The Bellingham Herald asked candidates to offer some reasons that account for their motivation to seek public office. Here are some of my thoughts.
I should preface this by confessing that there are times I wonder why anyone would want such a position. It doesn't pay much. One is criticized far more frequently than praised. The pace at which issues of community importance are presented to us for decision is seemingly relentless. And of course politics frequently makes people boiling mad and the ensuing criticism is often directed at elected officials. And I haven't even mentioned the anonymous online commentators who humor themselves at our expense. It really sounds fun, doesn't it? But that's politics in America and I suspect that it will ever be thus.
Despite these realities, the benefits do outweigh the downside, at least for me. I have always found public service extremely gratifying on a personal level. One has an opportunity to help make a healthy, smart, community vision real and this has, fundamentally, always been my primary motivation.
I was born and raised in Bellingham, graduating from Sehome High School in 1981. I moved away for 10 years to attend college and law school, to travel, and to work in both Alaska and Washington, D.C. When I returned in 1994 I noticed that Bellingham was no longer the sleepy little mill town that had gone unchanged for so many decades. It seemed we had been discovered. People were actually moving to this rainy northwest corner of Washington. Ensuring that we grow well became our new challenge.
When I wasn't working, I spent my free time engaged in issues of local public interest. I volunteered with the Clean Water Alliance, the Greenways committee, the Bellingham City Club board, to name a few.
In 2001 I had the good fortune of winning a seat on the Whatcom County Council with some clear ideas of policy initiatives that needed to be undertaken. I felt that we needed, at long last, to begin the process of building a full protection program for Lake Whatcom, our drinking water source. We needed a new approach to land use policy that avoided haphazard sprawl that has harmed other counties and eroded their farming and natural resource lands. I felt that Whatcom County and Bellingham still had the opportunity to get it right. I still feel that way.
I have successfully brought forward many measures that sought to help bring our community vision to fruition. In 1997 I chaired the Greenways committee and was a chief architect of the successful Beyond Greenways levy that provided critical funding to purchase, among other things, the Fairhaven Village Green and Taylor Street Dock. While on the County Council I sponsored the resolution, and funding amendment, that resulted in the creation of the Comprehensive Stormwater Management Plan for Lake Whatcom.
In 2007 I co-founded, along with the late City Councilwoman Joan Beardsley, the countywide Housing Affordability Taskforce that worked, painstakingly, with a politically diverse cross section of citizens to create recommendations on how to deliver affordable housing.
In 2004 I co-founded, with former City Councilwoman Barbara Ryan, the Bellingham Growth Forums that sought to create recommendations for how Bellingham could thoughtfully densify in ways that made Bellingham an even better city and also reduce pressures to expand into our finite countryside. The effort won an American Planning Association award for public process and its recommendations were incorporated into the Bellingham Comprehensive Plan as preferred methods for infill.
I have always been an active council member, bringing ideas forward and making them real. Since being elected in 2009, I now bring that commitment to the Bellingham City Council. In my second term I believe my primary value will be working to secure necessary, additional funding for Lake Whatcom stormwater improvements. I also look forward to working on the Bellingham City Center Master Plan Update. I continue to listen and learn. I believe I have been a good fit for Bellingham, giving voice to the concerns and aspirations that a majority of our citizens share.
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Seth Fleetwood is a candidate for Bellingham City Council at-large seat. The general election is Nov. 8. For more information go online to bellinghamherald.com/elections. You can follow the Whatcom election conversation on Twitter at #Whatcomvote.
