City of Sammamish not equipped to do the job say builders, commissioner

In March of 2009, then Sammamish Chief of Police Brad Thompson told The Reporter he felt the police force in this city was not big enough to adequately patrol the Plateau, and could be caught short in a time of emergency. Thompson's criticism of the city administration's staffing policy was one often whispered, but rarely to the local media or in official channels. A few months later, Thompson was on his way out of Sammamish. But the debate over whether the city is well served by its policy to keep staffing levels low in order to keep costs low for residents has not gone away. The fact that Sammamish spends far less on city employees per capita than any of its Eastside neighbors is a point of pride, often presented during budget deliberations and discussions of how to trim costs in this poor economy. The city has 1.8 full time employees (FTE) for every 1,000 residents. The next leanest city model is Mercer Island, with almost three times as many city employees (4.1) for every 1,000 residents. Kirkland, with a population similar to Sammamish's, in 2008 had 234 (FTEs) compared to Sammamish's 75. The question now being asked is, although it is clear what this saves the city, what does it cost? Most recently, it reared its head during a contentious land use decision affecting a property owner at Beaver Lake. Having ruled that the property owned by David and Megan Gee contained a wetland, City of Sammamish planning staff denied the Gee's permission to continue with the redevelopment plans. After months of negotiation that more resembled dispute, the Gee's design consultant told the Sammamish City Council that Sammamish planning staff were not equipped to deal with many of the applications that come before them. He said given the difficulties with having permits processed properly and on time, he and other building professionals were turning down projects in Sammamish because "it is not worth the trouble." Although Sammamish City Manager Ben Yazici told The Reporter this week that the unfortunate Gee situation was a result of poor communication for which he held himself responsible, and not a lack of quality planning staff, Simpson was not the first to claim that appropriate growth and regulation was being compromised by an under-equipped community development department. According to former Sammamish Planning Commissioner Scott Hamilton, a shortage of planning staff became an evident problem during the city's attempt to complete its Shoreline Master Program (SMP), and hampered efforts to draft effective regulations governing both cell towers and environmentally sensitive areas. Hamilton said during his five year tenure on the planning commission, on a number of occasions Director of Community Development Kamuron Gurol told commissioners "that he didn't have the staff to get us the answers." "This has been an issue for a long time," Hamilton said. "The planning commission of 2008, or 2009, made it clear to the city council that we thought staff were overworked and understaffed. This issue had everything to do with a long history of staff's inability to get back to the planning commission in a timely manner." The Sammamish Community Development Department is made up of 19 staff, ranging from four senior planners to office assistants and a permit center manager. It is this department's responsibility to process permits, enforce building and design standards, as well as do the research and leg work for comprehensive long range planning projects. Hamilton said the inability of this department to cope with the workload came to head in a number of poor planning products for the proposed Town Center and the SMP, and resulted in the Critical Areas Ordinance (CAO) and cell towers regulations having to be redone, delays that have cost more than if sufficient resources were assigned to the work in the first instance. "What's happening with city staff was particularly true with the SMP process," he said. "The staff were so burdened with work, the first draft of the SMP was so bad (the planning commission) rejected it out of hand. There were some incredibly bizarre restrictions and requirements. But by this time the deadline had to be met." The consultant in the Gee case, Jon Simpson, told The Reporter this week that not only was it a matter of staffing shortages, but suggested a deeper conspiracy - "they tend to want to circle the wagon around themselves, to protect their own interests, rather than resolving an issue and working with the developer." Simpson said that interest was an inherent bias against property rights in favor of environmental protection. Hamilton agreed the City of Sammamish was a "very environmentally conscious jurisdiction," but doubted this was the result of any suspicious ideological bias. "There are more environmentally sensitive areas here than in most other areas, including the three lakes," he said. "As a result, the council, the staff, the administration and the commissions are all very cognizant of the sensitivity of these areas." While Hamilton did not agree with the sentiment that the city had hired unqualified people, he did say that by requiring one person to fill a number of roles, to cut costs, they had a team of "generalists rather than specialists." He added that in a number of instances, staff would have to learn a particular subject while on the job. "A good example is the city's effort to bring low impact development into the code," Hamilton said. "(The staff member who) was the point man for LID, now, he's a very sincere and dedicated guy. But at the time he didn't know very much about LID. So he had to go off and learn it. As a result, the whole LID ordinance process took a year, or a year and a half, longer than it should have." Similarly, Hamilton said that Gurol was an enormously skilled and talented planner, but with minimal staff support he was "spread too thin." In response, Gurol agreed that in the five years he'd worked in Sammamish, there were days he'd felt thinly spread. "We have folks here with high expectations for quality and timeliness, and like a lot of cities we want to accomplish a lot," he wrote to The Reporter. But he denied this workload had compromised the department's performance. "We did also document the actual timeliness for delivery of materials to the planning commission, and if memory serves we actually performed pretty well," he wrote. "On the specific LID example, I know we worked hard to fulfill the policy direction from the council for a voluntary, incentive-based ordinance that could be applied city-wide. There were few models for such ordinances available and while we had some very good guidance, there were a lot of choices to be made. We are still waiting for the state to complete their LID guidance, so once we have that, it may make things a little easier." Mayor of Sammamish Don Gerend, who has been on the Sammamish council since the city's incorporation in 1999, said this week while it was true the city would like to have more police, and more planners and service people to respond to citizen requests, city commissions and the council, that would necessarily mean tax increases. "It is very easy to say that with more staff we would have better service, but the difficult decisions center around cost/benefit ratios," he said. "The Council and staff try to take their lead from the citizens, and the citizens, excluding perhaps a few very vocal critics, have clearly stated that they are not enthused about significant tax increases." Gerend said the city always understood that the boom development days of 2004 - 2007 would be a temporary situation, and so did not build a large, permanent staff to handle the 400 or 500 new building applications which came in each year. (In 2009, that number fell to 67). "Now that permitting is way down, we don't have a large number of excess employees like some other cities who find themselves in the painful situation of having to lay off a large percentage of the work force," he wrote, but admitted "I can't say that our staff is overworked or not." According to Hamilton, the proof of that is in the pudding. "This is a problem that is endemic to other governments, and to corporations too," he said. "They spend too much time looking at the cost and not at the value," adding that additional staff or resources may have prevented the city having to go back to the drawing board on the SMP, CAOs, and cell towers, ultimately saving them time and money.

Contact Sammamish Reporter Editor Jake Lynch at editor@sammamish-reporter.com.

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