By Scott Hamilton
After nearly a decade and a half of little, the Sammamish City Council may finally be ready to address serious storm water drainage issues in the 
Tamarack subdivision on the city’s west side.
The issue is on the council’s agenda tomorrow night.
Tamarack has been subject to increasingly damaging storm water runoff as development uphill from the subdivision, which is sited on a downhill slope off Thompson Hill Road, flows through the neighborhood.
By Scott Hamilton
Founder, Sammamish Comment
The Sammamish City Council held its last meeting of 2018 yesterday, ending the most contentious and divisive year I’ve seen since the incorporation vote in 1998.
As 2019 prepares to arrive, it’s time for a fresh approach to how this city is governed.
The city council, administration and staff has been consumed by traffic concurrency, the resulting building moratorium and related development regulations all year—really, since October 2017, when the moratorium was adopted to give the government time to sort out the concurrency issues.
These issues consumed the city nearly to the exclusion of all else.
Sammamish Retreat 2017
The Sammamish City Council yesterday created an ad hoc committee to come up with ideas to reduce the number of marathon public comment sessions.
However, in the discussion, not one Council Member or staff put their finger on the root problem. It is the Sammamish City Council’s own fault.
The following is my public comment given this morning on the topic.–Scott Hamilton.
The Sammamish City Council continues to dither while residents in the Tamarack subdivision suffer from stormwater drainage from uphill development and fish downstream are threatened by the same drainage.
In a contentious Council meeting last week, accusations flew that a tax hike of 5% for stormwater management was a thinly disguised effort to force the City to accept the entire responsibility for solving the drainage problems affecting Tamarack that have been more than 10 years in the making.
Sammamish Comment 