Summary

I have lived in the Lake Hills Neighborhood and the East Bellevue Community Council area for 30 years. I was one of the founding members of the Lake Hills Neighborhood Association and served on the Bellevue City Council from 2004 through 2016. I support the sunset of our local community council, and I want to explain my reasoning.

Story

I have lived in the Lake Hills Neighborhood and the East Bellevue Community Council area for 30 years. I was one of the founding members of the Lake Hills Neighborhood Association and served on the Bellevue City Council from 2004 through 2016. I support the sunset of our local community council, and I want to explain my reasoning.

Community councils were created by law to encourage unincorporated neighborhoods to annex to adjacent cities, giving them a means to stop the new city from imposing too much change right away. But that was over a half century ago.

The East Bellevue Community Council is one of only two remaining community councils of this type in the state of Washington. It came into being the same year President Richard Nixon took office. The other remaining community council, in the Houghton area of Kirkland, started the year before that.
Surely, after over 50 years, the purpose of encouraging a smooth and respectful transition to a new city has long since been met. So what is the justification for continuing this extra layer of government?

Community councils exist only to VETO certain zoning or land use decisions of their city councils. That’s all they can legally do. They are fundamentally exclusionary.

Unlike city councils, community councils have no affirmative responsibilities. They don’t have to provide for housing, utilities, public safety, or any of the basics of life. They only have the power to say “Nope, put that somewhere else!” That’s not local control. That is NIMBY – “Not in My Back Yard” – in the most fundamental sense.

But, you may ask, don’t community councils stop bad things from happening to our neighborhood? There is little evidence to suggest the community council structure “protects” us from much of anything except for desperately needed housing for our neighbors. Recently, the East Bellevue Community Council tried to stop a regional power line and a local power line that many local residents said they didn’t want. They failed to stop either power line (wasting a lot of taxpayer money on litigation in the process), because it is not in their power to stop such things.

Before it was ended in the early 2000s, the Sammamish Community Council threatened to try to stop the rebuilding of a local elementary school. If they had succeeded, that community council area would have been “protected” from a rebuilt elementary school while the rest of the district got new schools.
More recently, the East Bellevue Community Council succeeded in delaying the opening of a rebuilt elementary school in our neighborhood. Young students and their families will have to wait another year in an outdated school building that was built in the late 1950s. Is this the kind of “neighborhood protection” we should fear losing?

When the Sammamish Community Council in East Lake Hills/Spiritridge was sunsetted by local voters in 2001, one of the then-councilmembers raised the same fear of “loss of protection”, saying "I feel really sorry for [community council area residents], really sorry, because they have no protection from the city," predicting Bellevue would widen 156th Avenue, a two-lane street that passes single-family homes. 

In the almost 20 years that it has been without a community council, has the East Lake Hills/Spiritridge Neighborhood seen an onslaught of bad treatment from the city compared to the part of Lake Hills that remains “protected” by the East Bellevue Community Council? Certainly 156th Avenue has not been widened and remains a two-lane street that passes single family homes. There is simply no reason to believe that Lake Hills will suffer from any special bad treatment if we no longer have a community council.

What have community councils REALLY done and what are they likely to do in the future? The short answer is: Stop housing from being created. Both community councils have succeeded in stopping zoning changes intended to allow more badly-needed workforce and affordable housing. The East Bellevue Community Council recently vetoed an updated city code that allowed and set standards for emergency homeless shelters, essentially saying the rest of the city can take the responsibility for sheltering those without a place to live, but not our neighborhood.

We have a housing and homelessness crisis in our region and city. We know that the people most in need of housing and most at risk of being displaced from expensive places like Bellevue and Kirkland are seniors and young adults, people with lower incomes or limited resources, immigrants, and, notably, Black, Indigenous and People of Color. The power invested in a community council has most often been used and is most likely to be used to further limit housing, excluding people from our neighborhoods who are not able to afford our runaway housing costs.

We have power to influence city hall! The best power a neighborhood has to effect change is to organize and advocate with our city council. In 2004, I joined with a handful of neighbors and created the Lake Hills Neighborhood Association for this reason. Shortly after, we successfully lobbied the city to fund an upgrade to Lake Hills Boulevard, the kind of positive investment that has never been within the power of a community council. Our neighborhood association has held many candidate forums over the years to make sure we know our elected officials and they know us and our priorities. This kind of advocacy and relationship-building has far more ability to make positive change than an archaic quasi-government with limited veto power.

It is now 2022. It is time to finally end these extra layers of government and to turn our energies and power toward city hall, where we can most directly impact what happens in our neighborhood.

Claudia