Newport Shores court settlement to force cleanup of sediment

BELLEVUE -- At Bill and Leanne Weinstein's house on quiet Coal Creek, the early morning light suggested pleasant days ahead. The creek burbled. A bald eagle circled and, with its talons out, dove to the surface of Lake Washington.

This is Newport Shores, an Eastside stretch of waterfront living where the Weinsteins and their neighbors should be happy campers. They aren't.


		Dan DeLong / P-I
	Bill Weinstein, center, flanked by fellow Newport Shores residents Paul Nichol, left, and Larry Kahn, stand on a delta created by sediment flowing down Coal Creek into Lake Washington. A settlement is to be presented in court today.

Between the Weinsteins' house and the Newport Yacht Club to the north spreads a plain of coal-streaked gravel and silt larger than a football field.

Next door is Richard Lomas. Where he once tethered a floatplane is today solid ground.

And where the Weinsteins enjoyed waterfront just a decade ago, the long neck of an incomplete isthmus reaches for hundreds of feet toward Mercer Island.

"One of these days we won't need the East Channel Bridge," cracked another neighbor, Steve Cole, the yacht club's commodore.

But few here are laughing -- least of all those paying waterfront property taxes but who, like Lomas, have lost their waterfront.

Coal Creek and King County's Coal Creek Park canyon drain from the Somerset-South Bellevue-Newcastle region west into Lake Washington. A delta was formed by the creek's drainage mostly during the so-called 100-year storms of the 1980s and 1990s. They flooded through the old coal-mining sites on Cougar Mountain, blew out at least one cofferdam (an earthen dike), caused a landslide of coal-mine tailings and carried away silt and dirt from neighboring hillside developments.

Guess where it settled.

It wound up here in the yards and crawl spaces of Weinstein and his neighbors.

This massive invasion of mud and mining debris also filled the basin that had given mooring depths to the Newport Yacht Club.

As a 27-year Newport Shores resident, Lomas has stuck it out, although he is hard-pressed to say why.

"It was great for the first five or 10 years," he said. "But these last 17 haven't been so nice. As the mud poured in, no one wanted to do anything about it."


		Dan DeLong / P-I
	Newport Shores resident Larry Kahn holds a handful of sediment containing coal-mine tailings that has flowed down Coal Creek into Lake Washington over the years.

A theory by newcomer Larry Kahn suggests an answer as to why they waited so long: Being fairly well-off and of old-Bellevue stock, he said, Newport Shores residents are generally too polite to get nasty. Need a channel dredged? Suck it up and raise the money.

Weinstein, a lawyer, enjoyed no such fantasy.

He spent $100,000 of his own money just on water and soil studies to link that black stuff in his back yard to Cougar Mountain coal sites.

So two years ago, he gave notice to federal, state and local officials that they had been less than diligent in fulfilling storm-water abatement promises. He cited federal clean water laws and the rules to protect salmon.

In August 2003, Weinstein followed through by filing suit. With backing from the community, he took the city and King County into federal court.

He got their attention.

Tomorrow, a proposed settlement is expected to unfold in the courtroom of Judge Thomas Zilly.

The agreement, worked out behind closed doors, gives the troublesome creek and its lineal county park to Bellevue, with King County agreeing to help clean it up.

To make this worth Bellevue's trouble and to sweeten the pot, King County also will give Bellevue the old Surrey Downs Elementary School property on 112th Avenue Southeast. Long coveted by the city, King County bought it from the Bellevue School District in 1981. It has housed the Bellevue District Court since 1989.

In exchange for a promise of their own, Weinstein and his neighbors get more promises.

For a vow not to sue for 40 years, Weinstein and the Newport Yacht Club will secure a pledge that the city and the county will take care of the creek. And the community will get $700,000 to defray future dredging needs and help to obtain permits when necessary.

The city also will permit Weinstein to launch a salmon-enhancement project on property he owns on both sides of the creek

"Call me a tree hugger," Weinstein said. "I want my kids to grow up around salmon. That's one of the reasons we bought this place."

Weinstein credits King County Executive Ron Sims for urging settlement, but says he has little use for Bellevue city leaders.

"They fought us every step of the way," he said. "But you watch. When you see that huge windfall they'll be getting with Surrey Downs, they'll be beating their chest."

No sooner said than done.

After refusing comment for more than a week, the city, through City Manager Steve Sarkozy, acknowledged late Friday that the "potential" for liability had made it "appropriate that we step up and do what was right, to better maintain Coal Creek Park," Sarkozy said.

"We think it is environmentally responsible and resolves a long-term issue that not only affects Lake Washington and the residents of Newport Shores, but also adds to our portfolio of properties."

The Surrey Downs Elementary School building, he said, would be razed and the land turned into ball fields.

"I guess I should say I'm proud of the (city) council for doing this," Sarkozy said. "We had the choice of committing money to litigation or to resolving the problems. We stepped up. That's a good note."

A problem with the old school remains. During the summer, the state Department of Health found cancer-causing PCBs leaking from old light fixtures in a building occupied by a children's day school next door to the court. In a resolution passed Monday night, the City Council said it wants proof that those PCBs are gone before the ownership change.

Newport Shores has long been troubled by an accreting Coal Creek, and likely could not be built today given modern shoreline rules and salmon-protection laws.

As a development of waterfront home sites, it materialized in the late 1950s when its developer cut canals into an old lakeside airstrip. Fill was brought in and a nameplate applied. It would be Newport Shores, just down from Newport Hills.

Stockbroker William Pratt and his wife, Eileen, bought the first lot in 1959. Their home, the development's first structure, was completed in September 1961, just in time to weather the Northwest event remembered as the Columbus Day Storm

Pratt's house, and the boathouse he added later, stuck out like a sore thumb. "When we moved in, there wasn't a blade of grass or a single tree," he said.

Pratt, now 79 and retired, said the original developer suffered financially, but his project was rescued by Weyerhaeuser scion Norton Clapp and his Medina Land Co.

Pratt said sales finally took off after Lennox Scott, son of real estate pioneer John L. Scott, built a home there and moved in. By Pratt's count today, there are 346 lots.

"I'm glad to see something's finally being done about that creek," he said. "I blame the city and the county for not clamping down on those developers upstream."

And about the fish, he said, "We do see salmon in there, and none of us want to see that stop."

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