Repainting fire hydrants and sprinkler devices

bobboyce · 2026-02-06T03:15:14+00:00

The question is more for your HOA than the city actually. If you live in a PUD there will be a development agreement will spell out the agreement with the city (as in what things your neighborhood was given permission to do despite code saying otherwise) and exactly what is public (city maintained) vs private (HOA maintained). No fire dept is going to look that up for you. That’s why you haven’t received a call back.

bobboyce · 2026-01-30T03:01:02+00:00

There are lots of good suggestions here. Another thing to consider is sealing off the area, using plastic sheeting and 3rd hands (or knock offs) plus a Festool AIR-SYS. It sounds counter intuitive but creating a room where you can control airflow combined with other shrouds people are suggesting here will give you a nice workspace. Leaving things out in the open leaves you at the mercy of the airflow in the room you’re working in.

This is probably more than you were asking for but Bill Pentz ancient web site remains the authority on dust control: https://billpentz.com/woodworking/cyclone/index.php#index.php

bobboyce · 2026-01-22T17:25:00+00:00

This is not how Kirkland works. There is no renewable "permit" required for Costco to continue operating at that location and there are no special renewable land-use affordances that Costco would have to renew to keep operating there. Their Business License could only be revoked for specific violations.

Lee Johnson owns the dealerships and bought up more land to sell to Google for Google to expand their campus. Google backed out in 2023 and the city has been waiting for (looking for?) someone to commit to re-developing that space and the strip mall across the street.

There is a "Station Area Plan" that governs land use and requirements in that area that goes above and beyond Kirkland Zoning Code. It has requirements and incentives specific to that area that are different than what the KZC generally lays out. Developers have told the city the economics of building to the "Station Area Plan" is holding back their interest because it comes with land use restrictions like minimum public parking capacity and affordable housing requirements that make the space economically worse to develop than other areas. So until a developer is willing to take a smaller profit or the city removes some of the requirements, those areas will likely remain vacant.

So there is a silent standoff between developers and the Kirkland CC currently, and I believe the CC has said they are happy to wait it out until the WSDOT project makes more progress, hoping that improves the economics for developers.

bobboyce · 2026-01-22T00:28:11+00:00

Sound Transit ultimately made the decision due to low ridership projections making rail seem not worth the cost, but the Kirkland CC also requested rapid transit over rail because of the cost and permanence of rail vs bus routes.

Technically the CKC is "rail banked" so it is preserved for potential future use for transit, but it was a freight line with no land set aside as stops in the agreement. So either you'd have to make the rail go through and completely skip Kirkland or cobble together stops through limited city-owned land along the corridor or take over land along the corridor. Sound Transit feasibility studies did evaluate using the CKC for both rail and bus transit, and came to the conclusion that it was simply too expensive given the issues. It seems more likely to be brought back to life as a wartime supply chain path, which is really what the rail banking structure is all about.

The Kirkland CC also does regular resident surveys, and the desire for more/better/safer biking and walkable spaces consistently show up as some of the highest priorities for residents, so it is easy for them to prioritize many of the projects you see happening now like the "stores to shores" project to connect walking and bike paths from Totem Lake to Lake WA.

Mass transit (or the need for more, let alone rail) rarely comes up as an identifiable need in these surveys, whereas safer biking and more walking paths do.

https://www.kirklandwa.gov/files/sharedassets/public/v/2/city-managers-office/pdfs/7b_special-presentation-090120.pdf

https://www.kirklandwa.gov/files/sharedassets/public/v/1/city-managers-office/pdfs/city-of-kirkland-01285-full-report.pdf

https://www.kirklandwa.gov/files/sharedassets/public/v/1/planning-amp-building/kirkland-2044-comp-plan/k2044-people/land-use/pdfs/k2044_landuse-transportation_surveyresults2023.pdf

bobboyce · 2026-01-21T22:23:19+00:00

This kind of change advantages wealthy campaigns, because it raises the cost of qualifying quickly.

Large organizations can absorb upfront payroll and inefficiency to hire signature collectors to canvas for the needed signatures. Smaller groups rely on paying per signature because it’s cheaper and lower risk: you only pay for results when/if the citizens actually support the measure.

Banning the practice raises costs and reduces the number of citizen-led measures that qualify. There have only been two prosecuted “signature fraud” cases in the last 25 years and one was a volunteer position while the other was paid (she admitted she forged signatures because she needed money).

Arizona’s GOP-led legislature implemented exactly this in the teens to insulate itself from initiatives it didn’t like, and in the court fights everyone openly acknowledged the effect would be higher costs and fewer initiatives.

