Saying she wants to continue and extend Dwight Sutton’s work as a conciliator and mediator, Chris Llewellyn this week announced her candidacy for mayor.

Presently chair of the Bainbridge Island park board, Llewellyn becomes the first declared candidate to succeed Sutton, who is not seeking re-election.

“I am interested in connecting the island’s rich historical past with a visionary future,” Llewellyn said. “It’s an opportunity to give back to the community that has given me a wonderful life.”

Llewellyn believes that Bainbridge is facing a unique mix of challenges and opportunities.

The challenges involve the pressures from growth.

“We can’t pull up bridges or stop the ferries, like some people here would like,” she said. “But we can control the number of people that move here through land-use policies.”

The opportunities she sees are the proposed $8 million bond issue to purchase parklands and open space, which she strongly supports, and the opportunity to acquire the Wyckoff Superfund cleanup site on the south shore of Eagle Harbor.

“The taxpayers will spend something like $100 million to clean up the Wyckoff site,” she said, referring to the costs to remediate the abandoned and contaminated creosote plant.

“There’s no way that amount an be recouped by selling the land to a private developer,” she said, “so the public ought to get the benefit of the land.”

She also strongly supports the Japanese internment memorial proposed for the site of the old Eagledale ferry dock at the end of Taylor Avenue, the spot from which the island’s Japanese-American citizens were evacuated during World War II.

The proposed memorial would involve the city-owned Taylor Avenue road end and the western portion of the Wyckoff property.

“I hope that can happen really soon, while the people who were affected are still around to see it,” she said.

Llewellyn also describes non-motorized transportation as a critical issue – making pedestrian and bicycle travel safe on the island’s narrow roads.

Where possible, she favors bike and pedestrian paths separated from the roadways, or following different alignments altogether.

“When I was young, I could ride a horse from Fletcher Bay to Point White through the forest,” she said. “It’s not too late to put together a network of parks and trails.”

The native

Llewellyn grew up on Tolo Road “with the ocean at my front door and the forest at the back,” and had what she calls a charmed childhood.

She graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in clothing and textiles, and went to work in the apparel industry in Seattle, where she managed more than 100 people.

With small children at home, she abandoned the commute, and started Custom Sport, which manufactures and sells specialized sportswear, including protective equestrian gear, hiking and ski clothes.

She has served as a Little League coach, a swimming instructor and a church youth leader.

She and her husband Jim are ski instructors, and ran a ski school at Crystal Mountain for a number of years. They are also avid sailors.

Now that the children have all grown and left home, Llewellyn said she has enough time on her hands to run for office.

Jim Llewellyn’s position on the Bainbridge Island City Council and his plan to seek re-election this fall present an unusual situation, Chris Llewellyn admits, but not a real problem.

“As anyone who knows us knows, we are two individual people with our own opinions, and we agree to disagree on a number of things,” she said.

“And the jobs are very different. As it is now with Jim on the council and me on the park board, it makes life interesting at our house.”

Llewellyn said her style of management is to create opportunities and incentives for problem-solving.

“When problems arise, I think the thing to do is sit down with both sides to work through them, and have a time line to do it,” she said. “I think I can transfer my creative design talents into creative problem solving.”

Llewellyn does not yet have any specific proposals or programs in mind, saying that her learning curve is just beginning. But in general, she wants to preserve what she thinks is special about Bainbridge.

“The importance of community, and of economic and cultural diversity, are values we still have,” she said. “And there is still time to make those values work in the future.”