Waking up around 7 a.m. this Memorial Day morning, to the sounds of leaf blowers and other power equipment (in Kirkland, not legal on any morning until 8 a.m., and on a holiday not until 9 a.m.), I am reminded of the key attribute that is missing from Kirkland’s city administration: accountability. It is for this reason that the recent proposal to remove the city manager position and replace it with a real mayor with real administrative duties is in fact the best thing for Kirkland right now.
In the more than two decades I’ve lived in Kirkland, I’ve had the pleasure of dealing with the occasional city employee who seemed to take their job seriously, and to care about the quality of life in the city. Unfortunately, these employees are rare, and greatly hindered by the lack of top-level accountability and support, and the lack of effective means of enforcement. Noise complaints involving power equipment like that which woke me this morning are in particular maddeningly impossible to resolve, as the only after-hours agency available to address them – the Kirkland Police Department (KPD) – also appears to be completely ignorant of the code and unwilling to take action.
Perhaps not coincidentally, this apparent lack of interest in protecting the peace and defending the vulnerable by the KPD is also epitomized by their approach to bike safety, something that casts Kirkland’s recent “Bike Everywhere Day Proclamation” in a particularly ironic light. Not only does the KPD consider the bike lane to be the place to execute traffic stops (when they just as easily could be handled by pulling off on a side street) and a place to block by standing in and holding a patrol car’s door open in while they operate their speed-monitoring radar, and in doing so fails to defend the bike lane as roadway space reserved by signage and markings for bicycle traffic, it argues vehemently against such defense, putting forth logically absurd justifications for allowing (for example) garbage bins to be placed in the bike lane, and for motorists to drive in the lane as a matter of course.
Far from being the bike-friendly city that Kirkland wants people to think it is, it is actively hostile to cyclists needs and rights. And in large part, this is due to police department attitudes.
Noise complaints and bike safety are just two of many areas in which the city fails to protect its citizens. With each of these issues, citizen complaints about such failures are met with indifference or outright argumentativeness. Individual agencies are not accountable to residents of Kirkland, but rather to the city manager’s office, which in turn is accountable to no one in any meaningful way. The city fails to respond to active complaints, never mind does it take proactive steps, like educating the public and relevant agencies about the regulations that exist.
So, yes. It seems to me that it is time for Kirkland to look toward a different approach to administration. Indeed, toward an approach that has worked well not just for many of our municipal neighbors, but also our state and federal governments. Whether the office is called mayor, governor, or president, having an individual who is charged with the efficient and responsive administration of the city, and at the same time is accountable directly to the very people that office is supposed to serve, seems like a very good idea to me. We’ve tried the city manager approach, and frankly it’s just not working. It’s time for a change.
Peter Duniho, Kirkland
