After three hours of decision-making, the King County Council came to a verdict: Rhonda Lewis will be stepping into Girmay Zahilay’s District 2 seat, becoming the first Black woman to serve on the council in the process.
Zahilay, recently elected as King County executive, had to determine who would fill in his place on the council, which he has held since early 2020. Aware of the long history of marginalized groups being left out of government positions, he intentionally offered three nominees who all share the same race and gender: Lewis (the chief of staff for District 2), Nimco Bulale, and Cherryl Jackson-Williams. No matter whom the council decided on, that person would represent the county’s demographic of Black women for the first time in history.
Equally groundbreaking, Lewis’s appointment marks the first time the council has been composed of a majority of women, five to four. Lewis joins Claudia Balducci, Steffanie Fain, Teresa Mosqueda, and the recently elected Sarah Perry.
Her invitation into the fold wasn’t a given, however. Lewis, Bulale, and Jackson-Williams all had to answer questions about their past experiences via a public interview process.
When Councilmember Jorge Barón asked Lewis about funding public safety initiatives in the light of upcoming federal budget cuts, she spoke about meeting the severity of the situation. However, if the council cuts services based solely on the line item on the budget, she thinks we’ll be ignoring larger financial repercussions that are only seen on the ground level.
“There’s a fundamental principle here: We can’t cut our way out of this,” said Lewis. “A caretaker councilmember cannot change things overnight, but I can be a voice for District 2, and I can reject false choices between public safety and human services.”
Lewis’s career has had a wide impact on local communities. She started as the city administrator of Tukwila, where she worked to expand family and senior services for a daytime population of over 100,000 people. Once she started working for King County, she oversaw the operations of nine different departments and 12,000 employees in the county’s local workforce. Of the nominees brought forward, none of them quite understood the inner mechanisms of the county quite like Rhonda Lewis.
After all three candidates spoke, it was clear they shared a common thread: the belief that their role on the council has to go beyond the achievement of representation and eventually result in genuine, practical action.
“The district is excited to see three African-American women as their nominees, but above all, they want real stewardship,” said Johnson-Williams. “From day one, they want someone who can navigate the complex realities of our county government.”
Lewis was chosen by a near-unanimous vote by the council, who saw her experience and long-standing knowledge of the county as the deciding factor (Mosqueda was excused, as she was not present for Tuesday’s council meeting). They took a moment, however, to thank Bulale for advocating for District 2’s Somali community, given the president’s recent offensive remarks regarding Somalians across the country.
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