To the editor:

Lisa Neal is exceptionally well qualified to fill the city council vacancy in the Bainbridge South Ward.

She has a brilliant legal mind and understands public policy well. She’s been an attorney for more than 30 years, specializing in employment law and insurance litigation.

She’s helped me solve several legal problems, and I’ve always found her to be knowledgeable, responsive, and supportive.

She’s a consistent, well-informed attendee at city council meetings. She has vast experience in legal analysis and conflict resolution, which are highly desirable skills in a city council member. She knows how to analyze complex policy issues and then explain them clearly to people who don’t have policy experience — also highly desirable skills in a city council member.

She understands that the city sometimes suffers from a baffling lack of transparency, compounded by odd misstatements of law. (She knows, for example, that the state’s Growth Management Act does not require extraordinary growth on Bainbridge.) As a 25-year resident of Bainbridge, she can see that unless we get off the fast-growth track we’re blindly blazing away on, we’ll end up looking like Mercer Island in the near future, with high-density development shore-to-shore.

For all these reasons and more, I strongly support Lisa Neal to be our new Bainbridge city council member.

MARK HOFFMAN

Bainbridge Island