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The IssaquahPress
Wednesday, September 19, 2012
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Aging pool’s condition could shape park bond measure
By Warren Kagarise wkagarise@isspress.com Come summertime, about 1,000 people each day slip into the 84-degree water at Julius Boehm Pool, a fixture in downtown Issaquah for decades. The crowd is diverse in age and activity — early-morning
lap swimmers, senior citizens in water-exercise classes, children for swimming lessons and more. Summer is the busiest time of year for the pool. The pool is 40 years old — 15 years older than designers intended for the facility — and visitors and employees often encounter signs of age.
City Parks & Recreation Director Anne McGill said the facility is dated, and leaders face a choice as the City Council considers a possible park bond measure for 2013. “It’s like that old car in the garage. What are we going to do about it? Are we going to put another carburetor in it? Or are we
going to trade it in?” she said. In June, a polling firm hired by the city surveyed residents as the initial step in a process to pass a multimillion-dollar bond measure to fund future parks projects, including a possible pool upgrade. Still, the pool is only one option as leaders consider a bond.
Residents also indicated interest in more dollars to preserve open space, build parks, improve trails and more. Overall, most survey respondents inside city limits supported a $10 million proposal for open See POOL, Page A5
SILVER BELLE
Issaquah graduate Jennie Reed earns Olympic cycling medal By Matt Carstens ip-sports@isspress.com
As Olympic silver medalist and Issaquah High School grad Jennie Reed packs up her West Seattle home in preparation for a move back to the Eastside, she said she realizes moving will be a bit harder than she expected. “We’re having a hard time finding a place to rent,” she said. “I don’t think it’ll happen in a day, like I expected.” She said she also didn’t expect that she’d have any interest in track cycling … but here she is. Can we roller blade here? Growing up on east Lake Sammamish, Reed and a friend rollerbladed the 5-mile path down to Marymoor Park and stumbled upon the velodrome. They asked the local coach if they could rollerblade around the track. “Well, no,” he said. “But you can get on a bike.” Reed had some experience mountain biking and decided to give the track a try. “Once I took the track class, I was hooked,” Reed said. “I was never an ath-
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2012 OLYMPICS lete with the super endurance, but I was always powerful and fast.” That power and speed made her a natural track cyclist. She hopped on the Gregg’s Cycle club team, which taught her all the disciplines of cycling, including road and track. See OLYMPICS, Page A5
Jennie Reed, at the Marymoor Park velodrome in Redmond Sept. 14, holds her 2012 Olympic silver medal in team pursuit cycling. By Greg Farrar
Dispatchers demonstrate poise Issaquah election results under pressure amid shootout offer clues to November By Warren Kagarise wkagarise@isspress.com The callers punching 911 into cellphones on Sept. 24, 2011, a bright Saturday darkened as a gunman stalked across downtown Issaquah, heard a calm voice amid the chaos. In the hours after the gunman set across from a downtown intersection to Clark Elementary School, communications specialists at the Issaquah Police
Department fielded a tsunami of calls. In the tumult, a trio of dispatchers — including a recent addition to the team — attempted to assuage panicked citizens and advise the officers at the scene. The voices citizens and officers heard on the line came from Dominique Hill, Janelle Knight and Felicia Moore. “It’s our job to be calm. We learn in our training to just stay
By Greg Farrar
Dominique Hill, Felicia Moore and Janelle Knight (from left) were on duty as Issaquah Police Department communications specialists when gunman Ronald W. Ficker set off across downtown Issaquah on Sept. 24, 2011.
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By Warren Kagarise wkagarise@isspress.com
ON THE WEB The Issaquah Press started covering the incident moments after the initial 911 calls. Find complete coverage at http://bit.ly/Li2pPK. in the moment and deal with it as it comes,” Moore said. “We know if we panic or we have any sort of breakdown, it’s going to cause a breakdown in communication.” The communications center team arrived for a 12-hour shift at 6 a.m. Knight started at the police department a day earlier, and intended to hang back throughout the shift for training. Time started to blur just after 11 a.m. as Ronald W. Ficker abandoned a rented Kia on a downtown street and retrieved a pair of rifles and more than 900 rounds of ammunition from the trunk. Callers later directed police to Ficker at the Clark campus. Issaquah officers led the charge. Cpl. Christian Muñoz, and officers Laura Asbell, Brian See DISPATCHERS, Page A2
King County is a hard-fought battleground in the race for governor, and the August primary election results for Jay Inslee and Rob McKenna confirm Issaquah is closely divided, too. Only 150 votes separated McKenna from Inslee among Issaquah voters last month. In 2004, for comparison, 133 votes statewide decided the contest between Chris Gregoire and Dino Rossi. The information comes from a detailed analysis of precinct results in the Aug. 7 election. Elsewhere on the ballot, Issaquah voters endorsed incumbents, and rejected past and present state legislators’ bids for higher office. The neighborhood-level data illustrates how the Issaquah electorate selected candidates — and offers clues to local general election results in November. Issaquah is home to 16,992 registered voters. The city is divided into 31 precincts. Though results in Issaquah sometimes reflect broader trends, city voters occasionally select a different route. The race for the 8th Congressional District seat, for instance, is often much closer in Issaquah than elsewhere in the district. Issaquah Democrat Karen Porterfield fell 399 votes shy
Quotable “The life of the dogs sometimes is similar to some of the kids. They’ve been abused, abandoned, delinquent, they are aggressive and violent, and their families can’t take care of them.”
— Patti Berntsen Echo Glen Children’s Center associate superintendent (See story on Page B1.)
VOTE ON THE WEB
2012
Find more coverage at www.issaquahpress.com/category/election.
of incumbent Republican Dave Reichert among city voters. In 2010, Democrat Suzan DelBene outpolled Reichert by 742 votes in Issaquah, and lost the race to Reichert, a former King County sheriff and Auburn Republican. (DelBene is again a candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives in the redrawn 1st Congressional District.) Issaquah did not provide a home-field advantage to local candidates in races for higher office. State Rep. Glenn Anderson, a GOP candidate for lieutenant governor, and former state Sen. Kathleen Drew, a Democrat in the race for secretary of state, did not carry the 5th Legislative District. Though Anderson and Drew represented the district, voters overwhelmingly chose other candidates.
See ELECTION, Page A3
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