blog, where they also did a four-month stint as temporary editor.