The Sammamish city manager does not like to take credit for the accomplishments his career saw in the last 15 years.
“Building a city is not easy. It takes a lot of good residents, good elected officials, a good staff and an abundance of goodwill,” Ben Yazici said at his last Sammamish City Council meeting Feb. 2. “I have to tell you that we have plenty of those in this wonderful community.”
He doesn’t much like to talk about his personal life, either. But at the Feb. 2 meeting, he got a little choked up comparing the city’s growth to that of his youngest son, who was 3 years old when Yazici became the city manager in 2001.
“I miss that 3-year-old boy. I miss that small city of Sammamish,” he said. “On the other hand, I’m very proud and happy to see my son grow up. I feel the same way for our wonderful city here. I know, again, I’m biased, but I feel like they’re maturing very nicely. … It’s been a great honor,pleasure and privilege.”
After more than a decade as Sammamish’s city manager, Yazici retired from the position on Tuesday.
“It’s been a wonderful ride,” he told the Reporter last year after making the announcement to retire in April 2015.
Prior to 1999, the city was a rural place, caught in unincorporated King County between cities that couldn’t or didn’t want to incorporate the developing bedroom community into their own city limits.
“It was horrible. Development was rampant … but there was no infrastructure,” Yazici said. “It was highly congested and this was when our population was 30,000.”
Prior to incorporation, the county invested $1 million annually into the city’s infrastructure, Yazici said — which is stifling compared to the city’s $220.5 million 2015-2016 biennium budget.
The city’s roads and parks were neglected, taxes were high, land-use planning was questionable (at least the residents were not pleased) and traffic bottlenecked at the southern and northern tips of the plateau.
Current Mayor Don Gerend called this the “Pre-Yazici Era” during his farewell speech Feb. 2.
Come Aug. 31, 1999, though, with a population of more than 29,400 people, voters approved to incorporate with a 63 percent approval — and right off the bat, it inherited a $275 million deficit, Yazici said.
After incorporation, the city based its operations out of a rented space located in the Safeway shopping center. Yazici, first hired on as a public works director and finance director, became the city’s third city manager by 2001.
“It’s amazing how much work we got done under Ben’s leadership,” Gerend said.
Slowly, the city transformed, including improvements to 228th Avenue Southeast, 244th Avenue and Southeast 24th Northeast; developing sport fields, open spaces and parks; building the Sammamish City Hall in 2006 and nearly completing the Sammamish Community and Aquatic Center.
“Ben’s leadership and his ability to work with many stakeholders has turned us into a high-profile success story,” Gerend said.
Now, the city sports one of the most restrictive tree ordinances in the state, has a AAA bond rating and hasn’t raised the property tax rate (which is still lower than unincorporated King County’s property tax rate) for the last seven years. Yazici accredits this to the council’s “sharp decision making”and staff’s fiscal conservatism.
More than that, Yazici wanted to create a “sense of ‘place,’” he said.
Establishing community events such as the farmer’s market or Fourth on the Plateau and working toward the city’s town center, “those are the fabrics to building the community,” he said. “We’re in the business of building community.”