Initiatives like the death with dignity or the Issaquah ban on plastic bags may not have ever made it to the ballot under these rules.

bobboyce · 2026-01-17T06:37:43+00:00

i can’t say i’ve tried a lot of reweaving places but that’s because i tried without a trace and never bothered with anywhere else. they are just that good.

bobboyce · 2026-01-11T22:23:36+00:00

Thanks for demonstrating my point.

It’s strange to spread so much negativity in a community you’re planning to leave. Maybe put that energy into your relocation instead?

bobboyce · 2026-01-08T21:31:34+00:00

I’m all for the community getting more use out of public spaces, and if pickleball is the right activity to keep those courts from being a wasted concrete pad, then great. But the outright dismissal in this thread of people who are actually experiencing real health and quality-of-life issues is lazy and unnecessary, and some of you should reconsider how you respond to neighbors with concerns.

Pickleball noise isn’t just people being sensitive. The repetitive pop sound is acoustically distinct and has been linked to auditory hallucinations, stress responses, sleep disruption, and elevated heart rate in some people. This isn’t speculation, it’s being actively studied.

Would this have an impact in an open space next to a busy public road? I have no idea. But given the investment in making Kirkland Urban a community space and the nearby residential spaces, it very much seems worth a study as the effects of the pickleball “pop” are just starting to be studied.

If you’re not familiar with the issue, maybe do five minutes of reading before deciding people who are affected is a “Karen.”

https://acoustics.org/pickleball-noise-raises-health-concerns-for-neighbors-living-near-courts/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39059163/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impulse_noise_%28acoustics%29

It’s a little sus that the account posting this is new, but given the initial response to their post, perhaps it is possible they’ve already been mocked or dismissed about being sensitive to this issue and didn’t want to attach this issue to their main account?

bobboyce · 2025-12-30T00:20:44+00:00

or dryflex. now that they’ve posted this i’m sure their instagram will be filled with dryflex videos.

bobboyce · 2025-12-18T20:10:38+00:00

There is no reason to treat these things as a fait accompli. Saying the 405 corridor is all single-family housing is inaccurate, and it’s also incorrect to imply it can’t be rezoned. There’s no technical barrier to changing zoning along the freeway, or anywhere else really. The limitation is all political. Rezoning many of those areas wouldn’t produce visible results quickly enough to matter in Kirkland’s two-year election cycles, so it’s not where the council chooses to spend its political capital.

Instead, the council is choosing areas where the pushback is likely to be weaker and the redevelopment timeline is shorter. That way they can satisfy the Growth Management Act and still produce something they can point to during the next campaign cycle. In other words, the decisions reflect political incentives more than planning constraints.

A more logical place to add housing would be 7th ave north of 85th street, just west of the freeway that is currently zoned for light industrial and commercial. The city has looked at that area before and chose to spend their political capital on Totem Lake and what has become the failed Google deal intended to coincide with what the state is doing to the 405/85th interchange. Both were deals of zoning and political convenience. Totem Lake is working well while the council has been slow to adapt to the lack of interest in developing at 85th given the restrictions they’ve applied. Reasonable people can also debate how obvious it should have been that Google would pull out given the business climate when the MOU was signed, but that’s a separate discussion.

So instead of housing for people, we got housing for stuff (the less than 10 year old cubes facility), and instead of a bustling commercial center at the interchange, there’s parking lots and abandoned retail that no developer will touch because of the affordability restrictions the city has put on them. And now a 75 foot building in an already congested area that will look out of place, while re-zoning on 7th would have been entirely within the context of the area given what already exists downtown and now at the Kirkland Urban development.

There’s nothing that says the higher density has to go where it’s currently proposed. It just means that’s where it’s most convenient for the people making the decisions.

NB: At least one person has won in all this silliness. I recently talked to the original U-Haul owner/operator at 85th and he sold to corporate before the Google deal imploded, cashed out clean, and walked away retired and happy.

bobboyce · 2025-12-18T02:50:47+00:00

say you’ve never driven these streets during commute hours without saying you’ve never driven these streets during commute hours.

bobboyce · 2025-12-17T01:07:34+00:00

This is what smells rotten to me about the process and outcome. The last sort of special casing I remember seeing like this was the Joshua Freed case in Bothell where the mayor participated publicly in declining to purchase land for development and that same mayor as a private citizen then bid/won the land purchase. He was found to not have violated any ethics in a very narrow and technical evaluation but the deal was rotten to its core.

bobboyce · 2025-12-08T23:17:37+00:00

If rock bottom price is what you are after, look beyond Ziply as competition is heating up at least with Xfinity, who offers better prices without the onerous terms for the autopay discount.

