Lucy DeYoung Talks About Woodinville's Future

Changes in tax law and the economic downturn have forced Woodinville to tighten its budget. In the past five years, the city has seen a 30 percent decline in sales tax and property tax growth.

With the economy still sluggish it is difficult for cities to plan for the future. So what’s a city to do? How can a city develop and attract investors into the community. What type of development should be courted?

In an attempt to answer some of those questions, Woodinville Patch is launching this series asking business owners, civic leaders and the community where the future of Woodinville lies. Patch sat down with DeYoung and asked for her perspective.

DeYoung was elected the first mayor of Woodinville in 1993, and served as mayor for three years. Her roots in the community go deep — her father’s family moved to Woodinville in 1925 and her mother’s family in 1935. She is president of the Woodinville Heritage Society and serves on the boards of the Woodinville Cemetery and the Evergreen Hospital Foundation.

Patch: What has been the best change or changes in Woodinville in the last 30 years?

Lucy DeYoung: When we incorporated in 1993, you couldn’t buy a pair of socks in Woodinville. The ability to buy goods and services was severely limited, and there were only about two restaurants in town. The ability to live and shop and play and socialize and all that at home has been a huge, huge difference and an improvement in the community.

The north and south bypasses occurred right before incorporation, but prior to that, there had been no new roads in Woodinville since the 1930s. So the traffic and the circulation have been greatly improved since the 1990s.

Woodinville has always been a nice combination of jobs and a place to raise your family. The fact that there are so many people in Woodinville who grew up in Woodinville, that still live in Woodinville says a lot for the community.

The other thing that’s nice about Woodinville is we have a downtown. Redmond’s still trying to identify, to create, to build its downtown, and we have more of a defined downtown area that we can build on. There’s some defined barriers that created the downtown area for us.

Patch: What are the biggest challenges facing the city now?

Lucy DeYoung: The last eight years, the city council has been high jacked by a group of people who want to turn the clock back to 1965, focus on the negative and not the positive, and I think have spent too much time on personal agendas and fighting versus on doing what’s best for the citizens of the community. I’m deeply saddened by that.

I think we know what we want to be. We want to be a nice bedroom community where you live, raise your kids, have an active downtown where you can go shop, go to restaurants, do things. I think the challenge we face is how do we implement the vision? And to do that, you need to focus on the positive, not the negative. To implement a vision, you need to have people that try and implement the vision rather than want to fight everything that happens.

(Also,) In 2008 or 2009, the state legislature changed how the sales tax is distributed. When we incorporated, Woodinville, for 16 years or 15 years of its existence, had a great tax base. A third came from industrial sales tax, a third came from property tax and a third came from retail sales tax. So, Woodinville got a lot of money from the industrial sales tax, and that’s allowed us to do a lot of road improvements.

It allowed us to have parks and to do things that other cities really couldn’t do. When we changed how the sales tax was distributed, we lost basically all of the industrial sales tax. For better or for worse, the ground rules changed, and the city council has done nothing — they’ve focused on the downtown plan — but they’ve done little to respond to how they’re going to replace that sales tax revenue.

Patch: What sets Woodinville apart from surrounding cities?

Lucy DeYoung: I don’t know what sets it apart. It just always has been different. So let’s embrace and celebrate that differentness and build on it.

Patch: What do you think will be unrecognizable about Woodinville in 30 years?

Lucy DeYoung: Towns have personalities. Hopefully, the personality of Woodinville won’t change that much, because of the fact that we are on the edge of the urban growth boundary. We’re a transition between urban and rural, so we really want to keep those qualities of rural life that we find attractive.

I think that the neighborhoods will be pretty much the same. They’ll be a place where you want to either raise your kids or grow up or grow old and have a sense of community and all the things that are entailed in a family community.

I think that the change will be over the next 30 years as we develop new neighborhoods, and those two new neighborhoods will be the downtown and the industrial area. For the city of Woodinville, there’s really no incentive to have the industrial area anymore because of the change in the sales tax distribution.

You can’t force development or it won’t be used. It’s important that these things evolve as the services are needed, as the population grows.

I’d love to see 30 years from now us more integrated with connectors to the University of Washington campus so you’ve got the two wine areas, you’ve got the University of Washington, you’ve got this great connector of trails — so that Woodinville truly becomes a place where you want to work live and play.

It’s a place where people want to come to play, to enjoy the amenities we have to offer. Kirkland has the waterfront; we have the wineries. We need to treat the wineries as our waterfront.