Repeated Flooding & Buck-Passing Screws Kenmore Condo Complex
Posted by the Kenmore Crow | Filed under News
Goodness, what a mess. This is one crow that is glad not to live too close to a stream or creek in Kenmore. Look at what one group of local residents have been going through with a city-owned culvert that has been flooding their homes for years. Here’s a sampling of articles on the problem:
- KOMO News, December 2007: Failed culvert pumps mud into Kenmore homes
- KOMO News, September 2009: Kenmore residents: Battle flooding culvert with no help, sandbags?
- Kenmore Undressed, September 2009: Kenmore Homeowners Are Getting Stiffed – A $50,000 Flooding Problem
- Kenmore Reporter, October 2009: Kenmore residents, city dealing with another potential Wild Cliff Shores flooding problem
- Kenmore Undressed, October 2009: Flooding at Wild Cliff Shores – Three Years Later and Still No Answers
Here’s an excerpt from the Kenmore Reporter story:
Arroyo has video showing water flowing throughout his back yard, reaching roughly up to his knees. In this instance, the Northshore Fire Department came to the rescue, he said, showing up at 2 a.m. to help put sandbags along the creek.
Those sandbags are still in place and Arroyo said residents have come to look on them as sort of an insurance policy against the creek. But Arroyo said the subdivision now faces a new problem. The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife has stated the bags represent an illegal altering of a fish-bearing stream, and as such, they have to go.
Arroyo added, to further complicate things, the state has said that while the subdivision needs a permit to put up the sandbags, they also need one to take them down. Both permits cost money and, reportedly, neither is easily obtained.
In the long run, in order to keep the sandbags in place and possibly make other alterations to the creek such as removing silt build-up, Wild Cliff might have to do an environmental study with a price tag of $50,000 to $70,000, money Arroyo said the homeowners just don’t have.
UM… WHAT?
Welcome to Kenmore, Washington – a.k.a. Bizarro World.
Here’s a Bizarro World pop quiz.
Q: What do you get when you bring the City of Kenmore and the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife together to solve a flooding problem that has been affecting homeowners for three years?
A: This:
“In an ideal world, with these studies, in the next year or two, there will be some solutions to the problems that affect us all.”
That’s a quote from Kenmore City Manager Frederick Stouder. In Stouder’s “ideal world” it takes four or five years to solve a repeated flooding issue that is causing significant property damage and costing people money over and over again.
I’m speechless.
Tags: central-kenmore, flooding, Kenmore-Undressed, KOMO, Real Estate, Stouder, weather
2 Responses to “Repeated Flooding & Buck-Passing Screws Kenmore Condo Complex”
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In the meantime over on the Kenmore Blog we have a council person advising citizens about the proper way to sandbag. But wait, wasn’t that deemed illegal for some bizarro reason related to fish?
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The Wild Cliff may turn out to be yet another example of the “Northwest process.” Months, years and decades may go by before all the studies are in, all the players are happy and sandbags are actually put up against this particular stream. Of course, in the interim, lawyers will be paid, consultants will be paid, contractors will be paid, local politicians will pat themselves on the back for “solving the problem,” the neighborhood’s HOA will be financially ruined and the neighborhood will have washed into the Sammamish slew.
My most sincere hope is that the City of Kenmore is able to help the owners of Wild Cliff. The real important question is: is the City of Kenmore willing to help. Time will tell.
October 18th, 2009 at 2:53 PM