City of Sammamish needs to resolve the crisis it created for Inglewood residents
Every so often, a crisis lands in our community that tests whether our city government has the genuine desire to work with residents and solve problems together.
The right of way controversy for the Inglewood neighborhood is the latest test, and so far, the City of Sammamish is failing on the issue.
This all began when the City’s public works director sent a letter in late May to the approximately 400 homes in the Inglewood neighborhood, which straddles both sides of Inglewood Hill Road as it approaches East Lake Sammamish Parkway. In the letter, the City stated that it discovered the neighborhood’s roads “were never formally opened to the public” when the neighborhood was platted in 1889, and therefore, the City will cease to maintain them at the end of June, giving residents only a scant, single month of warning.
This means on July 1, the City will no longer provide services such as vegetation management, street sweeping, plowing during snow and ice, pothole repair, ditch maintenance, and parking enforcement. This leaves Inglewood residents to figure out how they would pay for it themselves.
The public reaction to such an abrupt and undue letter was about what you would expect. Given the City maintained these roads for decades with no issue, there was significant anger from Inglewood residents. In addition, people across Sammamish shared empathy for Inglewood, as well as concern on whether new discoveries may allow the City to stop maintaining their own neighborhood roads.
Sammamish is a relatively new city, so it is not surprising that land use issues like this will pop up with no clear path forward. But there is a collaborative way to solve them in which the City works to find common ground with residents, rather than an adversarial way.
By issuing the letter, the City chose the adversarial approach, and now Inglewood residents are considering hiring a lawyer and preparing to fight a protracted and expensive legal battle with the City. This is not the best outcome for the City of Sammamish, nor for Inglewood residents.
We need to get both sides back to working on the collaborative path.
The onus starts with City staff to take the first step. Their initial letter was so tactless, that it broke the public’s trust in the City’s ability to represent the best interests of residents. It can regain some good will by extending Inglewood’s deadline to at least the end of 2025, giving all parties enough time to work together and find a favorable solution.
Next, Sammamish City Council should take action. As the legislative body for our City, the Council has the power to set policy on how private roads can be converted to public roads, as provisioned by state law. For example, the City of Sequim created such a policy in 2023.
The Council can even carve out a special provision for Inglewood and make it easy for Inglewood residents to approve such a transfer by a majority vote on each street. Given that the City maintained those roads as if they were for public use since 1999, as did King County before that, there is enough precedence to warrant providing an easier path forward for Inglewood residents.
Some responsibility falls on Inglewood residents too. The neighborhood has no homeowners’ association, so residents have to organize a legal petition to capture signatures that support the conversion of their streets from private to public use, which demonstrates to the City that a majority of residents want it. This requires an organized campaign, time and some money, but it is an incredible opportunity for Inglewood residents to come together for a common cause.
It is important that such a campaign be led by Inglewood residents themselves, and not by outside agitators looking to advance their own political agendas. That would create an incentive to continue fighting with the City, which will damage our community and create further division in the long run.
Sammamish has always been a place where, if residents see something is missing, they come together to problem solve and fill that need. This is an opportunity for City Hall to demonstrate that it shares those values and can still work with residents to solve problems together. It would be a shame to waste this opportunity.
Lin Yang is a candidate for Sammamish City Council, position #5. He grew up in Sammamish, and has a master’s in public policy from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.
Martha Daman has been a homeowner in Inglewood since 2002. She has also been a middle and high school educator in the Lake Washington School District for 26 years.
The Sammamish Independent is committed to fair, balanced, and independent journalism. As part of our coverage of local political races, we disclose that Lin Yang, a candidate for the City Council Position #5, is a founder and former Board Chair of this publication. Mr. Yang stepped down from the Board on 3/18/2025.
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