Kirkland Views has become a participating business in the Kirkland Green Business program. Kirkland Green Business incentive program has been created in partnership between the City of Kirkland, the Kirkland Chamber of Commerce, ...

  Dear Mr. Butcher: Here is the testimony I presented last night to the Kirkland City Council regarding the Development regarding the South Kirkland P&R. Hopefully you can share it with your readership. Sincerely, Shawn Etchevers   A stealthy Kirkland Planning Commission’s project to construct ...

The Downtown Kirkland Commercial Property Owners are extremely concerned about the potential changes the City is considering making to the downtown zoning code. For example, the change to increase the width of the sidewalks from 10' to 13' (12' minimum) will, in effect, substantially reduce the building envelope for ...

UPDATE: The slideshow presented at the Nov. 18th Public Hearing on the 2009-2010 Budget is available in PDF format. Download it here.   The City of Kirkland is facing extremely difficult budget choices ahead. Kirkland is in a ...

Dear Editor: The council is about to adopt a budget that includes higher fees and taxes to make up for their inability to balance the budget. [Editor's note: State law requires the City Council to balance its budget]  Not a ...

Proposition 1 targets voter desires while asking us to ignore our crumbling infrastructure needs Remember way back, when... I think it was last year... everyone was screaming about how the ...

  Dear Editor: For 22 years, the council has always proclaimed their budgets were very conservative.  Thanks to this budget session, we now know that wasn’t true.  It was all a lie.  There was money to be spent and lots of it, far ...

Microsoft dumps support in favor of its own Connector shuttle bus service as light rail plan ignores the needs of the Eastside Next week the voters will be asked, ...

Dear Editor: Earlier this month I went to San Diego, courtesy of the Cascadia Center, where I visited the Public Transportation EXPO. There, I saw many state-of-the-art diesel and hybrid (single ...

Dear Editor: What happened at the Planning Commission’s October 9th meeting was clearly the result of staff’s overzealous approach to adopting more regulations than what is necessary to comply with the new Shoreline Master Program “guidelines.”  ...

While community is primarily about people, it’s also interesting to look at how buildings can contribute to community. Can new buildings make an already great community even more solid by providing resources to the city, places where people can connect, and improved quality of life and environment? For certain.

In the 1960s, our city leaders envisioned Kirkland with open space and lakefront parks that would be gathering places for our community. Peter Kirk Park was founded with a HUD grant and later a library and community centers were added. It’s not only a gathering place, it was ...

 Debra Sinick, an author for this blog and owner of the Kirkland Highlands Real Estate Buzz and The Eastside Real Estate Buzz has done a fantastic job of summarizing her impressions of some of the events that ...

Traffic analysis can be a complex issue. Touchstone understands that many Kirkland residents are deeply concerned about the potential traffic impacts of the Parkplace redevelopment. While a project of this scale can cause some people to be alarmed, there is a straightforward methodology to measure traffic impacts that is applied ...

Imagine a Downtown Kirkland so gridlocked on weekday afternoons, that you will avoid shopping or driving through downtown to get to I-405. How will this affect your current lifestyle and quality of life? From the Draft Environmental Impact Study (DEIS), we know that approximately 5,800 cars (office employees, office visitors, ...

The proposal by Touchstone Corporation to redevelop Parkplace provides for grossly inadequate parking. If approved as proposed, the parking shortfall will deliver a lasting, negative impact to the residents and businesses around downtown...

Throughout the public-review process of Touchstone’s proposed redevelopment of Kirkland Parkplace, parking has been one of the primary topics of discussion among local residents, business people and other community stakeholders...

  Yesterday, an effort was made to plant a news release on these pages by an anonymous author attempting to legitimize his/her comments by using a false name, false telephone number and a false email address. The ...

I may have disagreements with the course we have taken to date, but I share the goal of the entire Council going forward: remove ambiguity from the development process, thus preventing the insanity of the past year from ever happening again...

ow would you feel if you threw a party and nobody came? The city sent every household the “Special Budget Edition of the Kirkland City Update” to inform citizens of the serious $13M to $17M budget shortfall (about 12%) and to get feed back from citizens and commercial...