by David Mendez

Shoreline City Council candidate Valerie Snider called herself a ‘complete unknown’ compared to a quartet of long-time public servants and volunteers at a recent candidate forum. But Snider, a business supply-chain veteran who began working for King County in 2023, has made a name for herself among one of the city’s more vocal constituencies.

Snider, an Oregonian by birth who moved to Washington for college, raised her profile as a member of Save Shoreline Trees, an advocacy organization that seeks to defend and expand the city’s existing tree canopy. She also served as a legislative advocate with the Shorecrest High School PTA during the 2024-25 school year.

“I intend on carrying on [retiring Council member John Ramsdell’s] good work in behavioral health and in senior services, and in providing green spaces in underserved communities,” Snider said at the forum. Her campaign, she said, “is based off of research and on reality, with true affordable housing, with maintaining our tree canopy, with urban development and in growing small business.”

By day, Snider’s an IT acquisition’s manager, a position that has her digging in the weeds and building relationships with suppliers. She’s well-versed in supply-chain management, strategy-setting and contract management that comes along with it — skills, she said, will translate directly to decision-making within the city. She’s used to ensuring compliance with policies and ordinances, and comfortable with bringing people back into compliance if they step outside their bounds.

Her entry to local politics started small — she even called herself, at one point, an “armchair activist.” 

Sniders was asked to consider running by a group of residents led by Kathleen Russell, a co-chair of Save Shoreline Trees and — soon after — Snider’s listed campaign manager. “They asked me to run because I didn’t like what I was seeing with all of our trees getting knocked down. I happen to live in an area that is majorly affected by that,” said Snider, a resident of the Ridgecrest neighborhood.

Russell told The Osprey that she tapped Snider because she’s been active in the community and because she “would bring a different perspective” to the dais, contrasted with Malek’s long tenure on well-established boards and organizations across the city.

“She asked me straight out if I would run for council, and it definitely caught me off guard,” Snider recalled. “But you know Russell Wilson, who was our quarterback for a long time, would say: Why not me?” An iconic Seahawks quarterback and leader on Seattle’s 2013 Super Bowl championship-winning team, Wilson made the phrase his mantra, challenging himself to succeed in the face of adversity.

“That just kind of stuck with me, like: Why not me?” Snider recalled.

Snider’s candidacy is rooted in protecting the city’s existing inventory of significant trees.

Per the City of Shoreline’s 2023 Urban Tree Canopy Assessment, 37% of the city is covered by tree canopy as of 2021, nearing the city’s goal of reaching 40% coverage over the next 25 years. That same report found that, between 2017 and 2021, Shoreline gained 10 acres in tree canopy coverage, accounting for 0.1% of the city’s total inventory.

But neighborhoods east of Interstate 5, including Ridgecrest, are seeing tree losses across the board; every census block group east of I-5 lost between 1% to 8% of their tree canopy between 2017 and 2021. Many, but not all, of the blocks seeing the highest losses are along the city’s burgeoning light rail transit corridor, though no census block east of the freeway saw canopy growth over that four year period.

Snider has also made a point of focusing on small business during this campaign, as stores like Beach House Gifts and restaurants like Santa Fe Mexican Grill — both in Richmond Beach — face closure.

“It’s really hard to hear the struggle with our small businesses because they just kind of peter out,” Snider said. She looks back at Leena’s Cafe, the North City district diner that closed more than two years ago to be replaced with Alta Norra, a mixed-use commercial and residential building with 228 apartments. The building is expected to house retail on its ground floor, and many hoped Leena’s would find its way into one of those spots. “The idea was that they’re going to come back and occupy this lower space,” Snider said. “But then they find out the lease is so much, that they have to retrofit the construction of this new commercial space, and so they have a lot of upfront initial costs.”

To stop small business attrition, Snider is arguing for the city to have a stronger hand in facilitating financial assistance to small businesses, with grants to float businesses struggling with increased commercial lease costs.

Snider has won the trust of enough volunteers in Shoreline to sprinkle her signs along major thoroughfares and spend their afternoons waving her signs at major intersections, like Aurora and 175th Street, and Richmond Beach Road and Eighth Avenue.

One supporter, Carla, was proudly hoisting Snider’s colors to drivers around 4 p.m. on a Friday afternoon, trying to spread the word. Carla, who declined to share her last name, lives in the Richmond Beach neighborhood and she’s left uneasy by Malek’s platform.

“I feel that he is definitely pro-development. I’m not anti-development, it’s just that I want to see housing that is affordable here. And I want the city…to take steps encouraging development that’s affordable, and by that I mean it may be less than market rate and subsidized in some manner,” Carla said. Malek, she contends, is someone who appeals to the “One percent, or the very wealthy people.”

Snider wants the city to “take a beat” and ensure that the city isn’t approving development for development’s sake, but to keep an eye on “the objective, which is affordability.” She’s still searching for evidence that developer tax incentives encourage large developments and more affordable housing; she hasn’t reached a conclusion, but she cited a 2019 legislative auditor report that called Multifamily Housing Tax Exemption benefits “unclear.”

Operationally, the greatest difference between the two comes from fundraising. Between self-loans, donations to his own campaign and donations from folks around town, Malek has raised nearly $26,000 for this campaign. Snider has raised about $4,500.

When asked about the fundraising difference as she stood on the corner of Aurora Avenue and 175th Street, Snider wasn’t fazed.

“Does he have people like this,” she said, gesturing to the street corners at her volunteers, “standing outside and waving signs for him?”