Question, What’s with All the Grass being Ripped out on Snoqualmie’s Swenson Drive?

It’s been going on for a week now and the neighbors are getting curious.

Stretching about 3/4 mile, from the start of SE Swenson Drive at Snoqualmie Parkway, and almost to the end of the Deer Park neighborhood in Snoqualmie, the grass parking strip looks like it got a bad haircut.

Adjacent the sidewalk and then bordering the street, all the sod has been ripped out, with grass remaining in the center. Workers began removing the grass with sod cutters last week, then rolling it up and loading piles and piles into trucks – then hauling it out of the neighborhood.

So what’s going on?

According to Snoqualmie Public Works Director, Dan Marcinko and Snoqualmie Ridge ROA Director, Amy Atchison, it’s part of the city’s “punch list.”  Essentially, the Snoqualmie Ridge Division II developer is required to provide quality work.  When the city finds things that aren’t up to those quality standards, they add them to a punch list; the list of things that need to be fixed in the neighborhoods that the developer built.

Amy Atchison explained that from what she knows, the punch list contains bringing the contents of the Swenson Drive parking strip (i.e. dirt and sod) up to the level of the sidewalk, returning the parking strip to an “even better than before” type standard.

Snoqualmie is not funding the work, nor is it city employees doing the work in Deer Park; rather workers hired by the Snoqualmie Ridge Division II developer.  Now that the sod is removed, it’s assumed more dirt and then new sod will be added next. And the “bad haircut” parking strip will return to normal, with the grass level sitting at, not below, sidewalk level.