2025 Election Features: Luis Burbano for District 4 Representative

We are continuing our series featuring candidates running in the 2025 election for Everett city council and mayor. We are asking each candidate to share their thoughts on four hot topics that affect Everett residents and want to help the public get informed and involved in the election before they are opening their pamphlets for the primaries in a few months.

Luis Burbano is running for City Council District 4 in Everett. For more information please visit his website: https://www.electluisburbano.com/.

Luis is running against Alan Rubio and Niko Battle in the August 5th primary.

1. Public Safety & Police Staffing: What specific steps would you take to improve public safety in Everett? How do you plan to address the 20+ open positions on the police force and ensure the department is adequately staffed?

Public safety and police staffing can be improved by simply engineering our roads for safety. Safer roads equals less accidents for the Police department to attend. Therefore, our police officers can have more time to do other assignments. Hence, reducing the amount of police officers needed. Let's take a look at the following idea for resource optimisation.

Currently, Everett ranks worse than the state average for traffic serious and fatal injury, according to the City of Everett database :https://data.everettwa.gov/stories/s/tdj6-bvxt

The data for the chart below was extracted from the Everett Police Department Database Portal:

It shows the Everett Police response to multiple calls from January 2024 to January 2025. Suspicious event was the incident that the Everett police department worked the most on that year, with 11.7% of the calls. However, the second event with the most police focus was traffic with 8.2%. Collisions accounted for 3%. Traffic and collisions accounted for 11.2% of calls in 2024.

When there is a neighborhood speeding complaint to the Everett Police department, the city response is to send a police officer to sit next to the road for a couple of hours to slow down the traffic.

How about if instead of using police officers as temporary speed bumps, we actually engineer our roads for safety.

Chicanes make roads safer. Chicanes can be combined with rain gardens and trees. Please see below.

Where will the money come from? The city already provides grants to homeowners to build rain gardens. We could use the same grants to build rain gardens that work as chicanes that will benefit all residents. The city of Everett also provides free trees (I got 4 last year!) to improve the city tree canopy. The same trees can be used for the chicanes. Chicanes can also be built by the residents of the community (Upon city engineering design and approval). Saving the city money and making our roads safe for our children to walk to school.

This plan takes care of a few things:

• Makes our roads safe

• Reduces the workload of the police department, hence, less police officers are needed

• City resources are allocated in a way to benefit all residents

• We improve the city tree canopy that improves air quality

• Neighbors working together create an environment of community

• 0 tax increase to the residents of Everett

2. Homelessness Crisis: What policies or initiatives do you believe the city should implement to improve housing stability and address root causes of homelessness?

If elected I will support all initiatives to provide housing and treatment to the most vulnerable members of the community.

I will also support all initiatives to provide our youth with green spaces, parks and activities to prevent them from developing anxiety and depression that can lead to substance abuse. For example, studies have shown that kids who spend more time outside, playing with friends, have lower levels of stress and anxiety.

For our kids, I would advocate for implementing community gardens in our schools so children can be exposed to the outdoors and have a Montessori like experience. Gardening has also been shown to decrease stress and anxiety.

We also need to create spaces and activities for our teenagers so they spend time away from screens. Studies have shown that screen times cause anxiety and depression. We need more pump tracks, sport clubs and pools for our teenagers to maintain good mental health. Maintaining a good mental health of our community addresses, in a way, the root cause of homelessness.

3. City Budget & Revenue: Given Everett’s budget deficit, what alternative revenue sources would you explore to increase city funding without relying on property tax hikes for residents?

With my wife, we own a small business, www.tamiacakes.com. The cakes are fantastic and you all should place an order as you read this!

When starting up our business, we had a very difficult time obtaining our small business permit and building permits to implement our home business. We also had frustration trying to meet city, county and state requirements that don't align.

When the permit process is difficult, it discourages people from applying for permits, encourages business owners to move to another city or forces people to run a business illegally. This situation discourages small businesses and affects the local economy which affects the city revenue.

More accessible permits will increase the number of businesses, maintain businesses in the area which will maintain and invigorate the local economy.

I am also a big advocate of sustainability. I love short commutes to work. A 1 hour round trip commute to work takes 250 hours a year, assuming 50 working weeks. That is about 6, 8 hour work weeks. This is not sustainable and adding traffic to the equation results in road rage that is ubiquitous in the news nowadays. We can just imagine the impact on people's mental health this commute has.

If elected I will support all initiatives such as environmental grants for large employers to encourage their employees to live in Everett. This not only improves road congestion, vehicle driver health, but it also retains the money in the city so our residents spend their money in our local business and that generates revenue. Don't believe me? The traffic going north on I-5 around 3pm is the work force leaving town, taking the paycheck to other towns and leaving pollution for us and our kids.

4. Bright Spots & Future Vision: What excites you most about Everett’s future? Are there any projects, initiatives, or developments that you believe will have a particularly positive impact on the community?

I am super excited about the light rail. I was part of the Sound Transit Community Board for the light rail. I learnt that the light rail will displace low income members of the community and local businesses on Casino Rd. However, for the home owners, like me, we are expecting to see our homes appreciate in value. If elected, I will fight for a sustainable design of the light rail that protects the character, history, legacy, businesses and residents of Casino Rd and south Everett.