Everett, Wash. Published: Thursday, September 18, 2008
They must think voters will believe anything
Dave Somers for sprawl and global warming? Sure, and Ronald Reagan was a fan of higher taxes.
The ludicrous charges against Somers, a longtime environmentalist and currently chairman of the Snohomish County Council, are part of a sophomoric mail campaign by a developer, Dave Barnett, who's fighting to build a new urban community on a huge expanse of rural land he owns near Lake Roesiger, a development Somers opposes.
The mailers, which landed in voters' mailboxes in the past week, are an apparent effort to soften support for Somers in next year's County Council elections. They also seem to presume that the voters who will decide those elections are idiots who can be convinced that night is day and black is white.
At issue are county land-use rules that allow "fully contained communities," approved by the County Council in 2005. The basic idea is to allow master planned communities outside of established urban growth areas, developments that would include homes, jobs and shopping, and whose internal infrastructure costs would be borne by the developer. Requirements for open space are also part of the deal.
Master planned communities, placed in reasonable proximity to existing freeways, sewer and water lines, make abundant sense. The Lake Roesiger development, however, makes no sense at all. A majority of the five-member County Council, which has gained three new members since 2005, now agrees.
Far from stopping sprawl, a new community of up to 6,000 homes plopped 8 to 10 miles from Highway 9 and U.S. 2 would create it. To think that major employers would locate family-wage jobs there, where access is limited to narrow, two-lane county roads that lead to Machias and Monroe, is a pipe dream -- it has yet to happen in fully contained communities already built in King County. A thousand or more acres of forest would be carved away, and a massive increase in commuter traffic would jam Dubuque and Woods Creek Roads, putting more pressure on tight transportation budgets. That hardly sounds environmentally friendly or fiscally responsible, and it's certainly no way to reduce global warming.
