Email to King Country re Treehouse Resort & Spa

Please note several areas within the text below that must be customized. cut and paste the text into an email, customize it, and email it to SHERIE.SABOUR@KINGCOUNTY.GOV

Dear Sherie:

This email is in regards to the proposed Treehouse Resort & Spa (DPER File No. LUT417-0004), a destination resort in a Rural ‎Area zone. The proposed site for the Destination Resort is not only in the Rural Area, but also ‎within the Special District Overlay (“SO-120”), a designated buffer to the Sammamish Valley Agricultural Production District (APD). ‎

I [live/work] [near/in the community] of the proposed Treehouse Resort & Spa at ‎‎[my home address]. I have significant concerns regarding traffic, urbanizing the Rural Area that our ‎Comprehensive Plan goals strive to preserve, and ‎the circumventing of an agricultural buffer zone intended to retain and support and the APD.

The purpose of the SO-120 designation is to provide a buffer from the residential area to ‎the Agricultural Production District. This buffer zone is a particularly inappropriate location for ‎a commercial resort use (which is already an exception to allowed uses in the Rural Area) that will ‎increase land compaction and toxic runoff, increase traffic, cause ingress/egress issues due to its location near a busy intersection and within a residential neighborhood, and cause other more typically urban issues. No King County Code provision ‎authorizes such use in the SO-120 overlay. No King County Comprehensive Plan provision ‎supports or authorizes such use in the SO-120 overlay. ‎

In King County, protection of farmland is a priority when balancing conflicting uses that ‎have an adverse impact on farm operations. Here, the increased traffic, increased impervious surfaces and land compaction, and increased runoff from a commercial development in the buffer zone for productive farmland is a conflict. Pursuant to our ‎Comprehensive Plan, balancing of such uses should be in favor of agriculture. The buffer zone for an Agricultural Production District is not an appropriate location for the Treehouse Resort & Spa. Therefore, you should ‎recommend that the Special Use Permit be denied.‎

Thank you for your consideration of these comments. ‎

Sincerely,‎

[Name]