Snider and Malek debate Shoreline’s future at Chamber of Commerce Candidate Forum
The five candidates for Shoreline city council answered questions at a crowded forum hosted by the Chamber of Commerce at City Hall.
There are five candidates on the ballot for Shoreline city council this November. Incumbent Mayor Christopher Roberts, Deputy Mayor Laura Mork, and Council Member Eben Pobee are unopposed.
The only contested race is between Jack Malek and Valerie Snider, who are competing for council position No. 1. Snider and Malek provided more information for voters who want to know where they stand on the issues at Thursday night’s forum.
The comments from the candidates have been edited for length and clarity. In the interest of time and space, the comments from Mork, Pobee, and Roberts have not been transcribed here.
Opening Comments
In her opening comments, Snider said there are substantive differences between her campaign and Malek’s. “There are two different campaigns that are being run for this position. One that’s more visionary and one that’s more, I think, reality-based. Especially when it comes to things like affordable housing,” she said. She criticized the city’s program for incentivizing affordable housing. “We have a vision of providing affordable housing, but in reality… People who even work full-time, at a minimum wage job, cannot afford these affordable units. So I hear that the council is going to be reviewing the multifamily tax exemption [program], and I hope to be a part of that,” she said.
In his opening comments, Malek said he wants to attract bio-tech businesses to Shoreline leveraging Shoreline College and Fircrest. “We’ve got a wonderful community college that puts out biotech, bio-manufacturing. We’ve got the largest laboratory in the state in Fircrest. These are things that are great attractors. We’ve got people in Bothell Canyon Park that are out looking for places… to expand their biotech companies, and they’re out looking in Everett. We need to start reaching out and getting them to look here.”
How do you plan to attract and support businesses that would add to and serve the people of Shoreline?
Snider said, “What the city can do to attract new businesses is to offer temporary assistance and incentives on the financial side in order to bring them here and give them kind of allowances that might be temporary.”
But Malek disagreed. “I don’t agree at all with giving incentives for businesses.”
Instead, Malek said the city needs to do more to crack down on shoplifting. “I think one of the things we can do is actually address the rule of law. So when people go into a drugstore, they cannot walk out of there with their arms full of somebody else’s goods and have no repercussions.”
Malek also wants to see lower construction costs for businesses. “I also think that the cost of new construction on these ground levels is way too high,” Malek said. And he mentioned an Adaptive Reuse proposal from the Chamber of Commerce that would lift regulations to allow more businesses in existing houses near the transit stations.
How will Shoreline balance the needs of ongoing development in the city, both residential and commercial, while protecting trees and green spaces?
According to Malek, the city’s tree canopy has increased since 2013. “They told me we were somewhere around 13% to 15% tree canopy. And that our goal was 20%, and it takes years to get there. I thought, this is a meritable goal.” He said, “We got to 20% much sooner than that. We are currently at 37.1% canopy, tree canopy.”
Malek praised the benefits of trees but pushed back against criticism over tree removals to make way for improved mass transit. “The light rail has the equivalent of 45 million trees in terms of carbon load elimination. 44% of greenhouse gases are from our automobiles and vehicle trips. That can be mitigated mostly by the light rail,” he said.
Snider decried the loss of trees and called for more preservation. “If you’re going to increase your tree canopy, you have to invest and maintain the base. We have removed recorded almost 5,000 significant trees in the last almost a little over five years. You can’t knock out the base and then try and build more. There’s a very modest goal by the city to increase the tree canopy by a very modest 3%, and then there is a pie in the sky number to build it increase it by 25%. I don’t think either of those is realistic if you keep knocking down the trees.”
“It’s what makes people want to live here and build a business here and retire here,” Snider said. “It’s not just one designated place to have a forest, because you have to drive there, and that counteracts all of the benefits of having mass transit.”
How will you attract and support businesses by removing permitting obstacles to getting a business up and running in the city of Shoreline?
Snider said, “I would endorse having a liaison with the business community… so that the folks who are coming here can understand what the process is, what permits need to be done, who to reach out to, in order to expedite that... I would have a dedicated space that folks can go to… where those folks can reach out to to understand what the process is, how to expedite it and move it along and get through it, and if they need any grants or financial assistance, how to go about that as well.”
