By Manny Frishberg, JTNews Correspondent
Jon Friedman has been on Mercer Island for pretty much his whole life. A 1985 graduate of Mercer Island High School and the University of Washington, he lives there today with his wife Lori and two small children.
“The only time I moved away was when my wife and I bought our first home and we were just away for about five years,” he says.
Friedman is president of his own home-building company, a former pilot and flight instructor, and now a candidate for city council. He has been active in the Jewish community, serving on the local boards of directors of AIPAC and the Stroum Jewish Community Center.
“My family was a member of Herzl-Ner Tamid Synagogue and I was Bar Mitzvahed there. I grew up pretty much at the JCC,” he says. “I was kind of a JCC guy, going to all the camps and participating in all the JCC programs through the years.”
Today the Friedmans are members of Temple B’nai Torah in Bellevue where, he notes, Rabbi James Mirel performed his marriage and the bris and naming ceremonies for his son Ryan, now 6, and his 3-year-old daughter, Kayla.
Friedman explains that it took him about seven years after high school to complete his degree in Political Science at the UW because he was pursuing other facets of his life at the same time. During those years he earned his pilot’s licenses, eventually becoming certified as a commercial pilot able to teach others to fly, and getting his real estate license.
For some time after graduation he made his living as a flight instructor before abandoning that career for his current one as a real estate developer and builder. But, he adds, he never lost his interest in politics, which he says has now propelled him into active political life.
“When I started thinking about [running for the city council] my issue really had to do with trying to be an advocate for families here on Mercer Island,” says Friedman. “I moved here with my family and [I’m] raising my kids here. Building and selling homes, you get a pretty good idea of why people are moving here. Growing up on Mercer Island I also have a good sense of what issues are important to our community.
“People sort of divide themselves along liberal or conservative lines, but nobody says, I’m not always going to be liberal, I’m not always going to be conservative, but what I’m always going to be is an advocate for families, says Friedman. “I want to make sure that whatever decision I make is going to have the benefit of helping or doing something good to make it easier to raise your kids here on Mercer Island.”
While Friedman says he has always been interested in the city’s political life, he sees good reasons to take the step of becoming a candidate now.
“I am entrenched in the community now, in terms of my building business and in terms of my kids being part of the schools,” he explains. “I feel like it’s a good time for me, as an involved citizen, kind of at the meat of my involvement here, to be involved in the city council.
“I also feel like this is a turning point in terms of development for our city. The decisions that are going to be made now for our downtown development and the way our city is going to go, in terms of rapid transit and all these different issues — these decisions are going to have a lasting effect and most of them are going to be made in the next two to seven or eight years, he adds. So I think right now is a very important time on the city council to be able to make those decisions. I think it’s important for somebody who has a historical perspective of living and growing up on the island to be a part of that decision-making process so that you maintain what Mercer Island is and has been historically.”
Friedman says his impression of the current council is that they have been more reactive than pro-active in setting an agenda and charting the course for Mercer Island’s future. As a home builder, he also believes some of the building codes and development ordinances have not been harmonized as well as they might be.
“When you do a small remodel job, or anything that you do here on Mercer Island, you run into issues of codes or ordinances that are put into place, that are ambiguous or, in some cases, contradictory. I’ve had a lot of experience working with the city development department and understand some of the issues related to those codes and ordinances that I don’t think are really of benefit to really anybody living on Mercer Island, and certainly not for families.”
One more impetus for his candidacy is his idea for solving the problem of creating affordable housing options for teachers on the island, a matter he feels has a large impact on the quality of life and fits in with his overall emphasis on benefiting families.
“A few years back, the city ventured into trying to provide some sort of affordable housing solution for teachers specifically,” he says, adding that the city stirred up a good deal of controversy without achieving its intended goal.
“I think that it’s vital to a community to make sure that your teachers are an integral part of the community. We’ve got some teachers and coaches and longtime community activists,” he says, “and we’re losing that because it’s just been too hard to be able to afford a home here on Mercer Island for all but a very few.”