Originally published in the Seattle Post-intelligencer, June 29, 1992
When the Black Diamond Coal Co. built this town in the 1880s and began mining the bituminous wealth below, Seattle was four hours away by train, and there wasn’t much in between.
Today, most of that area has been developed into suburban South King County. The meandering railroad is gone, replaced by an often-crowded highway network.
This historic community of 1,500 people, with many of its original mining company homes still intact, is now flanked by modern housing subdivisions. Mayor Howard Botts notes with a grin that the city is about to get its first espresso outlet.
Urban pressures in one form or another are being felt by the county’s rural cities from Duvall to Black Diamond and Enumclaw.
How these communities and the areas immediately around them will cope with the 325,000 people King County expects in the next 20 years is the subject of a long list of growth-management policies now before the County Council.
Leaders of the county’s rural communities sometimes differ over how much growth should be allowed in their respective towns and who should dictate thatgrowth.
Snoqualmie, for example, opposes the recommended countywide planning policies, claiming in a statement that they go beyond the scope of the state’s Growth Management Act and usurp local land-use powers.
“We are in charge of how (the city) is planned,” Snoqualmie Mayor Jeanne Hansen says. “It is the way the people here see their future.”
Carnation Mayor Michael Plant says his Snoqualmie Valley city “does not feel threatened by the (proposed) growth-management policies. In fact, we are supportive of them.”
Plant stresses, however, that “one of the things we want is to have the county support farming…. We want to make it (Carnation) viable for farmers.”
Most rural city leaders agree that residential development must be balanced with some commercial enterprises that support employment and help pay for city services.
“Having strictly residential doesn’t support itself,” Botts says. He cites recent census figures that show 44 percent of Black Diamond’s population falls in the low-income bracket. The coal industry, which once employed more than 1,000 people locally, now accounts for about 80 jobs.
Enumclaw Mayor Keith Blackburn sides with Botts.
“I think we would … (want to protect Enumclaw’s) ability to attract commercial development … (because) we need that tax base to be viable financially,” he says. “It would also reduce the need for commuting to other urban centers.”
North Bend City Administrator Brian Olson says that despite “very diametrically opposed views” locally over how much growth the community should absorb, “we do not want to become a bedroom community. The business people are concerned about that.”
That’s not so much a concern in tiny Skykomish, King County’s most remote city. Town Councilman Tom Hiatt (also town planner and school teacher) describes the community of about 250 near Stevens Pass as a “very depressed area” because of the recent loss of railroad and logging jobs.
“We have the (U.S.) Forest Service and a couple of county and state road jobs and the (Skykomish) school, and that’s it,” Hiatt says.
Proposed growth-management policies for the county contain vague language about industrial and commercial development in and around rural cities, saying it should be “at a scale that reinforces the surrounding rural characteristic.”
The policies also say each rural city would be allotted an “urban growth area” surrounding it. The boundaries would be decided by the city, the county and the county’s Growth Management Planning Committee.
Lisa Majdiak, the county’s growth management project supervisor, says the rural cities—and whatever urban growth areas surround them—will be able to have a “character unique to themselves” while absorbing a share of the county’s growth.
“They are cities and will be required to take some amount of growth, but they will determine what kind or form of growth … through a (local) comprehensive plan,” Majdiak says.
“The challenge to them will be to protect the character of their community … while encouraging efficient development.”
What constitutes efficient development and acceptable growth is open to debate.
“Our bias is toward some increase in density,” says Craig Larsen, deputy director of the county’s Parks, Planning and Resources Department. “They (rural) cities are there because they serve a purpose. They need to be viable economically. So the point of all these policies is some increase in density.”
Sara Barry, administrative assistant to Duvall’s mayor, says City Council members are not opposed to increasing population density, provided it does not exceed the capacity of the city’s sewer system.
Council members are more concerned about proposed master-planned developments in the nearby Novelty Hill area that would infiltrate the proposed rural boundary “and take jobs and economic development from Duvall,” Barry says.
Botts advocates increasing the population of Black Diamond, which he says has sewer and water capacity for a city nearly twice its size. But he questions whether this can be accomplished under proposed county policies without “building houses on top of each other” and destroying the city’s rural flavor.
The 61-year-old mayor grew up in Black Diamond in the 1930s and ‘40s when it was a company town, and his father was the company doctor. “We had four rooming houses and a hotel for the miners,” he recalls.
The remainder of Black Diamond was made up of modest, single-family homes, Botts says. The town has remained that way, and the mayor says people like it.
“The consensus of the smaller cities in the rural area (of King County) is that we should have more say about (housing) density,” he says. “People here don’t want a lot of apartment houses.”
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