King County Council unanimously passes ethics reform after $813,000 grant conflict-of-interest scandal

The King County Council unanimously approved sweeping ethics reforms Tuesday designed to prevent county employees from using their positions to benefit relatives or others with whom they have close personal relationships, following a conflict-of-interest scandal involving more than $813,000 in grant payments.

The legislation passed on a 9-0 vote after a Seattle Times investigation found a county program manager overseeing a $10 million youth education and anti-racism grant program directed approximately $813,000 over five years to businesses connected to her relatives. The newspaper also reported the employee pressured three subcontractors to hire her daughter.

The investigation found concerns about the grant payments had surfaced in county records years earlier, but King County did not launch a formal investigation until 2025, raising questions about weaknesses in the county’s financial oversight and ethics policies.

The reforms, sponsored by Councilmember Reagan Dunn, expand and clarify King County’s conflict-of-interest rules by explicitly prohibiting employees from participating in decisions involving family members or people with whom they have close personal relationships. Dunn said he first called for an audit in 2023, but the review was not initiated until two years later.

“Obviously, you shouldn’t be doling out public dollars to members of your family. It just doesn’t pass the laugh test, and it isn’t appropriate, and might be illegal,” Dunn said during the council meeting. “This ethics reform package does a couple of things. First, it expands and clarifies the conflict-of-interest rules to very clearly prohibit close relationships … It also requires that conflicts of interest be resolved before a distribution, not just disclosed.”

The ethics overhaul is the latest in a broader effort by the council to strengthen oversight and accountability

Over the past year, lawmakers have approved additional grant oversight reforms, created a new Inspector General Division to provide independent oversight, and advanced other transparency measures aimed at protecting taxpayer dollars.

“In the last supplemental budget, we did increase the FTE authority for the executive ethics function and added some additional dollars, presumably to help educate and ensure compliance with this legislation that we knew was coming,” Councilmember Rod Dembowski added to the conversation.

The vote also comes as a recent county review found that 16 of 19 organizations receiving funding through the Department of Community and Human Services had nearly $700,000 in what auditors described as questionable costs.

Councilmember Rhonda Lewis wondered how all 7,900 employees would be informed about the new rules, asking two questions: “One, how will employees be notified of these changes and given the opportunity to comply with them, and the other has to do with whether or not we should have a regular cadence to update the ethics code, like we do with the charter and other regulations.”

The answer was that any decision about how to communicate the changes would land on Executive Girmay Zahilay’s desk. Many private-sector employers incorporate ethics and compliance training into employee onboarding and require annual refresher courses.

Councilmember Claudia Balducci said the county is now undertaking a broader, long-term effort to modernize its ethics code with input from the council’s central policy staff, the Ombuds Office, the executive’s office and the Board of Ethics.

“This, in my view, closes an important hole that should have been closed in our code probably long ago, and I’m glad we’re doing it now,” Balducci said. “It is a key feature of ethics code ordinances in many, many places that individual government employees should not and cannot work on contracts or other projects that financially benefit their relatives or business partners.”

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