The Sammamish City Council voted 6-1 at its June 6 meeting to approve additional funding to the Sammamish Heritage Society.

“It’s great,” Sammamish Heritage Society treasurer and former president Ella Moore told the Reporter. “We’ve really been working hard.”

Moore said the organization, a nonprofit 501.c.3 organization that was founded in 1999 to preserve the history and heritage of Sammamish and the plateau, is very grateful for the additional funding.

Sammamish Heritage Society is run by volunteers and receives funding through donations, grants and city contributions.

Since 2010, the city of Sammamish has given the heritage society $5,000 each year. Through 2016, the city has spent $35,000 in annual funding, plus an additional $106,635 for the Reard-Freed House, for a total contribution of $141,635.

The organization originally approached the council with its request for additional funding — $15,000 in 2017 and $5,000 in 2018 — at the March 6 City Council meeting. This funding was approved at the June 6 meeting.

In the presentation presented to council on March 6, the heritage society showed an operating deficit of $12,855 in 2017.

The deficit comes from expenses related to namely storage costs, a website redesign and for future projects like the heritage society’s mapping project.

Moore told the Reporter that the organization’s storage has increased from “one small, small unit to two large room-sized units.” Items are stored in Public Storage because they need to be air controlled, she said.

The mapping project, in its second phase, also contributed to the need for additional funding. The project aims to preserve historic locations throughout the city. The first phase of the project was field work to catalogue 150 pre-1941 properties. Most of these properties, however, were already gone. Phase two of the project is imputing the data the heritage society collected into a data base to be used by the city, county and state.

“We’ve been encouraged to do this [project] for several years,” Moore said.

The largest contribution to needing additional funds is to address the heritage society’s 15-year-old website.

Steve Thues, the organization’s outreach manager, said that because of the way the website was designed, the organization doesn’t have access to update it.

“We couldn’t post anything to it,” he said. “We couldn’t make any changes to it at all.”

He said the ideal new website will allow the group to incorporate a blog, announcing events or the latest happenings with issues like the Providence Heights campus.

“The main thing we want is to be able to update it much more dynamically, so that we can be a lot more current,” he said. “It’s a way for us to communicate with the people.”

They also hope to implement a search feature to make the information they already have more accessible. The current website cannot be searched.

“It had no search feature at all,” he said.

Additionally, they hope to implement a point-of-sale service so that if someone wanted to purchase an image, they would have access to a high resolution photograph.

Plus, Thues said, it would be nice to have a “donate” button.

“Those kind of changes would be a great leap forward,” he said.

The council conditioned the additional funding, adding that there needs to be a review of policy within 12 months in how to deal with funding moving forward.

Councilmember Tom Odel was the lone dissenting vote.