Housing Matters with Mayor Kevin Schilling

Kevin Schilling has been a friend of RHAWA for a number of years, and during that time, he has served on the Burien City Council and was eventually elected Mayor. Schilling works for the Washington State Dental Association as their Advocacy Director, and now Mayor Schilling is hoping to take his experience and advocacy to Olympia for his home District 33. For my Candidate Profile of Kevin Schilling, check out the June issue of Current. This time around, I had the pleasure of a more lengthy discussion with the state representative candidate as he joined Housing Matters. Our conversation covered history, national and local politics, and how he believes his party needs to adapt for the future.

Schilling spoke to the difficulty of separating local and federal politics for voters and Burien blazing its own trail outside of traditional King County bounds.

“For some reason, the area's political mindset is tied directly to what's going on in DC. That's the biggest frustration, because when we’ve pushed back — when the city variance pushed back on King County and said, wait a second, we're allowed to do what we want to do as a city, we're not controlled by you, the county government — we are allowed to do what we want to do. I think it sent a really big message to a lot of other cities in the area: be careful, if you don't do what King County wants you to do or not want you to do, then you're going to get into trouble.”

We discussed the homelessness issues that he very passionately moved toward a workable solution for — one that many in his own party fervently disagreed with.

“We were one of the few cities that didn't have any kind of regulation around it. So, Covid was kind of ending and moving on, and I kind of stood up in 2023 and said, this is crazy. We need to help people — like, we need to get them off the streets and into services and treatment. It's ultimately up to them to make that decision, to choose to accept that service. And if they don't, we have to say we can't allow unregulated tent encampments in the city next to the library and parks, the schools, and neighborhoods. How is this fair to anybody when we're offering services? So, one of the things we did, in my first term and going into being mayor, was put a lot of money into service outreach because it was a big priority.”

Mayor Schilling didn’t mince words when he spoke to his own party’s inaction and inability to react and adapt to policies that work and don’t work.

“Everything is controlled by Democrats. Where's my utopia? Like, if everything — if we 100% know our policies are the best policies in the world — then why isn't this area the best place ever? And that's my push, and my test within the Democratic Party. You have successfully made everybody afraid to think differently. Cool. But we haven't done anything. We haven't built more housing. We haven't fixed homelessness. We don't have the best public transit system in the world. We don't have a massive amount of new businesses starting here and growing and supporting entrepreneurs.”

Why are you running for State Representative, and what do you want to do?

“I'm running because, what we were talking about, around actually showing we can govern. Well, I'm running because I think right now, we're in a point in time with our state where we can either continue to go down the path we've been going — which is one of higher taxes and policies that make us less safe — or we can actually be a state that shows that policies we make help grow housing, grow wages, keep people safer. And by being someone who's been on the ground as a city council member and a mayor of a city, I can see firsthand that revenues are going down because the economy's not growing. Policies that are being pushed by the state are basically unfunded mandates that we then have to try to implement, that don't work.”

For my full interview with the Burien Mayor and State Representative Candidate, check out the latest episode of Housing Matters at RHAwa.org/podcast or search Housing Matters wherever you get your podcasts.