Grays Harbor County Clerk Kym Foster announces reelection bid

Published 1:30 am Monday, May 4, 2026

Grays Harbor County Clerk Kym Foster (D) has announced her bid for reelection. Foster won the post in the 2018 general election, narrowly defeating Janice Louthan by 771 votes. She won reelection in 2022 while running unopposed.

“I never lost sight of why I ran for this job. I know what it feels like to be treated like you don’t matter, and I don’t want anyone walking into our office to feel that way. That’s why I made it a priority to change the culture and set a higher standard for how our office shows up for the people we serve,” Foster wrote in a Facebook post. “Since I took office, we’ve made real improvements. We’ve cut processing times significantly. Many documents are entered within 24 hours, calls are returned, you might even get me on the phone, and requests are handled faster. I stay involved, I stay accessible, and I don’t let things sit. We brought in electronic filing and continue to do the work in-house to save taxpayer dollars.”

After graduating from Montesano High School, Foster moved to the East Coast where she worked a variety of jobs. She returned to Grays Harbor and served as a nutrition educator for the Elma Washington State University Extension for nine years.

While going through a painful divorce, Foster had a bad experience at the county clerk’s office. She eventually got to know attorney Vini Samuel, who now serves as a Grays Harbor County Superior Court Judge.

“There was a person there that I knew from school. So it was kind of embarrassing. I was just like, ‘oh, now everybody’s going to know about it,’” Foster said. “That’s when somebody had told me to contact Vini Samuel because she was a bulldog. I made an appointment and she’s like, ‘yeah, don’t go to the clerk’s office.’ A ‘snake pit’ is what they called it.”

Foster then went on to work for Samuel part-time one day a week. Her experience at the clerk’s office and encouragement from Samuel, and others, convinced her to run for the county clerk’s office despite a lack of experience.

At the urging of Samuel, Foster filed on the last day of filing week and launched a campaign against Louthan, who was the chief deputy clerk at the time, and eventually won the election. Her first order of business after taking office was changing the culture.

“It was pretty immediate too. [Staff] came to me and said, ‘we can breathe, there’s not this tension,’” Foster said. “We’ll get rid of whatever we need to do to get rid of the tension. I don’t want to be in a place where I hate going to work and I don’t want anybody to come to work feeling that way.”

“The biggest accomplishment that the public would know, in-house electronic is major, just for the attorneys, for litigants, for people that have to deal with the court on a regular basis, I feel like it’s the electronic filing,” Foster said. “But for the community, people who come in once or twice and we never see them again, I feel like it’s our office culture. It’s the front end staff, the clerks who are greeting, people who have interactions when they make a phone call, when they come in to check in for jury service. That has changed as a whole for the community.

“I feel like the biggest accomplishment is just our perception to the public that we are a caring group of people and we do want to help you. That’s the biggest thing … perception of what our office is, instead of it being that one office that everybody hates.”