by David Mendez

Edmonds City Councilmember Jenna Nand wears her practicality not on her sleeve, but on her wrist. Rather than a smart watch — which she owns, but lets molder in a drawer at home — she wears a Casio — a timepiece with an easy-to-read face designed to take a hit and keep moving.

That tracks. Nand was appointed to the Edmonds City Council in 2022, winning election in 2023. In 2024, the city declared a fiscal crisis, laying off 48 city employees. In response to the crisis, Nand co-sponsored an amendment defunding a training budget for the city council.

“I didn’t think [subsidizing hotel and travel] was something that the taxpayers should have to do when everyone in the city was being asked to tighten our belts,” Nand told The Osprey.

She’s running for the state legislature as a champion of affordability. Ensuring that everyone has the means to succeed has been central to Nand’s platform.

She wants to amend the state constitution to fund education so Pre-K-through-12 public schools aren’t dependent on bonds and levies; she wants public colleges and universities to lower tuition levels and create apprenticeship pathways to union jobs; she wants to incentivize the real estate market to create affordable home equity options; and she wants to develop healthcare reforms that prevent folks from medical bankruptcy without stifling medical research and development.

“We need to fix a lot of the inequities that are preventing people from being able to work hard and reap the benefits of that,” Nand said.

Among those inequities is the state’s tax code. She’d like to see wholesale reform which she said can only be informed by the state Supreme Court’s reaction to the millionaire’s tax.

“We’re one of the only states in the country that has a jurisprudence that interprets income as property. If the state Supreme Court sees a way to overturn that jurisprudence, that frees the hands of legislators a bit to start crafting a new code that’s more appropriate for the 21st century economy we’re dealing with here in Washington state,” Nand said.

Failing that, she said, she’d champion a constitutional amendment explicitly allowing income tax collection. “I don’t think it could be done in one, three or five years; it’d really be a generational change,” she cautioned.

Nand is a second-generation American, born to Fijian immigrants who joined the middle class as proud union-affiliated teachers in the Seattle Public Schools system.

Nand a volunteer animal rescuer in her spare time — which led her to sponsor a local ban on backyard rabbit, dog and cat breeding — and a small business attorney by day. She’s a resident of Southeast Edmonds, making her vitally aware of her neighborhood’s Highway 99 business corridor, which produces the most sales tax revenue in town.

She grew up in a Shoreline that wasn’t yet an incorporated city, and takes inspiration from the nascent city’s leaders. The discussion then was whether or not the community wanted to be absorbed, piece-by-piece, into Seattle, Edmonds and Lake Forest Park.

“I really understand and respect the decisions that the inaugural city council made when they decided to incorporate and not be annexed into Seattle. I think that a lot of the 32nd is full of independent, small cities that really value having their own identity and their own community. And I definitely want to make sure that we stay focused on local issues and local desires,” Nand said.