The city of Sammamish hosted its first of three public meetings on developing its Land Acquisition Strategy on Feb. 15 at City Hall.

Anjali Myer, parks and recreation project manager, said the intention of developing the strategy was to ensure the city had enough resources to meet the growing needs of the community. Myer said through the parks’ Capital Improvement Plan that was adopted last year, the city had $13 million allocated for purchasing land, with $7 million available this year.

“The whole purpose, the whole reason this came about is in part due to growing concerns with all the development taking place and to make sure that we have a strategy in place … so we can proactively go about procuring land for whatever the needs may be,” Myer said.

The city began with 44 acres in 1999 and has since grown to 630, Myer said, though the city doesn’t have a strategy for acquiring land in place. She said the goal was to spend the first six months developing the strategy through an extensive public process and then to implement a policy and procedures for acquisition.

Chad Weiser, a consultant with the design firm Otak, said the first phase of the process focused on analyzing the existing conditions within the city and getting a better understanding of the needs and priorities of the community.

“I guess the best way to describe this is we can only build a strategy of where we want to go if we really understand what we have,” Weiser said.

Along with the city currently holding a Virtual Town Hall forum on land acquisition through its website, Weiser said a public survey would be sent out to randomly-selected residents to gather feedback on the community’s land priorities.

In preparing a strategy for Sammamish, Weiser said staff had researched acquisition plans in other communities for comparison, one of the nearest jurisdictions being in Portland, Oregon. He added that there were not many other communities in the Puget Sound area that had strategies similar to what Sammamish is trying to create.

Among the mapped areas that the city believes may factor into the land acquisition process, Weiser mentioned natural areas, which include lakes, streams, wetlands, wildlife corridors and potential erosion and landslide hazard areas. Also mentioned were existing parks and trails and homeowners’ association properties, which may be privately owned but also committed to be open space areas.

The next steps in the process of developing the strategy include meetings with the Parks Commission and City Council in May, followed by a second public meeting on May 11. A third public meeting is set to take place June 14. The city is targeting to adopt a policy in July.

Multiple community members in attendance at the Feb. 15 meeting expressed interest in seeing the strategy’s development process completed sooner rather than later to protect city land before seeing developers purchase it.

While no criteria for land acquisition has been established yet, Myer said at the next public meeting in May, the city will work with community input toward finalizing criteria.

“If we stay on track and we are able to get a policy adopted in July, we could go shopping in August,” Myer said.

This story was updated to specify Anjali Myer as a parks and recreation project manager. A previous version of this story incorrectly referred to Myer as parks and recreation director. The Reporter regrets the error.