Seattle Sun Newspaper - Vol. 8, Issue 7, July 2004

Copyright 2004 Seattle Sun. Please feel free to use the article below in your research. Be sure to cite the Seattle Sun as your source.

City lets homeowner bury more of Kramer Creek

By JAMES BUSH

It's just a trickle of water in a roadside ditch along Northeast 110th Street, but the tiny tributary of Thornton Creek in the Meadowbrook neighborhood appears on city maps and even has a name: Kramer Creek.

But, for the second time in the past two years, the City has allowed a homeowner to divert a section of Kramer Creek into a pipe, much to the displeasure of local creek advocates.

Meadowbrook resident Bob Vreeland, a fisheries biologist and founding member of the Thornton Creek Legal Defense Fund, says that the health of creeks is degraded over time by small actions such as this.

"It doesn't look like much," Vreeland says of Kramer Creek, "but if it continues as it has for the last 150 years of Seattle development, things are not going to get better."

Kramer Creek is fed by three springs which pop out of the hillside just below Lake City Way between Northeast 110th and Northeast 115th streets.

The channel starts on the north side of Northeast 110th, roughly on a piece of property developed as affordable housing by the nonprofit Low Income Housing Institute (LIHI).

Continuing down the hill, the stream of running water disappears intermittently under driveways and streets, with the flow increasing noticeably at 28th Avenue Northeast, where it is joined by a pipe conveying water from the two other springs.

Kramer Creek then takes a sharp right turn at 30th Avenue Northeast, continuing in a much larger channel across the street from Nathan Hale High School. Kramer Creek joins Thornton Creek near the vehicular entrance to the Meadowbrook Playfield complex.

The section of stream placed in a pipe in late May is on the property owned by Esper Obenza, which is located immediately south of the LIHI project at 2825 NE 110th St.

Sharon Lee, executive director of LIHI, says her organization performed the work on the Obenza property under the terms of a settlement, under which the family withdrew its appeal of the LIHI project's master use permit.

The portion of the stream on the LIHI property is daylighted and the award-winning project includes an on-site stormwater retention system, says Lee. "We thought it was important to do something that was good for the creek, which is to daylight it, and add landscaping and green space."

A second stretch of Kramer Creek, roughly two blocks downstream, was buried in late 2002 by a homeowner with the City's permission. At the time, officials of various City departments admitted that allowing that portion of the creek to be culverted may have been a mistake.

This time around, though, Seattle Public Utilities officials are noticeably unapologetic.

Denise Andrews, manager of SPU's surface water planning unit, confirms that her department signed off the permit to bury the creek. She says protecting Kramer Creek may prove impractical because the roadway on Northeast 110th Street doesn't meet arterial standards and may be widened at some point in the future.

"The City has competing interests in the right of way," Andrews says.

A portion of sidewalk was built at the same time the creek was placed into a pipe, although it doesn't connect to anything and probably won't be extended in the near future.

After the 2002 creek culverting, SPU officials told the Seattle Sun that they would consider the question of whether this section of Kramer Creek (which is shown on more than one SPU stream map) should actually be considered a creek. There's no evidence that any such deliberations ever took place.

"Is it a creek? I'm not sure," says Andrews. While she acknowledges that the spring-fed creek has year-round flow, it runs down a drainage ditch, rather than its original channel.

"That's pretty much the attitude of the City: big deal," says Vreeland. He quotes conservationist Aldo Leopold, who said in his 1949 book "A Sand County Almanac" that the first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all the pieces.

"That little chunk of Kramer Creek was one of those pieces," says Vreeland. "And they just threw it away."