In considering how they will go about opening or maintaining the 30 or so barricades which are currently blocking streets around Sammamish, city staff and its consultants are embarking on an examination of the core concepts of democracy and government.

At a debrief meeting on Thursday of last week, following an earlier bus tour of a number of barricade sites, connectivity consultant Dan Burden of urban planners Glatting Jackson Kercher Anglin, explained the range of the city’s options in involving residents in the decision making process as to which barricades should remain, and which should be removed.

“At one end of the spectrum is the ‘just inform’ option,” said City Engineer Laura Philpot. She said that this option would see the city making decisions on its own, with constituents kept out of the planning process.

“At the other end is empowering the people, and having them involved in the decision making process.”

Residents will be pleased to hear that the later is the approach favored by Burden, a man who is described as one of the premier facilitators of transformation in cities and towns over the past decade.

As the city considers not just the barricade issue, but also the concept of a pedestrian friendly Town Center, Burden may well be the one man to shape the future vision of Sammamish more than any other.

“Getting a good process is everything,” Burden told The Reporter this week. Part of that process, he said, was making sure that the information residents were using to base their suspicions and conclusions upon was trustworthy and available to all.

He said that during Tuesday’s tour, where he had the opportunity to meet with residents impacted by barricades on both sides of the debate, he heard figures and statistics quoted that were not accurate.

At a barricade meeting in the Timberline neighborhood, residents disagreed over the validity of their very different traffic accident figures.

“A lot of the traffic volumes that people spoke of were unrealistic, and totally skewed out of reality,” he said. “We don’t want to negate the stories of people in those neighborhoods, but we do want to be working from a factual basis.”

Philpot agreed that reliable data was a key issue, and said that one of her next steps would be make sure relevant information was made available to those who were interested, whether through the City of Sammamish web site or the series of public meetings scheduled for the fall.

“Importantly, we need to ensure that everybody trusts that data,” she said.

For both Philpot and Burden, one of the most interesting things to come out of last week’s barricades tour was that many of the connectivity issues are not about the barricades at all.

In the Beaver Lake neighborhood, for example, Burden and Philpot listened to residents complain of the high speeds at which motorists would drive around Beaver Lake Drive, and the dangers of a curvy road with short lines of vision.

Philpot described this as “the ‘a-ha! moment’ for me.”

“We need to look at the existing conditions,” she said. “In terms of better connectivity, we need to take a look at the neighborhoods holistically, not just at the connection points.”

Burden said that the issue of speed in residential areas was one that in some ways planners and developers had brought upon themselves.

As the bus drove slowly through the north east section of the city last week, Burden told those on board to take notice of the street and the associated landscaping – wide streets, straight lines, trees set back from the edge to give a feeling of plenty of space.

These are all designs that encourage people to go fast, he said.

“This is a mistake you see all over America,” he said. “It’s universal. We’ve been ingrained with this idea that we need to keep the traffic moving, and keep it moving fast. But then we’re like “whoops, we actually have to live in these neighborhoods too.’”

Burden said that one of the great challenges to the process would be the urge of people to consider only that which impacts on themselves directly, and not the welfare of those in other areas of the city.

“When we drive further or longer than we need to, for the sake of keeping traffic out of a certain section, then we are being fair on our children or our neighbors,” he said. “But we also need to be fair to children on other streets, residents on other roads. We don’t want to just be creating problems elsewhere.”