Jon Pascal Candidate Profile
There are a plethora of city council races happening all over the state, but for my candidate profile this month, I want to focus on Jon Pascal, who is running for his third term on the Kirkland City Council. Councilmember Pascal and his wife raised two children in Kirkland, who are currently in college and high school, and Pascal originally moved to Kirkland from Bellevue, where he was born and raised. Pascal earned a bachelor’s and a master’s degree from the University of Washington before taking on many city and county committee roles.
Pascal has been a pragmatic and outspoken voice during his time on the council, where he successfully secured funding for additional law enforcement officers, passed a landmark transportation plan, and is looking forward to leading smart planning and housing development with all the mandatory initiatives and benchmarks passed by the state legislature. He decided, after working as a consultant for many private and public agencies on transportation projects through his part ownership in his company, Transpo Group, that he wanted to get more directly involved.
“And I recognized that I could have the best solution, but the policy aspects and funding aspects of transportation were so dependent upon our elected leaders. So that's when I started thinking about that, that's something that I could do, and I could provide a different perspective and bring some of my professional experience to assist in some of those issues.”
I asked Councilmember Pascal what some of his biggest goals are for housing in Kirkland, if re-elected, especially given the mandatory middle housing benchmarks for cities to meet after a statewide bill from Olympia a few years ago.
“One is really around housing and making sure that with all these state requirements that we continue to think about how we can thoughtfully implement those as a city, that we don't just blindly follow the stage, in implementing some of these things that we really are careful and, and really prop up some of the great things that make Kirkland special. Let's not lose that, because that's why we're such a desirable place to invest. Why we have higher property values is why people desire to live in Kirkland,” said Pascal.
“We have this incredible need. But, you know, it's a supply and demand issue, and the only way to solve this is really to put more public money into housing. But where does that money come from and how do you do it? And that's what I'm talking about is that those are good things to work at, but let's not go into this, let's go into this pathway because it has to be sustainable. It has to work. You have to achieve the outcomes.”
On the housing front, I asked the Councilmember his thoughts on the passage of the rent control bill and how he views that as a statewide policy that Kirkland will have to work with.
“The landlords and other folks that own property across the city are now increasing their rents more than they want to because if they don't, then they're going to be jammed down that road. And so, this has brought hardship along to many tenants that they very much respect that I want to see continue to live in Kirkland, that now have to move, because they can't afford it. And so, it doesn't give the flexibility that I think many of the landlords want, and I think we're trying to fix something where there are maybe a few bad apples, but there's a lot of good landlords out there, and now we're impacting them.”
Pascal did assert that he would be in favor of some sort of uniform statewide policy instead of the current patchwork of landlord-tenant law in different cities and counties. If this sounds familiar to RHAWA membership, that’s because RHAWA ran a bill to fix this exact problem. Our Harmonization bill, House Bill 1088 and Senate Bill 5661, would have done just this. Here is what Pascal had to say on the matter.
“I was never supportive of a city-by-city approach to rent control or tenant protections because we know that people own multiple properties across multiple jurisdictions, and that would be super confusing not just to them, but also to renters to tenants. So, I'm just really concerned that we're trying to solve a market, an economic problem through regulations, and what we're going to continue to do is chase our tail, and it's not going to really ultimately, realize the outcomes that we want, which is more housing.”
When he is not pounding the campaign trail or working on smart legislation, you will find him on many local hiking trails in the summer, or catch him on the ski slopes in the winter months.
The RHAWA proudly endorses Councilmember Jon Pascal for re-election to the Kirkland City Council. To find out more about Jon, or to donate to his campaign, check out www.jonpascal.com/home.