ECC board reform

A heritage of engagement and forward momentum. Founded in 1971, the Eastlake Community Council has been one of Seattle’s most effective, open, and inclusive neighborhood associations. In the 1970s, President Jimmy Carter’s National Commission on Neighborhoods identified ECC as a model of what a neighborhood association should be. In the 1990s, the Seattle Neighborhood Coalition honored ECC as the “community council of the decade.”

The ECC-managed Eastlake Neighborhood Plan was adopted by the Mayor and City Council in 1999 with praise for its unexcelled outreach. The Plan, which was conducted under City contract and oversight, emerged from years of consensus-building among residential, business, and other stakeholders. It lays out a program of neighborhood improvements that has brought millions of public dollars to Eastlake, with more to come if the current ECC board of directors does not continue to ignore it.

In its first 50 years, ECC helped transform Eastlake from a certified depressed area with poor transportation and just two parks, into a growing and sought-after “urban village” with many walkways, parks, and other amenities but still a prized “small town” feel. For decades the ECC board brought favorable City policies and funding through coalitions among residents and industrial and commercial businesses.

Generations of ECC board members, officers and ECC members shared a common strategy: build community consensus and the engagement and support of all levels of government neighborhood improvement plans and projects. These plans and project proposals are unique among neighborhoods in their detail and in the degree and documentation of widespread neighborhood support and government involvement. They provide irreplaceable background on existing conditions, planning detail and project design.

But in the last five years, the ECC board has lost basic understanding and momentum for the following six plans and sets of recommendations. Four do remain on ECC’s web site but some are hidden in a section with the offputting name, “Archives”. The web site should be reworked into topics in order to recognize these plans and sets of recommendations as being of current importance. With each, ECC should specify what it is doing to renew and carry them out, and how the public can help, if it wishes. Here are the four that are at least on the ECC web site:
Fairview Green Street Design Concept Plan (http://www.eastlakeseattle.org/archives/fairview-green-street)
Eastlake Neighborhood Plan (http://www.eastlakeseattle.org/archives/eastlake-neighborhood-plan)
Edgar-Hamlin Shoreline Pathway Gap (htts://www.eastlakeseattle.org/archives/shoreline-pathway-gap-edgar-hamlin) (https://www.eastlakeseattle.org/archives/i-5-colonnade-planning-and-design)
I-5 Colonnade Open Space Plan (https://www.eastlakeseattle.org/archives/i-5-colonnade-planning-and-design)

The following two plans and sets of recommendations were removed a few years ago from the ECC web site. They should be restored to the web site so that progress can be resumed on implementing them:
Recommendations for the Transportation Management Plan and Program for TOPS-Seward School (http://eastlakeinfo.net/?page=schooltraffic) Seattle requires this school to develop a TMP for City approval, but the TMP has not begun to be developed.
Eastlake Transportation Plan (http://eastlakeinfo.net/fp-content/attachs/eastlake-transportation-plan-and-related-design-issues-1994.pdf)

A puzzling new board culture. In 2020 and thereafter, a new majority of board members and officers took hold which without evident new public process, systematically set aside longstanding ECC bylaws, best practices, and plans.

The wrecking of the bylaws was dramatic. Click here for a table of the accountability protections that were in the previous bylaws compared with the worrisome deletions and additions of 2020. (For reference, click here for a full version of the previous bylaws; and on the ECC web site for the current bylaws.)

ECC’s articles of incorporation (adopted in 1971) require it to be a membership organization, with the board and officers responsible to the membership in their decisions and actions. The bylaws had always contained safeguards for accountability of the board to the membership, and for due process in the board’s internal affairs. Incredibly, most of these safeguards were abandoned in one day (June 16, 2020) through wholesale and amendments by the board which it adopted without first sharing the proposals with the membership to whom the board is supposed to serve.

The board considered and adopted the 2020 bylaws amendments without first offering or providing them to the ECC members for their review and comments. Repeated requests for the revision drafts to first be released to the membership for their input were ignored. Prior notice and review should especially have been given, because the revisions now insulate the board from meaningful accountability to the membership.

For 49 years, ECC’s official purposes (adopted in the Dec. 21, 1971 amendment to the Articles of Incorporation — click here) were fully quoted at the outset of the bylaws document as a way to encourage officers and board members to heed them. In the ECC board’s June 16, 2020 peremptory revision, these official purposes were removed from the bylaws, and the Dec. 21, 1971 amendment to the articles of incorporation that sets them forth is not provided on the ECC web site. Because today’s board is acting so at odds with these official purposes, it is so very important to recall and honor these official purposes:

[ECC’s official purposes, from the Dec. 21, 1971 amendment to the Articles of Incorporation:]

1. To foster and encourage a sense of community among people who live and work in the Eastlake Community.

2. To work with all governmental and civil agencies in the development and implementation of social, cultural, educational, and environmental programs that will benefit those who live and work in the Eastlake community.

