Michael Lilliquist (Bellingham City Council Ward 6, Washington, candidate 2025)

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Michael Lilliquist

Nonpartisan

Candidate, Bellingham City Council Ward 6

Elections and appointments

Last election

November 4, 2025

Education

High school

Sammamish High School

Bachelor's

University of Washington, 1987

Ph.D

University of Texas at Austin, 1997

Other

Edmonds Community College, 2009

Personal

Religion

Unitarian Universalist

Profession

City council member

Contact

Campaign website

Campaign Facebook

Personal LinkedIn

Michael Lilliquist ran for election to the Bellingham City Council Ward 6 in Washington. He was on the ballot in the general election on November 4, 2025.^[source]

Lilliquist completed Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection survey in 2025. Click here to read the survey answers.

Biography

Michael Lilliquist provided the following biographical information via Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection survey on October 6, 2025:

• Birth date: January 20, 1963
• Birth place: Frankfurt, Germany, Armed Forces Africa/Canada/Europe/Middle East
• High school: Sammamish High School
• Bachelor's: University of Washington, 1987
• PhD: University of Texas at Austin, 1997
• Other: Edmonds Community College, 2009
• Gender: Male
• Religion: Unitarian Universalist
• Profession: City Council Member
• Prior offices held:
  • Bellingham City Council, Ward 6 (2010-Prsnt)
• Incumbent officeholder: Yes
• Campaign website
• Campaign endorsements
• Campaign Facebook

Elections

General election

General election for Bellingham City Council Ward 6

Michael Lilliquist and Andrew Reding ran in the general election for Bellingham City Council Ward 6 on November 4, 2025.

		Candidate
	Submit photo	Michael Lilliquist (Nonpartisan)
	Submit photo	Andrew Reding (Nonpartisan)

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	Incumbency information for this election was not available.
= candidate completed the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey.
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Endorsements

To view Lilliquist's endorsements as published by their campaign, click here. Ballotpedia did not identify endorsements for Lilliquist in this election.

Campaign themes

Ballotpedia survey responses

See also: Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection

Michael Lilliquist completed Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection survey in 2025. The survey questions appear in bold and are followed by Lilliquist's responses.

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Who are you? Tell us about yourself.

I have a track record of hard work, collaboration, and public engagement that has delivered important results year after year. My opponent says he wants "action not words" on housing, but he ignores significant progress and minimizes actions the city council has already taken to increase housing and ease affordability.

I helped create the Bellingham Home Fund and other programs to fund the construction of new affordable housing – producing hundreds of permanently affordable homes, with a pipeline of hundreds more in the works. I passed zoning reform to remove barriers to housing production and allow for more housing variety, including smaller starter homes. I helped to re-shape city planning to prioritize people and safety, by investing in walking and biking infrastructure and Greenways trails, and I voted to adopt equity-based tools to redress underinvestment for parks and sidewalks in neglected neighborhoods. I helped launch Urban Villages for where higher density makes sense, and successfully supported their growth through fee discounts and tax incentives (over 1,400 new units to date). Housing reforms will continue under my watch: streamlining over a hundred slightly different residential areas to three basic zones – low, medium, high density.

Change has never been a slogan for me—it’s been my work and my commitment.

Please list below 3 key messages of your campaign. What are the main points you want voters to remember about your goals for your time in office?

• I support a balance approach to housing that delivers affordability and increased production. This approach creates opportunities for more housing by removing unnecessary zoning barriers, careful expansion of city limits, and more intensive development in urban centers and near high-frequency transit routes. My approach also continues successful public investments and public-partnerships to deliver what the market does not. These additional tools can help deliver starter homes and affordable housing for people on fixed incomes, seniors, and those on disability. My opponent claims that ‘deregulation’ will solve our housing crisis, overlooking statements by the development community that below-market housing is not their business model.
• Community safety goes hand-in-hand with justice. We can create community safety through addressing root causes of addiction and mental illness, through ‘community courts’ that promote recovery and reduce recidivism, and through systemic efforts to reduce homelessness. I support sending crisis workers to people in distress, so that police can focus on law enforcement. As an original member of the Justice Project’s Stakeholders Advisory Committee, I will hold the county to its promise to the voters, to not only build a safer jail but also to build a behavioral care center, expand re-entry support and addiction treatment, implement robust probation and home monitoring, and increase interventions that break the cycle of arrest and re-arrest.
• I want a livable and living world for our children. I am a proven leader in protecting our drinking water from pollution that may get into our streams and bay. I championed the city's Climate Action Task Force and its recommendations, which has led to the installation of public EV charging stations across the city, and led to adoption of Bellingham's new residential energy code that has since been copied as the model for the entire state. I believe building the new energy economy is a job creator. On the board of directors of Whatcom Transportation Authority, I passed the plan to move away from fossil fuel buses, so that we now run on battery-electric buses or all plant-based fuels to drastically cut emissions from public transit.

What areas of public policy are you personally passionate about?

