Tag Archives: Tom Odell

More study about new taxes or budget, service cuts for Sammamish

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The day before the State Legislature began to reveal a big property tax hike is coming for education, Sammamish City Council members met with staff in a retreat to examine City finances.

The Council met with staff Thursday afternoon and evening. The State began releasing information about its new budget, with tax hikes, on Friday.

Council Member Tom Odell, looking at the 2017 Six-Year Transportation Improvement Plan (TIP) that identifies nearly $90m in spending through 2023 and up to $165m in future years, inclusive of the $90m, and declared officials need to examine all potential revenue sources to pay for these projects.

Translated, this means potential new taxes.

At the same time, Council Member Tom Hornish remains unconvinced that budget cuts aren’t impossible and if these are deep enough, funding the road projects could come out of operations and current revenues.

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Sammamish finance retreat Thursday to ponder whether new taxes needed

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The Sammamish City Council will hold a five-hour financial “retreat” Thursday at City Hall to determine whether the City’s financial condition is sound enough to avoid a tax hike, new taxes or new debt.

The meeting begins at 2pm.

Sammamish faces large road building expenses if it follows through on everything it wants to do or thinks it should do.

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Outraged, shocked, surprised about Sammamish cooking the books on concurrency? I’m not.

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  • The City Council meeting tonight at 6:30p will undoubtedly discuss the Mullor Study. The study may be accessed here.

Commentary

By Scott Hamilton

Scott Hamilton

The news yesterday that Sammamish has been using outdated traffic counts, mostly from 2012 but some from 2014 and none from 2016, to run its traffic concurrency tests for development applications is fundamentally cooking the books to approve projects.

I should be outraged, but I’m not.

I should be shocked, but I’m not.

I’m not even surprised.

It just goes to show you how far our city government and City Council declined over the years to become a mini-King County.

I reached this conclusion as far back as 2009. That was 10 years after Sammamish incorporated.

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13 candidates seek 4 Sammamish City Council positions

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Thirteen candidates filed for four positions on the Sammamish City Council, the most since 1999 when 40 people filed for seven positions for the first Council.

 

This means there will be primary races in the August election for each seat up this year. The top two of each race will advance to the November general election.

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Keller for mayor, Malchow for deputy mayor

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Bob Keller

With Don Gerend planning to step down in July as Sammamish mayor, due to personal business reasons, the City Council must select a new mayor the next meeting.

Gerend will remain on the Council as a member retaining a vote for his successor.

Bob Keller is deputy mayor, but under Council rules, he does not automatically succeed Gerend. A Council vote makes this decision.

(The mayor is selected by the Council, not the public, under the state laws governing Sammamish’s council-manager form of government., unlike Redmond and Issaquah in which the public directly votes for the mayor.)

Sammamish Comment supports elevating Keller to mayor for the rest of this year, the unexpired mayoral term for Gerend. Gerend and Keller decided not to seek reelection in November and each goes off the Council Dec. 31.

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