I am writing in response to the letter dated July 13 Mrs. Senecal supports this outrageous development planned by YarrowBay. She thinks that her business will increase when the 20,000 new residents show up. But, Mrs. Senecal, how are they going to get to your restaurant? Roberts Drive will be grid locked with traffic. If you are worried about people with commute times of over an hour to find jobs, what do you think is going to happen with all these new residents? Boeing and Microsoft are not relocating here. These additional estimated 12,000 cars per day will be on the roads. King County and the state of Washington are on record stating that there are no improvements planned for state Route 169 (Maple Valley Highway), state Route 516 (Kent-Kangley Road) or the Black Diamond-Auburn Road in the foreseeable future. And where have you been during the open and closed hearings? I have been to almost all of them. I haven’t seen you there. Have you heard the residents’ concerns first hand or only second hand? I am not against growth, per se. What I am against is having a large multi-national company buying their way into our town by way of paying the salaries some of the city staff, telling us what they think will be good for us, clear cutting our forested areas, ignoring the wetlands and water quality issues that will abound and then pull up stakes at some point and leave us, the taxpayers with a huge bill to pay. And then there is the idyllic ad placed by YarrowBay: happy construction workers, a medical person and school children. The reality is that with all the noise being generated by all this construction, neighbors will be forced to their doctors, the noise will be in the 90 decibel range (the level of pain), school plans are still in the development stages with the Enumclaw School District (and look who pays those costs, the taxpayers of the Enumclaw School District), and who knows how many local jobs there really are. If you really want to know what the residents of Black Diamond think, read the record of public comment during both the open hearings and the closed hearings. These are educated, well informed citizens whose concerns need to be heard. We are not the “local yokels” that YarrowBay thinks we are. YarrowBay has their fingers in a lot of pies in Western Washington. Many of them are eyesores right now. Their predictions have not come true.

As part of the urban growth plan, Black Diamond only needs to increase by 1,900 residences by the year 2022. Don’t be fooled by the slick attorneys for the developer. Let’s hold our City Council’s feet to the fire. Do the right thing for our city and our taxpayers. We don’t need to bankrupt our city and we certainly don’t need 6,800 new residences. We cannot support a population increase of 350 percent.

Janie Edelman

Black Diamond