Category Archives: Town Center

Sammamish retreat: 2040 vision, annexation, council relations–Part 1

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The Sammamish City Council’s annual retreat revealed similar visions for the City by 2040, with a population reaching about 80,000 (the maximum under current land use zoning), a more technologically advanced city and local transit shuttles.
Council members also hoped to expand the tree canopy despite current development that has seen large-scale removal of trees; greater use of electric and even driverless cars; and redeveloped commercial areas at the QFC and Safeway complexes in addition to the Town Center, which is on the cusp of realizing the vision that was created in 2009.

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Sammamish Town Center gets a kick-start with major grocery anchor tenant

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The Sammamish Town Center has finally got a good kick-start for development of 100,000 sq ft, with a mixture of commercial/retail/office and residential, and the anchor tenant of Metropolitan Market, the locally owned grocery chain.

The Sammamish Reporter first broke the news today. Details were brief, so I called City Councilman Tom Odell, who filled in some of the information.

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Sammamish taxpayers, beware: More than $100 million in spending on the way and climbing

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  • Community Center: $35 million and probably more.
  • Developing the former YMCA property next to Pine Lake School, at a cost of $15 million proposed in the park plan.
  • Sahalee Road improvements at an unidentified cost, but probably in the low millions at the least.
  • Millions of dollars in the park plan for the Sammamish Landing, the Pigott property and more.
  • Klahanie Annexation: $32 million for road improvements and who knows what else on top of this, almost certainly amounting to tens of millions of dollars more.
  • Widening Issaquah-Pine Lake Road at a cost of $16.5m.
  • Rebuilding “Snake Hill Road” (it’s really 212th Ave. SE, down the windy, snake-like drive to East Lake Sammamish Parkway): Millions of dollars.
  • Desires to take over the Northeast Sammamish and Sammamish Plateau Water and Sewer Districts: tens of millions of dollars, at a minimum.
  • Town Center improvements.
  • And this is on top of the normal operations of the city, including millions of dollars for road maintenance, parks, services and overhead.

Sammamish is embarking on a spending spree over the next few years that will make your taxpaying eyes water. For a city that prides itself on not raising property taxes and imposing no utility tax, one has to wonder how long this will stand in the face of this pending spending spree.

Let’s look at the issues.

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Staff Conclusion: Not enough time to meet Ace Deadline; an analysis

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See the running update in previous post here.

Analysis:

The Sammamish City Council spent a great deal of time on the Ace problem last night and in the end directed the City Attorney, Bruce Disend, to meet with Ace’s attorney to see if a developer’s agreement could be reached.

Ace’s attorney argues that a Developer’s Agreement will enable the City to compress permitting processes and essentially bypass environmental regulations–or mitigate them–in a way that makes building Ace on an environmentally constrained property feasible.

Ace also has retained a company called Watershed to come up with a mitigation plan. The principal of Watershed is Bill Way, who lives on the Lake Sammamish waterfront in our City. I’ve known Bill for years and he is a stand-up guy, dedicated to protecting the environment. His company has come up with creative ways to do so, including for the widening of 228th and its impact on George Davis Creek, as well as Skyline and Eastlake high school projects. This creek runs through the properties involved in the Ace proposal.

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Sammamish and “the vision thing”

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In 1987, Vice President George H. W. Bush was gearing up to run for president. The Vice President was well known for mangling his syntax (like father, like son, as it turned out) and often had difficulty articulating his thoughts (as we said…).

This inability led to his famous characterization of “the vision thing.”

Sammamish has a Vision Thing problem.

First, it must be acknowledged that governments in general typically lack vision. Out of necessity, days are consumed with simply running things and fixing day-to-day problems. But Sammamish, since its inception, has had trouble with “vision.”

I’ll concede that the City has looked into the future and taken some steps on this or that. But action often becomes years in the making and vision, if it is recognized at all, often becomes inaction.

The greatest example is the Community Center. Consider:

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