3. To provide a clearinghouse for information on laws and governmental or private programs and proposal affecting the welfare and environment of the Eastlake community.

4. To work for and assist in the development and growth of the Eastlake community in ways that will preserve the history, charm and attractiveness of the community and its adjoining inland water and shorelines for those who live and work in the community.

5. To work to maximize public use and enjoyment of the inland waters and shorelines adjoining the Eastlake community.

6. To cooperate with other community councils and organizations in working for the improvement of the quality of life in the City of Seattle and its environs.

August 2023 purge. The by-laws changes adopted in 2020 created potential for a bare majority of boardmembers to ignore and cast out the other board members, and such abuse came to pass in August 2023. As reported that month in the on-line newsletters Urbanist (click here), and Seattle Bike Blog (click here), the ECC board by a 5-4 vote removed from office four board members, including three who were the board’s only renters and youngest members. This unprecedented step was taken without any prior notice to them nor was it even listed on the agenda that day.

The immediate issue was as follows: A closely divided Eastlake Community Council board of directors had just approved and sent on August 14, 2023 a letter calling on federal and local officials to cancel funding for both the RapidRide J Line and for protected bicycle lanes on Eastlake Avenue. In response, four dissenting board members, as individuals, co-signed their own August 17 letter to the same officials, expressing support for the RapidRide J Line and for protected bicycle lanes on Eastlake Avenue.

A few days later, five board members by the barest of majorities voted to remove from the board their four board colleagues who had voted against ECC’s official anti-letter, and who had written their own unofficial letter supporting the project. This inexcusable expulsion of the four by the five-person board majority was an unprecedented departure from ECC’s 52 years of fair and open process, and its former tolerance for the diversity of board and neighborhood opinion. Board members do not give up their freedom of speech when they join.

A heritage of consensus-building. The ECC board culture that took hold in the 2019-23 period was a sharp departure from earlier boards’ philosophy that narrow votes do not produce the best decisions. Throughout most of ECC history, the officers and board of directors sought to avoid narrow margin votes by engaging board members who might be opposed to a motion, in order to make amendments that would draw their support. Most ECC board actions were unanimous.

In the past, presence on the board of a minority view was not seen as an offensive barrier, but as an opportunity to improve the outcome. The board recognized that the ECC membership and the general Eastlake population hold diverse opinions that deserve consideration, and that diverse opinions on the board are a blessing that can produce a result that better reflects the community’s wishes. The additional effort to listen and adjust has produced better and more long-lasting decisions for ECC and the neighborhood.

While Robert’s Rules of Order does not require that the majority fully listen to the minority, it does give the minority a voice and a platform to communicate its views to the majority in ways that can improve deliberation and results. In repealing the bylaw requirement that Robert’s Rules govern board and membership meetings in 2020, the ECC board disreepected due process and the value of dissent.

Even without the repealed bylaws requirement for due process in removal of a board member, Robert’s Rules of Order (had its mandated use not also been dropped in the 2020 bylaw revision), would have required due process protections such as written notice stating the reasons and a required waiting period for the accused to consider the charges and prepare a defense.

Until the 2020 revisions, ECC’s longtime bylaws included due process requirements that made full deliberation, consensus-building, and alternative dispute resolution more likely. The bylaws long required that their own amendment be only if a quorum of three quarters of the board of directors is present, and then by a vote of at least two-thirds of all board members. Also, a bylaw amendment could not be adopted at the same meeting at which it was first introduced. In 2020 the board changed the bylaws to make them much easier to amend.

ECC’s bylaws until 2020 did not allow removal of a board member except with ten days advanced notice, just cause and a 2/3 vote. Probably for that reason, from ECC’s 1971 founding onward, no board member was removed until after the 2020 bylaws changes had repealed these due process protections, allowing removal without cause or notice.

For much of its history, the Eastlake Community Council board of directors sought consensus even though the bylaws did not strictly require it. As this best practice can no longer be expected from the current board values and culture, in the future it should be required by the bylaws, such as in this example from the Eastlake Neighborhood Plan Steering Committee, which produced the 1999 Eastlake Neighborhood Plan. The Steering Committee consisted of Eastlake-based organizations and other stakeholders. ECC staffed the Committee and and co-chaired it with Eastlake’s business community.

The Eastlake Neighborhood Plan Steering Committee committed to and practiced (p. II-2 of the plan) “that, although parliamentary procedure would govern, the committee would encourage consensus and avoid narrow margin votes on important issues.” The resulting neighborhood plan stunned the City Council at its 1998 public hearing (held in Eastlake) by the lack of anyone testifying against anything in it, contrary to the City Council’s experience with the other 36 neighborhood plans.

