Ruling favors rails-to-trails plan over Sammamish homeowners

Seattle PI, Gordy Holt Saturday, January 8, 2005

The East Lake Sammamish rails-to-trails project appears headed back to the rail bed it started on six years ago and not onto the rails-to-trails-to-curbside detour some lakeside homeowners envision.

U.S. District Judge John Coughenour ruled this week that the city of Sammamish has no power to force King County trail planners to deviate from the old Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad route.

Citing environmental concerns, the city attempted to force a route detour that would have taken the trail away from the rail bed to a shoulder of busy East Lake Sammamish Parkway, and a hearings examiner was persuaded to agree.

Coughenour said that would violate the 1983 federal Rails to Trails Act, a law passed by Congress to preserve abandoned railroad rights of way for future use as rail beds should changing times ever make them economically viable again.

Bente Pasko, a Sammamish resident and longtime trail supporter, said yesterday that she is "tickled pink" by Coughenour's conclusion.

Adding the East Sammamish link to the Seattle area's current trail system, she said, will give her son, Jim, a University of Washington freshman, a 30-mile ride home around the north end of Lake Washington "and not force him onto a single road."

King County paid $3 million for the Burlington Northern Santa Fe right of way in 1998 and set about designing and building a trial that would connect north to Marymoor Park and the Sammamish River Trail, which links with the region's first rails-to-trail route, the Burke-Gilman Trail.

But 47 Lake Sammamish waterfront residents, most of whose properties are bisected by the route, quickly objected.

One year later, permitting authority over a 7.3-mile stretch of the 11.7-mile route got complicated when an area of the county north of Issaquah was incorporated as the city of Sammamish.

Along the lake, where the rail bed squeezes between the hillside and Lake Sammamish, some residents had already extended their fences and landscaping into the right of way, and before long, things went from bad to worse.

After one resident threatened to haul out his shotgun and shoot would-be trespassers, former King County Councilwoman Louise Miller insisted on a police escort before making a tour of the place.

Mike Witek, attorney for the lakeside property owners, said yesterday that it is too early to say whether his clients will ask Coughenour to reconsider his ruling or will move to appeal the matter to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

"But we will look at those options, of course," he said. "I, for one, am disappointed."

Seattle lawyer Matt Cohen, who, on a pro bono basis, represented the non-profit plaintiffs -- Friends of East Lake Sammamish Trail, the Cascade Land Conservancy and the Pasko family -- was as tickled as Pasko.

"This," he said, "is an important decision. ... For the last four years, a small group of people who own property next to this right of way have been holding up King County and its effort to develop this trail."

In the exercise-happy Pacific Northwest, a national movement to convert abandoned rail beds to walking and cycling trails caught fire in the late 1960s.

Seattle's popular Burke-Gilman Trail was among the nation's first along a Burlington Northern route, this one abandoned in 1971. It links the University of Washington area to Kenmore at the north end of Lake Washington, where it joins the Sammamish River Trail, and extends west from the UW to Ballard.

The East Lake Sammamish Trail would be a final link in a loop that includes cycling routes along Interstate 90 and Seattle city routes to Elliott Bay.

A southern leg along I-90 nearly completes the loop reaching Lake Sammamish State Park via Seattle's Judkins Park, the I-90 bridge, Mercer Island and sections of Factoria and Eastlake. Yet to be completed is a section through downtown Seattle.