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Does Sammamish really want to be a regional growth center?


 

 

Anna Yorba

One of the arguments used in Sammamish's 2025 Town Center Plan and Code Amendment Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement (SEIS) to support increased population in the Town Center is quietly embedded in the middle of Sammamish's 2024 Comprehensive Plan as the following policy:


"LU 10.4. Pursue PSRC (Puget Sound Regional Council) Regional Growth Center designation."

A Regional Growth Center is defined as having dense existing jobs and housing, high-quality transit service, and planning for significant growth.

The Draft SEIS states:

"The City of Sammamish will pursue RGC status for the Town Center in the future as laid out in the City's 2024 Comprehensive Plan Update. This status prioritizes Town Center for consideration in funding allocated through the PSRC's planning processes, including grants for transit improvements, multimodal network upgrades, and infrastructure projects to support housing and job growth."

It should be noted that Sammamish is not included as a Regional Growth Center in the PSRC's Vision 2050 Plan.

The 2025 Draft SEIS examines the impacts of adding 2,000 more residential units to the 2,000 units currently approved in the Town Center Plan. It appears that the City is presenting these incremental increases as a way to avoid examining the impacts of their ultimate goal of achieving Regional Growth Center status.

If the City is pursuing status as a Regional Growth Center, a full Environmental Impact Statement should be required to assess the impacts of development necessary to meet RGC criteria. By dividing the ultimate project into smaller parts, the analysis of the current density increase makes each individual component appear less significant than the cumulative impact of the entire project. This approach can lead to an inadequate assessment of the overall environmental effects.

This piecemeal planning undermines the goals of the National and State Environmental Protection Agencies by potentially allowing significant cumulative impacts to go unrecognized or unmitigated.

I don't believe the citizens of Sammamish are aware of or support our current City government's push to pursue this designation. Enormous expenditures of tax dollars and negative impacts on our quality of life would be required to achieve RGC status due to our challenging topography, infrastructure constraints, lack of efficient transit access, and limited employment opportunities.

I urge the State Environmental Agency to send this Supplemental EIS back to the City of Sammamish in favor of a full EIS on the intended Regional Growth Center plan.



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