Frank and Maureen Santoni have made a beautiful home for themselves.

Their 30 year old timber house sits in a small clearing, close to Sammamish City Hall and 228th Avenue but sheltered from the noise of the street by tall Douglas Fir, Maple and Alder trees.

When I visited the Santoni’s recently, walking up to their front porch in the evening the smell of cedar burning in their woodstove filled the air. When the strong wind split the dark clouds, there were the stars.

Like many people who enjoy the peace and quiet that pockets of Sammamish offer, they are regularly visited by raccoons and deer, hawks and eagles, the occasional unseen bobcat. It is a quality of life they have deliberately sought, a defining trait of what they value as residents. It is also one that they fear is now threatened by the development of the proposed Sammamish Town Center.

The Santonis have watched on as plans have changed and morphed, launched and been abandoned, in the short history of the city. They took a keen interest in the deliberations of the first Planning Advisory Board, a volunteer group of residents charged with drafting Sammamish’s first comprehensive plan. Most weeks you will find them in the public gallery at council or planning commission meetings.

“We just really like where we live, and we want to know what’s going on in our city,” Maureen said.

The Santoni’s property on Sixth Avenue Southeast sits at the convergence of two of the proposed Town Center’s most controversial zones – the ‘A’ zone of the south east quadrant, and the ‘E’ zone, where they are, to its south. Just yards from their front door is the property line where the south east quadrant begins, a section of land whose owners recently asked the city to amend the limits on development density to allow for taller buildings and more retail space.

At the eastern boundary of their property begins a ‘B’ zone, which will require a minimum density of eight units an acre at a maximum height of four stories.

While much of the Town Center debate thus far has centered around whether or not the city’s plan will provide enough commercial opportunities on the Plateau, the Santonis are concerned that something of greater value will be lost if the council does not remain firm in its conviction to limit development density and building heights.

They say it was the relative tranquility of the place that attracted them, and many like them, in the first place, and the city would be compromising its brightest asset if became too concerned with commerce and condos.

On 228th Avenue, they are, in many ways, at the heart of the storm.

“We realize that we are on a prime road up here,” Frank said. “We always knew it was going to be developed, to some extent. But all we really want is for that development to be appropriate. Under the Galvin plan (to increase density in the south east quadrant to their north), we would have a four story building right up against our property line.”

One of things the city must do, Frank said, is form a design review board which would make sure new buildings and structures would “keep the feel of the place, to keep Sammamish looking like it does.”

They are an educated couple engaged with their community, who have, through their own efforts, stayed close to the goings-on at city hall over the past 10 years.

And what they are seeing of late has them worried.

“What I’m feeling is that now there is a (Town Center) plan in place, there is pressure now to increase density on a plan that hasn’t even been tried and tested,” Frank said. “Really, my concern is that even the density they have now isn’t supportable.”

They point to the empty retail buildings just down the hill in Issaquah, such as Joes Sporting Goods on Gilman Boulevard and Albertsons on East Lake Sammamish Parkway as evidence that existing commercial space exceeds the demand for it.

“When the city moved out of their space in the Highlands Shopping Center to move into city hall, it took six months to get another business in there,” Frank recalled. “Same with the Blockbuster Video.”

Maureen said she had no problems with the relative lack of retail on the Plateau.

“I don’t mind at all going down to Fred Meyer. I certainly don’t want it next door,” she said. “Besides, with all the development they are planning in the Highlands, with the cinema etc, could it really be sustained here?”

Frank saw the recent council decision to ignore the recommendation of its planning commission to continue a ban on electronic reader boards in residential zones as a sign that the things they value about Sammamish are under threat.

“We don’t want this to turn into Aurora Avenue,” he said. “There is definitely a development mentality on the council. It’s the business they’re in – they have a natural propensity to see development.”

A stone’s throw, maybe two, across 228th to the west is the 2.25 acre property Donovan Albrecht and his wife Helen have called home since 1976. There is a modest house, a prefabricated building the Albrechts trucked up to the Plateau from Issaquah 30 years ago. That was the same year he

and a few buddies, one of whom had a new backhoe, another had a road grader, built the first road into the place, from South East 4th Street. Over the years he has kept it graded with his 1952 Allis-Chalmers compact grader.

Back then the property didn’t look too different to what it does today, apart from a few small homes nearby and Albrecht’s sturdy fences. He is a tall man, getting on in years – he moves with the stiff, patient lumber of an old farmer around a paddock he knows very well.

A feature of his place is the old brooder barn which wasn’t in great shape when Albrecht got to it, but thanks to a few coats of paint, some roof repairs and plenty of nails, is one of the best examples of historic architecture in a city rapidly losing touch with the buildings of its past.

