My sincerest thanks to the many of you who supported my candidacy with your time, effort, donations, and your vote. I believe – and I have been told – that we ran a good, clean, and issues-oriented campaign that helped to elevate the level of discussion. We have much to be proud of, even if the numbers fall short of complete victory.

The issues that made up the planks of my platform when I announced back in June remained the central issues throughout the campaign, and became the focus of other city races as well. I would like to believe that we helped to create this focus, and that this focus will not be lost in the coming term. Some very fine people were elected, and we owe it to them as our elected representatives to provide the pressure and the support that they will need going forward. Bellingham is changing, and for all of our sakes, we need to guide those changes so that they will be positive ones.

I hope that all of you will stay engaged in our democracy at the grassroots level, as I intend to do.

• Our drinking water source still needs protection and restoration
• We still need to fight sprawl
• We still need to identify and encourage livable and attractive forms of infill
• We still need to rewrite our land use laws to move away from outdated and car-dependent patterns of growth
• The far north of our city still needs parks and a genuine library presence
• We continue to need a better means of ensuring accountability and performance measures of how well our tax dollars are spent
• Housing affordability remains a pressing concern
• And the financial and environmental challenges of waterfront redevelopment still need to be tackled head on.

It is my fondest hope that in two years time, in the next election cycle, we will have seen genuine progress on all of these matters. Please work with me and your fellow citizens, and our elected officials, to bring about these positive changes!

Yours,

Michael Lilliquist