I am writing to voice my support for Redmond’s propositions 1 and 2 on the Aug. 4 ballot. As a council member, I can tell you that we thoroughly reviewed the service needs of our community balanced with our ability to meet those needs. During the Budgeting by Priorities process last year, it was quite clear that the residents of Redmond highly valued the Public Safety and Clean and Green priorities. Not only did we hear this during meetings, our unofficial survey through the interactive budget game created by students at Digipen backed it up. And those priorities were funded in our budget, but there were more needs than resources available.

So we followed the letter of the law and are asking our residents if they want to live in a city that barely keeps up with the rising costs of doing business by sacrificing services on the edge or one that has the resources to meet the needs of all of our residents. When we began our discussion of whether to place the levies on the ballot, we leaned on input from our residents in selecting the programs and projects. As elected officials, that’s the kind of feedback we need to deliver the services our community wants.

We are also sensitive to the impacts our decisions have on residents and sought out programs and projects that enhanced the services we provided, or helped to fill a gap where the level of service was challenged due to limited revenues. It is easy to point out how revenue has grown in the past few years, but failing to acknowledge how Redmond weathered the recession and the impacts it had on our service is myopic.

The city survived the downturn because we were fiscally responsible and made hard decisions to reduce levels of service. Those decisions are being felt in many ways, such as limiting the number of neighborhood parks we can upgrade, limiting the hours of coverage at sports fields, timing road overlay projects to more closely align with when the roads will show significant wear and subsidizing aid cars throughout the city. While doing this, our region began to change and we were faced with new crime trends that require a significant investment of police investigation time.

Our reaction is to partner with our residents, roll up our sleeves and get to work on keeping Redmond a great place to live, work, raise a family, play and learn. The proposed levies fill gaps created by economic forces that we couldn’t control, but we had to confront. The needs expressed by our residents are recognized in the proposals before us.

Please join me and Vote Yes on propositions 1 and 2 on Aug. 4. Help keep Redmond a place that we can all be proud of for years to come.

Hank Margeson

President, Redmond City Council