I’d like to offer additional thoughts to the excellent June 10 guest commentary on FCCs, “Lake Roesiger looks like sure recipe for sprawl,” by Pilchuck Audubon Society’s John Mauro.
An FCC is a “fully contained community” created from several thousand rural acres in which, ideally, all residents will live, work, shop and supposedly die within a self-contained “bubble,” separated from and causing no impacts to the “non-bubble” world outside the FCC.
The only way a community could ever be considered fully contained is if a contract is signed as a condition for home purchase, obtaining the buyers’ agreement to work and shop only within their fully contained community. We all know this is ridiculous, except (apparently) members of the current county council. Without such an agreement, what will instead be created is a temporarily separate, but aggressively virulent growth “cancer” that will quickly spread into the diminishing rural enclaves between the new FCC and existing urban areas, speeding our decline as just another L.A.-like mountains-to-water growth victim, with nothing but asphalt, noise, stink, shingles and exhaust fumes from constant gridlock.
Redmond Ridge, a King County FCC, was a gorgeous and pristine green gem located between Redmond and Duvall that successfully fulfilled the developers’ and King County’s vision. Unfortunately, it was also successful in simultaneously destroying thousands of forested acres along with the quiet, upscale estate housing, creating overnight gridlock between The Ridge and the City of Redmond and Highway 520, via a single two-lane road with no plan or hope of future improvement.
The only benefactors of such a stupendously stupid idea are the owners of the rural, currently-worthless land, the developer and the council members who are touting this idea as “revolutionary,” as they use it to scramble over the backs of existing neighbors and county taxpayers – who have to pay for, and live with, the boondoggle created by such a concept – on their way to ever-more powerful elective office.
Fully contained communities? A more appropriate name for these explosive population centers would be “future community cancers.”
Sultan
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