John Galvin, one of the landowners in the SE Quadrant, continued to lobby city council members on the Town Center after the public hearings closed September 7, in violation of the rules.
Written submissions closed at 5pm on Sept. 7; additional oral testimony was allowed that evening, but closed when deliberations by the council began. The second email below arrived after deliberations began.
Below are his emails.
The City Council on March 2 discussed a Planning Commission recommendation to change the 2008 adopted Town Center Plan to exclude 240 housing units from the “D” zone (which is the Sammamish Commons civic center and park) and instead disperse these among the A, B and C zones in the rest of the Town Center.
Some Council members want to retain the original Council decision of 2008 to allocate these 240 units on the Kellman property. This is the old mansion immediately west of the new Library. The Kellman mansion has been vacant since the City bought it, and it’s becoming rundown and is uninhabitable without major work.
As the City Council begins review tonight (March 15) of the Town Center regulations, eventually one element recommended by the Planning Commission is providing for a transit-oriented development (TOD). This has become more controversial than it should, and for reasons that continue to escape me.
The City wants to put 2,000 residences that would house perhaps 3,500 people and 600,000 sf of commercial on about 100 buildable acres. This is on both sides of 228th Ave., the busiest road in the City–and the City Council in 2008 did not accept a recommendation from the 2007 Planning Commission that TOD be a part of the plan, although some highly generic language was included in the Town Center Plan.
As a Commissioner, I last year cited the absence of a solid TOD as a “major flaw” in the Town Center plan.
The 2009 Commission included specific language in the recommended regulations for a TOD.
The City of Sammamish has the ability to provide financial support to developers to kick-start the Town Center (see following post). And there is a way to do so in a partnership, not an up-front gamble in today’s dicey marketplace.
The City’s current newsletter discusses the conservative approach taken by the City which avoided fronting infrastructure costs or land purchases for developers that would have stuck taxpayers with the burden following the September 2008 financial market meltdown and resulting global recession.
One of the issues facing the City Council as it begins its review of the regulations for the Town Center is whether to help finance elements of it to kick-start development.
This issue is not part of the Planning Commission’s regulations recommendations that will be under review beginning March 15 (see following post); this issue was deemed by the Commission to be beyond its scope of work.
As a former member of the Commission, and a long-time activist regarding land use and traffic issues, I was of the opinion going into the Town Center regulations process in early 2008 that the City should not contribute to financing TC stuff–this should fall to the responsibility of the developers under the “growth pays its own way” theory.
Sammamish Comment 