The recent King County buyout of the Riverbend Trailer Park has a lot of consequence for people who are not always considered when these things occur. In addition to the longtime local residents who spoke out against the plan to displace them all over a three-year period, there are scores of young children there who can’t speak for themselves.

These are the children of low-income families there – many of them Latino – who will have very little chance to find new homes in such healthy circumstances. Too many will end up in high-density, low-income projects. There they will be exposed in all likelihood to negative factors, such as gangs and the danger of increased vehicular traffic.

The county posits this is all necessary to protect these innocents from flooding in the nearby Cedar River. The irony is that King County has and continues to pour millions of dollars into failing river-restoration projects there that were touted as flood-reduction means.

The failure of that Cedar Rapids Project has caused great harm, including damage to bridges in downtown Renton in recent years, and the hard fact of the matter is that this quiet little buyout is an effort to conceal not only past failure there, but clear failure in the offing.

The families in the Riverbend Park deserve protection from the dislocation they are going to suffer and the means to that end is to move forward with a full review of the danger that King County is trying to obscure.

Reagan Dunn has called for an audit of this failure and he should be challenged to renew the request. In the meantime, a moratorium on any evictions should be put in place.

Healthy low-income housing is vanishing in the face of upscale development in this county and here the situation is even more pernicious. There will be no new productive private development there, only more near barren “parkland” that King County cannot even afford to maintain.

It is worth mentioning that King County plans to waste another $8-10 million buying homes just across the river which will lead to more tax losses as well as more wasteland.

The county can’t solve the river problems effectively and they should not be allowed the luxury of expensive coverup when the lives of children are at stake.

Chuck Pillon,
Renton