Developers, city staff, designers, talk turkey over town center

It was standing room only at the Sammamish City Hall on Thursday afternoon as more than 70 architects, town planners, designers, developers and development experts came together for a planning charette to discuss the proposed Sammamish Town Center.

It was a brainstorming session of high calibre.

Sammamish city officials mingled with out-of-state consultants, local residents conversed with young engineers on the cutting edge of commercial incentive schemes.

Six tables were set up in the space typically reserved for council meetings, each focussing on a particular issue.

These were:

1. Sustainability

2. Residential incentives and affordable housing

3. Commercial incentives

4. Design standards

5. Street-scapes/landscaping/sense of place

6. Structured parking

"The long term desire is to not have 228th Avenue as a commercial strip," said Town Center Plan consultant John Owen in his introduction to the charette.

What followed was a session of ideas and discussion that will hopefully lead to the establishment of a town center that functions successfully for its residents and businesses, and promotes the idea of communities being environmentally and socially sustainable.

At the commercial incentives table, Lafe Hermansen, Core Design Inc in Bellevue, said "it's going to be a hard sell, to get the 'first in' entrepreneurs."

"With no residences or infrastructure in, what banks are going to get behind you?" he said.

A developer at his table suggested that public/private partnerships would be a good way to encourage investment in the early stages of the town center, that is, joint contributions to common areas projects like roads, parking areas, and utilities, from local government and businesses.

Tom Puttman of David Evans and Associates, brought his experience with storm water incentive programs in Portland to the table, and said that performance based incentives, in terms of using resources efficiently and minimizing impacts on the community and environment, would encourage the right type of firms to operate the right type of business in the new center.

"The big thing is certainty," he said.

"They want to know, 'if we are going to do this, then this is what we will get,' in terms of incentives."

At the streetscapes table, town planners recognized that an easy and convenient way to cross 228th Avenue was important, suggesting either a pedestrian bridge or tunnel.

Gareth Roe of BCRA Design in Tacoma said that the style of outdoor furniture, lighting and signage in the new town center could be a form of 'branding', to distinguish the area.

"Bremerton does that well," he said, before referring to Gig Harbor as a negative example of overly-strict regulations creating a forced aesthetic environment.

At the residential incentives table, Sammamish resident and Habitat for Humanity volunteer Dick Gram pushed for the inclusion of affordable housing for people earning 50 percent of the area average income.

His thoughts were echoed by those at his table, who agreed that low income housing ensured that local industries could be staffed by people who lived in the area, reducing transport issues and contributing to reinvestment in the commercial area.

City of Sammamish councillors Mark Cross and Nancy Whitten also took part in the charette.

For more information on the town center plan process, go to www.ci.sammamish.wa.us/TownCenter

As volunteers recorded the discussions at each table, city staff Kamuron Gurol, Michael Matthias and Tom Vance, will be keen to use the collected thoughts as they proceed with the town center plan.

The Bigger Picture

The council and city staff are beginning to feel the weight of the decisions they must make regarding how the town center will look and function.

These decisions will inform all future mixed-use developments in the city.

Director of Community Development Kamuron Gurol told The Reporter this week that although some landowners had criticized the city for taking too long on the plan, he felt the city was moving along appropriately.

“We need to be very thorough,” he said. “The Planning Commission has requested, and we support this, that we must do it once and do it right.”

Gurol said he had sympathy for those that own land in the area that will be affected by the town center, as they had been dealing with changes in the zoning regulations since before the formation of the city.

“Some of the early estimations we made about the town center were overly ambitious,” he said. “But we have tried to keep the landowners informed, and make the best possible estimates we can on how long things in the process will take.”

Councilwoman Nancy Whitten was one of the councillors to raise concerns about extensions to the town center timeline at the council retreat in January. She said that any extensions to the timeline needed to have strong justification.

“We made a commitment to the landowners, in terms of the timeline, and we must make sure we have a very good reason to break that commitment,” she said. “The issue is that they cannot release the value in their land until we are ready to go.”

Gurol said that as the town center plans took shape, they were forming a new zoning code — 21B.

“Eventually 21B will apply to all other mixed-use areas in Sammamish,” he said. “The city’s comprehensive plan directs us to go back and look at the two existing commercial centers, Sammamish Highlands and Pine Lake Village, and undertake a similar planning process, using 21B.”

“We want to re-envision those areas from the current western, strip-mall, car intensive type development, into the exact opposite of that. When we are ready to do that we will have the ready-made legislation.”

Gurol said that parking, and reducing environmental impacts, were two of the big issues facing his town center planning team at the moment.

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

Comment on this story.

COMMENTING RULES: We encourage an open exchange of ideas in our online community, but we ask you to follow our guidelines for respecting community standards. In a nutshell, don't say anything you wouldn't want your mother to read.