Today's King County Journal has as its lead editorial, Thumbs up for approval of Redmond Ridge. For anyone who has read any of my accounts of this debacle, including the wrongdoing, the whistleblower complaints, or the hearing examiner's recommendation to deny Redmond Ridge East and to rescind Quadrant's concurrency certificate, take note of which local paper has come running to Quadrant's aid to help cover up the stink left by last week's vote by the County Council to approve Redmond Ridge East anyway.
It's coverage like this that earned the King County Journal its true title as the King County "Developers" Journal many years ago. And its the biased coverage and cover-up of wrongdoing by our local media that has given cover to the wrongdoers inside King County government and emboldened them to go further and further in their biased and improper acts every day.
Posted by mjcostello at August 28, 2006 09:44 AM | Email ThisMore importantly, an entire land use process and laws in both the state and county exist to guarantee that the necessary infrastructure is built. But the county ignores, subverts, and outright violates those laws and processes for developers like Quadrant. The approval of Redmond Ridge East was a pure violation of the public trust.
The public researched, analyzed, and proved to the hearing examiner that Redmond Ridge East was going to further overwhelm roads already devastated by Redmonnd Ridge and Trilogy. In fact, opponents proved that DOT cheated to allow this development when it otherwise should have been denied outright for violation of concurrency. Is it so much to expect government to enforce the laws on the books that protect existing communties?
Are apartments and townhouses, considered affordable housing, worth gridlocked roads impacting thousands of county residents?
King County needs homes and affordable housing. They need that housing near the jobs or they need to build up the road network to move people from their homes to their jobs. Instead, the county is so desperate for permit dollars to run their land use machine, that the land use process is nothing but a facade aimed at generating those dollars to the county at any cost to the taxpayers.
If Redmond Ridge East is going to cost the taxpayers $10 million in infrastructure costs that the developer is not being required to pay, are you willing to pay it?
Redmond Ridge and Trilogy's unfunded impacts are probably in the neighborhood of half a billion dollars, including impacts to state and city roads, schools, and other necessary services to support a city in the middle of the rural area. You willing to subsidize that growth too?
Posted by: mjcostello.com on August 29, 2006 12:11 PMIn this sense Redmond Ridge and Trilogy are not close to employment, as commuters have to use one of only two 2-lane rural roads to get off Union Hill and both are operating well over design capacity today with thousands of homes yet to be constructed in Trilogy and Redmond Ridge East.
This new city was "sold" to King County (like King County cared) as a Master Planned Community. As such it was supposed to provide the jobs for some significant percentage of the residents of the community so they wouldn't have to use the rural road network to commute somewhere else. But Quadrant was allowed to construct all the Redmond Ridge homes and most of the Trilogy over-55 year old homes before the first building was constructed in the Redmond Ridge business park, and before the few retail businesses opened.
As the Redmond Ridge business park is constructed and populated by people commuting from off Union Hill commuting here, critical intersections are only going to be further overwhelmed with traffic increases in the opposite directions that are being impacted today. That will mean longer left-turn delays and longer waits for local homeowners before they can even turn onto Novelty Hill Road and Union Hill Road.
The only jobs in Redmond Ridge and Trilogy to date are low-paying service jobs in the Redmond Ridge retail area and the Redmond Ridge Marketplace. The overwhelming majority of Redmond Ridge and Trilogy residents commute off the hill to jobs somewhere else. Not only was this liklihood ignored by county planners when citizens argued against these projects in 1995, but the county conveniently treated most of the Redmond Ridge and Trilogy workers as drivers that would not impact the principal arterials since they would be working in Redmond Ridge.
This was just one of the strategies used by King County DOT to hide the impacts of this new city on the rural road network. The other decisions and schemes were even worse.
Posted by: mjcostetllo on August 29, 2006 04:13 PM