Public engagement and fiscal oversight at center of Treen’s campaign
Debbie Treen, 70, has long been involved in local politics. She served on the Bothell City Council for six years, including two as mayor, before stepping down prior to the end of her term due to a job transfer. She is also married to current Sammamish City Councilmember Kent Treen. Now she is running for a seat on the Sammamish City Council, aiming to apply her political and financial experience to Sammamish city governance.
“It’s time for a change. I’ve always been involved in civic activities, and I am a former councilmember and mayor. I believe I can make a difference,” Treen said in an interview with the Sammamish Independent.
Treen, a former chief financial officer, hopes to bring a more fiscally strategic approach to the city’s budgeting process.
Drawing on her experience serving on Sammamish’s Fiscal Sustainability Task Force in 2023, one of her goals is to improve how public feedback is integrated into financial decisions. Treen believes the task force’s scope was too narrow.
“That task force was restricted to only looking at revenue, so we did not evaluate how the city was spending its money. We did not have any discussion on Town Center. Those are two pretty key impacts on our city budget that didn’t get addressed,” Treen said.
To better balance the budget, she believes the City Council should continue their current approach of a thorough, line-by-line approach to reviewing the budget, ensuring that essential services—such as police and fire—are fully funded first.
Where her approach differs is with what she refers to as discretionary expenses. For items like road maintenance, she supports cost-benefit analyses to decide whether spending more now could save money later or if it is better to delay. For others, like consulting fees, Treen advocated to more closely evaluate the return on investment.
“One of the first things I would look at are our consulting fees. We have done a tremendous amount of studies, and oftentimes studies don’t yield anything that truly makes a difference in the community; they go on a shelf,” she said.
Treen also aims to apply her background in growth management to the city’s Town Center development plans. She previously co-chaired a growth planning initiative and contributed to the development of Washington’s Growth Management Act.
Drawing from this experience, Treen urges caution against being overly optimistic about the projected benefits of the Town Center development.
“I would want to see forecasted revenue and increased costs that would be incurred by the city if the Town Center is pushed forward. The current conventional wisdom is that we could somehow generate more revenue from sales tax. I really don’t believe that there’s much to be gained unless we go to big box retailers, and that doesn’t seem likely,” she said.
Though businesses pay equal rates of sales tax, regardless of size, big-box retailers typically pay higher property taxes because they occupy larger physical spaces.
Treen also advocates for improved teen engagement in Sammamish. She supports the idea of a youth-oriented space similar to the Issaquah Teen Garage, espousing ideas of the Central Washington University campus serving as a site for redevelopment.
Throughout her campaign, Treen has emphasized the importance of public input in city decision-making and said she would advocate for more meaningful engagement.
“I would say right now, too often we have open houses. They’re really presentations of what we’re going to do, not an actual attempt to obtain public response. So we need to make sure when we engage the public that we’re actually listening and want to learn from their responses,” Treen said.
Treen plans to maintain an open-door policy if elected and encourages residents to share their concerns.
“I am so committed to maintaining communication with my residents, not just the ones who vote for me, but those who don’t vote for me. My approach is to learn and to treat everyone with respect before making up my own mind on items that I’m asked to vote on,” Treen said.
Debbie Treen is running for Sammamish City Council Position No. 7.
Correction: a previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Treen helped develop Sammamish’s Growth Management Act. This has been corrected to reflect that she contributed to Washington State’s Growth Management Act.
