I think a lot about purpose. Purpose is an anchor - when disagreement is rife, it gives us something to return to. While we don’t know, and won’t assume, the board’s purpose, we can make a guess at topic purpose, because we all are working towards a better neighborhood and our board meetings should serve that goal.

This was an eventful month. Here are the highlights, from most exciting, to most impactful.

If an existing community asset can be rejected without a full cost or impact analysis, what process governs decisions about other assets?

Since January, we have been watching the board enter executive session to discuss issues pertaining to private lots. One of the persistent topics has been a 'declaration of covenant' for lot 2151 - which you may remember better as the Kaiser Woods Trail.

Our members have a right to be in that room — not because the board tolerates our presence, but because the law requires it. The board does not get to change that because they find someone inconvenient.

But there is another use of the phrase — one that has nothing to do with taste and everything to do with power. When someone says something false about you, and the response to a request for correction is let's just move on — that isn't resolution. That's a transfer. You absorb the damage. They keep the narrative. The social contract of agreeableness means you're not supposed to say so.

Demonstrating reasoning is a core part of the role of a board director. Members need to know not just what decisions are made, but how they are made. This is a member protection that is encoded into Washington state law.

We would like to talk about what kind of politics we are actually dealing with here.

April 2 Special Meeting - Understand the Topics

The membership section is actually very personal. It answers basic questions like: Who gets to vote? Who can run for the board? Who is officially a member of the association? That’s why we’re taking our time with it.

When members are told to step back and be quiet, the board doesn’t get to “do its work” more effectively — it just does it with less information, less trust, and less legitimacy.

When we demand how the work, it’s a signal that the issue isn’t procedural. It’s cultural. It’s distinction between support and compliance.

No candidate could identify a point at which their own conduct might merit reflection — or even consideration. We will also be collecting checklists and takeaways from the series in one place.

This site includes different kinds of writing, each with a specific purpose. Being clear about those purposes helps readers understand what they’re reading, how to use it, and where opinion and analysis fit. We don’t aim to sound neutral. We aim to be transparent.

This article explains how groups move from honest error to entrenched conflict — not through a single bad act, but through a sequence of thresholds that change how correction, accountability, and disagreement are handled.

I have opinions, and I’m not neutral about systems that reward exclusion or punish dissent. I write from lived experience, from documents and records, and from direct involvement in the community issues discussed here. I bring references not to posture as objective, but to show my work — so readers can trace how I arrive at my conclusions and decide for themselves whether those conclusions hold.

Interrupting a speaker during community comment is never neutral. It is a communication act — and it reveals who is allowed to define the story and who is not.

And if we want a neighborhood where people feel safe to speak, disagree, participate, and belong, then we — the adults in the room — must be willing to look honestly at how narratives form, how they distort relationships, and how we can break the cycle early.

Once a narrative forms about a person, every new action is filtered through it — no matter what the documents say. This is not about anyone being bad or malicious. It is about how stress and emotion turn into shared stories that shape how an entire community interprets one neighbor. And once systemic bias takes hold, that person can do nothing right, because the story has already been written.

It is important to say clearly: We understand that many of the people who spoke or wrote most strongly this election — including board leaders and candidates — genuinely believed what they were saying. Believing something strongly, however, does not make it complete or accurate.