By Miki Mullor
Editor
By Paul Stickney
Nearly two dozen residents from the Timberline and Hidden Ridge subdivisions protested Tuesday over the possibility that Sammamish might consider removing the 42nd St. barricade, a controversial idea that previous city councils rejected.
The barricade has safety and design issues that residents say make removing it dangerous.
City officials previously considered it as a way to improve connectivity and traffic flow in the far northwest corner of the city and to relieve traffic pressure on SR202 from Sahalee Way.
Continue readingBy Miki Mullor
Should Sammamish neighborhoods be transformed into mini high density “town centers”?
Yes, if you ask the city’s Planning Commission.
In what will likely to become an election issue, a new vision for the city, centred on high density housing and retail centers, has been put forward by two Planning Commissioners and supported by the entire planning commission and two council members.
This is a departure from the current strategy of “absorbing” or “focusing” growth in the Town Center, spreading growth all over the city.
A split Sammamish City Council tonight passed the new traffic concurrency rules.
The “M4,” Mayor Christie Malchow, Deputy Mayor Karen Moran and Council Members Tom Hornish and Chris Ross, voted for the new volume/capacity (V/C) rule that brings some measurement of reality on the roads into Sammamish concurrency rules.
The “V3,” Council Members Ramiro Valderrama, Pam Stuart and Jason Ritchie, voted against.
Continue readingBy Miki Mullor
Analysis
On Tuesday night, the Sammamish City Council drew a line in the sand on over-development, forcing a potential pause on development until a much needed public infrastructure is built.
A split council voted on an esoteric traffic engineering parameter that decides what is the accepted level of traffic congestion the city is willing to tolerate.
In doing so, the council have possibly made Sammamish the first jurisdiction in the Puget Sound to be implementing the Growth Management Act (GMA) the way it was originally intended to – to protect the citizens’ quality of life.
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