New development projects in Sammamish have been put on hold after the City Council passed an emergency ordinance on Oct. 3, implementing a moratorium on the acceptance of new land-use development applications and building permits or approvals in the city.

After the city began it’s deep dive into traffic concurrency and traffic impacts in July, the council identified that the traffic planning and process did not always line up with established policy and that the council were not receiving answers to some of their more pressing question in regards to the detail behind traffic planning.

“This was pretty much a reaction because we were being overwhelmed with the information and questions that came up, because we were not getting the answers that we are hoping to get,” Councilmember Ramiro Valderrama said. “We have got to take a step back, that plan and policy aren’t aligned, we’ve got so much riding on this. Let’s take this pause and understand what the process should be and be able to deliver a better, transparent process.”

During the Oct. 3 council meeting, Deputy Mayor Christie Malchow stressed that the council doesn’t take this moratorium lightly.

“It’s not that this was hatched overnight,” she said. “We have spent a lot of time and energy going through documents — more documents than I thought we’d ever look at. But I think we are going to have the time to take that break, that pause, to really dig into this and get what our citizens have been asking us for, so to that end I think this is much needed on the part of council and staff so that we can … have that laser focus.”

The ordinance is set to last six months and will allow the council to create a revised traffic concurrency policy and traffic modeling program that will help them answer questions and improve the level of services they provide. The council will also be looking at how the traffic planning meshes with the Comprehensive Plan.

In the upcoming months, the Sammamish City Council will be examining several elements of the traffic plan and revising them to collect more data to be used as the city continues to find solutions to many of the traffic problems plaguing Sammamish.

Valderrama said that there were some assumptions built into the current traffic model that are not fully understood and the council will either change them or figure policy to go with them.

“We should make sure that the end result is not only a more transparent process but to have a way to measure and maintain the level of service and flow rate. How we are measuring it, how that is taking place,” he said. “We are calling it a pause, there were a number of exceptions, basically with all this it will allow us to implement a new revised traffic model that will be more transparent.”

For example, Valderrama said, the council was told that data on peak traffic from both the a.m. and p.m. hours were being collected for reference, but in reality only the afternoon traffic was being measured. That is something the council will address to make sure both the morning and afternoon data is being collected.

There will be a public hearing on the moratorium within 60 days and the council must renew the action if they are not finished with revising the traffic plans within the six month time frame.

Valderrama also said that the moratorium may be set for a six month period, but if the council completes its work before then they will be able to end the moratorium.

“We do not have to leave it the full six months, Councilmember [Tom] Hornish raised that point, he hoped the pause will not last six months,” he said. “In the case of traffic, the developer that is looking at the Town Center will be working positively with the city, working on east-west streets.”

There are exceptions to the moratorium, including projects that are already under construction or have development applications filed with the city.

In a news release, the city stated that with two years worth of projects in the pipeline, citizens may not see the effects of the moratorium right away. Other exemptions include emergency repairs or construction by the city, permits for publicly-funded facilities like schools and permits for developments wholly comprised of affordable housing units.