In response to the Kent Reporter’s story “City Council terminates Pine Tree Park sale” (April 8):<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
The Kent City Council just cost the taxpayers a little under a $1 million trying to pull a fast one on Kent residents by selling the park to a developer with no disclosure to the public, knowing full well that the underlying deed dictated it had to be kept as a park “in perpetuity” and could only be swapped for additional open space.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Bill Boyce, elected 2011, Kent City Council president, states (paraphrase) that the only mistake was not to engage with the public.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Dana Ralph, elected 2011, blames the staff, and Jim Berrios thinks King County misled them all.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
In an April 7 Seattle Times article, “Kent pays for trying to sell park”, staff columnist Danny Westneat throws back the curtain on this entire outrageous stunt that has cost us a million dollars.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Emails obtained by the Seattle Times show that as far back as 2013 “King County correctly advised Kent” about the deed. In another email, a King county attorney, fielding a question from Kent about selling the park, “wrote clearly that the park could only be traded for replacement park land.”<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
In another email, Kent wanted to “get the county to remove the deed covenants restricting use of the property.”<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
To say that Boyce and Ralph didn’t know about the status of that park land is a long, long stretch.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Councilmember Boyce, you’re fired. Kent residents cannot afford your leadership.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\u2013 Dale Brantner<\/strong><\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In response to the Kent Reporter’s story “City Council terminates Pine Tree Park sale” (April 8):<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":106,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-6247","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-letters"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6247"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/106"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6247"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6247\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6247"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6247"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6247"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=6247"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}