The city’s election lineup is set, and while there are four Newcastle City Council seats with expiring terms, only one race includes more than a single candidate.

Community Activities commissioners Linda Newing and Victoria Sandoval will compete to fill the seat being vacated by City Councilwoman Lisa Jensen.

Linda Newing

Victoria Sandoval

Incumbents Gordon Bisset and Carol Simpson will each run unopposed to retain their seats. Planning Commissioner Allen Dauterman initially drew a challenger for Position No. 3, but Rob Lemmon withdrew.

Linda Newing

Linda Newing never envisioned herself running for public office.

“I don’t come from a hugely active political family,” she said.

But the prospect seemed to grow on her as she volunteered on the Newcastle Community Activities Commission and contributed to meaningful neighborhood enhancements.

That, coupled with her experience in municipal government, set the 11-year Newcastle resident on what she called a “surreal, humbling” journey toward elected office.

“Yes, I know this is politics, but I don’t view it that way,” she said. “I view it as community service at a higher level.”

Newing joined the Community Activities Commission in 2013, and now serves as the vice chairwoman. In her role, she had a heavy hand in establishing Little Rhody Park and planning volunteer appreciation events.

If elected, she plans to pull on her experience working as an administrative assistant in the city of Renton Public Works Department.

“I work in municipal services infrastructure, and people notice when things aren’t right,” she said. “Safe infrastructure is huge, especially when you’re doing all this growth and development.”

Ensuring public safety, monitoring growth and development, and improving public outreach are among the most important issues facing the city, Newing said.

As large-scale development projects flood the city, Newing said it’s important that public officials do all that they can to maintain Newcastle’s identity.

“I want to make sure that that development and growth is viable, and it still preserves our residential character,” she said.

Newing also identified effective public outreach as a critical trait any public policymaker should possess. She looks forward to attending community meetings, talking to residents about city issues and hearing their concerns this election season and beyond, she said.

“People want to be heard,” she said, “and it’s an elected official’s duty to listen, digest and respond.”

Victoria Sandoval

Victoria Sandoval is a relative newcomer to Newcastle.

She moved to the city in January 2014, but already, she sees it as the place she could call home the rest of her life. That’s why she’s running for a City Council spot.

“When you love a city, you want to make a difference,” she said.

She wants to have a hand in a crafting a Newcastle that instills pride in its residents and has outsiders clamoring to join that unique sense of community.

“We’re small enough that we should definitely have a community feel, and I don’t think we do, not yet,” she said.

Sandoval, who joined the Community Activities Commission in October 2014, said development is one of the city’s most important issues.

She highlighted the Newcastle Way apartment project as an example of residents unhappy with the trending growth in the city.

“It would be part of my job to facilitate the ease on the residents so that they make this transition easy,” she said.

While Sandoval said she understands residents’ fears of newcomers coming into the city and changing its dynamic, she added that growth, especially in the form of retail, is necessary to bring more people, and by extension their money, to Newcastle.

Sandoval described herself as a very passionate person with strong convictions; but she also has a mind for mediation and reconciliation, which comes in handy on a board with seven distinct voices, she said.

At the end of the day, though, Sandoval, a real estate agent and nurse, said all City Council members want what’s best for their community and residents.

“I’m not into the politics of being a politician, but I want to look back and say, ‘Wow, look at the difference we’ve made,’” she said.

Newcastle resident Jo Ann Pancheri often sits in her home, peering out the window, clutching her phone and waiting for the worst.

Her house sits at the intersection of Southeast 75th Street and 125th Place Southeast, a corridor where neighbors have repeatedly asked for traffic-calming measures.

Pancheri has an unobstructed view to the speeding and near-miss accidents that community members say plague the neighborhood.

“I wait every day with my phone waiting to call 911,” she told the Newcastle City Council on July 21, illustrating her fear of witnessing a major accident.

Neighbor after neighbor told similar stories of heart-pounding close calls and a reluctance to let children play in the front yard due to speeding concerns.

“This is an accident waiting to happen,” resident Laura Peterson said. “I would hate to see changes being made because there’s been a tragedy that has occurred on our street.”

The community wanted speed humps installed, and residents have relayed that message to the council at more than one town-hall meeting and past council meetings.

This time, however, residents got their wish. At its July 21 meeting, the Newcastle City Council directed its public works department to install speed humps on the Southeast 75th Street corridor.

“We’ve talked about it a lot, we put money aside to do something and now I think it’s time to do something,” Newcastle City Councilman Rich Crispo said.

The council voted 5-1 in favor of the speed humps, despite Public Works Director Jeff Brauns’ earlier presentation that suggested alternative measures. Councilwoman Carol Simpson was the lone dissenter, while Deputy Mayor John Drescher was not in attendance.

Data collected did not support the installation of speed humps, Brauns said.

While studies show that the traffic volume has increased on the corridor that includes 125th Place Southeast, Southeast 75th Street, 127th Place Southeast and Southeast 73rd Place, Brauns said speed data shows that the majority of vehicles are going the speed limit.

“The data doesn’t show that there’s a significant problem,” he told the council.

The posted speed limit on the street is 25 mph. At various points across the corridor, the city recorded 85th percentile speeds of 23, 24, 25 and 26 mph in 2015, Brauns said.

The 85th percentile speed is the speed at or below which 85 percent of all vehicles are observed to travel under free flowing conditions.

Brauns suggested installation of wide-edge striping, neighborhood traffic circles and initiation of a speed-watch program as alternative solutions.

He added that the city’s practice has been to look at speed humps when the 85th percentile speed is about 5 mph above the posted speed limit.

The city has $75,000 allotted for traffic-calming measures. Speed humps cost about $10,000 each, Brauns said. The exact number of speed humps to be installed on the corridor is currently unknown.

Traffic volume on the corridor has increased, though, and that could continue with new development planned in the area.

Residents said they believe drivers are attracted to the corridor because it doesn’t have the traffic-calming measures that neighboring streets do.

“For me, it’s more about diversion,” City Councilwoman Lisa Jensen said of the speed humps.

Slowed speeds is certainly a benefit, Jensen added, but she said she hopes the speed humps also discourage those who have used the corridor as a “faster” way to get out of the neighborhood.

Simpson, the only council member to vote against the motion, earlier angered neighbors when she said, “I’m getting tired of driving over speed humps. I’m getting tired of paying for bills for my car repair,” at the town hall meeting in June.

At the July 21 council meeting, Simpson said speed humps are a “low-quality solution to the problem.” Really, what that street needs is full sidewalks from Donegal Park to 129th Avenue Southeast, she said.

Simpson also suggested to neighbors that they would likely regret their call for speed humps after frequently using them.

Neighbors in attendance clapped in approval once the 5-1 vote for speed humps was completed.