If you live in the City of Bothell, you will definitely be interested in watching what happened at the City Council meeting on May 20th

It is long, but you need to watch the first 20 minutes and again at about time stamp 2:54:00.
After watching it I am certain you will be motivated enough to visit the next City Council meeting in person and let them know how you feel about what they are planning to do with your money.   The next meeting is Tuesday, June 3rd at 6:00 PM at City Hall.

In summary: First, they are planning on spending $47 Million on a brand new city hall building.  Without a public vote and, as you can see in this video, without even spending an extra hour to review the 200 page document after getting the final price quote.

They already spent about $1 Million to get a design for it. Now they are discussing moving forward to close on a deal to pay Vulcan Real Estate to build this new city hall.  The new building will be 66,000 square feet versus the current 11,000 square foot building.  While we may need new facilities, do we really need something 6 times larger?  They don’t even know what to do with the 4th floor.  It will be vacant!  Do we need to build a brand new facility when there is ample suitable real estate readily available at a much lower cost?  Are there other things of a higher priority that we should be spending our money on first?

Of course, if you were a council member and received campaign funds from Vulcan Real Estate to help get elected to Bothell City Council, then I suppose you would be pushing very hard to award Vulcan this $50,000,000 deal.  Fortunately we have due process that should protect us from conflicts of interest like this, yes? Well apparently not this time.  Normally when the city is considering spending such a huge capital outlay, they put it to a vote by the public as will be the case for the other big item they are planning: a $42 Million bond measure they are going to ask for in the fall to pay for “parks and roads improvements”. Why? because we won’t have enough money after they buy this new city hall.  But that’s another story.

THERE WILL BE NO PUBLIC VOTE on spending this $47,000,000 of our tax money, which, when you divide it up among the 33,000 residents  (correction, 39,000 including those annexed earlier this year who were not informed about this measure at the time they agreed to the annexation) within the City of Bothell, amounts to about $1,500 for every man, woman and child in the city.  Since my daughter isn’t paying taxes, I guess I’ll have to cover her share too.  This is crazy.  They haven’t even found where they will get the funding to cover all of the costs of the current project to revitalize downtown.  And now they are talking about spending an additional $50 Million on one building.  AT THE SAME TIME they will ask for a public vote on a bond to raise $42 Million for additional downtown revitalization projects including turning Hwy 527 through the downtown area into a boulevard (bi-directional traffic in the middle with separate one-way streets with parking on either side).  And those improvements won’t even cover the costs to finish the plans for the park at Bothell Landing.
All of this while our road maintenance is already under-funded by somewhere around $70 million and our existing roads are crumbling and without adequate pedestrian access such as this article describing 195th St / Hollyhills Dr behind the Seattle Times building.

The Call to Action is simple:  Attend the next Bothell City Council meeting Tuesday, June 3 at 6:00 PM.  Sign up for the Visitor Comments which come at the beginning of the meeting.  Speak your position.  Stay for the agenda topic where you will be able to voice your opinion further. Make your voice heard.  Remember that you elected them and they work for you.  Be sure to watch the May 20th meeting to fully prepare yourself.

Last meeting Former Mayor Lamb also received a gavel in honor of “amazing service to Bothell”.  Read this article to learn more about the truth of his character.