Category Archives: King County

Sammamish Disaster Preparedness Fair Oct. 15

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City_of_SammamishSammamish will hold its annual Disaster Preparedness Fair Saturday, October 15, at City Hall from 9am to 3pm.

Details can be found here: Sammamish Disaster Preparedness Fair.

Several private and civic organizations will have displays in the Council Chambers and in the Courtyard, providing information residents need to survive disasters.

The principal focus is on earthquake preparedness, but other emergencies—such as downed power lines that can be dangerous—have been addressed in the past.

The City is the host but didn’t participate last year with a table of its own. It will this year.

Sammamish also was slow to participate in the Cascadia Rising emergency disaster drill last June, finally signing up after Sammamish Comment began asking questions about the City’s preparedness.

Since then, the new City Council (effective Jan. 1) and new City Manager (effective March 1) have undertaken numerous steps to bring the City to a state of preparedness.

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Setting priorities: King, Pierce and Snohomish counties–or for Sammamish

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As the Nov. 8 election approaches, the Sammamish City Council still has not taken a formal position on whether it supports Sound Transit 3 (ST3). The topic is set for discussion at the Oct. 4 Council meeting.

Sammamish City Council: Back row, L-R: Tom Odell, Mayor Don Gerend, Deputy Mayor Ramiro Valderrama, Tom Hornish. Front row, L-R: Kathy Huckabay, Christie Malchow, Bob Keller.

Sammamish City Council: Back row, L-R: Tom Odell, Mayor Don Gerend, Deputy Mayor Ramiro Valderrama, Tom Hornish. Front row, L-R: Kathy Huckabay, Christie Malchow, Bob Keller.

Five of the seven members previously said they oppose ST3 as it currently is laid out. Two members, Kathy Huckabay and Bob Keller, support ST3 in the name of regionalism. While regionalism is an admirable goal, the plan needs to make sense. ST3 has serious flaws.

Even Mayor Don Gerend, who is a regionalist and represents Sammamish on many such committees, finds the ST3 plan so bad and so disadvantageous to Sammamish, that he declared his opposition to ST3.

As this column has reported several times, the $54bn plan doesn’t even guarantee a single project. It only guarantees that taxpayers will no longer have the power of the vote over new taxes. This power shifts solely to the ST board, which is comprised of appointed people not the least bit accountable to taxpayers.

ST3 proposes less bus service for Sammamish, which now is the second or third largest city on the Eastside.

ST3 says it will give Sammamish a north end park-n-ride. But as noted, this isn’t guaranteed.

For this reduction in service, removal of direct taxpayer authority over new taxes and a park-n-ride that may not even get built, Sammamish taxpayers get to pay between $500m and $550m over the next 25 years.

It’s overdue for the City Council to stand up and take a position.

Supporting ST3—or not—is a matter of the City Council setting the right priorities for the people they were elected to represent. They were not elected to represent the greater King County, nor Piece County nor Snohomish County—all part of the Sound Transit taxing district.

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2003 City Council election flips from 4-3 conservative majority to 6-1 “green” Council

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City_of_SammamishThe 2003 Sammamish election presented an opportunity to shift the balance of power from a Republican-conservative leaning City Council to a Democratic-left-of-center membership.

As the election season approached, the Council was generally, though not reliably, split 4-3. Ken Kilroy, Ron Haworth, Troy Romero and Jack Barry were reliably a voting bloc. The minority three were Michele Petitti, Kathy Huckabay and often, but not always, Don Gerend.

Petitti won her seat in 2001. The others were all original council members from 1999.

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Writing Sammamish’s first Comp Plan

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In Part 1, the background, objectives and membership of the Planning Advisory Board was described. In Part 2, the PAB gets down to work writing Sammamish’s first Comprehensive Plan. This is six pages when printed.

City_of_SammamishThe 17-member Planning Advisory Board members were a cross-section of environmentalists, activists, developers, real estate agents and businessmen. The City Council did an admirable job of appointing a broad spectrum of people.

Open divisions from the start

However, from the start there was open tension among the members. Divisions from the bitter 1999 City Council election carried over to the PAB, which was appointed by this Council. Most of the members of the PAB supported the candidates who won in that bitter contest; a few supported the losing candidates, who, it will be remembered, lost by wide margins in what turned out to be a nasty race filled with anonymous fliers and a forged newsletter.

Sammamish MapOne of the developer-real estate appointees who supported the Council candidates later told one of the environmentalist-activists it was her personal mission to oppose everything he said. The two strong personalities clashed often and openly.

Two members resigned early. One Council Member later said they resigned because they thought the PAB was too heavily dominated by environmentalists. Whether this is an accurate characterization or not is beside the point. The broad spectrum of the appointees belies any charge that environmentalists ran away with the process. In the end, the Comp Plan was adopted and recommended by the PAB with just one dissenting vote and this vote had nothing to do with the environment or any other issue. The dissenter complained the PAB hadn’t finished its job. (This will be described later.)

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Sammamish delivers punch to King County over ELST

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July 5, 2016: Sammamish handed King County a strong left hook to the jaw tonight when the City Council voted to withdraw from a 12-year Inter-Local Agreement (ILA) section involving the East Lake Sammamish Trail (ELST).

Fed up with complaints from property owners and increasing tension between City and County officials over how the County has developed the trail, the City Council’s move to cancel the ILA means Sammamish now has complete control over approving Section 2B of the ELST.

Section 2B is the center section, from the 7-11 to Inglewood Hill Road. Section 1, north of Inglewood to the Redmond city limits, is complete. Section 2A development is under appeal to the Shoreline Hearings Board, which is now deliberating. A decision is expected this fall.

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