The Sammamish Town Center plan was about seven years in the making, controversial throughout. Then development was held up by the 2008 Great Recession. Ground was finally broken in 2015. The first store, Metropolitan Market, opened this year. And now the Town Center is again at the center of controversy over the building moratorium.
By Scott Hamilton
There has even been a call to revisit the plan.
Here’s why doing so is not a good idea and why the Town Center is needed.
Ramiro Valderrama
Sammamish City Council Member Ramiro Valderrama, citing what turns out to be a series of unsubstantiated claims, executed a pirouette on his previous vote supporting a moratorium including the Town Center—and went splat.
The Town Center was exempted from the moratorium at the Nov. 21 meeting by a 4-3 vote, with Valderrama, Mayor Bob Keller and Council Members Don Gerend and Kathy Huckabay voting to lift it.
Valderrama said his vote always was about storm water management for the Town Center. In voting to exempt the Town Center, Valderrama claimed the emergency moratorium was not about traffic concurrency.
This simply wasn’t true.
The surprise move Tuesday by the Sammamish City Council to adopt an emergency building moratorium was about more than creating a pause to understand how traffic concurrency became an enabler of development rather than a control mechanism.
It was a rebuke to a staff and consultants that, years in the making, had ignored Council policy and the City’s own codes and Comprehensive Plan.
Commentary
By Scott Hamilton
Scott Hamilton
The news yesterday that Sammamish has been using outdated traffic counts, mostly from 2012 but some from 2014 and none from 2016, to run its traffic concurrency tests for development applications is fundamentally cooking the books to approve projects.
I should be outraged, but I’m not.
I should be shocked, but I’m not.
I’m not even surprised.
It just goes to show you how far our city government and City Council declined over the years to become a mini-King County.
I reached this conclusion as far back as 2009. That was 10 years after Sammamish incorporated.
March 22: Metropolitan Market, the anchor for the Sammamish Town Center’s commercial district at SE 4th and 228th Ave. SE, opened today to a 33 lb chocolate chip cookie for the long line of consumers that wrapped around to the fronting sidewalk.
The Sammamish Town Center commercial center at SE4th and 228th Ave. SE.
Sammamish Comment 