Amy Walen: Council Member Passionately Projects Her Vision for Kirkland

Life in Kirkland didn't start out smoothly for Kirkland City Council member Amy Walen. She and her husband, Jim Walen, had just invested in the dealership and were getting ready to move up from Portland, Ore., when Amy was diagnosed with breast cancer.

"My mother was diagnosed at age 47 and passed away just before she turned 50," she recalls. "So, I thought my diagnosis was a death sentence."

Thinking she would have to return all the way to Portland to undergo surgery and treatment, Walen faxed Dr. Marion Johnson at with the details of her illness and family history hoping to find help closer to her new home. Dr. Johnson called her within 30 minutes and had her in surgery a week later.

After receiving amazing care at Evergreen nearly every day for a year, Walen desperately wanted to give back to the community to show her gratitude.

"I wanted to drive cancer patients back and forth to their treatments, give facials, things like that," she says.

Walen, 43, also tried her hand at fundraising for a local colon cancer group. But asking people to give money just wasn't a good fit for her personality.

In 2009, her husband made an impassioned case to the City Council in an attempt to keep it from approving a business head tax. At $100 per employee, the 100-plus employees at Ford of Kirkland were going to cost the company more than $10,000. The tax was nonetheless implemented by the council.

After the experience, Walen's husband suggested that she run for a council seat. It turns out that City Council work is just the kind of giving back for which she is well-suited.

She won the 2010 election with something like 67% of the vote -- "a great honor," says Walen, who was touched that people believed in her.

During the election, she was often portrayed as the "business" candidate vs. her opponent, the "neighborhood" candidate. She rejects this compartmentalization saying, "I live in a neighborhood, too."

However, business does figure prominently in Walen's vision for Kirkland's future. As a sales tax-based city, it only makes sense to support the businesses, she says.

Kirkland Mayor Joan McBride, who describes Walen as elegant and a "real star" says, "she is very business oriented, but also amazingly progressive. She asked for a study to see how competitive we are with other cities. Then when she saw the results, she said, ‘Here’s what can be done.'"

Amy believes that the role of the City Council is to plan for the future, projecting even fifty years out. She would like to see the wetlands restored to their park-like state, while redeveloping the adjacent area as a central business district with some high rise office space attractive to large companies like Microsoft.

She is a strong supporter of keeping Kirkland's downtown core charming, historically preserved and welcoming to residents and guests. Local business owner Stuart McLeod of restaurant is a good example, Walen thinks, of someone dedicated to Kirkland's small town roots while taking steps to realize the community's revenue-generating potential.

Another project on Walen's radar is to see the City of Kirkland purchase the currently unused from the Port of Seattle. The idea is to turn it into a biking/walking trail directly connecting the downtown area with Totem Lake.

Though city related work takes as much as twenty hours per week including meetings, agenda reviews, luncheons and community interaction, Walen is also part of the Suburban Cities Association, an alliance of smaller suburban cities to increase their bargaining voice with King County and the City of Seattle.

"As with most things in life," she says, "you have more power if you get organized."

When Walen isn't doing the work of policy-making for Kirkland, she is usually spending time at her "home," Ford of Kirkland, where she and Jim Walen have the unusual policy of allowing family members to work together.

She also loves to walk her dogs along the waterfront and eat at local restaurants. Her favorite lunch spot is , a small French cafe on Central Way with a reportedly delicious lunch crepe. And though she wants to try more of the menu at , she is currently obsessed with the chile relleno and can't will herself to order anything else.

Walen's diagnosis with breast cancer has put other fears in perspective. She learned to scuba dive and also made the really scary decision to run for public office. It has allowed her to become a more decisive person, knowing what she wants instead of a just going along with the whims of others -- a helpful trait when navigating the waters of policy-making as an elected city leader.