The Record continues its coverage from last week on the Snoqualmie Valley Chamber of Commerce candidate forum held Sept. 18 for candidates for Snoqualmie and North Bend City Council.

Snoqualmie candidates Charles Peterson in position 6 and his opponent for position 6, Joe Larson, answered questions while candidates Chelley Patterson and Brad Toft, both unopposed, gave opening statements.

Patterson did, however, use her allotted time to also endorse Peterson for Position 6, saying she had no opposition to Larson, but was concerned that two family members on the council — Larson’s brother is Snoqualmie Mayor Matt Larson — “would be really, really tough on city council.”

What’s an interim solution for traffic congestion at the I-90 and Highway 18 interchange?

Larson: Possibly allowing or adding a dedicated right turn lane on the Parkway down to I-90 west. Another lane could provide relief for people trying to get up to the Parkway rather than turning left on Highway 18… The project depends heavily on how much the city is ready and willing to operate outside of the city, county and state levels to apply influence. I’d be happy to network or do whatever I could to win that kind of support at the state level.

Peterson: Snoqualmie is now in the process of having a survey conducted of traffic from near the hospital to the Highway 18 intersection. We will use that to continue to push all state and federal agencies to rebuild the interchange as rapidly as possible.

Should the city play a role in developing the mill site?

Peterson: I was against annexation of the Weyerhaeuser mill site. I went to the King County Council and found out the cost of maintaining the roads and rebuilding that bridge. I was able to improve the agreement with the research that I did. Nevertheless, I felt it was too early to bring it in. We have to maintain the roads, police, the fire department, and the taxes that come in do not support it at this time.

Larson: If the Muckleshoot move ahead with their development, suddenly the mill site comes in much closer proximity to the traffic of the Salish and conceivably you could have a hotel there. Once you have a hotel, you’ve got business parks and lots of opportunities for generating planned development with corresponding revenue. The development with the mill site fits in very nicely with all of that.

North Bend candidates were incumbent Mayor Ken Hearing and write-in opponent Mary Miller; Jonathan Rosen, unopposed in position 1; Trevor Kostanich and incumbent Dee Wayne Williamson, who coudn’t attend, for position three; incumbent David Cook and Brenden Elwood for position 5, and Judy Bilanko and Martin Volken for position 7.

With 800 more homes coming to North Bend, how would you address traffic congestion?

Cook: The city has no money to mitigate the impact of growth until we get impact fees. The city council is going to raise those fees. We are going to gain about $9 to $10 million. That money is enough, along with other funds, to fix ‘the mess in front of QFC,’ Ballarat, Tanner, Thrasher, 140th and Exit 34. We have plans in place now to fix all of these issues.

Elwood: I like development paying for development, but the fact is we have to look for additional revenue sources.

Bilanko: We need every dollar we can get with the growth paying for growth and we absolutely will get some of them solved.

Volken: The Transportation Improvement Plan had a lot of vague language and I’m hoping we can use the time it takes to build these houses to fully crystalize the plan.

Hearing: We don’t get to collect that impact fee when the building permit is issued anymore, we have to wait until (a building) is occupied. That’s a three to four month lag. We have to pay for it with the impact fees or our own money.

Miller: We’ve lost grants here, we are going back for another larger grant to help support the plaza coming in. The traffic is just an abomination. The people are not feeling like they are heard.

Kostanich: What is the vision for 10 to 20 years from now? The city has actually done a great job trying to divert traffic. Some of that rerouting is going to help us create a more pedestrian friendly area downtown. I would like to see us include non-motorized connection.

What role should the city play in developing affordable housing?

Elwood: We need to be exploring this on every level. We have a wide variety of people that live in North Bend all coming from different backgrounds, different economic resources. It really troubles me that we have people who have worked here their whole lives, but they can’t live here.

Volken: There are some people who are a bit less fortunate and I don’t see North Bend as a community that starts to effectively eliminate people not quite so lucky. I think it should be part of the greater plan for the city.

Bilanko: I’m hoping that we can get some condos built, perhaps some more apartments, and I know it has to be zoned, but it will provide some housing. I think we have some opportunity and I think we need to explore that.

Miller: I think there is a definite need for apartments, we need a few more structures to help facilitate people that keep having to find another way to get to town to work… Something to get them started so we can have a fuller reach.

Hearing: It can be done, market driven,” Hearing said, citing an example from Spokane, where a cottage housing development has a maximum lot size of 950 “and they are selling like hotcakes.”

Kostanich: I’d love to see the market driven thing work but I think you are not going to find a lot of developers able to do that unless the city is going to accommodate a much higher density. I’m very open to utilizing some existing programs that have shown success.

Cook: The city council has struggled with the idea of affordable housing. We did do the cottage housing and we thought that was a good idea, but the market drove prices up. You don’t get excise taxes from apartments. The only way you get excise taxes to invest in your city is from individual homes. It’s a very complicated issue.

The forum also included a rapid-fire round of questions, about candidates support of various issues such as marijuana shops, tattoo parlors and roundabouts.

The Chamber will also host a candidate forum Oct. 7 at the North Bend Theatre, featuring candidates for North Bend City Council. For more information, visit www.snovalley.org.