City starts rewrite of environmental regulations
August 10, 2010
By Caleb Heeringa
A little bit of mud has led to a lot of anguish for the Gees.
The Sammamish couple bought two plots of land and a small cabin on Beaver Lake in 2003 with visions of building a waterfront home. When they went to begin development in 2008, they were surprised to find that the city considered a small, soggy depression in the middle of their property to be a wetland covered by the city’s Critical Areas Ordinance. When the necessary 50-foot buffers are added to the required setbacks from Beaver Lake, the Gees estimate more than 75 percent of their land is unbuildable.
Standing in his wetland – mostly mud and deer tracks – and looking across a wooden fence to his neighbor’s landscaped lawn less than 20 feet away, David Gee can’t help but wish he’d started development before the city passed their ordinance in 2005.
“The only difference between that person and me is that I didn’t develop before ’05,” Gee said.
Gee, his wife Megan and the architect and ground water specialist the couple hired to study their property all spoke at a July 27 Sammamish City Council meeting, encouraging the council to keep aggrieved property owners in mind as they review the city’s Critical Areas Ordinance.
The city is beginning the process of reviewing the ordinance, parts of which are set to expire in 2012. Whether that review is a surgical rewrite of those portions or a wholesale review of the entire ordinance and the science that underpins it remains to be seen.
Community Development Director Kamuron Gurol outlined the options the council has as it navigates the overlapping bureaucratic deadlines the city faces in coming years.
In addition to the sunset clause, the state’s Growth Management Act requires a regular review of the city’s law every 7 years – by 2014 for Sammamish. Gurol and several council members said they didn’t see the point of delving into controversial portions of the law – wetland buffers or landslide setbacks, for example – if they’d end up having to come back to it again in 2012 or 2013.
“I want to do this once, not twice,” Councilman Tom Odell said.
But the council and Planning Commission might not be able to jump right into the process, since the large-scale review requires several other documents be finalized first. Gurol said the city’s stormwater manual is on the commission’s agenda and might be before the council in six to nine months with updates of the basin plans due a little sooner.
The council is also waiting to hear back about whether its Shoreline Master Program passes muster with the state’s Department of Ecology. That program contains a separate set of Critical Areas Ordinance regulations that apply to wetlands and environmentally sensitive areas around Lake Sammamish and Pine and Beaver lakes.
“What I don’t want is to have two (Critical Areas Ordinances) in Sammamish – one that applies to the (shoreline) area and one that applies for everywhere else,” Gurol said.
Councilman Mark Cross encouraged long-term planning on these issues and cautioned the council from assuming that all these pieces would fall into place without a hitch or a price tag. He said the storm water regulations and basin plans may require big capital investments that the city isn’t planning for. The city also shouldn’t assume that the state will accept its shoreline regulations, he said.
“We may have to back up, not move forward,” Cross said. “That needs to have a role in the budget discussions.”
Councilman John Curley said he understood the value of the city coordinating its efforts on these overlapping issues, but wondered whether affected property owners should have to wait in limbo for the estimated two years it would take to complete the review.
“What do we do for those individuals who find themselves in between a rock and a hard place?” Curley asked. “Are they told to just wait 24 months for the whole thing to be cleared up?”
City Manager Ben Yazici assured the council that he and Gurol were doing what they could to address citizens’ concerns on a case-by-case basis.
The council is expected to finalize the scope of the Critical Areas Ordinance review in September.
When questioned by council members on the Gees’ issue, Gurol was quick to defend his staff. He said a vast majority of disputes with owners are resolved administratively or occasionally through the hearing examiner.
The Gees claim that any water on their property leaks from an uphill city detention pond, meaning that any wetland wouldn’t be naturally occurring. When the Gees protested the city’s wetland finding, city staff suggested they fund their own study of the area. The Gees then hired a hydrogeologist that the city claims isn’t qualified to make a wetland determination.
“It was one of the most frustrating cases I’ve worked on,” Gurol said. “We’ve obviously got a strong difference of opinion of what qualified consultant work really looks like in that case.”
Gurol said staff went out two or three times and could find no evidence of any leakage from the detention pond going toward the property and that wetlands require more than just errant water to form.
“Even if it were leaking water, that’s not going to create a wetland in a few years’ time,” Gurol said. “That site has had wetland soils … It’s likely had them for tens if not hundreds of years.”
The Gees, who have spent years studying the drainage patterns in their area, say they doubt that. A ditch on the east side of West Beaver Lake Drive has no clear drainage outlet and points downhill in the direction of their property. They say the city’s ordinance unfairly infringes on their private property rights and is so vague it allows individual staff members to make determinations that can cost landowners hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The family, who bought the land for $895,000 in 2003, now plans to sell the property at a loss because they cannot afford to pay the property taxes on it – almost $15,000 in 2010. They said one of the parcels can still be developed, but they can’t afford to unless they sell the parcel containing the wetland. The Gees said the city told them that parcel could still fit a small home at the end of the property furthest from the lake, but few people have been willing to pay for waterfront land that can’t fit a home near the lake.
“Given the hundreds of thousands of dollars of life savings and pensions at stake; if we had been clairvoyant, (we) would have chosen not to buy property in Sammamish,” David Gee told the council.
Reporter Caleb Heeringa can be reached at 392-6434. ext. 247, or cheeringa@isspress.com.
Other Stories of Interest: Beaver Lake, Critical Areas Ordinance, environment, Sammamish City Council, Sammamish Government
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