Leaders don’t really listen to citizens

Published 9:00 pm Tuesday, April 27, 2004

Our neighborhood in southeast Everett recently benefited from a couple of important civics lessons from Snohomish County government. We must share our lessons with other residents so that the mistakes we made will not be repeated, wasting the time of the resident and the county bureaucracy.

In mid-2003 we received notice that a plat of land adjacent to our neighborhood was to be developed into seven single-family plats. In 2003, several of the neighbors testified at an open hearing and were rewarded when the hearing examiner agreed not to open the street. We believed the process that we live under worked on the behalf of the citizens.

That’s when we had our first lesson! We were later informed that county planning was ignoring the decision of the hearing examiner and decided to force the road through. We learned that the process that is set up to allow us to grieve governmental decisions through a hearing examiner is a facade that will be arbitrarily ignored when it befits the county.

Several letters were written to local representatives asking for intervention on our behalf. Lesson No. 2: Don’t believe all of the rhetoric you hear during elections. They are professional politicians and have limited concern for the community! All we received from the county executive and our councilman is acknowledgement that they support county planning. They were invited to attend a neighborhood meeting to discuss our concerns and have yet to respond.

I am not a supporter of Tim Eyman because I have seen how his initiatives have hurt us all. But after this experience I can understand the frustration his supporters feel toward government.

As a neighbor who is a developer stated in the beginning of this escapade, “You can’t win.” Sorry, Scott, should have listened to you from the start.

Everett