Clyde Hill News: Annual Spring Clean-up!
Also: City Council meeting, petition update
This time of year is particularly gorgeous in Clyde Hill (as long as you look when it’s not raining). From walking the dog this week:
One more item before our disclaimer: if you find this newsletter useful or interesting, please forward it to your Clyde Hill neighbors and friends. Thank you!
Disclaimer: while I am a councilmember on the Clyde Hill City Council, I write this newsletter in my capacity as an individual resident. Any opinions expressed are my own and not necessarily the position of the City. The information and references here are from public sources. I welcome email responses — and if the topic is about City business I will respond from my City email account.
What’s the news?
From a resident point of view, here is what I believe will be of interest in the Weekly Report when it’s available to the public.1
Annual Spring Clean-Up Event
Thursday and Friday next week — June 9 & 10 — “residents are able to put large items on the curb for pick-up by Republic Service without additional cost.” There’s a flyer with more details available here, link.
City Council Meeting, June 14
The Weekly Report shared a draft agenda for the next City Council meeting. Among the topics:
Time for public comments regarding the petition circulating in our community to change Clyde Hill’s form of government. More on this, below.
Discussion of enforcement policy problems with City’s building and land use code. One way to make sense of why the City Council keeps putting this topic on the agenda month after month is that the Administration has not yet acknowledged or begun to address the problems that the community and the Council keep bringing up.
For example, finding the Administration’s enforcement policy is non-trivial. You need to go to a slide deck from the January 2022 Council Meeting, an Administrator’s Weekly Report from May of 2021, and also one particular page on the City’s website. Some key terms are not defined.
The enforcement of this hard-to-discover policy has been inconsistent as well.
Public Hearings that are required by law so that the City Council can vote on two matters:
The City needs to “incorporate new DOE Stormwater Manual requirements into the City’s Municipal Code” for good reasons related to its Washington Department of Ecology (DOE) Municipal Stormwater Permit. There will be a public hearing about this proposed Ordinance.
The City will present its annual update of the six-year Transportation Improvement Plan (TIP). Same as last year, there will be a public hearing about the proposed plan immediately followed by a City Council vote to approve the plan.
Last year the Administration gave the community four days to discover, understand, and offer feedback on a lengthy proposal concerning which roads the City would re-pave in Clyde Hill at a cost of $125,000.
The vote on this proposal immediately followed the public hearing on the proposal, so that there was no time to even consider (much less incorporate) any feedback. (The vote went ahead due to the Administration’s statement that bids would be higher if the Council delayed approval.)
“Plus ça change” and all that.
Petition on Form of Government
About that petition going around our community… questions about it came up at the Planning Commission meeting. Some more information for people who are interested…
The petition is from residents — not the Mayor, Administration, Council, or an organization.
That’s one reason there hasn’t been any formal communication about the petition itself from local government.
That might also be why you haven’t seen it — it’s going around in an old fashioned social way, haphazardly.
The petition text is very brief — it’s for putting an item on the ballot in November.
Signing the petition expresses “support for the holding of an election…”
“so the voters of the City of Clyde Hill can decide whether to change… the form of government.”
In the event the petition gets enough signatures and is valid, the City Attorney will draft text for a ballot initiative that voters can vote for or against.
There’s an image of the petition text in last week’s newsletter — link.
Of the two forms of City government available to Clyde Hill, the choice is not a “better/worse” thing but a “distribution of authority between legislative and executive officials” thing.
The best source for information (link) about this is a little dry.
Looking locally, Medina, Mercer Island, Bellevue, and Kirkland all are council-manager cities; Clyde Hill, Yarrow Point, and Seattle are mayor-council cities (well, Yarrow Point is a mayor-council town).
Clyde Hill elections have been delightfully non-partisan to date; this petition does not align “Red” or “Blue.”
It’s easy to find smart, capable people (as well as people who have served as elected officials in Clyde Hill <g>) who are neutral, undecided, for, and against this change.
You can contact petition organizers at ClydeHillCouncilReform@gmail.com. (As soon as I have an email contact for anyone organizing against the petition, I’ll publish that as well.)
Finally, to make up for how dry the petition information is, here are some SchoolHouse Rock videos. First, a song about the 19th Amendment and voting rights for women and the endeavor to “improve our country, state, county, town, and school:”
And the perennial favorite about the foundation of American democracy:
Thanks for reading! Please forward and share with your friends and neighbors, and if you are not already getting this newsletter, subscribing is both easy and free.
Dean Hachamovitch
Unfortunately, the Weekly Report from the Administration has not been posted publicly in two weeks. Here’s a screenshot of where the Administration posts its weekly updates:
The contents of the report are public information, and as a Councilmember, I receive a copy in email.