Position 3, one of four Sammamish City Council seats up for election this year, will see a primary in August.

Immigration attorney Minal Ghassemieh, marketing consultant Karen Howe and Sammamish Plateau Water Board President Karen Moran have registered for the Position 3 seat.

Ghassemieh

Ghassemieh, 36, has lived in Sammamish with her husband and three young children for six years.

She has a bachelor’s degree in business from University of Washington and obtained her juris doctorate from Gonzaga University.

For the last nine years she’s been practicing immigration law, focusing on employment and family-based immigration cases. She’s also a pro-bono attorney for the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, One America and the city of Seattle.

She has served on the API Chaya Board for the last five years. API Chaya, based in Seattle, serves King County by providing services to survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault and human trafficking.

Ghassemieh said that public safety, related to things like substance abuse and domestic violence, is “definitely” a priority. She said she would want to facilitate stronger relationships between the city, school districts and police.

She said that when discussing substance abuse and domestic violence, the city needs to talk about allocating money toward prevention programs. She said she would also bring “culturally relevant resources” to the city, like information sheets on domestic violence resources in different languages from API Chaya.

After the national election in 2016, Ghassemieh decided to get involved at a local level. She began going to hate crime forums on the Eastside. “That’s where I started to feel like there might be room for my voice at the City Council,” she said.

Additionally, as a City Council member, she said she could mitigate many citizens’ concerns with an “open and transparent conversation.” She pointed to things like transportation, infrastructure, rapid growth and preserving the environment as sore points in the community.

Ghassemieh said she represents the changing demographic in Sammamish, citing her age, the fact that she’s a mom, a professional, a lifelong community organizer and a woman of color.

Howe

Howe, 61, has lived in Sammamish with her family for 25 years. She has a bachelor’s in theatre from Whitman College, with an undergrad focus in history.

“What history teaches you is how to do research. What theatre teaches you is how to prepare and talk to people,” she said. “It’s an unusual thing to be a CEO with that kind of background.”

Currently, Howe is a marketing consultant for Farmers Insurance and is a precinct committee officer.

Her professional background holds titles such as vice president at AOL, CEO of Technicolor-subsidiary Singingfish and director of marketing at Microsoft Research. She’s held Cancer Lifeline, Parent Teacher Student Association and Homeowners Association board positions and has logged hundreds of hours as a volunteer, she said.

She decided to run for City Council one day when she was sitting in traffic looking at a clear cut. She recalled thinking, “We can do better than this.”

Howe wants to focus on managing growth in a way that won’t impact residents’ quality of life. Managing growth goes hand-in-hand with managing traffic, infrastructure and the loss of trees, she said. She suggests continuing efforts to work with King County Metro, but acknowledges that this will take time, so she’s looking for shorter-term solutions, like installing traffic cameras throughout the city so residents can see what their commute will look like or creating a shuttle system within the city so people can get around town.

She said there’s a lot of anger on the plateau regarding the loss of trees. “I would channel that into something more productive,” she said. She said she wants to educate the residents on how to engage with the city in a productive manner.

And ultimately, she would want to stop pilot programs, citing that they’re usually in environmentally sensitive areas.

Moran

Moran, 54, has lived in Sammamish for 30 years. She and her husband have raised three children on the plateau.

She has a bachelor’s degree in business accounting from Griffin Business College and an associate’s degree in nursing from the University of Wisconsin.

Currently, Moran is board president and a commissioner for Sammamish Plateau Water. If elected to City Council, she said she would give up her commissioner seat on the board if that’s what the public wanted.

Moran has been involved with the city of Sammamish since the beginning. She was one of two people to file the paperwork for incorporation back in the late ‘90s. She has more than 25 years of experience serving the community in delivering public policy, by participating on boards like the Sammamish Planning Advisory Board, Sammamish Planning Commission, Sammamish Parks Board and the Washington State Boundary Review Board.

She said she wants to run for council because all the long-time members are leaving. “Some history needs to stay on the council,” she said. “It just seems like the obvious next move to me.”

She wants to focus on three things: roads and traffic, financial management and responsible growth.

She wants to see a more walkable community. “Until we can get people out of their cars, we’re not going to get much out of the roads,” she said. And she criticized the city’s “watered down” concurrency standards. She also said that she’s seen traffic projects sit on the Transportation Improvement Plan for years and that it’s time to move on some of these projects.

She called for the prioritization of projects to help the city manage its current and future budgets and talked about putting away money into a “rainy day fund.”

Regarding responsible growth, she said that goes hand-in-hand with being good stewards of the environment and meeting adequate concurrency ratings on the roads.







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Immigration attorney Minal Ghassemiah, 36, has lived in Sammamish with her husband and three young children for six years. She’s running for Sammamish City Council Position 3, which will see a primary in August.

Marketing consultant Karen Howe, 61, has lived in Sammamish with her family for 25 years. She’s running for Sammamish City Council Position 3, which will see a primary in August.