Growth way up as town strives to keep maples

By JACK HOPKINS
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

There was a time when Beckie Town couldn't even give away bagels in Maple Valley.

"Maple Valley really used to be a bread-and-butter type of community," says Town, owner of The Dough Shop Bakery.

"When we opened, we were lucky to sell a half-dozen bagels a day. We prepared them. But people just didn't want them. Now we probably sell about 40 dozen of them a day."

Maple Valley has gotten a lot more cosmopolitan in the 14 years Town has operated her popular bakery at the intersection of the Maple Valley Highway and Southeast Wax Road.

Rising bagel sales are just one sign of it. The town has gotten a lot bigger, too.

This once rural, formerly unincorporated community southeast of Renton has shaken off the sleepiness of its past. Where once there were thousands of Douglas firs and vine maples, now there are highways and houses.

Rapid growth has given Maple Valley a population of nearly 12,000, making it the state's 55th-largest city. Some say the growth has come too quickly. And in 1997, they did something about it.

Concerned about the threat of urban sprawl and hoping to preserve the community's identity, valley residents voted overwhelmingly to form their own city.

It took the first City Council members just minutes after they were sworn in to impose a building moratorium severely limiting new construction until land use planners and residents could decide how to control growth.

It won't be until spring of 1999 that city officials complete their comprehensive land use plan. But there's no question it will attempt to preserve some of the small-town feel of this community.

Mayor Laure Iddings and City Manager Mike Cecka say city officials deem that a priority. They have already seen what sudden and unfettered growth can do.

"Twenty years ago, the community truly was rural and we didn't have a lot of development," Iddings says. "Bellevue, Redmond and Kent were growing by leaps and bounds, but Maple Valley was pretty much sheltered from that."

Then one day residents looked up and noticed urban sprawl was pounding on their door.

"Back in the late 1980s, we began experiencing between 6 and 7 percent growth a year. And that lasted for almost eight years," Iddings says. "Lake Wilderness Elementary School became the largest elementary school in the state, and half its students were in portable classrooms for a while. The parks were overtaxed and the roads became a nightmare.

"All of the problems that plagued the rest of the county developed out here."