Skip ads and navigation
Advertising
Our network sites seattlepi.comHelp

Defenders of Lake Forest Park wetland unite

Wednesday, February 2, 2000

By KRISTIN DIZON Mail Author
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

LAKE FOREST PARK -- Thirty years ago, Tony Angell lead several thousand people in cleaning up Brookside Creek. School children, parents and volunteers waded in, picking up cans, bottles and bed springs from its muddy depths.

Then they stocked it with fish, which thrived for years but have since become a ghostly absence.

Now Angell, the state supervisor of environmental education, sees a new threat to the creek's future from four homes a developer wants to build nearby.

  Photo
  Doug Mitchell, president of the Lake Forest Park Stewardship Foundation, takes infant son Raymond on a walk near the Rob Hill property, where his group is fighting a plan to build four houses near a wetland. Mike Urban/P-I
Brookside starts in wetlands on the seven-acre Hill property off of 30th Ave. NE and a mile later feeds into McAleer Creek, a Chinook and other fish-bearing stream. The Hill property wetlands are the only sizable ones left in this affluent community of 13,000.

Four homes, Angell admits, seems innocuous. But he sees a rare opportunity to recover fish in a sensitive urban ecosystem and to preserve a natural outdoor laboratory for young students.

Moreover, Western Washington's wetlands are rapidly vanishing, and activists are willing to draw a line in the mud over this one.

Wetland experts say the cumulative impact of losing or disturbing a wetland here and a wetland there translates quickly into loss of habitat, increased flooding and lessened water quality.

"If you take this one property -- that's not much," said David Peterson, a University of Washington professor of ecology who testified against the Hill development. "But if you take the next one and the next one, that really starts to add up."

Calculating the loss of wetlands is far from an exact science, given that wetlands haven't long or extensively been mapped. But the Washington Wetlands Network, an offshoot of the Audubon Society, estimates the state has lost between 33 and 50 percent of its wetlands. A 1989 U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service study estimated wetland acres at 938,000, or about two percent of the state.

Ecologists say wetlands provide essential functions that have real-world economic value. They absorb rain and stormwater, discharging them slowly so downstream flooding is greatly reduced. They trap sediment and silt, filtering and cleaning water.

Wetlands are excellent habitat for birds, amphibians and plants and a particularly good place for juvenile fish. Young Coho salmon can live in the shallow pools, protected from winter storms, for as long as a year.

With local salmon runs dwindling and the Chinook listed as an endangered species, there is heightened concern about areas like Brookside Creek, where salmon could make a recovery.

The developer, Rob Hill, doesn't want to fill in the wetlands, and he says his plan to put four homes on his seven acres won't even change the wetland or the creek. But he has won an exemption from the Lake Forest Park's Sensitive Areas Ordinance that allows him to put a driveway flush up to a wetland in what would otherwise be part of a 50-foot buffer zone.

"I've . . . hired fisheries experts, wetland experts, soil engineers," said Hill, a real estate agent who lives in Shoreline. "I hope my people are right, and I don't have any reason to not think they are."

Hill, who grew up near Brookside Creek, bought the land in 1993 for $60,000. He said he's willing to face community opposition to his project because he's a staunch defender of private property rights.

"There are very few people who would want to go through the process that I have," Hill said. "It's beautiful there. I love it for the same reasons that the people who want to protect it do. But I believe that the meadow and the pond can coexist with families living there."

Some locals see irony in the current battle. They note that Lake Forest Park was incorporated in 1961 by homeowners who lost a fight to stop a shopping center from covering the area's only sizable wetlands. They wanted more control over local land use.

But today, residents are challenging the city's decisions.

"A housing development at the headwaters of a creek is not a good idea," said Doug Mitchell, president of the Lake Forest Park Stewardship Foundation. "If Hill gets to build as he wishes, then every other developer along this corridor is going to say, 'I get to build, too.'"

The year-old foundation was created to raise money to buy the Hill property following a failed city effort to do so. The 200-member group also wants to buy land near the creek as an open space and wildlife corridor for the city.

