About Greenways

The Importance of the Greenways Levy

The Greenways 5 Levy Campaign has ended. The Greenways 5 Levy was approved by Bellingham voters with about 67% of the vote! Thank you for supporting this campaign and the Greenways Program. This website is being preserved to inform Bellingham about the origins of the levy and to help maintain a record of the campaign.

The Greenways 5 Levy will be on our November 7th ballot this year as Proposition 2. We encourage you to vote YES and replace the current Greenways 4 levy, extending a popular property tax levy that has been continuously in place since 1990 to fund our Greenways program.

The visionary Greenways program expresses our community’s desire to incorporate trails, urban forests and trees, shorelines, parks, community gardens, wildlife habitat and corridors, and open spaces into the fabric of our lives and that of our growing City. Our Greenways program has acquired or developed beloved public places such as the Taylor Street Dock, Cordata Community Park, Squalicum Creek Park, the Railroad Trail from Whatcom Falls to Barkley, Northridge Park, the Fairhaven Village Green, Big Rock Garden, and Galbraith Mountain, to name only a few excellent examples of Greenways’ accomplishments to date. Bellingham now is truly defined by our Greenways.

Our Greenways are amazing, but we aren’t finished. There are missing trail linkages, parks to build, trees to plant, and habitats to protect. Voting YES ensures the continued support of the first-class system of parks, trails, and open spaces in Bellingham through property acquisition, development, and maintenance. But Greenways 5 is not a mere continuation of the program. Just as Bellingham has grown and changed over the past 33 years, our Greenways program will adapt to fit Bellingham and its evolving character. Greenways 5 emphasizes Equity to balance our parks and trails system to serve everyone. It emphasizes Urban Trees to create a healthy and robust urban forest. It emphasizes Climate Resiliency to ensure our Greenways system is best adapted to the future and provides more service and comfort to us as the climate changes and stresses on Greenways, and us, increase. Importantly, Greenways 5 is written with the future in mind. The allocation of Greenways levy funds has built-in flexibility to allow the achievement of current Greenways goals without excluding the great ideas our community will have in future years.

Funding Greenways is still critical. This levy creates public parks and trails throughout our city; it secures needed funding for development and restoration of acquired sites; it ensures we maintain and steward our existing parks and trails; it permits completion of trail linkages throughout our City; it restores and maintains our urban tree canopy; and it increases our community’s climate resiliency. Each Greenways levy has been a vote of confidence in our community; Greenways 5 is the same.

Please VOTE YES on Bellingham Proposition Two.

Greenways Information Resources

Below are links to other websites with additional information about our Greenways.

Greenways in the News

Below are links to a selection of Greenways news articles.

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