Sixty-five percent of the votes cast in the Sammamish City Council races were cast for Christie Malchow, 
Although Valderrama is an incumbent, he was isolated by the ruling majority of the Council and members worked hard to find a challenger to defeat his bid for reelection. His reelection is a blow to the ruling majority’s ambitions to maintain control and eliminate a challenger to the status quo.
The election of Malchow and Hornish, allies of Valderrama, cement voters’ message of change.
Illustration of Intelligent Transportation System. Image via Google images. Click to enlarge.
Sammamish’s new Intelligent Transportation System (ITS), intended to speed traffic along the main arterial, 228th Ave., through the City, has generated enough complaints that a refresh is likely, officials say.
The ITS is intended to synchronize traffic lights based on traffic demand through the entire corridor. The problem: left turn signals don’t “trip” as often as before, sometimes leading to three full traffic light cycles before left turns are permitted, according to some City Council Members at a recent Council meeting.
Complaints appearing on social media point to longer cross street red lights, even when there is little or no traffic on 228th.
On other occasions, cross streets have the green even when there has been no traffic.
City transportation officials are well aware of the problems.
Although votes are still being counted and the election results won’t be certified until Nov. 24, Christie 
Malchow and Tom Hornish have been elected to the Sammamish City Council; their Election Night margins were too great for Mark Cross and Tom Vance to overcome. Their vote tallies have only increased each day additional votes have been tabulated.
So the questions become, What’s next? What’s next for the balance of 2015 in what is now a lame duck period of the City Council, and What’s next in 2016?
Click on image to enlarge.
How did two veterans of Sammamish public service lose their bids for election to the City Council in the Nov. 3 election to two unknown newcomers to the City?
They also had an unwitting helping hand from their own Deputy Mayor, whose obsessions galvanized the opposition to upset her allies.
This is the inside story of how Mayor Tom Vance lost to two-year resident Tom Hornish and how former Mayor and Council Member Mark Cross lost a comeback bid to a feisty young Mom in tennis shoes, Christie Malchow, invoking remembrances of another tennis shoe Mom campaign in Washington long before Malchow moved here.
Openness and transparency in Sammamish have taken another hit as Mayor Tom Vance and Deputy Mayor Kathy Huckabay appear to have withheld emails requested under
Tom Vance
the State Public Records Act.
This is especially ironic because Huckabay, in a last-minute email and letter-writing campaign against Council Member Ramiro Valderrama, who is seeking reelection, and candidates Tom Hornish and Christie Malchow, has made openness and transparency her top point against these three.
Sammamish Comment filed a multi-part Public Records Request (PRR) August 27 in pursuit of several stories that subsequently were posted as information was developed through interviews and records. Included in that multi-part request was the following:
Request #2:
Subject: All emails from the City server and the personal email accounts:
Kathy Huckabay
City Clerk Melonie Anderson responded Thursday last week:
Sammamish Comment 