Big Change Starts Small

About Me

I'm Daniel Corkrey, a 21 year old who's lived in Duvall since 2010. I've grown up in our schools, work at Red Pepper as a delivery driver, and spend as much time as I can in our town and in the valley. I spend my freetime researching governments and political theory, along with watching auto racing, playing videos games, or just driving around the valley.

Why I'm running

I feel like my age, and life position put me in a unique place to represent those in our community that might otherwise go unspoken for. A huge concern for me is the cost of living in our community, many people, especially young people like myself, get pushed out and aren't given much of a chance to stay here and be heard.

And in a personal way, I've wanted to run for office since at least the time I was in middle school. I've always had a huge interest in politics, especially local and state politics, where I feel the biggest and most important impacts to people's lives can be made.

Priorities

Here's what I'd like to explore while on the council:

• Affordable Housing

  I believe the city should take a proactive stance on affordable housing in our city, not just hope developers build something we need. Our city can and should directly build and manage some affordable housing units itself, many cities across the country, state, and region already do this widely. As it stands, the state provides many pieces of funding and frameworks to make it happen. We can do this through grants from many different sources, and finish the funding through a bond that's tied to the revenue from the project itself, meaning the city could do this with minimal or no tax money at all.

  The fact is, that for many young people, seniors, and people on hard times, there's no options to stay in town. The only places you can really go are usually far away from here, we should prioritize creating a stable floor of housing in our city to keep our community together.

• Transparency, Accountability, and Engagement

  I want to explore ways our city can help keep everyone in our community in the loop about decision's it's making, or projects it's working on. This to me could start with a newsletter, saying in plain and simple terms what the city council has been working on, what decisions were made, and what they're working on next. This could provide good opportunities for everyone to know what's happening, and to make their voices heard when they see something happening that they care about.

  It's just impractical for most people to keep up with the council right now, it requires watching a 1-2+ hour meeting twice a month, or reading difficult documents like meeting minutes. It's just not something that most people who have jobs, families, and lives, should be expected to keep up with.

  My eventual goal with this, if it goes well, would be for this to be expanded into a full commission. Right now, we have a planning commission, cultural commission, civil service commission and library board. We could add a civic commission, tasked with keeping the community up to date with the city government, and even other governments, like the county, local districts, or relevant state decisions. If the county is debating something that may impact Duvall, we could keep our community informed, and ready to go engage and speak on our behalf. The city speaking for itself is one thing, but mobilizing our community, the citizens of our town, to advocate for us would increase our voice.

• Community Spaces

  There's not a whole lot to do in our town, it's mostly houses, some parks, and some businesses. But I believe we could do better, especially through exploring and hopefully building, a community center and public pool. Currently I'm getting involved in the community effort for a public pool, but I'd like to use my seat to push that vision forward. This is especially important to me as a young person, there's not much in town that appeals to people my age; young adults or teenagers. But a community center could be the perfect place for everyone in our community, if we build it with the whole community in mind.

• Business and Economy

  I support local businesses, but more importantly, I want to see strong support for cooperative businesses in town. Cooperative businesses are businesses run democratically by the people who rely on them, for the good of stakeholders instead of an owner. A popular example of this is REI co-op, or credit unions like BECU which are both owned by their members. But a more important version of this in my eyes are worker co-ops, where the workers together vote on decisions together, and share in the profit together, without a traditional business owner. This provides better wages, builds democracy into our economy, and gives the people doing the work the full share of what their labor produced, and full control over the work they know best how to do. Cooperatives keep wealth local and dispursed in the community, providing better stability in our local economy, and for the workers at these businesses.

• Regional Vision

  Being on city council provides opportunities to make changes and improvements directly here within city limits, but it also provides a platform to be involved regionally to help our city and neighbors out. I want to use the seat as a way to help organize collaboration regionally, across the Snoqualmie Valley, and even the Eastside. Things like a Public Utility District could help lower utility bills for all of us, or exploring ways to work together with the other cities in the valley on contracts with service providers like Waste Management could also help lower bills.

  Alone, Duvall is a city of 8,000 people, but with the other cities in the valley, we're a voice of 30,000+ people. This is important when we think about the fact that our mainstreet, along with the mainstreet of Carnation, is a state highway, meaning we need to consult the state frequently when it comes to interacting with mainstreet. It's also important at the county level, when you look at the fact that our city is surrounded by county land, and county roads, meaning that if we want to help our traffic issues, we have to work with both the county and state to achieve it.

Your ballot is due on November 4th, even if you don't care about any other race, I'd ask that you please just mark my name and return your ballot at the least. If you want to reach out to give input on anything at all, feel free to email me at DanielCorkrey.Vote@gmail.com or message me on social media.

Thank You