An inspiring book, Democracy in Small Groups: Participation, Decision Making and Communication (1993), by former UW (now Penn State) political scientist John Gastil, looks at hundreds of organizations that strive to make their decisions by consensus rather than by narrow majorities. Gastil finds that democracy within an organization is not well served if members are left out who, with more effort at consensus-building, could be heard, and often included in a decision with broader support.

Decisions are often better, and an organization stronger and more sustainable, with mutual commitment and trust. The majority is not corrupted by power, and the minority is not left out, thrown out, or wanting out. The Eastlake Community Council board of directors was wise to take this approach for much of its history, and should return to it now.

Restore fair play and openness. Recent years have been an aberration from the ECC board’s longstanding tradition of neighborhood improvement, community-building, due process, and responsiveness to the membership. Recent board culture appears to regard fairness, openness, and accountability as inconveniences to be evaded rather than as ECC’s essence and greatest strength.

In its August 2023 actions, the current board majority board broke trust with the ECC membership, and damaged ECC’s longstanding and hard-earned reputation with the City government and with the public at large. Bold action is required to heal this self-inflicted wound. If the board is not willing to make the following changes, then the membership must intervene:

1. Withdraw the August 17 ECC letter which calls on federal and local officials to defund the RapidRide line J and protected bicycle lanes. Apologize publicly to the four boardmemberesho were removed.

2. Expand the board to include young people, renters, bicycle and transit advocates, and more people of color. Recognize that the many cyclists and bus riders who use Eastlake’s streets are stakeholders whose welfare and opinions must be considered whether or not they are from Eastlake.

3. Restore the time-tested but recently repealed by-law provisions for accountability and due process. Add to the bylaws the following provision that can no longer be taken for granted: “In carrying out the requirement to observe parliamentary procedure, the board shall act to encourage consensus and to avoid narrow margin votes on important issues.”

4. Reaffirm the above-discussed plans and policies for neighborhood improvement that ECC took years, financial resources, and huge volunteer resources to develop, and which retain widespread community support. Going in a different direction can be justified only by a showing (unlikely) of widespread rejection of these long-delayed community improvements.

5. Revise the ECC Board Member “job description” (first adopted in 2019 but never in the bylaws and always hidden from the general membership) to delete the so-called responsibility to “Maintain the confidentiality of ECC board meetings, which means that board members will refrain from sharing the nature of discussions and the opinions of individual board members.” The ECC membership has a right to know what those it has elected are doing in the board meetings.

Other best practices to restore the ECC board’s openness and public engagement.. Following are some best practices that were second nature for much of the ECC board’s history. The current board should “remember the answers” and take best practices such as the following to heart so that it promotes openness and public engagement rather than the opposite.

1. ECC public meetings will be held monthly, and be publicized well beforehand through the Eastlake News, social media, posters, and ECC’s large e-mail data base which was well used in the past but is no longer being updated or used. A particular focus of the meetings will be issues on which the the board is considering action. The meetings will be scheduled well enough in advance for any public comments to be useful input to the board decision.

2. When ECC officers, board members, board committees, and “Associates” interact with public officials, developers, the media, and other stakeholders, the board will be responsible for ensuring that these outside contacts are featured at open public meetings, well publicized in advance as described in #1 above, and in formats allowing the public to pose questions and engage in public discussions.

3. The ECC Secretary or other designated officer will be responsive in timely providing to members, upon their request, the minutes of board, executive board, and other committee meetings; as well as any correspondence these bodies and their chairs may have with public officials, developers, the media, etc.

4. Board members and others who represent ECC on advisory committees such as at UW, the Police Department, and TOPS School shall report back to the ECC board and to the public via public meetings, the Eastlake News, the ECC web site, and social media.

5. ECC public surveys will reach out not only to members, but to all who live in the neighborhood.

6.. ECC will amend its by-laws to restore the checks and balances that were in place s for decades before being removed in 2020.

7. ECC will not censor its web site or the Eastlake News to exclude mention of local institutions, news sites, and diverse opinions with which some board members and officers may disagree.

Conclusion. Eastlake is too small a neighborhood for its Community Council to stray from maintaining momentum on quality and well vetted and supported plans and projects. It needs to be transparent with the membership and the general public and should work to get them involved in actual and virtual venues. It should play fair within the board, and be open to a range of possible new board members. Only by rethinking and reforming its current board practices can ECC, and Eastlake as a whole, overcome the challenges that our neighborhood faces.

[Comments and suggestions about any of the above are always welcome at info@EastlakeInfo.net.]