For the past year and a half, hundreds of the citizens of Black Diamond and surrounding communities have been fighting an attempt by the international developer YarrowBay to quintuple the size of the rural city of Black Diamond by building a city of 6,050 homes and apartments. The citizens were stymied by an inability to communicate effectively with the Black Diamond City Council, due to the process put in place by the city’s and the developer’s lawyers to push through the MPD that the developer wanted.
On Tuesday, Feb. 15, the state of Washington’s Growth Management Hearing Board (GMHB) ruled that the process followed to approve the development had been illegal, and denied the citizenry their proper voice in the process. On Thursday, the City Council room was filled with citizens who wanted to talk to the City Council about how to start over and come up with a smaller and more rational development that more closely matched the character and “Rural By Design” vision of the community and the desires and needs of the citizens of Black Diamond and the surrounding communities.
One of the many important issues that had been glossed over during the illegal approval process is the traffic that would be generated by 12,000 to 15,000 new cars in an area served only by two-lane roads. The city and YarrowBay treated this as a problem that would be solved soon by WSDOT with state highway funding.
State Senator Pam Roach told the City Council that she had just come from Olympia and from very tough budget meetings discussing the transportation budget. She told the council that between now and 2040 there is absolutely no money even considered to widen state Route 169, the main arterial to Black Diamond, because the entire budget will be absorbed by the state Route 520 bridge, by the Seattle tunnel, and many other higher priority transportation projects. “It’s not even on anybody’s list!”
After the meeting, many citizens were enthusiastically chatting with all the City Council members about how exciting it was that they could now have a new process of open dialog. However, in spite of the GMHB ruling, it appears that the city of Black Diamond still plans to go ahead with the Development Agreement (DA) hearings. These hearings assume that the current MPD will stand as is. In other words, the city is either going to waste everyone’s time by going through a process that they will just have to repeat again later on, or else they are planning to ignore both the spirit and the words of the GMHB and once again ignore both the desires of the citizenry who elected them as well as the carefully researched studies which citizen experts have compiled.
If the city continues with the MPDs as is, they are ignoring many critical facts about traffic, the environment, water quality and city finances. They are also not requiring development to pay for itself, and they will be burdening the city and the surrounding areas with a horrible tax burden for decades to come. For instance, if a developer is creating a need for $250 million in new school construction, then why shouldn’t the developer have to pay for it? Why should the citizens of Enumclaw and Black Diamond have to pay for it?
Development should be self funding. City government should listen to its citizens. And if research is incomplete or inaccurate, then it should be done over again until they get it right.
Michael E. Irrgang
Black Diamond
