Sheridan-area annexations complicate woodsy '60s plan

By CONSTANCE SOMMER
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

Barely five years ago, a mere 3,400 people lived within Lake Forest Park municipal limits, which formed a sort of circle in what is now the center of a city of 12,500 citizens.

This original city incorporated in 1961, though the community dates back as far as the turn of the century, when the North Seattle Improvement Company was formed and a civil engineer prepared maps and recording documents for a 1,300-acre expanse to be named Lake Forest Park.

According to local historians, this new neighborhood was designed to match the contour of the existing landscape, so that streets curve with the hills and streams flow alongside homes rather than being diverted or forced underground.

Today, many Lake Forest Park residents remain proud of these very features, which they say contributed to a community so distinctly forested that it stands out from neighboring areas.

"If you go up somewhere high, you don't see a mass of houses," says resident Karen Wallace. "You see all those trees."

The planners didn't think of everything: They left out sidewalks. The great majority of city streets, which are largely residential, lack sidewalks, or even ruts where pedestrians can walk safely on the side of the road.

One exception is the Sheridan neighborhood on the south end of the city, where sidewalks line the pricey waterfront homes east of Bothell Way and the somewhat more modest houses on the hill west of the highway.

Of course, some folks in Sheridan Heights, Sheridan Terrace and Sheridan Beach never planned to join sidewalk-less Lake Forest Park. Like numerous other unincorporated neighborhoods surrounding the original city, they were swallowed up by their mushrooming neighbor in its race to nearly quadruple its size between 1993 and 1996.

Mayor David Hutchinson and others say the state's Growth Management Act triggered the eye-popping expansion by making it more financially painful for Lake Forest Park to remain its original size than to annex all its unincorporated neighbors.

Somebody must have wanted to join the city, because enough people signed petitions to join to meet the legal requirements (landowners constitute 60 percent of the area's assessed valuation). But it's mighty hard to find those folks today, at least in the prickly Sheridan neighborhood.

"Of course we fought it tooth and nail," says longtime Sheridan Heights resident Jean Carlson. "We wanted to remain the way we were."

Councilwoman Mary Jane Goss, who grew up in Sheridan Heights and lives there still, says what really smarts is that the city never put the matter up to a vote.

"I wanted to have a chance to vote," she says. "It was kind of a rush."