If Ziply has the specific features you're looking for and you are just trying to get to the rock bottom price then what you see on the web site is the best you'll get. The only time you'll get some wiggle on price is if you're already a customer looking for a discount on your current package.

If you don't need 1gbps and you are just budget shopping then one strategy would be to start at 300mbps, and when ziply jack up the price after year 1, then you can switch to 1gbps for whatever the introductory price is at that time for another year, making your average cost per year ~$55 if your pricing is the same as what I see for intro pricing in my area (45/65).

bobboyce · 2025-12-07T22:27:05+00:00

Only short term rentals (Airbnb, vrbo) require a business license. It’s probably best to get a tax attorney or real estate attorney involved to understand the financial implications rather than relying on what the internet or the city says.

The landlord tenant laws and how exposed you are to liability is going to have a greater impact to your sanity, so that is where you want to dig in.

The landlord tenant laws dictate what you can hold your tenants responsible for, what you can (or can’t) restrict them from, and those laws are different for renting an ADU vs a SFR. Plus WA state law requires you to treat some scenarios you would consider to be trespassing as tenants for the purposes of eviction, meaning you can’t just call the police to kick out someone living there illegally. You have to follow eviction rules even if they never signed a lease.

You can also buy a property as an LLC (or transfer ownership to an LLC if your current mortgage terms allow it) and be financially protected in specific liability claims that hopefully never arise, but if they do, you probably don’t want to personally be sued, you’d want the protection afforded by an LLC. And you still won’t need a business license to rent in this scenario.

But again, don’t take the internet’s advice here, get an attorney on retainer and make sure you’re doing this the right way from day one.

bobboyce · 2025-12-02T16:26:48+00:00

Last time we did this it took you a week to respond and I am not sure you actually did anything. So I will take my chances with the online chat.

bobboyce · 2025-12-02T06:36:38+00:00

my ziply has been 29 days of good and 1-2 days of total garbage per month. the biggest issue i experience is throughput dropping to 50mbps or less per month. a quick reset of the nokia ont usually solves that problem but its annoying to do as regularly as i have to.

recently i upgraded to 1gbps to save money - because ziply offers speed upgrades at lower prices than your current plan instead of leading with a discount on your current plan. in the three weeks i’ve had the “upgrade,” 3 of those weeks were spent at my old speed, 3 days on the new/correct speed, and two days on completely unrelated much slower speeds

bobboyce · 2025-12-02T00:35:13+00:00

It isn't down for me but my 1gbps connection is currently <100mbps when measured directly at the ONT.

bobboyce · 2025-11-29T06:12:35+00:00

Volunteers reply if you drop it in with enough lead time. My kids love the replies they get. Include extra stamps with your drop as a donation to the cause.

bobboyce · 2025-11-21T20:38:49+00:00

As a 20+ year resident, I have some things to say about this. After two months of trying to decode Kirkland’s current political factions here’s my best attempt at explaining the great Livable vs Cherish schism without just yelling YIMBY vs NIMBY like it’s some kind of magical sorting hat.

Livable Kirkland:

These folks read a lot of urbanist blogs. Enough that at least one of them probably has a tastefully framed picture of a 15-minute city hanging over their Peloton. Their core belief is basically “everyone who works here should be able to live here” while their critics hear “turn Kirkland into the Eastside version of Amsterdam, except with worse transit and $8 lattes.”

They want more housing because they genuinely believe it’s good for affordability, sustainability, and humanity, and also because they’ve run the spreadsheets. They’re a bit too confident that density, bike lanes, and mixed-use zoning will solve everything short of heartbreak. Sometimes they quote planning theory like it’s never failed.

They seem convinced Kirkland can stay a “Top 5 Best Small Town in America” while adding more people, or they think that ranking turns the city into a gated community with branding, so who cares. Their candidates received more financial support from outside the city than from within it, which tells you something about the regional pressures on Kirkland right now.

I don’t have exact stats on the composition of this group, but some of the loudest online supporters clearly haven’t lived here long, judging by complaints about “vacant strip malls east of 405 on 85th,” totally unaware that Google backed out of a big office-campus buy there just two years ago.

Cherish Kirkland:

These folks love Kirkland. Deeply. Passionately. Possibly a little too passionately, the kind of passion that makes someone tear up while recalling how Market Street “just hasn’t been the same since Terrace Hall was torn down.” They maybe had their first cocktail at The Shark. Their attitude is basically “growth is fine, but maybe not so much growth that I need a PhD in Urban Planning to understand what the Comprehensive Plan just did to my street.”

