• 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.

KOMO launched a so-called “hyperlocal system” of Seattle-area community websites today, with 19 pages for Seattle neighborhoods, 9 eastside cities, 9 southern cities, and 6 northern cities.

One city that was notably absent from the list of new websites happens to be Kenmore. Luckily for you, you’ve got Eyes on Kenmore, so you don’t need a corporate-sponsored faux-community portal. Of course, neither do West Seattle, Ballard, or Capitol Hill, but they all still got one from KOMO anyway.