The foundation is also considering a lawsuit to force the city to scale back Hill's development and require an Environmental Impact Statement.

In its battle, the foundation has been joined by some powerful voices like Doug Hennick.

Hennick, a habitat biologist with the state Department of Fish and Wildlife, says Coho salmon frequented Brookside creek in the 1960s. But the fish stopped spawning there after several property owners illegally changed the creek flow with driveways and ponds.

Hennick says it would be easy to return Coho to the creek, though he's clearly worried about the Hill development's potential impact on what he calls the best wetland pond in the McAleer Creek system.

Hennick recommended against the allowing Hill to build in the wetland buffer. The city granted Hill an exemption to its Sensitive Areas Ordinance, which sometimes happens when property owners might be deprived "reasonable" use of their land.

Map

Foundation members say one house would be a reasonable use within the city's regulations.

"If these cities aren't going to enforce their sensitive areas ordinances, then they'd better get together and repeal them," said Bob Simmons, a retired KING-TV reporter and foundation board member. "Because no city should have an ordinance it doesn't intend to enforce. It's dishonest. It's window dressing."

Christi Norman, program director of Washington Wetlands Network, calls the law and others like it "paper tigers."

Ty Peterson, Lake Forest Park planning director, said opposition to Hill's proposal is the strongest he's seen. More than 50 people testified against the development at city hearings, and more than 100 wrote letters. But Peterson, who recommended the exemption, said Hill's plan is adequate.

"What we're saying is that with mitigation, combined with the city's development regulations, the proposal does not create more than a moderate environmental impact," he said.

Yet Peterson acknowledged that it's difficult for a small city to do much monitoring -- something opponents say is a concern. They want to know who will check to see if construction causes more silt runoff into the wetland, or if the proposed septic tanks on the steep hillside leach effluent.

There's reason for concern. A 1998 King County study found that of 38 wetland sites where development impact was supposed to be mitigated, 84 percent failed to meet standards or weren't mitigated at all. In only one instance was an altered wetland replaced with a new one.

"We were very surprised because King County is probably one of the most sophisticated jurisdictions in the country," said Norman. "We were shocked to find out that they weren't doing site monitoring; there were no follow-up visits."

It wasn't just a depressing rate of failure, said Anna Mockler, who performed the study for the county but now works as a private consultant.

In the seven years she studied, Mockler found the county didn't collect any money from performance bonds for mitigation that developers didn't do.

But more than future monitoring, locals question the studies underlying Hill's plan.

Sarah Spear Cooke, president of the Pacific Northwest chapter of the Society of Wetland Scientists, found flaws in the wetlands map. She surveyed the property for a prospective buyer of one of Hill's lots.

"I found almost the entire site was wetlands and I recommended to him that I didn't think it would be a good investment," Cooke said.

Erik Stockdale, a state Department of Ecology senior wetlands specialist, also said Hill's site map probably underestimates the size of the wetlands. He recommended that the city get an independent consultant to review it, but that hasn't yet happened.

Locals caught up in this battle realize they're talking about a small wetland in an area that's already largely developed, but they say that habitat under siege is in need of the most protection.

"Some of the best, high quality wetlands are in urban growth areas," said Simmons."And while we've been busy trying to shut the developers out of the rural areas, we've been giving up without notice these little jewels in Lake Forest Park and elsewhere."

P-I reporter Kristin Dizon can be reached at 425-497-1660 or kristindizon@seattle-pi.com

OUR AFFILIATES
NWsource KOMO
Pacific Publishing

Seattle Post-Intelligencer
101 Elliott Ave. W.
Seattle, WA 98119
(206) 448-8000

Home Delivery: (206) 464-2121 or (800) 542-0820
seattlepi.com serves about 1.7 million unique visitors
and 30 million page views each month.

Send comments to newmedia@seattlepi.com
Send investigative tips to iteam@seattlepi.com
©1996-2008 Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Terms of Use/Privacy Policy

Hearst Newspapers