I was looking forward to being a proud new citizen of Black Diamond since the January 2010 King County Council meeting which included my property with the latest annexation. In fact I am profoundly embarrassed by the actions of the current city employees and am outraged beyond civility by the current elected city government completely riding roughshod over the will of citizens and bending over backward for the interests of the developer YarrowBay.

As a neighbor of Black Diamond, over the last 17 years, I have been allowed to help the city understand the incredible value of Black Diamond Lake as a significant, now unique and pristine intact ecosystem. They listened to my testimony, they enlisted the expertise of the Nature Conservancy called in because of my testimony, and they proceeded to place protections in their code and promised that any development would never impact Black Diamond Lake in any way, “that the lake would not know there was a development and that the development would not know there was a lake” is what they told us at that time.

This understanding has allowed the city to set aside about 200 acres around the lake and associated wetland over objections from prospective development. When Mayor (Howard) Botts came to see me and view what we were saving here, his breath was taken away. And he remembered this area from his youth, but had forgotten just how impressive it is. The first encounter I had with a YarrowBay representative on my property, he said they planned a bridge over the lake and then at a later City Council meeting he was also talking about roads with views of the lake. All this would completely destroy the pristine ecology and would turn the development into a sort of theme park with a lifeless and polluted lake, instead of what we have now an intact ecosystem. I review this history of my specific experience because I know that everywhere down wind, up wind, down ecology, up ecology, down water, down traffic, from the Cascade Crest to Puget Sound there are areas and people who will be forever impacted by this scale of development. Many of the impacts can be foretold easily by the people living there now, as I can predict the results of a bridge and view road on Black Diamond Lake. But, many of the effects can only be guessed at by the “best sciences” standard set in our municipal code.

Black Diamond has the very embarrassing history of a hasty decision to construct the failed sewage treatment plant that polluted Lake Sawyer and the Rock Creek Basin. Black Diamond made this mistake by not completely understanding the treatment plant and its implications and results. I would think Black Diamond would be ultra cautions about failing to understand the results of its decisions to develop and would insist on pursuing every concern completely before proceeding so as to avoid irrevocable culpability for environmental degradation again.

Black Diamond has a sacred responsibility to have learned from its past and to allow all possible concerns from all our neighbors near and far and to study every one of those concerns until they are completely understood, to invite expert advice but to scrutinize that advice for reasonableness with multiple experts till we are sure of what will be done. Instead, we have a very grave breech of the proud policies of the past. We used to welcome and in fact encourage the active participation of our neighbors in the planing of our shared environment: now our Council and city employees shut our neighbors off and refuse to listen to and include their concerns. When it became apparent that not all the structures were in place to protect Lake Sawyer, we courageously placed a moratorium on development until the problems could be understood and dealt with: now our city says “too late to complain” and hide behind some legal loop hole. Since the failed sewage treatment plant Black Diamond was ruled and bossed by pragmatic folk who were more concerned with doing the right thing for our community and its neighbors instead of bowing to the big money developer so the developer could improve their profits.

I am also disturbed that the mitigation requirements are just the payment of money in this case to the down traffic neighbor cities. This is a sort of bribe scheme where city fathers take money into their city to spend as they will, and the folks who live with the false planning line up on the road for hours trying to get home, or to pick up their kids. If the more trips require an extra lane on the highway, and development must pay for development, then it logically should follow that YarrowBay should be required to pay for and build the extra lane before it can begin to develop. That Covington and Maple Valley and actually King County did not make these requirements for other developers must also be a mistake of the past that they and we should learn from and not repeat.

There is a requirement looming on the horizon to reclaim the destruction caused by the John Henry mine, in fact Palmer Coking Coal has been ordered to do just that by the federal mining board several times and will run out of excuses likely sooner rather then later for not proceeding with this. What will happen with this property must also figure into Black Diamond’s plan for itself and needs to be taken into consideration now before the development under consideration is allowed to proceed.

The main thrust of the “Plan for Black Diamond” was that we the citizens of the city were going to be the people who planned our environment. We were dedicated after our embarrassment over Lake Sawyer’s pollution to consider our neighbors views so as not to degrade their lives or property in any way and to always be completely sure of the outcomes of projects from within our city. We would never allow others to in any way dictate to us what our environment should be like. Our vision for Black Diamond was for a Village with a view of Mount Rainier that was interconnected by trails and leisure opportunities for clean healthy family living, and that was supported by local gainful employment. I beseech the current city government and employees to act on the citizens vision and principles no matter what any developer wants, YarrowBay will take their profits and run, we will have to live with the decisions you make in our name and the damage that is done to our neighbors going forward forever.

Erika Morgan

Black Diamond