April 20 Town Hall
Town Hall 4-20-26
Yesterday’s council meeting was a different format: a Town Hall. Council members were seated at tables with discussion topics on each. They were accompanied by a staff member. City Manager Killgore also was on topic rotation.
Instead of visiting all eight tables, I spent time at two. The first was the KAPE topic, with Mayor Herbig and John Vicente (Traffic Engineer). My questions were mostly procedural - why, when you sign the affidavit of non-responsibility, are you now having to appear in court (and why don’t they tell you this when you sign)? Doesn’t this unreasonably increase the court costs? Mayor Herbig said that this is the result of changes at the State level.
What I learned was this: those speed signs, even if not linked to a camera, are recording and sending speed data to the City, so we are able to track changes in speed. We are seeing a substantial reduction (percentage in the 90s) in speed with the cameras, and the speed signs, in place. With the KAPE funds, we are able to build sidewalks and the long-term goal is to improve pedestrian and multi-modal transportation safety (create permanent traffic calming measures, not just the camera band-aid). Mayor Herbig said he’d like to see the revenue go to zero, since that means the cameras are doing their job. The biggest hurdle right now is the backlog in the courts; it’s delayed implementation of the mobile cameras (which, heads up, will look like utility boxes when they are in). Lake Forest Park is having the same issue, and discussing implementing their own traffic court.
We talked a bit about pedestrian safety on non-sidewalked streets, such as 80th, as well as e-bikes/motorcycles. On my way home, there was a group of kids wheelie-ing down the sidewalk on the East side of the Sammamish River Bridge. This morning, driving my kids to school, I passed a 9th grader walking up the bike lane on the North side of Simonds.
The second table I spent time at was the Climate Action Plan/Environmental Services table with Councilmember O’Cain and Richard Sawyer (Environmental Services Manager). Much of the discussion was about water safety at Logboom, and a resident brought concerns about the City sponsoring the Kenmore Quad when the safety of swimming in that beach is unknown. I thought about a triathlon I did years ago in San Francisco, where the swim portion was in an area known to have toxic waste. That, however, wasn’t a city-run event. The Kenmore Quad is.
Another member of the community talked about using drones to track and monitor toxic algae blooms in the lake. She asked me what I do; I told her my background is in housing, but that everything is interconnected. We can’t solve environmental problems without also talking about how it intersects with housing, transportation, and economic development.
During the conversation, CM O’Cain brought up her “Centennial Plan”. This was barely a footnote in the retreat, but it deserves more attention. When you spend enough time watching the way that government functions, you realize that we’re almost exclusively caught playing catch-up instead of future planning. Planning for the 100-year anniversary of Kenmore becoming a city seems far out, but what it enables us to do is create a cohesive vision for what the city would look like 72 (?) years from now. In her vision, it sounds like a walkable, connected, green city with a thriving economy and community spaces where we can connect both with each other and with nature. This vision is precisely what enables us to create a roadmap to success. Much of what we’re doing now is solving the “now” problem, or the “ten years ago” problem, which means by the time we hit 2098 we will have solved it another 14 times. If we’re focused on creating a City that will work seven decades from now, we only solve those problems once.
