By Scott Hamilton
Commentary
The Sammamish City Council hardly distinguished itself Tuesday night, descending into full-fledged dysfunction, paralysis and open warfare.
The issues: concurrency and the building moratorium.
It was often an embarrassing display and overall, the council as a collective body came off tarnishing itself.
The building moratorium in Sammamish won’t be lifted next week.
In a sometimes-heated meeting, the city council on a 4-3 vote adopted an amendment offered by Deputy Mayor Karen Moran to add some capacity-based measurements to the Level of Service concurrency model previously approved.
The absence of road capacity measurements means some key road segments without stop signs or stop lights aren’t measured.
These include East Lake Sammamish Parkway north of Inglewood Hill Road to the Redmond city limits; 244th north of NE 8th to the city limits; and long stretches of Sahalee Way.
All are heavily congested during rush hour and would likely fail concurrency tests.
Editorial
Kellie Stickney Communications Manager
Just how cozy is Town Center developer STCA with the Sammamish city administration?
Sammamish Comment has been reporting aspects of the relationship between the developer, administration and certain members of the city council for more than a year.
Now, The Comment discovered that the city administration collaborated with STCA to promote their project using taxpayer money at the same time the new concurrency model was being developed by the city.
This casts an appearance of a conflict of interest because a realistic concurrency system may block new development under certain circumstances, including the Town Center. STCA is the largest developer of the Town Center.
The council included the Town Center in the moratorium so it will be subject to the new concurrency.
It is our view that it is improper for city staff to collaborate with STCA and at the same time develop a concurrency model that may block it.
Indeed, on February 28, Kendra Breiland, the city’s concurrency consultant, met in Bellevue with STCA for “coordination.”
Editorial
It’s about transparency.
On Tuesday, Sammamish Comment published a post about Council Member Ramiro Valderrama and City Manager Lyman Howard sending an email to staff, with a CC to the city attorney, to talk about a Developers Agreement with STCA, the principal developer of the Town Center.
City Manager Lyman Howard labeled the email Attorney Client Privilege, even though it was addressed to his assistant and only copied to the city attorney and even though it did not ask for legal advice.
Labeling the email Attorney Client Privilege had but one purpose: to keep the email from being produced in a Public Records Request.
The City Council, then in power in November 2017, was not copied on the email.
After The Comment revealed this email and drew the obvious conclusions, Valderrama, typically, tried to cover his tracks.
By Scott Hamilton
Editor
Analysis
The Sammamish City Council continues to wrestle with the controversial and highly complex topic of traffic concurrency.
The council has been backed into a corner by staff, consultants and, as the responsible executive, the city manager. There are no good choices left to the council to deal with the city’s growing traffic problems and balancing these against development.
Chris Ross
Karen Moran
The process to date has been so thoroughly mucked up that, in reality, there are few choices the council has if it is going to lift the building moratorium in July, its self-imposed target.
Deputy Mayor Karen Moran and Council Member Chris Ross are the key votes that will determine the direction.
The first choice is to adopt the new model that has been proposed by the city staff and consultants.
The second is to go back to the old model, adjusting it to eliminate “credits” for theoretical added capacity that, for the most part, are pencil-pushing solutions.
I favor the second choice. Here’s why. But it may be too late to go there.
Sammamish Comment 