As I understand it, my collaborative style while serving on the North Bend Budget Committee as a citizen member, 2019-2022, motivated a few city councilors and leaders asked me to consider running. To my surprise, I got elected in November 2022 and the past four years have gone by quickly. I am running again not only because I find the work fascinating but because I believe my principles that put the team part of the work first are beneficial.
We have both difficult choices and unique opportunities that stand to invigorate our community in ways we haven’t seen in decades. They all have a number of steps across several years to complete. Since consistent leadership is quite helpful in times of great change like this, here I am, again, although I have to admit that thinking of myself as an important part feels embarrassing to presume.
To me, the most valuable skill anyone brings to Council or a board like it are the team skills that allow full and deep discussions across diverse perspectives even while in disagreement. The difficulty in those kinds of discussions is the very human tendency to use emotion to persuade rather than Star Trek it and run the discussion on ideas instead.
I’ve worked with people who believe that God put them in the spot they are in for a particular agenda. What they don’t foresee is this: if you can’t convince a simple majority of your peers to go along with God’s idea you are messaging, you’re sh*t out of luck. And that’s on you. Righteousness is a poor substitute for simple courtesy and civil discourse.
Through these years on Budget Committee and Council, I have developed and deepened my respect for our city leaders, those “unelected bureaucrats” who manage to run the city on our shoestring budget.
Consider how North Bend’s $40 million to keep roads, water, sewer, police, fire and other functions that support our lives compare to the likely yearly sales of our local Walmart — approximately $50 million based on Walmart's 2020 Annual Report, undoubtedly with inflation this revenue level is higher, our city and county "coffers" are quite a bit smaller in direct comparison and relative to what our governments require to keep roads, sewers, and other essential systems afloat.
Corporate entities like Walmart rely on municipal infrastructure for their brisk business and, at the same time, outstrip our city’s annual resources while managing significantly less. That says a lot about our city's public servants.
I ask a lot of questions. Our city leaders welcomed them with a thoughtfulness I’d never experienced from any of the investors, CEOs or other executives I’d come in contact with in my startup work life. Our city staffers have deep financial knowledge and local commitment at a level that dwarfs all the leaders I encountered in high tech all those years despite I rubbing elbows with some extremely wealthy people to whom we, as a culture, anoint as those with the superior ideas. Ha, I say! Not true, I say!
In the budget and council discussions, I experience a consistent hint of the process city leaders go through to move North Bend forward: an intellectual tetris performed by a collective of invested fellow citizens, some of whom are skilled, experienced and level-headed -- the city staffers and some of whom are unskilled, inexperienced and can get ahead of themselves -- us, the councilors. IMO, council is present to use our diverse perspectives and concerns as a way to vet ideas and courses of action staffers bring forward. When our community has tough choices, we need to represent as much of that community as we can.
I respect and appreciate this process of expressing individual viewpoints alongside collectively deciding. It would an honor to participate more and with support of my neighbors. We are in this together!
If you would like to read about other candidates, Vote411.org from the League of Women Voters has an excellent non-partisan sight that invites all candidates on the ballot to answer some questions.