The city of Issaquah will pay $250,000 to have the historic Tolle Anderson house moved out of Confluence Park, under an agreement with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
The Issaquah City Council voted unanimously Monday to foot the bill on the relocation in order to move forward with restoration of habitat along nearby Issaquah Creek — and avoid losing more than $1.2 million in grants tied to the creek project.
The restoration project has been a part of the city’s plan for Confluence Park since the plan was approved in 2012. City officials also say the project — which would widen the waterway among other improvements — is important to regional salmon recovery efforts. The city must complete the restoration before its grants expire in early 2016. Those grants include $1,119,952 from the Salmon Recovery Funding Board and $110,000 from the King Conservation District.
But the project requires a permit from the Corps of Engineers. After a review of the project in late 2014, the Corps determined the Tolle Anderson farmstead is a historical site and that it would be the city’s financial responsibility to mitigate the restoration’s impact on the farmstead’s remaining structures. City workers demolished a barn and shed on the property in April 2012, but a Corps investigation later determined that the city did so without knowledge of their historical value.
Under the agreement, the money paid by the city will be used by the Washington Trust for Historic Preservation to search for a candidate to provide land for the house and relocate the house to that land. The King County Historic Preservation Program and the Washington State Recreation and Conservation Office are signed onto the agreement as concurring parties.
If the house has not been relocated by Dec. 31, the city will be able to demolish the house and the money will instead go into a grant program for the preservation of historic buildings in Issaquah.
During discussion of the agreement in the Council Infrastructure Committee, council members questioned whether the $250,000 should come from the city’s general fund, a catchall account not assigned to any particular department.
Those questions continued into Monday’s council meeting.
“The sort of obvious (question) that I wanted to ask was, do we have any money left in our parks bond and, if so, could this come out of the parks bond instead of the general fund?” Councilman Tola Marts asked. “It sure seems a shame to take it out of the general fund.”
City Manager Bob Harrison said all the funds in the park bond had been spoken for.
In the agreement’s agenda bill summary, city staff wrote that the general fund was ample enough to handle the payment and that the purpose of the one-time expense did not fit into other department accounts, such as the utility fund.
If the Anderson house needs to be demolished, that cost will be carried by the city in addition to the $250,000, Council President Paul Winterstein said.
