Over the decades, business owners in Woodinville's wine country have worked with the city government to create a plan for the business district that's profitable for the businesses and beneficial to the community as a whole. It distinguishes Woodinville as a tourist destination that draws visitors from all over the world.

Earlier this year, that vision was clouded by applications from the largest developer in the district. They requested a long list of changes that included auto dealerships, warehouse stores, department stores, 60-foot-high buildings, dramatically reduced parking requirements, and larger numbers of smaller dwellings. To put it bluntly, they asked Woodinville to lower its aspirations from a Whistler to an Aurora Avenue.

The developers withdrew the applications in the last few weeks. They cited two reasons: massive public opposition, and the fact that it was too difficult to get the changes approved in an election year. As far as I can tell, that second reason referred to the fact that the developer has the current City Council majority firmly in his pocket (via campaign contributions, endorsements, support for pet projects, etc.) but even those tight strings could not be pulled in an election year. Wait until next year and they can work out a deal.

In contrast, I've been working with the neighborhood and business groups to defeat the changes.

This issue has extremely high stakes for Woodinville. Keep the bar high and we develop as a world-class small town. Lower it—the likely outcome if this developer keeps his Council majority—and we propel ourselves down a path that at best condemns us to mediocrity. At worst it destroys not only Woodinville's character but destroys the long-term viability of Sammamish Valley agriculture.

Everybody loves a good park, and I'm unambiguously on the record documenting the benefits parks of all types have for a community. However, we have a responsibility to conduct due diligence, to make sure our parks benefit our community and beyond in both the short and long term.

In summer of 2008 or earlier, citizens of Woodinville began writing to the City Council with concerns over the safety issues of the artificial turf sports fields, which the Council had specified as their requirement as early as 2002. The concerns revolve around several issues:

• Toxicity: The ground-up tires and plastic grass that make up the playing surface each have been tested to have levels of metals and carcinogenic hydrocarbons that are toxic to humans. Just as troubling, they are known to kill, prevent spawning, and cause mutations in salmon. Cancer clusters have shown up in young athletes who play on artificial turf fields.
• Excessive temperatures: on a 98-degree day, a grass playing surface measures 114 degrees; an artificial turf playing surface measures 200 degrees. The danger of heat-related illness is real.
• Infection: Artificial turf, with its unnatural surface, doesn't support the natural biota that breaks down the infectants that are part of the package when you have an outdoor sports facility: the human-generated sweat, blood, and spit; and the environmentally generated animal waste like bird guano and dog urine. Artificial turf fields have been correlated with increased levels of skin infections including MRSA.

The response of the Council majority has been to accelerate the process of installing artificial turf. They cite the fact that many cities have installed artificial turf over the past 10 years and few report problems.

I don't agree with the "all the other kids are doing it" rationale. I think our kids' safety is more important than keeping up with the Joneses. And I'm old enough to remember the same sort of rationale being used about the dangers of smoking, and to resist child car seats and motorcycle helmets. I can't think of any situations where the precautionary principle has been applied to a concern that was later found to be a non-issue.

Fortunately, we have a great alternative. The natural grass system that was used for the Beijing Olympics is cheaper to install and about the same cost to maintain as artificial turf, and offers similar durability and play time.

And just as fortunately, it came out at a recent City Council meeting that the Council, and no one else, imposed the requirement of artificial turf. There's nothing preventing us from changing to a system that's better for our kids and our environment.

As I talk to people all over town, the top request people mention to me is the same as the one Woodinville's Public Works Director receives: People want more sidewalks and crosswalks between neighborhoods and schools.

They'd also like better pedestrian and bicycle connections between neighborhoods and business districts, and trails connecting Woodinville's parks.

Pedestrian and bicycle facilities are one of my two top capital priorities. And I want to start with connections between neighborhoods and schools.

Sometimes the best preparation is prevention, like not building on hillsides that are prone to sliding. There are other things like snowstorms and earthquakes that are unavoidable. But just because they're unavoidable doesn't mean we have an excuse for being unprepared.

Woodinville is 16 years old and still doesn't have a Public Works facility. We store City vehicles in unsecured downtown parking lots out of view of nearby streets, to the delight of the occasional drunk who takes them joyriding.

Unfortunately, it also means that our Public Works employees have found themselves out in those parking lots, in the snow, repairing the vehicles instead of being able to spend their time using those vehicles to clear roads.

Even when the vehicles are ready to roll, they have to travel to a site outside of town to pick up sand.

Or, consider the floods we've had in the recent past. We've known we had a problem, but it took a major flood and a lawsuit before we fixed it.

In 16 years, could we have bought land and built a public works facility? Personally, I think we could have, but our priorities have been placed elsewhere.

Getting a public works facility built in or near Woodinville is the second of my top two capital priorities.

Who should be in charge of Woodinville's destiny, its citizens or out-of-town developers? Citizens, obviously, but not everybody sees it that way.

In 2007, several Woodinville City Council candidates accepted large contributions, endorsements, and campaign advertising from individual developers and from the biggest developer groups in Washington: the Building Industry Association of Washington and the Master Builders Association.

That investment has been a bargain for developers. When developers' interests have been pitted against the interests of citizens or existing businesses in Woodinville, the Councilmembers who received campaign help from developers have been more likely to vote in favor of developers and against Woodinville's own people.

Regrettably, ever since he was appointed to City Council in 2007, my opponent has voted with this group. From environmental codes to spending decisions, his is one of the most pro-developer, anti-citizen voting records on the Council.

