I am writing to share my thoughts about the YarrowBay MPDs (master planned developments). I write from the position of being directly and personally impacted by the noise; indirectly impacted by the traffic, fiscal and environmental impacts.

My husband and I have spent thousands of hours reading the EIS (environmental impact statement) and MPDs and attending the hearings. We have paid out of pocket for noise experts that the hearing examiner concluded should have been the responsibility of YarrowBay. Both YarrowBay’s and our expert agree that our home will be adversely impacted at sustained noise levels that are shockingly high and unhealthy. So, after decades of living here and giving to our community, we are supposed to sacrifice our home we built, our quality of life, frankly our health so that YarrowBay can profit?

I know everyone is entitled to their opinion; that is what is great about our country. But it is dangerous to make opinions and statements when you didn’t attend the hearings or read all the information. If you had, you would have heard almost everyone speak of “incremental” or “slow” growth with the control left in the city’s hands not with YarrowBay through their request for long-term vesting. You would have heard YarrowBay present and state, “That they are entitled to this massive growth”, yes entitled. I don’t have YarrowBay’s public relations budget to flood the papers with full-page ads and letters to the editors from people that didn’t even attend all the hearings or hear all the testimony.

This is what I know.

• Our home will be adversely impacted and it cannot be mitigated.

• Yarrow Bay has had years to work with us and they continue to wait and see what our council will impose before they will work in good faith.

• Black Diamond, Maple Valley and Covington will be severely impacted by traffic.

• Nowhere in the MPD analysis does it say that YarrowBay will pay for a single infrastructure component, only all of us for schools, roads, sewers, fire departments, etc. When I say all, I mean Black Diamond, other local cities, county and state taxpayers.

• The majority support and understand the required growth in our community; who doesn’t want new jobs. My boys work construction. It is tough out there and we are all feeling the pain of the economy, but that same majority wants it to be slow, incremental, phased and with significant controls and discretionary steps by our city to ensure that we truly have smart, balanced, healthy growth.

• When did it become wrong in our society to stand up and demand fiscal and environmental accountability by our government, especially when the rules appear to favor a private corporation and the cost of the public taxpayers? Although Yarrow Bay has the power and press coverage to make this appear as if a small group opposes their project; in-fact their project has rallied the majority of the community; it has brought the Lake Sawyer folks and old town folks together, along with the Green Valley community and those in Ravensdale, Maple Valley and all the surrounding areas for a common goal and concern.

Vicki (William) Harp

Black Diamond