By Peggy Sturdivant

Less than 24 hours after polls closed on the general election in November Catherine Weatbrook took her usual place at the monthly Ballard District Council meeting. Her seven-month campaign to represent Seattle City Council in the newly formed District 6 was over. When I asked her later why she didn’t even give herself one night to recover from months of community events she replied, “It didn’t occur to me.”

I’ve seen Catherine Weatbrook at work in the community for over 20 years but never sat down with her socially. I’ve heard her as then President at the Ballard District Council table and had been to her home, stepping over at least one foster dog and using her washing machine as a surface to make telephone calls to potential voters the night before the election as she ran against incumbent Mike O’Brien.

I’d attended an Emergency Preparedness class she organized and seen her at candidate forums and public events. I trailed as she fearlessly went to the front doors of hundreds of North End residents during her campaign. Yet she never impressed me more than the night after losing the election when she took her seat as usual at the Ballard District Council meeting.

Last week she was at the Urban Design & Transportation Open House; after all she chairs the Seattle Freight Advisory Board as they work on a Master Plan. The issues that confront Ballard and all of Seattle were her passion before the election. The problems that she wants to help solve didn’t go away and neither will Catherine.

“When I see a problem I like to jump in to solve it,” Catherine told me. She has always been the person friends and strangers called to solve their problems, whether it was a lost dog or how to get blood out of the carpet. “I’m an engineer. My passion is problem-solving.”

She grew up in Seattle, got her engineering degree at University of Washington and was the “mom” who took on organizing for projects such as the North Beach and Soundview playground. As a parent at Small Faces Child Development Center, located in the former Crown Hill Elementary School, she joined the Board, and then what she calls her “circles” really started to get bigger.

The fate of the former Crown Hill School was up in the air, and she was part of the team that took on the legal and financial challenges of helping Small Faces acquire the building while creating a non-profit neighborhood organization. That slow but crucial success led her to the Crown Hill Business Association and then her realization that Crown Hill had no representation on the Ballard District Council. Once a member there, “You learn about all the other things that are going on with the city.”

Having worked on the first Neighborhood Plans in the 90s she became acutely aware of the city’s infrastructure. Delivery trucks in the middle lane of 24th N.W. Increasing bicycle thefts and lack of bicycle safety (on and off the Burke-Gilman). Deferred maintenance in Parks & Recreation due to budget constraints. School buses that had no choice but drive up on the sidewalks. Emergency responders that had to detour to a fire…she wondered what the neighborhood would do in a real emergency, without power or phone service. She started working on Emergency Preparedness, became a member of the Freight Master Plan Committee. More and more circles even before the strongly developer make-up of the HALA Committee prompted her decision to run for office. She lost, but she’s undeterred.

“Why would I not have continued?” she asked of me when I queried all of her efforts since the election.

I’ve seen many community organizers become disillusioned and even bitter yet I have never seen Catherine anything other than realistic and strangely positive in the face of meetings that have me claiming I’d rather stick needles in my eyes. As if a relentless campaign wasn’t enough drama for Weatbrook’s last months included the deaths of two close friends, her son’s car totaled by a drunk driver, foster dogs and losing her own longtime dog to cancer. Five days after the election her husband was hit by a car while bicycling down 23rd NW Avenue. “REI has a $65 service to see if a bicycle is road-worthy after an accident,” Catherine told me wryly. Her husband was treated and released from the emergency room, his road-worthiness still to be determined.

Catherine said there are things she would do differently if she were deciding to run for Seattle Council today instead of last spring. She would start earlier. She would listen to her own instincts about stating her positions clearly from the get-go instead of trying to fundraise first. She would doorbell earlier, and therefore more.

Over coffee we could have talked about more issues, and therefore more problems that Catherine would like to solve but there was a foster dog waiting. Other than walking the dog around Green Lake, Catherine Weatbrook isn’t going anywhere. She’s not walking away from Seattle’s growing pains, but going forward to meet them.