Kent Kammerer

Kent Ronald Kammerer (1933 – November 11, 2011) was an American teacher and activist. A resident of Seattle for his entire adult life, he was known as an opponent of dense redevelopment in Seattle and as a "defender of Seattle neighborhoods." After living with relatives in Lakewood, he graduated from Clover Park High School in 1951 and matriculated at Seattle University, where he studied art and education.

Kammerer met his future wife, Sonja Elken, at Harborview Medical Center, where she was a nurse and he worked as an orderly. and had two daughters. He warned in the 1990s that members of the coalition had been targeted by strategic lawsuits against public participation, and that some of the members took on extra homeowners' insurance coverage to protect against economic losses from the lawsuits. As president of the SNC, Kammerer hosted a monthly breakfast at a diner in Ballard where local civic leaders participated in Q&A sessions. Journalist Knute Berger described this gathering as a meeting of "Seattle's biggest grumps," which he said was a compliment: "These civic activists are old-school mossbacks—neighborhood folks who are often dismissed as gadflies, NIMBYs, cranks, or worse. I think they should wear those epithets as badges of honor: You can dismiss someone as a not-in-my-backyard type because they stand against so-called progress, but often they are also the people on your block who actually give a damn. Think of them as civic P-Patch tenders who do the hard, dirty work of keeping Seattle livable." Berger described Kammerer as a "wise Yoda-like presence" in the meetings.

After initially supporting the Seattle Monorail Project, Kammerer later opposed it on the grounds of insufficient transparency, reduced carrying capacity and a lack of planned bus connectivity. Kammerer supported the unsuccessful initiative in 2004 to stop the project. After the monorail project was eventually wound down, Kammerer wrote on Crosscut.com that its "financing was so flawed that the system of paying for it simply wouldn't work. In some ways it was little more than the classic ponzi scheme." In 2009, Kammerer wrote an article for Crosscut that warned against "greens pushing transit-oriented development" (TOD) and arguing against efforts to mandate TOD zoning at the state level.

Death On November 11, 2011, Kammerer died from cancer at age 78.