The Sammamish City Council extended the building moratorium to allow staff and the 
council to complete a revised traffic concurrency plan by July. The Town Center was not exempted.
The vote was 7-0.
Council member Jason Ritchie said STCA, a developer of the Town Center, “will be fine either way.”
But he expressed concern about the individual homeowners being prevented from building.
Sammamish City Council members quietly and out of the public view closed down efforts by developer STCA to dramatically upzone the Town Center.
The effort by STCA and the Council’s action never emerged into the public domain, it was revealed at the Save Sammamish meeting last night.
The revelation came after Sammamish Comment revealed the plans in a post Monday morning. The issue quickly became a hot topic on Facebook in various activist pages.
Council member Ramiro Valderrama, in a posting on The Comment, responded that, “I know of no current discussions for upcoming the Town Center.” But he did not reveal the Council had shut the effort down last fall, at a time when the City was preparing to accept “Docket Requests” to the Comprehensive Plan.
One Valderrama critic noted the parsing of words: there are no “current” discussions.
Even as Sammamish residents scream over traffic congestion, exacerbated over what proved to be fraudulent implementation of a traffic concurrency model intended to be sure the roads can handle growth, efforts are underway to sharply up-size the Town Center.
The Town Center was approved to have 600,000sf of commercial/retail/office space and 2,000 residential units. Transfer Development Rights (TDRs) already boosted the residential units a few hundred above the 2,000.
The Environmental Impact Study (EIS) studied impacts up to 700,000sf and 3,000 units. Anything above this would require a Supplement EIS, Kamuron Gurol, the Community Development Director, said at the time.
The development company, STCA, is working with staff to propose hiking the Town Center by as much as 250,000sf and up to 1,500 more residential units.
STCA is currently developing the Town Center west of 228th Ave.
By Miki Mullor
Guest Contributor
Miki Mullor
During the recent moratorium deliberations by City Council, the Town Center neighborhood plan was brought into the conversation. The issues with traffic planning in the city, exposed during the concurrency debacle, were feared to also impact the Town Center plan. Calls to review the plan were answered with a response that the plan was done 10 years ago therefore it’s too late to review. This implies a “statute of limitation” argument that if indeed there were issues with the plan, those should have been raised at that time and cannot be argued now.
However, recently surfaced documents from the time of Town Center planning in 2007 reveal just that – that serious problems do exist in the plan and those problems were raised timely – yet ignored by the city.
By Harry Shedd
Special to Sammamish Comment
The Sammamish City Council appeared indecisive during the council retreat about future growth in the city.
Should the “bedroom community” vision continue into the future or will future generations demand change in our vision?
Should the Town Center receive more of the city’s future growth or should the city continue with current “throughout the city” plans?
Should council members seek out resident input or go with their “best understanding”?
Sammamish Comment 