The last thing Woodinville needs is Councilmembers who owe favors to the special interests that have the greatest potential for eroding our quality of life.

As Vice Chair of the Planning Commission, my top priority is to advocate for the interests of the people who live, work, and own businesses in Woodinville. That won't change.

I had a conversation one day with a high school student who lives near Lake Leota. He described waiting as long as 11 minutes for an opportunity to turn left from the Lake Leota neighborhood road onto Woodinville-Duvall Road.

His story is one that resonates with most of us: our roads are extremely burdened, and our traffic delays are excessive.

Think of the impacts. Children aren't safe walking to school so their parents drive them, which makes the traffic problems even worse. Parents with long commute times have less time to spend with their families. And our businesses' balance sheets are worse off because their drivers, or their deliveries, are stuck in traffic.

I believe that our next spending priorities need to be on congestion relief and safe sidewalks and cross-walks, especially near schools.

Woodinville is a collaborative venture among multiple overlapping jurisdictions. The Woodinville Water District provides our drinking water and sanitary sewer; the King County Sheriff provides our police protection; the Northshore School District educates our kids, and so on.

Even our streets are not under our sole control. The Woodinville city limit goes down the middle of several streets; some of our arterials are state highways; railroad rights-of-way limit the changes we can make.

All of these considerations point to a need for strong and diverse partnerships. Forging those bonds requires a sense that all parties are ready to work collaboratively and agree on practical, achievable solutions.

Woodinville's business and industrial districts are ripe for change. It's clear that our future is going to be taller and more intensive than our past. With our growing wine and high tech industries, and solid identity as the region's premier horticultural supplier, we have an opportunity to attract great new businesses and the revenue that comes with them.

But we shouldn't leave our existing businesses behind. For example, the many small private medical practices in our downtown see the redevelopment coming but have no place to move – they need office space that has the extra water lines and electrical outlets that are a necessary part of a medical practice. I believe one of our first priorities should be to attract a medical building that gives first priority to current downtown private practices. If we provide this facility, we'll be better able to develop the other kinds of professional, commercial, and mixed-use housing-over-retail construction that seem so clearly to be a part of Woodinville's future.

Our construction and nursery businesses are well positioned to benefit from the green and sustainable development revolutions and build a green-collar employment base. It's all part of helping Woodinville to be as great a place in 50 years as it is today.

King County's Open Space program provides a near-perfect synergy: the lands that we shouldn't build on because they're geologically or hydrologically unsuitable are the same lands that are most eligible for designation as Open Space. To a great extent, they're also the same lands that give Woodinville its Northwest woodland character: our valley walls and river floodplains.

We should encourage placement of our most unbuildable land into the Open Space program. In cases where it's also suitable park land, the City should purchase it from willing sellers.

Parks and recreation programs have well-documented benefits to a community in terms of property values and crime reduction, in addition to the health benefits. I've testified to this effect in public hearings.

However, for the past few years Woodinville has spent nearly half its capital budget on park facilities. When citizens' requests are so much more basic—sidewalks and roads—I think we should be directing our funds to those basics and save our parks spending for opportunities that are undeniably unique, like a piece of land with prime park potential coming onto the market.

It says good things that our community provides senior housing, so that the people who have raised families here can also retire here. In turn, seniors benefit the community. They volunteer, they provide a valuable historical perspective, and they guide all of us on our own journeys through life.

That partnership places some responsibilities on our shoulders. Just as they paid the taxes to educate us when we were children, we have the responsibility to provide a high quality of life for them. They remain valuable members of our community and deserve our support. We should provide the same levels of support and respect to today's seniors that we want the next generation to provide to us.

In Woodinville, this means easy access to public transportation; ADA-compliant public buildings; safe sidewalks and streets; and recreation and support programs.

It also means making sure that when our seniors are ready to move, they receive fair and full value for their land without being pressured into transactions that are detrimental to them or their neighbors.

We could learn a lesson from the 1995 earthquake in Kobe, Japan. That Magnitude 7.2 event devastated the city and disabled Kobe's sewage treatment plant. Millions of gallons of raw sewage dumped into Osaka Bay.

Brightwater is potentially a much bigger threat to Woodinville. A confirmed active fault crosses the Brightwater site, and if the plant fails it won't be diluted in an ocean bay, but rather will flow into a Chinook-bearing stream that flows through Woodinville into the Sammamish River and Lake Washington.

I believe that Brightwater at the current Route 9 site should have been a non-starter. There's little hope left for stopping it, but we should certainly require every structure to adhere to building codes, and we should prepare ourselves for the disaster Brightwater could become. Woodinville's newly established Emergency Preparedness Commission has an important role to play in helping us prepare and recover from this and other potential natural disasters.

I've testified against Brightwater at City hearings, written to county, state, and national representatives, and argued with Ron Sims on the radio. I'm not opposed to essential public facilities, but we do need to comply with our own laws when siting and building them.

Many citizens have expressed concerns about the lack of civility in our city government. I share your concerns, and one of the great joys of this campaign has been that my endorsers consistently state that my approach is constructive, collaborative, practical, and focuses on the facts. It's been tremendously encouraging to see that people who have worked closely with me have that opinion.

My promise to you is to get the facts, respect and learn from those who have differing opinions, understand the history of a project before I criticize it, avoid special interest groups whose goals conflict with Woodinville's goals, and work constructively with City Staff.