FRIDAY, JANUARY 27, 2017
YOUR LOCALLY OWNED NEWSPAPER SERVING SNOQUALMIE AND NORTH BEND
SNO★VALLEY
STAR
GRAPPLERS GROUNDED Mount Si wrestlers fall to Woodinville Page 7
Star to close shop, ending 9-year run
Valley newspaper falls victim to shrinking revenue; final edition to be published Feb. 24 SnoValleystar
The Issaquah Press Group, which publishes the SnoValley Star, The Issaquah Press, the Sammamish Review, the Newcastle News and theeast-
side.news website, announced the company will cease operations Feb. 24. In a letter to readers and advertisers, General Manager Charles Horton wrote: “After several months of exploring
different paths for a sustainable future, we came to this difficult conclusion.” The SnoValley Star was founded as a weekly newspaper in March 2008. Its final edition will publish Feb. 24.
The Issaquah Press Group’s affected employees include seven in the newsroom, four in advertising and one in operations. They were informed of the closure by Horton during a noon meeting Jan. 19. “I’m sorry we weren’t able to get where we needed to be,” Horton told employees. In the letter to readers and advertisers, Horton said the
company, which has been owned by The Seattle Times Co. since 1995, had rolled out newsroom and advertising initiatives with the hopes of turning around the company financially, but, even with deep expense cuts, it “wasn’t enough to overcome revenue losses that began over six years ago.” SEE CLOSING, PAGE 8
Grizzly bear repopulation proposed BY STUART MILLER smiller@snovalleystar.com
STUART MILLER | smiller@snovalleystar.com
While city officials have tried to keep development in the Ridge business park discreet in the past, like for the new Safeway and Bartell Drugs buildings (pictured), the length of a proposed Hilton hotel would run along the parkway, less than 15 feet from the sidewalk at points.
Discussion builds over Ridge development BY STUART MILLER smiller@snovalleystar.com
City of Snoqualmie is asking the public to weigh in on plans for a large new hotel and retail area on Snoqualmie Ridge that is seen by some as a fundamental shift in the development strategy for the business park.
“It appears to me this would be the most dominant feature on the parkway,” Planning Commissioner Joe Larson said during a Jan. 17 discussion at a meeting of the commission. “It’s a shift from what we’ve tried for in the past on the parkway.” Larson noted that while the city went to great lengths to
make the Safeway and Bartell Drugs buildings planned for the business park more discreet, the proposed 99-room hotel and adjacent retail building would be featured prominently at its location off Southeast Center Street, paralleling Snoqualmie Parkway. Developers of the Hampton Inn & Suites by Hilton have
requested that the required 50-foot buffer zone between the parkway and any proposed structures be amended to a 15-foot “average” distance. Some commissioners, such as Steve Smith, expressed confusion at how the average distances were calculated. SEE RIDGE, PAGE 3
A plan to restore wild grizzly bears to the North Cascades, including areas as far south as Snoqualmie Pass, was recently released to the public by the National Park Service. There are thought to be very few, if any, grizzly bears left in the United States portion of the North Cascades. The population was listed as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act in 1975, and there’s been no confirmed evidence of grizzly bears in the U.S. portion of what’s known as the North Cascades Ecosystem since 1996. In the last decade, all four detections of grizzlies in the North Cascades Ecosystem have been in British Columbia. Recent scientific modeling suggests the U.S. portion of the ecosystem has enough habiSEE BEARS, PAGE 5
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