I started out my public service career as a ‘smart growth’ advocate. Transportation and wise land use plans should work together, and poor planning can lead to sprawl that harms our quality of life, traps us in traffic, and threatens the natural beauty of our city, and threatens the farmlands around us. We also know that sprawl adds to taxpayer burden for more streets, more water and sewer infrastructure, new parks and public amenities, and additional government services that are almost never offset by a larger tax base. Wise growth must include job growth, identifying sufficient land for businesses and for (light) manufacturing, rather than only housing subdivisions. That is the way to a fiscally-sound tax base and local economy.

What qualities does this office possess that makes it a unique and important part of the state government and legal system?

I believe to be an effective city council member it helps greatly to understand where city government and the city council falls without our system of government. The city council has full legislative authority to pass laws and levy taxes, which means that these sovereign powers that belong to the people are invested in the city council, to act on the people's behalf but not to wield that authority as its own. We are entrusted with that responsibility only so long as we hold office.

Cities are 'general purpose" governments charged with very wide range of duties and possibilities, but constrained and limited by other governments around us and by the people who elect us. The American system of self government is a series of nested 'limited domestic sovereignties,' with different levels of government having final authority over some things, while ceding authority on other matters. Most obviously, the federal government retains exclusive authority of some matters, yet under the Reservation Clause of the Constitution, all other matters fall to the States. Washington State, in turn, retains final control, but the state legislature chooses which powers and abilities are delegated to cities. Legally speaking, cities are subordinate creatures of state government, not independent authorities in their own right.

What characteristics or principles are most important for an elected official?

I have learned many lessons in my time of public service, starting with the advise of the late Sen. Paul Wellstone, who taught that you can get the support and friendship of people you disagree with, even in politics, if you can disagree honestly and with sincerity. I have learned that doing well in this job requires equal measures of leadership and the ability to follow, both fellow public servants and the community you serve. I have learned to persevere to accomplish lasting change, yet always retain a sense of urgency even when being patient and working across long spans of time. I have learned that balancing priorities is at the center of municipal leadership, not paying attention to the loudest voices or to dogmatic ideology, even your own ideology. From my fellow council member Louise Bjornson, I learned to go everywhere and talk to everyone and attend every gathering, if you can. From my predecessor on the council, Barbara Ryan, I learned that asking good questions is central to this job. And from my council colleague Hannah Stone I learned to not be afraid to show my heart and my emotions, because what we do matters and impacts people and ourselves personally.

What do you believe are the core responsibilities for someone elected to this office?

As an elected official, my obligation if to understand and serve the best interests of the public, to the best of my ability.

The core responsibilities of the city council are to listen, learn, evaluate, deliberate, and decide. My opponent says he wants "action, not words," which shows he does not understand that the city council acts through words, learns through conversations, and creates transparency with our words.

Under the City charter, the council had final authority over all lawmaking, final control over the city budget, responsibility over all matters of public property and taxation, and over all the top-level policies and plans for the city. In none of these responsibilities is the city council secondary to the mayor, nor can the council be overridden or ignored by the mayor. Our 'bosses' are the people who elect us and hold us accountable; in the words of the Declaration of Independence, the government's "just powers are derived from consent of the governed."

What legacy would you like to leave?

I do not expect to be remembered in this world in the long run – maybe decades by friends and family, but certainly not hundreds of years – so I think my only real 'legacy' is in the present. I want to make positive changes and create good feelings in people around me, and be an example of a life well lived.

What is the first historical event that happened in your lifetime that you remember? How old were you at the time?

I remember poor-quality black and white TV images of a moon landing, but I was too young to know if it was "the" moon landing. I think it was.

What was your very first job? How long did you have it?

My first paid job was picking blueberries for a couple weeks during the summer, and my next job was moving 50-lb boxes of nails around in warehouse. I never did understand why I was told to do that!

Do you believe that it's beneficial for holders of this office to have previous experience in government or politics?

I think it can help a great deal, but it is not necessary. I have learned to be more effective in government by having more knowledge and understanding that comes from time and experience in public office – but some of my most important skills in communication and analysis and critical thinking come from personal life, my background as a scientist, and my training as a paralegal. My fellow council members bring important life experiences and skills from other professions and histories. I think this diversity of experiences and perspectives adds value.

What kind of skills or expertise do you believe would be the most helpful for the holders of this office to possess?

Above all, humility and a healthy dose of skepticism and self-doubt. Experience and knowledge are invaluable. But what hurts us is not so much what we do not know, but what we think we know "that just ain't so."

What organizations or individuals have endorsed your campaign?

I am the only person in my race to be endorsed by the Democratic party, and I have the sole endorsement of the NW Washington Central Labor Council, the sole endorsement of the Sierra Club, the sole endorsement of the Lummi Nation, the sole endorsement of the Washington Housing Alliance Action Fund, and several other unions, community groups, and civic organizations, as well as the endorsement of over 20 current and former elected officials in Bellingham and Whatcom County. Please visit the website.

What is an accomplishment that you are proud of?

I am most grateful for the opportunity and joy of being a father, and even more grateful and fortunate to have been a stay-at-home dad for the first several years of my daughter's life. Being a parent isn't exactly an "accomplishment," but I am infinitely proud anyway.

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Other survey responses

Ballotpedia identified the following surveys, interviews, and questionnaires Lilliquist completed for other organizations. If you are aware of a link that should be added, email us.

• VoteWA Profile

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Bellingham City Council Ward 6

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