Malek pushed back against comments from incumbent council members who said the city has improved the permitting process. “I’m intimately associated with the process, and I will tell you we have not improved, not meaningfully, and we do need to desperately.”
To emphasize his point, Malek blamed the city for how long it took for Suni’s in North City to reopen. “It took almost three years to get a place that burned down: Suni’s across the street to open their doors and then another year or so to expand into the space next door. That’s not tenable. That’s not tenable… We can do better, so much better.”
Snider was asked what her approach to homelessness and mental health issues will be.
“When it comes to homelessness, this is a top priority that the residents of Shoreline have reiterated… through the city surveys… It’s a very complicated issue, but the success models have shown that the best way to address the homeless situation is to take money out of the equation and for the government or the homeless organizations to own the land and to partner with nonprofits like Habitat for Humanity, for building up the residential areas and those units.”
Presumably referencing a project in Kenmore, she said, “We have seen this being done with our neighbors over at the city of Kenmore, and we don’t need to reinvent the wheel here and scratch our heads and try and start from ground zero.”
As a longtime realtor with connections to developers in the area, Malek was asked to address his potential conflict of interests.
“I will promise you, if I ever become compromised in terms of a client of mine that I’m working with or land that I own myself, I would recuse myself from that decision. I don’t believe that will be a problem. I don’t believe you’ll find that I have an overwhelming amount of landholdings or developers that would conflict, but if it were, I’d be happy to recuse myself, if necessary,” he said.
The candidates were asked to talk about the possibility of bringing a pool back to Shoreline.
Malek says he supports the pool but wants to pay for it by growing sales tax revenue instead of increased property taxes. “I think we’re a large enough city now of 64,000 people. We have enough of a tax base. We could do better with a business sales tax revenue base, and that’s something that we really need to do. I don’t think that we should keep taxing everybody with levees, interim levees, and bonds… I do think we need some way to balance getting business in here, getting it paid for, and getting it done… I think a lot of folks really need that pool. It’s really not too much to ask for a city of our size and for what we have. I think we need to just make it a priority, and we can fund this thing without leaning on property taxes even more or levies and bonds. I think there are ways that we’ll perhaps need a bond, but there are ways to pay it back through business sales tax revenue.”
Snider opposed the previous pool as too expensive but is open to the idea now. “When it comes to the pool, personally, I had kind of mixed feelings because the original initiative was very, very expensive. And I didn’t think that that was a great use of taxpayer money. That being said, the new design… for the pool has a much lower price tag, and the people who would benefit from it, largely our seniors and our students within the school district, not to mention our families, there would be a community-wide benefit for having a pool, especially right next to the senior center. So I am leaning towards a pool. I’m very interested to understand what comes out of the committee, in terms of how expensive it is, how it would be financed, and how the county and maybe the park bonds would assist with funding that pool.”
How would you address providing affordable housing options for those who may be priced out of living in the city of Shoreline while also attracting developers to develop in Shoreline?
Malek wants to see faster permitting to increase the number of homes. “I think to make affordable housing, we need competition, we need volume. We don’t have it…. We need to improve the permit times… People can’t waste two to three years to get a simple permit to get town homes or single-family homes built. The more volume we get… the more competition, the lower the prices. It’s just simple, simple math.”
Snider rejected the argument that building more homes is bringing down housing costs. “I live in the rezone area down in Ridgecrest, only a few blocks from the Light Rail. And getting those areas rezoned from single-family to multifamily, it was a very, very hot topic. It still is, years and years later. And when you’re knocking down a single-family home and putting in multiple town homes that go for $800,000 apiece, you’re not lowering the costs of housing.”
Closing statements
Malek closed with, “I’ve got two parting comments. One, it’s not about us. It’s not about our children. It’s about our children’s children. That’s a saying that I absolutely adore and I believe in. And my final one is from the Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts of America: ‘Leave it a little nicer than you found it.’”
Snider mentioned her endorsements, the 32nd District Democrats, the King County Democrats, the National Women’s Political Caucus, and State Representative Cindy Ryu.
Snider ended by saying, “I’ll say what I told a gentleman I asked, what message do you want to give to the Council of Shoreline? And he said, ‘Stop knocking down our trees.’ And I will say to you what I told him, ‘I’m your girl.’”