Broback's Blog

Another example of how industry has apparently co-opted the regulators who are supposed to enforce the so called “Growth Management” Act of 1991 which was designed to prevent exactly what just happened to the Lake Washington School District.

It seems that they’ve piled so many condos and homes into Redmond that the local schools are “overflowing” according to KIRO TV.

Some background. Evidence and court rulings strongly suggest that regulators (King County) and developers colluded to circumvent regulation in order to build the gargantuan Redmond Ridge development (which is no doubt the catalyst for this school problem.) It seems clear that King County was motivated to accommodate the developers that they fabricated roads and traffic stats in order to bypass GMA restrictions. A gazillion homes got built, Avondale Road became gridlocked, and so many people moved in that all the majority of the local voters know is that compared to Los Angeles, Mountain View and Mumbai, the schools and roads they now crawl along in are positively roomy. A nice trick.

Some relevant quotes from a related 2005 P.I. article include references to how county officials actively worked to prevent suspicious King County employees from learning or propagating the truth about this blatant overdevelopment.

“…the five whistle-blowers have maintained that their data had been manipulated wrongly and could put the county at risk legally if not corrected. Their pleas were dismissed by their supervisors, according to Mickey Gendler, the attorney for two whistle-blowers…five King County traffic experts who said their jobs were threatened because they tried to blow the whistle on faulty traffic data.”

I take very small comfort in that Redmond High (a school we love) will be in our rearview mirror by the time the bulge in this monstrous python hits campus.

Hey, when we finally have to ration sewer access, the developers will have a trifecta!

At least some corporate and state agencies made a lot of sales (and tax revenues…)