Tag Archives: Lyman Howard

Keller for mayor, Malchow for deputy mayor

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Bob Keller

With Don Gerend planning to step down in July as Sammamish mayor, due to personal business reasons, the City Council must select a new mayor the next meeting.

Gerend will remain on the Council as a member retaining a vote for his successor.

Bob Keller is deputy mayor, but under Council rules, he does not automatically succeed Gerend. A Council vote makes this decision.

(The mayor is selected by the Council, not the public, under the state laws governing Sammamish’s council-manager form of government., unlike Redmond and Issaquah in which the public directly votes for the mayor.)

Sammamish Comment supports elevating Keller to mayor for the rest of this year, the unexpired mayoral term for Gerend. Gerend and Keller decided not to seek reelection in November and each goes off the Council Dec. 31.

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Seatax fatigue may affect Sammamish tax need

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Sound Transit 3 would not have passed without an overwhelming Yes vote from Seattle. The tax hike still is reverberating. (Sammamish voted 52%-48% against this new tax.)

Dow Constantine, King County Executive headquartered in Seattle, proposes a $469m countywide tax for arts.

Seattle Mayor Ed Murray proposed a $275m five-year city tax to combat homelessness. Then he dropped the idea and proposed instead a county-wide tax that would raise $335m over five years.

Seattle never met a tax it didn’t like. Despite the suburbs often rejecting new taxes, the overwhelming concentration of Yes votes in Seattle usually carriers the day.

It’s not Seattle anymore. It’s Seatax.

And Seatax fatigue may make it harder for Sammamish to raise taxes for new road projects or land preservation acquisition.

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Issaquah-Fall City Road cost jumps 36% over pre-annexation estimate

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The construction cost of Issaquah-Fall City Road (IFC) improvements quietly has gone up by 36%.

Or has it?

The Sammamish City Newsletter says the improvements to Issaquah-Fall City Road will now cost $36m. In 2015, the figure was $23m.

The March Sammamish City Newsletter’s page 1 article updating the plans to widen Issaquah-Fall City Road is the following, opening paragraph:

“When 10,000 Klahanie-area residents came into Sammamish last year, the city knew that a big responsibility was going to follow them through the door – a $36 million item known as Issaquah-Fall City Road.”

This figure is not what the City told Klahanie residents and the taxpayers of legacy Sammamish when promoting annexation to Sammamish.

Instead, then-City Manager Ben Yazici and then-Mayor Tom Vance said IFC Road would cost $23m, a reduction from the $38.8m King County priced the road improvements, cited by Issaquah.

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Sammamish hires full-time emergency management director

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Sammamish has hired its first emergency preparedness director.

Andrew Stevens, the emergency manager of Downey (CA), starts work April 17. He holds

Andrew Stevens, Sammamish’s first full-time emergency management director.

the same position in Downey (CA).

“I’m very pleased that we were able to attract and hire Andrew Stevens to the position of Emergency Manager,” Sammamish City Manager Lyman Howard wrote in an email to The Sammamish Comment..
The folks on the interview panel were impressed and delighted as well.  I’ve also heard positive comments from the regional Emergency Management community, that we made a good choice.  Andrew starts April 17th.”

The appointment comes nearly two years after The Comment revealed Sammamish was going skip a multi-state, multi-jurisdictional, Canadian-US earthquake disaster drill called Cascadia Rising. Sammamish scrambled to join after the revelation.

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Little progress between City, County over ELST, but hope continues

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Little tangible progress appeared to be the result of a staff-to-staff meeting two weeks ago between King County Parks and Sammamish over the interminable controversy of development of the final segment of the East Lake Sammamish Trail.

But City Manager Lyman Howard is hopeful some progress can be made.

“I think so,” he said in an interview with Sammamish Comment this week. County officials said they want to work with the City and property owners—statements that have been made before, only to be met with unsatisfactory results.

Howard, ever hopeful and acknowledging past disappointments, nonetheless isn’t throwing in the towel.

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