Central Washington University officials and its board of trustees journeyed around the pass and into Sammamish Oct. 20 for a joint meeting with the Sammamish City Council and a tour of the Mars Hill building at the city-owned property.

Central Washington President James Gaudino briefly commented on the amount of time that putting together a partnership between the city of Sammamish and the university had taken so far.

“I think we have dotted every ‘I’ and crossed every ’T’,” Gaudino said. “All the indicators are very, very positive.”

City Manager Lyman Howard said higher education has been a goal and a vision for the Sammamish City Council since he began working for Sammamish in 2001.

“Given your affiliation and our interest in having Running Start programs, I think that may be a great foundation to start with,” Howard said. He noted the amount of local students participating in Running Start that had to leave Sammamish to do so, which could preclude them from taking part in after-school activities.

Mayor Don Gerend said he had firsthand experience with his son participating in the Running Start program, saying his son “basically dropped out of high school” during his junior and senior years.

“He didn’t participate in high school activities and that was sort of a loss for him,” Gerend said. “Here we have the three high schools within walking distance of this facility.”

Central Washington provost Katherine Frank said the university could move quickly once all the necessary hurdles were cleared. She said a rollout of a Running Start program, as well as ESL programming, could be ready by the fall of 2017.

Frank added the city and the university could think in the long-term about four-year degree offerings and graduate programming.

“Everything, it seems, is possible,” she said. “It’s a matter of building this in a scalable way that we know is successful, that capitalizes on the partnerships that you all emphasize and really serves this area in a way that makes sense for your population.”

Moving forward, the CWU trustees had to travel back to Ellensburg to hold an executive session on expansion to Sammamish. Gaudino said he anticipated a “green light” to enter an agreement with Sammamish.

Howard mentioned some of the factors the city was looking into included financial modeling, a traffic impact analysis and how many students the city would anticipate to come from outside Sammamish. He said he expected to update the council on the process on Nov. 15.