Longtime Lake Stevens Arts Commissioner Susan Lind steps down

Published 8:32 pm Sunday, March 1, 2009

LAKE STEVENS — Music on the Lake will have to find a new caretaker.

Susan Lind, who has been in charge of the outdoor summer music program in Lake Stevens for nine years, is stepping down from the city’s arts commission.

In her capacity as arts commissioner, Lind not only performed the routine tasks necessary to stage six concerts each summer, but took a step to help keep them going in future.

She helped create a nonprofit organization so businesses who donated money to the program could count their donations as tax deductions.

The program costs about $2,800 a year, and for about the past four years donations have been handled through the Lake Stevens Arts and Parks Foundation.

This encourages businesses to donate so the city “can offer all these concerts to our citizens for free,” Lind said.

Lind, 56, an elementary school music teacher, will continue to serve on the foundation but will retire from the arts commission. She wants to free up time to pursue other interests, she said.

Music on the Lake will continue, but it will be hard to fill Lind’s shoes, arts commission president Tracy Stevens said.

“Susan is an amazing woman, she has done so much for the arts commission and the community,” Stevens said. “She is just going to be sorely, sorely missed.”

In addition to her work on Music on the Lake and other work on the commission, Lind pushed for funding for the salmon sculpture for the Lundeen Parkway roundabout. Money was available under a state program that requires agencies to set aside half of 1 percent of the cost of any new government building to purchase public art.

“I’m proud of that,” she said.