By Miki Mullor
Editor
The Sammamish City Council, in a 5-2 vote, selected David Rudat as its new interim City Manager. Rudat replaces former City Manager Rick Rudometkin, who was fired after only six months.
Continue readingBy Miki Mullor
Editor
Former Mayor Don Gerend, who challenged Sammamish’s stricter traffic concurrency testing ordinance adopted last year, recommended that the city council keep its attorneys after a group of them defected from Kenyon Disend and set up their own law firm.
And, tonight at the council appears ready to follow the advice of the plaintiff asking the Growth Management Hearings Board (GMHB) to overturn a piece of legislation that is critical to measuring traffic in future development applications.
The city’s law firm since incorporation in 1999, Kenyon Disend, lost five of its 10 attorneys in November, when those five attorneys abruptly resigned to start their own law firm. Two of those attorneys represented the city in the Gerend case.
Continue readingBy Miki Mullor
Editor
STCA, the Town Center developer owned by Matt Samwick, has contributed $70,882.80 
to former Mayor Don Gerend’s Livable Sammamish PAC.
Gerend and Kathy Huckabay, also a former mayor of Sammamish, were the only citizen contributors to Livable Sammamish. Gerend was the public face of the political action committee.
Continue readingBy Miki Mullor
Editor
Development, the Town Center, traffic congestion and the 2019 city council election dominated the Top 10 2019 stories in Sammamish.
The Town Center became the surrogate for development throughout the city and the poster child for traffic congestion that is frustrating drivers across the Plateau.
The election, in which three city council seats and control of the council were at stake, became unusually bitter and set records for expenditures on both sides of what became a pro-development slate vs a slate that advocated “infrastructure first.”
Continue readingBy Scott Hamilton
Guest Contributor
Jay Inslee
A little noticed interview with Gov. Jay Inslee could potentially mean a new push to up-zone land in the Puget Sound region to accommodate more housing.
In a Dec. 10 interview with the Tacoma News Tribune, Inslee said “he will ask the state Legislature next year to approve major initiatives to increase the number of homes in Washington to address high prices and also take steps to reduce homelessness, which he called a ‘statewide crisis.’”
Sammamish Comment 