Locally owned Wolves train their cubs
50 cents
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July 23, 2014
Klahanie study released
New rules could help with runoff
Mama duck at dusk
By Ari Cetron
City could net nearly $2 million, but money would be quickly spent By Ari Cetron
As expected, Klahanie residents will pay less in taxes, and the city of Sammamish will net more money if city annexes the unincorporated area. Pete Butkus, a former Sammamish deputy city manager who now runs Butkus Consulting, presented his study of Klahanie to the City Council July 15. Sammamish paid Butkus $26,500 for his work. In addition, it paid Issaquah $30,000 for access to information from that city’s study completed last year. The Klahanie area is a roughly 2-square-mile mile triangle just outside the southern portion of the city. A small portion of Klahanie also borders the city of Issaquah. County planning
Photo by Christina Gomez
A family of ducks is silhouetted against clear waters in this photo taken July 11.
documents have long assumed Issaquah would eventually annex the area. After two failed attempts, however, Issaquah plans to relinquish its right to annex the area to Sammamish.
One step in Sammamish annexation process will be a review by the King County Boundary Review Board. City Manager Ben Yazici explained the Butkus study should meet
one of the requirements of the board, which will need to make adjustments to allow Sammamish to annex the area. See STUDY, Page 5
3 vie for District Court judgeship By Ari Cetron
A trio of part-time judges is competing to fill an open seat on King County District Court. Judge Linda Jacke has announced her retirement in the Northeast Division, which serves a large swath of the eastside stretching from Lake Washington in the west to the county line in the east, and from Newcastle and areas south of North Bend in the south to the county line in the north. The district also includes the part of Bothell in Snohomish County. Jacke’s courtroom is in Redmond, though there’s no guarantee the new judge would sit there. The three running for the
seat are all pro-tem judges, meaning they act as fill-in judges when a regular judge is away. The top two vote getters in the August primary will move on to the General Election ballot in November. Court rules prohibit judges from speaking about how they might be inclined to rule in specific sorts of cases, but each of the three would bring a different skill set to the bench. Lisa O’Toole Lisa O’Toole, 52, is a Newcastle resident who has been a pro tem judge for the past six years. She is married with two children and has experience in both
On the Web Each of the three has an extensive list of endorsements that can be found on their websites, along with more information. www.marcusnaylor.com www.leoforjudge.com www.lisaotooleforjudge.com civil and criminal law, and notes that she is the only candidate to have practiced both sorts of law. “What I really bring is experience” she said. O’Toole said although she’s been serving as a pro tem judge for several years, for the past three, its been her sole occupa-
tion. “The more I did it, the more I actually enjoyed it,” she said. O’Toole said that she tries to keep in mind that when people come to her courtroom, they want to be understood as a person. “It’s not just a case or a number that’s coming before us, it’s an individual,” she said. If elected, she said she would like to be visible in the community outside of the courtroom. She’d want to work with leaders in communities that might not always have a positive experience with the justice system to help reach out to members of those communities in an effort See JUDGE, Page 3
A change in stormwater rules will make more new homes subject to a review process that could reduce the impact new homes have on existing neighbors. The Sammamish City Council enacted the regulations July 15 with a unanimous vote. The rules specifically target the Inglewood neighborhood, said Laura Philpot, the city’s public works director. That neighborhood was platted in the late 1800s and consists of small lots. Philpot said the area has seen a lot of pressure about development lately. Citywide, there are regulations in place that mandate homes with a footprint of 2,000 square feet or more to find ways to detain stormwater that runs off of the property. A footprint is the amount of ground a house covers, so a two-story house might have a footprint equal to roughly half of the home’s total square footage. Philpot said a recent uptick in the number additional houses, coupled with developers taking advantage of the 2,000-squarefoot rule (some, she said, come in with a footprint of 1,999 square feet), has resulted in an aggregate problem. Lots are often being submitted one at a time, meaning that while the impact of one house might not be very much, when all of them are added together, the extra water makes for a headache for their downhill neighbors. “Up to this point, it’s been more of a nuisance, but we see the potential for it to be much more than that,” said Eric LaFrance, the city’s stormwater See RULES, Page 2