Last Wednesday I attended a meeting for my neighborhood in the city of Bellevue. Bellevue is a nice city in Washington, population a bit over 100,000. It has a pretty built up downtown (the tallest building is 42 stories) but is mostly sprawling suburbs.

Bellevue is divided into thirteen “neighborhoods”, though it’s arbitrary and based on school districts or zodiac signs or something like that. I never knew I lived in the “Sammamish/East Lake Hills” neighborhood until a few weeks ago, when I got an invitation in the mail to attend this meeting. Beyond being a Toastmaster blogger wanting to evaluate something more high brow than Grow Rich, Stay Rich guy, it also provided me a chance to meet some of my fellow residents of Sammamish/East Lake Hills. Emphasis on “some of!” I counted twenty three people in attendance, out of 4000 households.

At the meeting we learned about the Neighborhood Enhancement Program (NEP). The good natured bureaucrat running it explained that every three years each of Bellevue’s thirteen neighborhoods is allocated a certain amount for small projects (< $150K per project). Residents chose potential projects themselves and then vote on the top three. These are small things like new sidewalks, making some lights better, school field improvements, and a bird study. There were thirteen projects that had been submitted and made it past their selection criteria, which the bureaucrat presented one by one after explaining the program. He had maps of where the work would be done along with pictures when he had them.

The $275K they’re throwing to cover 4000 households is chump change, especially when quite a few of said households are over a million dollars a pop. (Mine is not one of them unfortunately.) But I still really like this program and the man running it for many reasons:

• It gives us (twenty three of us at least) the opportunity to participate in direct democracy. I couldn’t help thinking to the old-time New England town hall meetings and wonder if this isn’t a better way to run our government. It sounds cheesy, but I’ve never felt this connected to government in my life.
  
• We can go to City Hall and ask for various improvements, but the issue is that the downtown bureaucracy is slow. This admission came from the bureaucrat himself! The NEP is our town grandees admitting that too and an honest attempt to help out on a few of the smaller issues.
• This isn’t a replacement for maintenance/traffic/police etc. It’s to help with a small, non-crucial quality of life issues and is not sold as anything more.
• There are tradeoffs and they are dealt with bluntly by the bureaucrat. Unlike crooked politicians who promise the moon and more even if there’s nowhere near enough money to pay for it, because we’re capped at spending $275K it places a limit on what we can possibly hope for. I’m sure the bureaucrat would resent me calling him “the bureaucrat” all over the place because he was exceedingly blunt on this and on all points.
• We’ll receive the ballots by mail and not have to stand in the dreary Northwest rain to vote.
• Personalities are completely removed from the equation. Maybe the lady who proposed the new sidewalk near my house forgot to pay her nanny’s Social Security in 1992, skipped serving in Vietnam, or is a member of the Olsen Twins fan club. Who cares? The way the NEP is presented, it’s purely what improvement we get and how much it costs and nothing more.

In my next posts I’ll dig into the pure public speaking elements. The guy running this wasn’t a professional speaker but he wasn’t bad, and was infinitely more likable than Grow Rich, Stay Rich guy. I asked him after the presentation if I could get a swimming pool put in my back yard as one of their projects three years from now. He immediately said yes. All I have to do is cede my back yard to the City of Bellevue so anyone can use it whenever they want. I told him I’d get back to him on that.