Interesting Week of Meetings in Fall City Washington.

This week I attended three public meetings in Fall City. 

Monday December 3rd was the public meeting for the Unincorporated Area Council or UAC.  The UAC that started out being to represent the people of the Fall City Area, has morphed into an area the size of the Snoqualmie Valley School District, less the incorporated area.  This covers an area from Ames Lake to Snoqualmie Pass.  To me it seems like too large of an area, with too many diverse interests to be represented by one UAC.  I think this size will increase the difficulty of communication and the ability to reach consensus.  One example of communication challenge is that with a UAC of that size, and $10,000 budget, they will not even be able to afford one mailing to the whole area.  The UAC appears to be evolving, and if they listen to the public input, I think it will continue to evolve.  I encourage you to attend the next meeting and see what it is all about and give your input.  

December 4th the group that is interested in creating the Fall City Metropolitan Park District had their second meeting.  They are investigating the difference between a Metropolitan Park District and a Parks and Recreation district.  They are looking at District boundaries, budgets, and a vision for the parks in Fall City. This group has a meeting planned for January 9th.  Why not come to the next meeting and share your vision for Fall City Parks with the group?

December 6th was a meeting with Representative’s from the King County Sheriff’s Department.  They discussed the crime statistics for Fall City Patrol District, Charlie 2, and discussed crime prevention tips that people can follow to help insure that they do not become a crime statistic.  I was impressed that the crime statistics are very low.   Within the presentation, The Major, the Detective and Deputy that were there listened to the concerns of the community and gave more information on how they can become part of the solution to crime.  Most of the people that were there participated in the discussion.  I was disappointed to see that more people did not come to the presentation. Perhaps that is just another sign that the people of Fall City are not concerned about the current level Crime in their community.

Fall City Food Pantry (Food Bank)

Today I stopped in at the Fall City Food Pantry, to see if I could help, while they were open today.  They had a good variety of food and were very organized.  The Fall City Food Pantry is located at the Fall City United Methodist Church at 4326 337th Place SE Fall City.  They are open one day a month, usually the third Wednesday of the month.  This month they moved the day up one week because of the Thanksgiving Holiday.  They have hours in the middle of the day 12:00 to 1:30 and in the evening 6:30 to 7:30 PM.    The next day that they are open will be December 19th.  Please help get the word out  to everyone, that there is a new resource in town to help get food to those who need it.  You can also keep the Food Pantry in mind if you are interested in donating food.

Photo from the Fall City United Methodist Church web site.

Price Reduced on Fall City Rambler

I have a great listing in Fall City that we just reduced the price on.  We lowered the price from $400,000 to $390,000.  It is a very clean three bedroom one and half bath rambler with an attached two car garage.  It is located on a very quiet non through street.  You can find lots of photos and more information on the house here. It has a remodeled kitchen with a Bosch dishwasher and a five burner stainless range with double ovens. The master bath has also be updated.  It is the lowest priced site built three bedroom house on the market in Fall City take a minute to check it out. There are several new real estate listings that hit the market this week.  If you are interested in searching for homes for sale or to see sold prices of Fall City homes you can start your Internet search here.  Be sure to try the interactive home search while you are there.

Library Construction Has Started

The construction on the Fall City Library, a King County Library has started.  It is nice that after all these months to see some walls going up.

Geocaching in the Northwest

We have been geocaching again after taking a few years off.  What is it?  It is an international treasure hunt using Global Positioning Satellites (GPS).  Members hide caches or stashes of trading items and post the Latitude and Longitude at Geocaching.com. When a member finds it they log in at the physical site, and trade items if they want to, and then log in on the web.   The web keeps track of their finds, and the ones they did not find.  I have a geocache in Fall City called If Fish Could Walk.  It is an example of a geocache that will take you to a spot that could be easily overlooked.  A lot of the caches are at pocket parks, or scenic spots that most people don’t know about or never take the time to stop at.  If it sounds interesting to you take a minute to check it out.

King County Comprehensive Plan to allow more development before making traffic improvements?

This is an interesting Seattle Times article regarding proposed revisions to the King County Comprehensive plan. They want to allow development even when congestion is at level E, in a scale from A to F. This is a radical change that eliminates traffic concurrency in my opinion.  You can find out more about the 2008 revision to the comp plan here.  The good news They are looking for comments from citizens.  The next local meeting is October 11, 2007 at Cascade View Elementary School 6:30 to 8:30 PM.

