Valderrama cites fake facts in Town Center moratorium flip-flop

Ramiro Valderrama

Sammamish City Council Member Ramiro Valderrama, citing what turns out to be a series of unsubstantiated claims, executed a pirouette on his previous vote supporting a moratorium including the Town Center—and went splat.

The Town Center was exempted from the moratorium at the Nov. 21 meeting by a 4-3 vote, with Valderrama, Mayor Bob Keller and Council Members Don Gerend and Kathy Huckabay voting to lift it.

Valderrama said his vote always was about storm water management for the Town Center. In voting to exempt the Town Center, Valderrama claimed the emergency moratorium was not about traffic concurrency.

This simply wasn’t true.

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Final Nov. 7 election results

Final vote counting in the Nov. 7 election confirmed election night results and Sammamish Comment’s projected winners.

Vote tallies for Positions 1, 3 and 7 were within one percentage point from election night to the final results.

Tallies in Position 5 narrowed almost two points. Winner Chris Ross on election night pulled 54.65% of the vote to Rituja Indapure’s 45.35%. By the final tally, the percentages were 52.77% and 47.17% respectively.

The detailed chart is below.

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Funding for roads used for other priorities, wrote former Public Works director

  • City Council Member Tom Odell is on the record—several times—that Sammamish neglected its road infrastructure for 10 years. Charts and graphs below tell the depressing story.
  • “[F]unding that could have been used for transportation capital projects was used for other priorities such as city hall, the city’s street maintenance program, the YMCA/Community Center and to some extent, even the city’s parks capital projects,” wrote the City’s former Director of Public Works in June 2017.

If Sammamish residents want to know why there is so much traffic congestion, two visuals created by citizen Miki Mullor tells the story easier than long, drawn out narratives can.

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Day 2 Election results: No change from Election Night

With additional votes counted on the day after the Election, there were no changes in the outcomes and only fractional changes in the percentages.

The chart below the jump includes last night’s vote count and today’s for comparison.

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First results: Ritchie, Moran, Ross, Stuart win City Council seats; Lambert reelected; Dems win 45th LD

Jason Ritchie, Karen Moran, Chris Ross and Pam Stuart are projected winners of the Sammamish City Council seats.

Kathy Lambert has been reelected to a fifth term on the King County Council. Democrats flipped the State Senate seat for the 45th Legislative District.

Indications are there may have been an unusually heavy turnout for a City Council election.

So far, 26% of the ballots have been returned. By the time the last ballot is counted after Thanksgiving, typically the return about doubles. There are 36,136 registered voters in Sammamish. Typically, a City Council election sees a turnout of 40%-45%.

City Manager Lyman Howard announced at 7:20pm tonight during the Council meeting that the ballot drop box at City Hall had been emptied a couple of times today.

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