Tag Archives: Nancy Whitten

Who’s supporting whom in the Sammamish City Council Election

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With Labor Day now past, electioneering will pick up in earnest for the City Council races.

A review of the Public Disclose Commission contribution filings gives a sense of the early support for the various candidates.

Position 2

Kathy Richardson vs Nancy Whitten

This is the seat currently held by Michele Petitti, who declined to run for another term. Whitten had held Position 4 but switched to 2.

Neither candidate as yet has reported much in the way of contributions. Whitten reports just $100, from herself. She largely self-funded her 2003 winning election but did bring in contributions from others then and in 2007. So far, there is nothing more to report.

Richardson hasn’t raised much money as yet: just $1,243, including $301 from in-kind contributions. The largest contribution is from Concentric 2 LLC, which according to state records is the business of David Collins of Lake Sammamish Parkway NE. Other contributors: David and Megan Gee, Ursula Geiger and Paul Oostmeyer.

Bob Brady of Sammamish, a commissioner on the Sammamish Plateau Water and Sewer District, has publicly endorsed Whitten.

Position 4

Jim Wasnick v Ramiro Valderamma

This is shaping up already to be the bitterest race that the city will see, with a whispering campaign of innuendos underway against Valderamma. One of those whispers is that he is running as a slate with Whitten and Tom Vance (Position 6). However, a review of the campaign contributions so far couldn’t be more representative of opposite ends of the spectrum.

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Whitten goes off the deep end on affordable housing

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It was a perplexing comment in The Sammamish Review profile of Nancy Whitten, seeking election to her third term on the City Council.

Here’s the bizarre portion of the article:

Whitten said she is also concerned about Town Center’s requirement that 10 percent of a development’s housing units be “affordable,” in that they can be rented by a family with an annual income of about $54,000. Having grown up in Chicago, she points to the infamous Cabrini-Green public housing project as an example of the downfalls of clustering affordable housing together.

“I question, socially, if we want to pack that much affordable housing in that small of an area,” she said.

I, too, am from Chicago (the Western suburbs) and know well the history of Cabrini Green. In the heart of Chicago, the place was a notorious housing project owned and operated by the City–not privately-owned units administered by a local organization like Seattle’s Arch. It was a densely-packed project for thousands of people of low income.

Chicago’s Cabrini Green. This is no Sammamish.

The affordable housing plan for Sammamish is a required 10% of the 2,000 units throughout the Town Center (with an option to go up to 20% of any given project), and families would have an average income of $54,000–which in their dreams, nobody residing in Cabrini-Green remotely made (except through illicit activities, perhaps).

The Chicago Housing Authority so mis-managed the “projects,” as it was known, and crime was so rampant, that the projects were eventually torn down.

Sammamish’s affordable housing plan doesn’t bear the slightest resemblance to Cabrini-Green, and Whitten knows it.

In fact, the Town Center Plan doesn’t even remotely resemble the one once advanced by the Lake Washington School District, which owns 15 acres in the Town Center (not all of which is buildable). LWSD once proposed 144 units on this site, all of which would be affordable, for professions like teachers, police officers and fire fighters. Insofar as the proposal came very early in the Comprehensive Plan process, it was deemed premature and LWSD withdrew the plan.

The Town Center plan calls for a minimum of 200 and a maximum of 400 units, scattered throughout the 100 buildable acres.

What is Whitten thinking?

Time has come to form own fire department

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The front page story in the Sammamish Report January 28 that the Eastside Fire & Rescue is prepared to create a new taxing authority to expand EF&R is the final straw in long-running disagreements between Sammamish and EF&R over the direction and fiscal responsibilities of the district.

The disagreements have been well covered by the Sammamish Reporter, the Sammamish Review and the City’s own newsletter and won’t be recounted here. Suffice it to say that Sammamish believes EF&R hasn’t been as cost-conscious as it should be, particularly during the recent national economic crisis, and that ambitions to annex other fire districts (notably the area at Snoqualmie Pass) means more cost to Sammamish taxpayers with no additional benefit.

The City’s own studies about costs have been previously disputed by members of the EF&R board, who at one point labeled the Sammamish City Council a bunch of “rascals.” This characterization may or may not be true, but certainly not in this case. Our “rascals” are spot-on.

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TDR decision the right one

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The decision by the Sammamish City Council to approve an agreement with King County for transfer of development rights (TDR) from two small areas adjacent the city to the Town Center is a correct one.

An article reporting the agreement, with a map, may be found here.

The vote was 6-1 with Nancy Whitten against. Whitten has been fighting any additional residential units to the Town Center because of traffic implications. While Whitten properly raises questions, she unfortunately has diminished her credibility because virtually every objection revolves around her inability to exit her driveway on 229th Ave. across from Discovery School during rush hour.

Whitten asserts that there is no plan to mitigate traffic, and in this she is correct–but this is only part of the story. Here’s why:

  1. The Town Center Environmental Impact Statement assumed traffic generation up to 3,000 residential units and up to 675,000 sf of commercial space. Up to this point, traffic impacts are already accounted for.
  2. Any development applications have to undergo traffic analysis and traffic concurrency testing. If the development doesn’t meet these tests, it cannot go forward.

Thus, these are the two safeguards. These assume, of course, that the City periodically does new traffic counts to have the latest data available for the analysis and testing; that recognized and scientifically valid methods are used; and that the traffic analysis modeling is reasonably accurate.

These are all important elements to accurate traffic testing and analysis.

Whitten is right to be concerned about trip generation from the Town Center but rather than picking on TDRs that already fall within the EIS analysis, she should be more concerned about the effort last year by Mayor Don Gerend to do away with the nationally-accepted Trip Generation Manual used by cities and counties and states nationwide.

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No “corruption,” “cronyism” or “favoritism”

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On February 16 at the City Council meeting, Town Center resident Michael Rutt spoke. He said he was “angry” and said he was dealing with  “corrupt people” and subject to “favoritism” and “cronyism” with respect to the E zone of the Town Center.

The E zone is a small area in the SE Quadrant involving the Lutheran Church and four residences that were zoned at the current R-1 (one unit per acre). This E zone has come under withering criticism by John Galvin and Rutt over the past two years because a Planning Commissioner, Stan Bump, lives in the E zone. Galvin and Rutt repeated have charged he received special consideration for this zoning. A previous column discusses this.

The charges are without merit. Below is a cryptic analysis of Rutt’s allegations.

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