Seattle Times columnist
A decade ago, when King County first asked voters for $392 million in property taxes for the Best Starts for Kids program, the only group opposing it called itself “Smart Choices King County.”
“This levy sounds nice,” the group wrote in the 2015 voters guide. “But it is a ‘blank check’ without details on how it will be spent.”
“They don’t tell you before the fact what you’re buying,” one member told The Seattle Times.
This critique was correct. Elected officials even acknowledged it at the time. But they argued that figuring out grants for early learning and child-support groups later, on the fly, was a nimbler approach that would better serve the community.
The critics lost the argument. Fast-forward to today. This funding, which ballooned past $1 billion when a second kids levy was approved in 2021, is at the center of the mushrooming grants scandal at King County.
It turns out some of the groups started taking the money but not doing the work. Some were obvious scams, what one county employee called a “blatant misuse of funds.” But with little oversight the county kept right on paying out the money, and fired one employee who called attention to possible fraud.
Of 36 contracts later reviewed by an auditor, 19 showed possible improper payments or fraud. This audit covered only about 2% of the money spent on grants in a year, so it could be just the tip of the fraudberg.
Bottom line: The program was too much of a blank check.
The grants for kids and other programs clearly needed more guardrails. The most damning sentence in a blockbuster Seattle Times investigative report last week was when a former state auditor summed up King County’s internal reaction: “It seems like their response was just, ‘Oh well.’ ”
That’s some really bad government, right there. That’s government that expects to be bad.
So what will be the fallout from this round of bad government? Probably not much, unfortunately.
We are in a political era where bad local government doesn’t seem to really matter. It’s too overshadowed by how catastrophically bad things are in D.C.
It doesn’t tend to trigger rounds of accountability among public officials, as it sometimes did in the past. It doesn’t seem to register much with the voting public.
The person most responsible for King County’s grant-making boom in the period at issue, 2019 to 2025, was the King County executive back then, Dow Constantine. He also was the force behind the ad hoc style of Best Starts for Kids, in steering grants to higher-risk, untested community groups. He moved on to become the CEO of Sound Transit.
The Metropolitan King County Council was responsible for overseeing and watchdogging the programs. One of the members who overlooked these problems, Girmay Zahilay, has since been elected executive. Most of the rest are still there, but likewise aren’t feeling any particular political heat for falling down on the job.
The council member who did raise a stink is a notable outlier to the local political system. Meaning, he’s a Republican. Reagan Dunn is about the last Republican standing in King County. (There’s also Pete von Reichbauer, but he’s a relatively silent County Council member at this point.) Dunn was howling at everyone who wouldn’t listen back in 2023 that some of these grantees were running amok.
“It’s just the Wild West, and unfortunately, it’s a very bad reflection on King County government,” Dunn said this past week, about being proved correct.
I’ve argued in this space many times that the self-destruction of the local Republican Party is a bad development — and not just for Republicans. Both parties can go bonkers when they have total control. Around here, the GOP’s mad descent into Trumpism has left the field entirely to the Democrats.
Kudos to Dunn then for resisting the MAGA nonsense of his own party, while still serving as a town crier about the excesses of the other party. Not an easy balancing act.
But back to the part about bad government. Will this scandal lead to better government?
The county is proposing to set up an inspector general’s office so it can better vet outside contracts. That a $10 billion annual operation doesn’t have one already is a sign of how lax things had gotten.
A bigger issue, though, is whether modern politics is even set up to result in a government that functions.
One academic paper recently argued that no, it isn’t.
“Effective government is the forgotten pillar of democracy,” a New York University legal scholar, Richard Pildes, says.
Having government work well has become an afterthought in the public dialogue. There’s little political incentive for it. Voters today mostly yearn to stick it to the other party. Or they’re motivated by primal concerns, like ideology or identity.
You can feel this happening right now with state Democrats and the new millionaires income tax.
Democrats got the primal part down — they taxed the rich. Taking a nick out of the wealthy is likely to be a hit with big slices of the electorate.
But that isn’t really the government part. What the money might be used for remains murky. It’s a bit like the Best Starts for Kids levy, in that they’re saying “trust us,” give us the money and we’ll do right by it later.
The trouble is it comes at a time when state government is sputtering. The public schools are perceived as declining in quality, at least by test scores; the state budget is chronically in deficit; taxes are way up yet many services remain in crisis; the business climate is deteriorating, and so on.
This past week a Pew Charitable Trusts report noted that Democrats here have spent down our state’s rainy day fund to the second smallest in the nation — though we aren’t having a rainy day.
If Republicans are allegedly the party of small government, Democrats are supposed to be the party of good government. Good means well-intended, sure. But it also used to imply a government that works.
It’s a generational failure of Democrats, who run everything around here, that they have gotten away from government needing to work. For starters, when government fails, it helps the small government argument. It’s also just bad for your own constituents. There’s not an obvious, immediate way out of this spiral, other than to appeal to Democrats to reform themselves.
The political reality, though, is they don’t need to. Not with one Donald Trump lurching around breaking things and threatening the democratic order. Voters are far more keyed up on that, understandably, than they are the “boring but important” expenditure of local taxpayer dollars.
It means local Democrats can do just about whatever they wish, for now, for better or worse. The good, the bad or, in the case of the grants gone wild, the downright ugly.