“I know it’s a least 72 years old,” he said. “A few years ago I was doing some work on the place and I found a piece of siding that said on it ‘Bill loves Faye – 1937.'”

The Bill was Bill Schween, who owned the land some years before. Turns out, Faye loved Bill too, because the two were later married. After they found it, the Albrechts presented the piece of siding to Bill and Faye. According to Albrecht, Bill passed away some years ago, and Faye lives in a nursing home in Redmond.

The history of the land he calls home is not lost on Albrecht. But he’s worried that it is lost on the planners in city hall.

Under the current Town Center plan, his property would be zoned to encourage the construction of up to 20 dwellings per acre, a mixture of apartments, townhomes, and cottages. As landowners around him jostle to increase the value of their property in the eyes of developers, Albrecht just wants to keep some of his peace and quiet.

“It’s just a little chunk of ground where you can open the doors and have a little bit of privacy,” he said. “I want to live here as long as the good Lord allows.”

Standing out by the old barn, looking over the wetlands and pond a few hundred feet from his southern fence, it is not hard to see why. Ducks mill about on the pond, the water surface breaking occasionally as the bass feed. The gully at its outlet is filled mostly with blackberries, but the trees that Bob Lynette planted there in the 1970s have transformed what used to be a paddock for cows. Huge yellow apples hang from a volunteer apple tree.

The proximity of what is a remarkable watershed and environmental amenity should complicate the picture for developers, as the city has stated the preservation, and improvement, of environmental features in the Town Center is a priority.

The city’s Town Center document states that mixed use development “should incorporate natural areas such as wetlands, stream corridors, wildlife corridors and stands of mature trees as amenities into the mixed use nodes where possible.”

But Albrecht is worried that among the councilors and councilors-elect there are not many who have demonstrated a desire to choose ecology over economy.

“Don Gerend said to me once ‘if you play it right with a developer, you might get an apartment out of this,'” he said. “I’m not interested in that.”

As we walked back up the steep slope to his barn, I began to understand why Albrecht feels so compelled to explain the attachment to his home, to put it into words and tell the council why he doesn’t want it to change, this land where he raised a family.

“Ah, it’s been a bad year,” he said, falling silent, water welling in his eyes, confused, awkward. After a few long moments of silence, he told me their son Daniel had died a few months back. I didn’t ask any more.

But he showed me Daniel’s prized motorbike, which he keeps under the barn, immaculate and gleaming. On the walls inside are some posters his son once brought back from France, some model cars, treasures. Albrecht is proud of the old barn he has done much to restore, and feels it could be a feature of the Town Center, along with the pond and lush gully nearby.

“It’s got a fair lean to it, I know, but that thing will keep on standing for another hundred years, if they look after it,” he said. “They could turn it into a picnic spot, the barn would be a good shelter, there’s room for parking.”

With the council unwilling to help preserve that icon of Sammamish history, the Freed House, barns like this one will certainly be prized rarities in years to come.

City of Sammamish Director of Community Development Kamuron Gurol said he was aware there were a number of property owners in the Town Center area eager keep things the way they are.

“Polling of property owners a few years ago showed us there are some not interested in developing or selling their land,” he said. “A couple of those properties are inconveniently located.”

Gurol said these properties represented a challenge that developers would have to meet, and said planners were looking at the experience of other cities, such as University Place, which had difficulties proceeding with major developments when individual landowners didn’t share their vision.

“There are a couple of ways of skinning that cat,” Gurol said. “Cities do a lot of different things. Some go out and buy all the land and become, essentially, the master developer. This city made a decision early on that it didn’t want to do that.”

He did say that the city currently owned a small number of properties in the Town Center, such as the Kellman Mansion, and the option of purchasing more property in important areas of the proposed development was one they could consider.

Gurol also said it was possible that some of the opposition to the development would erode over time, as plans became clearer, and land passed into new ownership through sale or inheritance.

Frank and Maureen Santoni and Donovan Albrecht are worried the city may resort to increasing property taxes on their parcels to drive them away.

The “over my dead body” stand-off is one that major developers are still struggling to deal with, despite the enormous resources at their disposal and the favor of local and state governments.

The famous story of Edith Macefield’s refusal to sell her small home in Ballard to make to make way for a large construction project not only made national news but also made developers change their plans.

Macefield’s little house became a symbol of local residents’ increasing opposition to the gentrification of the neighborhood and the erosion of older values.

It is a lesson that the City of Sammamish would do well to heed as landowners in the Town Center begin to dig their heels in to the land, and homes, that they love.