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.
It’s a very odd statement, reported by The Sammamish Review this week: the City doesn’t have the funds to complete improvements for Issaquah-Pine Lake Road.
The Review wrote, in part:
Councilwoman Nancy Whitten wanted the city to reprioritize a plan to improve Issaquah-Pine Lake Road between Klahanie Boulevard and Southeast 32nd Street. The project is on the improvement plan with an estimated cost of $16.5 million. However, it has no start date assigned, and Whitten hoped it would begin sooner.
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Whitten noted that the road needs to be fixed, even if the city does not end up annexing Klahanie.
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City Manager Ben Yazici agreed the road needs work, but said the city does not have funds to complete the project.
This strikes us as a very odd statement, since the City has a nine-figure spending spree that seems to be rising at every opportunity.
It’s also odd since the City boasts of no debt, more than $400m in bonding power and a cash balance in the tens of millions of dollars.
The Sammamish City Council is failing the public trust.
All you have to do is watch the video of the June 17 City Council meeting to understand this bold statement.
When we became a city in 1999 (after the 1998 vote to incorporate), there were high hopes about getting out from under an unresponsive and arrogant King County government, the Council and departments, who viewed Sammamish as a dumping ground for development but without supporting infrastructure. We could communicate with “downtown” till the cows came home and our concerns would fall on deaf ears.
In the early days of our city, our council and staff indeed proved more responsive to citizen concerns. Today, our City is certainly more responsive to infrastructure requirements–but responsiveness to citizens has been slowly returning to “downtown” mentality.
Long-time readers of this column know the evolution of support I’ve expressed for the City Council and policies to a great deal of concern as arrogance and tone-deafness has set in. I need not recount all these issues, but instead will focus on what came up at the June 17 meeting.
The water wars between the Sammamish Plateau Water and Sewer District and Issaquah were entertaining. Despite the City of Sammamish watching this war, and becoming involved as an interested party, Sammamish city officials couldn’t resist approaching the Northeast Sammamish Sewer and Water District to invite a “discussion” about assuming the district.
To keep the players straight, here are the references we’ll use going forward:
Sammamish Plateau Water and Sewer District: “Plateau”.
City of Issaquah: “Issaquah”.
City of Sammamish: “City”.
Northeast Sammamish Sewer and Water District: “Northeast”.
Citizens for Sammamish: “C4S”.
Northeast went tilt over the City’s overture. Obviously having watched what was going on between Plateau and Issaquah, and the latter’s hostile takeover attempt of part of the Plateau’s assets and district, Northeast was paranoid. Not only did officials reject any call for “friendly” discussions, they fired up their customers, who flooded the City with emails and protests. Furthermore, Northeast budgeted $600,000 to defend the district against any attempt by the City to take over the district.
City officials seemed bewildered by Northeast’s reaction. We aren’t planning any move to assume Northeast, City officials protested. We just wanted to sit down and discuss the possibilities. A couple of City newsletters devoted a great deal of space to injured innocence.
Having watched the Plateau-Issaquah water wars (and participated in some of the negotiations to bring the wars to an end), I find it astounding that the City was so ham-handed in its timing to approach Northeast and even raise the issue when Plateau and Issaquah seemed headed for armageddon. Repeating, having become involved in talks as a neutral participant, so-to-speak, to resolve the dispute between Plateau and Issaquah, how could the City not understand the sensitivities of even raising the topic at that time with Northeast? It’s mind-boggling.
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.
Sammamish Comment 