Tolt Hill Bridges over the Snoqualmie River

This is an interesting view from the Suspension Bridge in The Tolt McDonald Park, a King County Park, looking South to the Tolt Hill Road. The Tolt River is entering the photo on the left side of the photo. You can see the old bridge in the foreground an the new bridge in the background.  The funny thing is that the bridge in background has two arched spans.  The second arched span is to the east of the one you can see in this photo.  The community fought the county to have a similar style bridge replace the old one and I think this photo proves that aesthetically it was the right decision.  Thanks to the King County Department of Transportation for seeing the light.  I just thought this was such an interesting contrast of the old and new.  The old bridge will be torn down once the new one is put in service.   

Snoqualmie Tribe loses bet on Salish Lodge

The Snoqualmie Tribe lost the bid for the Salish Lodge to the Muckleshoot Tribe the Seattle Times reported today.  What a surprise.  I thought it would have been interesting to have the Snoqualmie Tribe obtain ownership of Lodge at the Falls that in their creation legend was the birthplace of the world.  Stay tuned…..

Does Fall City Really Need an Unincorporated Area Council?

David Read has been on a campaign to create an Unincorporated Area Council for Fall City for several months.  You can view his pro UAC web site and see what he wrote about it.  Unfortunately on that site you will not see any dissenting opinion because the comment link and the opinion link to do not allow the reader to post either.   So I thought I would post some of the questions and concerns that I have here.

I get the impression form the piece that David wrote that he thinks there is a vacuum in Fall City that needs to be filled.  I disagree with that.  I would have a hard time telling all the people that are active in community organizations and are contributing to Fall City that they are not, and have not been effective.  I am proud of the community and the organizations that over the years have influenced and shaped the community through their actions over the years.  Years ago I under estimated the level of community involvement because I didn’t know all the organizations that are active in Fall City.  My experience is that they quietly go about their business and when there is a pressing issue, like a park transfer, they get organized and make their opinions known.

Here are just a few of the active effect organizations that are part of our community.  Many of the organizations are reachable by the links on the side of my blog.

Fall City Community Association, FCCA

Raging River Riders

Fall City Neighbors Newsletter

Patterson Creek Advisory Committee

Fall City Elementary School PTSA

Chief Kanim PTSA

Fall City Food Pantry, (Food Bank)

Local Churches

Fall City Cub Scouts

Fall City Girl Scouts

Fall City Boy Scouts

Fall City Soccer Association

Fall City Little League

Fall City Historical Society

Snoqualmie Falls Forest Theater

Mountain To Sound Greenway

Snoqualmie Valley Schools Foundation

Lake Alice Community Association

Snoqualmie Tribe

Washington Trout

Eastside Steelheaders

Fall City Hop Shed Foundation

And many more….

Each of these groups has an influence on the issues that they care about.  Power vacuum? I think not.  One example was the community response to the proposed park Transfer to the Snoqualmie Tribe.  Several groups got together and were able to express there concerns to Kathy Lambert who organized a very well attended community meeting. 

One other point that I have heard discussed is that it will increase community involvement.  When I went to the web sites of the “active” UAC’s it does not look like they are increasing the turnout. 

For example: Bear Creeks April 24th meeting, the most current meeting with minutes posted, had 4 board members attending, four county staffers and 6 community members. Maple Valley had 13 members and 2 guests at their August meeting.

I think that we have a larger turn out at FCCA meetings that they are getting at these UAC meetings for areas that have larger population than Fall City.  In my years as a Fall City Community Association member and past President.  The organization has refocused its attention based on the desires of the active membership.   There have been times when they were very focused on County issues, transportation, arts, human services etc.  It is really a reflection of the memberships wants and needs.  Perhaps the FCCA should reconsider the meeting times and increase the number of meetings a month to allow more time for discussion of the issues in the community.

My concern is that if the UAC gets approved there will be low participation, and the few that do attend will present their own wishes to the county as “the community’s wants.  One of the other thing that I have noticed that happens with the county meetings is that the county tends to direct the discussion in the way they want it to go trying to lead the discussion so that at the end of a process they are able to say that the out come was what the community wanted.  When the outcome really what the community was willing to accept from what what was offered or available. 

What do you think?  Do we need another layer of Government? Do we need more meetings?  Do you feel like you do not have access to the people in charge at the county?  What message do you want to deliver to King County?

What’s Happening in Fall City Real Estate

As you can see from the graph* the inventory in Fall City has been on the increase with the number of Pending Sales each month holding steady. In August the number of active resale listings went down to 71, with 12 pending sales and 8 closings.  It is interesting that both the pending and closed sales were up from July.  That gives us 8.9 months of inventory based on the closed sales, and 5.9 months based on the pending sales.  In comparison last August there were 65 active listings, 12 closed sales and 2 pending .  So it looks like we have more for the buyers to choose from, and the buyers are still very active in the market.  It will be interesting to see what happens with the September numbers, as September is usually a pretty strong month for sales.

* The graph includes resales single family homes that are in the Fall City, 98024 zip code in all price ranges.