What began as a fairly benign and routine meeting of the Sammamish City Council took an interesting turn on Tuesday night with the discussion of possible amendments to the Sammamish Comprehensive Plan.

Though annual comprehensive plan amendments are a matter of course, in 2011 the state government is requiring Sammamish to update their plan to reflect any regulation changes in the past seven years. Those changes include updated targets from the county’s Growth Management Planning Council (GMPC), which now estimates Sammamish will need to provide an additional 4,000 housing units and 1,800 jobs in coming years.

What is at stake in this round of amendments is nothing less than the plan for the Sammamish Town Center which, although completed and ratified in 2008, may now be opened to revision and alteration, in order to ensure it meets these targets.

The discussion of changes to the comprehensive plan was also prompted by an amendment application from a group of landowners in the Town Center, known as the southeast quadrant, to increase the development capacity in their section by up to 300,000 square feet of commercial space.

One of the residents behind the proposal, John Galvin, has been a regular contributor to planning discussions at city hall, often to the chagrin of councilors and planning commissioners. He believes the current limits on density will prevent appropriate development in the Town Center.

So it was unfortunate that Galvin was not in attendance to witness the discussion that he, in many ways, has been trying to instigate for years.

When a number of councilors, particularly Nancy Whitten and Michele Petitti, responded angrily to the idea that the city reopen Town Center plan discussions after years of hard work to create it, the council became embroiled in a conflict over the core assumptions which support the plan.

Whitten, Petitti, and councilmember Kathy Huckabay made a number of forceful statements that the time for discussing the plan needs to be finished, and the city should be working toward actually getting the project started.

It was then that Mayor Don Gerend finally gave voice to a belief that many residents have held for some time.

“I’m hearing all this talk about ‘we need to get the Town Center going,'” he said. “Well, we don’t have a Town Center – we have a plan, and we have a market. The market doesn’t support the plan.”

Gerend said high development impact fees of about $17,000 per unit were one of the factors discouraging developers from investing in a Town Center project.

“Why would a developer come here to do something when he could do it cheaper in another community?” he said.

His comments marked the first time a councilor has publicly questioned the wisdom of the plan they have, until this point, staunchly defended.

The Mayor went on to say the city should be looking to create sufficient employment opportunities so residents could work locally, all but explicitly supporting an increase in commercial density.

His comments drew passionate responses from fellow councilors, as did Director of Community Development Kamuron Gurol’s comment that the southeast quadrant amendment application “dovetails well, in my opinion, with the city’s need to accommodate growth.”

Gurol stated several times that his department was not recommending approving the amendment request, but that the city was required by state law to revise their growth targets anyway, and it would be efficient to consider any amendment concurrently.

“The request by the landowners is nothing new, it’s been there since day one,” Whitten said. “Why would we want to reopen the plan? We’ve already done the studies.”

Whitten said she had “tremendous concerns, philosophically,” with entertaining the possibility of increasing capacity in the Town Center.

“The growth – it’s not benign. It costs us,” she said.

Gurol said that in 2003, the city planned for an additional 2,000 units to meet their growth targets of the time.

“My presumption is that because we have new targets, we’ll have to make some adjustments to the plan,” he said.

The GMPC is a formal body comprised of elected officials from King County and surrounding cities, charged with ensuring jurisdictions such as Sammamish develop comprehensive plans that are consistent with the overall vision for King County, including where people will live and work.

The recently released growth targets quoted above are the nuts and bolts of that vision. They are numbers the city is bound by law to work toward.

Councilmember Mark Cross said Gerend’s vision of jobs growth in Sammamish serving the citizens of Sammamish was flawed, using Snoqualmie Ridge as an example.

“Snoqualmie Ridge has a large employment center right next door, but my understanding is that 17 people who live in Snoqualmie Ridge actually work there,” Cross said, indicating that commercial or office space expansion in the Plateau would likely just exacerbate traffic problems on the Plateau.

Gerend said it was a mistake to “set a rigid upper limit of possible development,” and that “my feeling is zone it for more than you will eventually allow.”

Whitten, whose opposition to the Mayor’s suggestions grew more passionate with each passing comment, said it was “terribly unfair to over-zone.”

“If the infrastructure can’t support it, you create unfair expectations, and unfair demands on the tax base.”

City staff will begin researching possible comprehensive plan amendments in the first quarter of next year, before reaching out for public comment in the second and third quarter.