The decision by the Sammamish City Council to approve an agreement with King County for transfer of development rights (TDR) from two small areas adjacent the city to the Town Center is a correct one.
An article reporting the agreement, with a map, may be found here.
The vote was 6-1 with Nancy Whitten against. Whitten has been fighting any additional residential units to the Town Center because of traffic implications. While Whitten properly raises questions, she unfortunately has diminished her credibility because virtually every objection revolves around her inability to exit her driveway on 229th Ave. across from Discovery School during rush hour.
Whitten asserts that there is no plan to mitigate traffic, and in this she is correct–but this is only part of the story. Here’s why:
- The Town Center Environmental Impact Statement assumed traffic generation up to 3,000 residential units and up to 675,000 sf of commercial space. Up to this point, traffic impacts are already accounted for.
- Any development applications have to undergo traffic analysis and traffic concurrency testing. If the development doesn’t meet these tests, it cannot go forward.
Thus, these are the two safeguards. These assume, of course, that the City periodically does new traffic counts to have the latest data available for the analysis and testing; that recognized and scientifically valid methods are used; and that the traffic analysis modeling is reasonably accurate.
These are all important elements to accurate traffic testing and analysis.
Whitten is right to be concerned about trip generation from the Town Center but rather than picking on TDRs that already fall within the EIS analysis, she should be more concerned about the effort last year by Mayor Don Gerend to do away with the nationally-accepted Trip Generation Manual used by cities and counties and states nationwide.
Sammamish Comment 