As 2014 comes to an end, the Renton Reporter staff is taking a look back at some of the stories that most affected our readers this year.
From the sale of major local business assets to the opening of a new playground to the final word on the UW strategic alliance and the death of a Renton City Council member, this past year provided us with a lot of news and a lot of memories.
Here are some more of the stories that we followed this year:
Tiffany Park plans causes a stir
One issue that caught the attention of a Renton community was plans to develop 21.6 acres of land into 96 single-family lots in the Tiffany Park area of the city.
The Renton School District owns the previously undeveloped parcel of land near Tiffany Park Elementary School and had determined earlier that the land would be unsuitable for a new school.
Residents in the area cried foul when the district decided to sell it because they use the area for walking, birding and other recreational purposes. The Tiffany Park Woods Advocacy Group (TPWAG) was formed to speak out for the community as they worked to convince the developer, Henly USA, and the school district to change their plans.
The group tried unsuccessfully to get access to the woods to get environmental specialist to survey the area in question. Their pursuit was to try and get the land deemed significant enough to cause the City of Renton and a King County hearing examiner to rethink allowing the development to go forward.
TPWAG appealed the City of Renton’s determination of non-significance, mitigated. Final briefs are being filed at the end of December and after that the hearing examiner has ten days to decide the case. A decision could be issued in the first couple of weeks of January.
The alliance is legal
More than three years after it began, the strategic alliance between Valley Medical Center and UW Medicine withstood its final legal challenge in the fall. The Washington Supreme Court decided not to review an appeals-court ruling the alliance was valid.
The commission of Public Hospital District No. 1, which owns the medical center, had claimed in a lawsuit the alliance put oversight of the publicly owned medical center in the hands of an unelected board. Attorneys for the alliance argued the five elected hospital district commissioners are responsible for the public side of the medical center, such as levying taxes.
The alliance, which began in July 2011, is designed to improve quality and safety of care, to control and reduce costs, and to improve access to care for citizens of South King County.
