Ellen Monrad has been supporting area for years
Ellen Monrad, current chairwoman of the Queen Anne Community Council, has been a member of the neighborhood organization for so long she can't remember when she first joined. "It could be 20 years."Monrad is also unsure how long she's served as chairwoman. "Five times, I think. I can't remember," said the Nancy's Sewing Basket employee. "It's fine," she added. "Someone has to do it; that's my feeling."It's not an easy job trying to keep things moving in meetings where everyone has an opinion, Monrad concedes. "You can have the same discussion over and over again, and never get anywhere."That didn't use to be a problem when the community council met on the Seattle Pacific University campus, where they could and sometimes did stay until midnight, she said. These days, most of the meetings take place at McClure Middle School and there's more need to stay on point because the council members have to be out of the room by 9 p.m., Monrad added.The makeup of the community council has changed over the years, as well. "We have more professional people," she said. And they don't come to the council with an agenda already in mind, Monrad said. "They come on the council for the good of the community."The council's goal is to protect the community as a whole, which can be a problem occasionally for some community members, she said. "Sometimes people don't feel we're paying enough attention to their (small) areas."A case in point was when plans to fix up the Fremont Bridge were announced. A certain faction of North Slope residents wanted to close off parts of the neighborhood to through traffic when the bridge was out of service, noted Monrad, who added that the community council wouldn't support the idea. "For the Hill, it wasn't going to be good."The residents who supported the plan were not pleased and tried to get revenge by coming to the council's last election and trying to vote Monrad out, she said.It was a wasted effort. The chair of the council is chosen by other council members and doesn't have to run for re-election until they are replaced by another council member and have to serve the remainder of that council member's two-year term, Monrad explained. "That was in the original bylaws."The community council, however, is not a monolithic organization. Separate community groups with their own agendas have formed over the years, Monrad allowed. In the 1980s, that included the United South Slope Residents, which successfully waged a battle to restrict building heights on the South Slope of Queen Anne.Another group calling themselves the Friends of Queen Anne formed in the 1990s to fight against turning Upper Queen Anne into an Urban Village under the city's Comprehensive Plan. The community council supported the effort, Monrad said. 'That would have been devastating for Queen Anne."And of course, there's the Uptown Alliance, which renamed Lower Queen Anne Uptown and never came to community council meetings, she said. "They do a good job at what they do." Still, Monrad observed, the community council's Land Use Review Community still considers projects everywhere in the neighborhood - including in Lower Queen Anne.The council was ahead of the loop with neighbor planning when they and volunteers spent thousands of hours completing the Queen Anne Plan before the city's separate neighborhood comprehensive plans even began, she said. Queen Anne later completed its own comprehensive plan by using elements of the Queen Anne Plan. "We're continuing to fight that battle," she said of planning efforts many consider to be a top-down effort."Another battle we've been fighting is the fire station (on 13th Avenue West), Monrad said. The city wanted to tear down three homes on the block to make room for a larger station, and the community council supports the residents' efforts to block the effort, she said. "They haven't won the battle yet."[[In-content Ad]]