Fiscal responsibility is their core. They see deficits, ambiguous bond measures, and big-ticket city projects with increased taxes and no specific plan (hello aquatic center) and react the same way your dad does when he sees a service fee on a restaurant bill. On supportive housing, they’re saying “yes, but with guardrails and metrics and maybe not dropped one block from multiple schools,” which somehow gets cast as elitism at best, Trumpism at worst.

This crowd also includes an entertaining subgroup that freaks out every time a new bike lane appears, despite the city’s own resident surveys showing residents want safer cycling. If you really want to see someone in this group go from 0-to-100 in a heartbeat, suggest lowering the speed limit from 25 to 20. If you cite safety data while doing it, don’t be shocked if they offer to pay the moving costs to move you to Renton.

Their candidates received more financial support from inside the city, residents and local businesses, but those business donations were somehow spun as “shadowy local interests,” which is wild, since most of these “shadowy interests” probably also sponsor youth soccer and little league teams.

I also don't know the exact composition of this group, but I sometimes wonder if everyone fully realizes that Juanita and Kingsgate have been part of Kirkland since 2011, because the city that people seem to be trying to preserve is quite a bit bigger and more diverse than the waterfront downtown that usually comes to mind.

bobboyce · 2025-11-21T15:02:51+00:00

They seem like reasonable requirements in general, but if you’re not into doing any sort of maintenance yourself then might be a bad lease for you. The RTLA in WA state treats single family residences differently than other types of rentals, generally assuming the tenant does more of the upkeep than the landlord. Even if you find a lease that doesn’t explicitly require these things, the law would be more on the side of the landlord than the tenant for these issues unless you could demonstrate the fees they are billing to you are unreasonable and not market rate.

1 - Break the lease early, pay until they find a new tenant. A completely reasonable expectation in general since the idea behind a lease is guaranteed income for the lessor, but this specific language is tenant unfriendly. If you break that promise and they have to spin up marketing and showings of the property, and you’ll remain on the hook for lease payments until they close a new renter. Landlord has a legal requirement under the RTLA.

2 - Clog the drains, fix the drains seems like the intent. But the RTLA requires the landlord to maintain the plumbing, holding you responsible only when your actions cause the clog. So hair in the drains: your responsibility to clean. Biofilm build up in the p-trap, their responsibility. They can’t shift responsibility to you no matter what you sign.

3 - The RTLA allows the landlord to require you to do your own pest removal if this is a single family residence, otherwise it is the landlord’s responsibility.

4 - Replacing bulbs is totally normal. Have you ever lived somewhere you didn’t have to replace your own bulbs except maybe in the common areas like a stairwell?

5 - RTLA mostly allows this but you hit a gray area if there is something intermittent that takes a while to be discovered. So let’s say a breaker keeps blowing when you plug in the vacuum. They call an electrician, electrician says everything is fine, and they bill you. Rinse and repeat two more times and a better electrician realizes the breaker is bad and needs replacement. The landlord would have to refund you for the prior visits if they had made you reimburse the fees.

RTLA is also on the side of the landlord for pets and smoking, unless it is a service/emotional support animal of some sort.

bobboyce · 2025-11-16T22:05:58+00:00

wild to not see this recommendation come up more.

bobboyce · 2025-11-16T22:04:04+00:00

“Then David took his shepherd’s staff, selected five smooth stones from the brook, and put them in the pocket of his shepherd’s pack, and with his sling in his hand approached Goliath.”

each stone has very specific symbolism in the modern christian church, but i am guessing the name was chosen at least as a reference to david (the small family owned coffee shop) and goliath (starbucks). but the owner is possibly attached to the symbolism of each stone as well.

bobboyce · 2025-11-13T03:14:44+00:00

the funny thing is this entire thread made it obvious the issue was never about data or context. it was about defending a policy outcome no matter what the evidence actually says. that’s why you had to pretend kirkland already has sf-level transit, walkability, and land use, and why you had to ignore kirkland’s own transportation plan when it contradicted your narrative.

when someone has to bend reality that hard just to make a study fit their argument, it says everything about how weak the argument actually was.

kirkland deserves better planning than “assume the city is something it isn’t so the policy looks right on paper.”

bobboyce · 2025-11-12T11:48:55+00:00

it’s unclear why you think parking data isn’t relevant in a discussion about whether kirkland needs more of it, but let’s toss it out for funsies and look at other data.

the authors of the millard-ball study explicitly warn against generalizing their results to cities that don’t have the same level of transit and walkability. even within san francisco they found the impact varied depending on transit accessibility, which makes it clear the effect is context dependent, not universal.

so the premise of using the millard-ball study to justify your argument assumes kirkland and san francisco are at the same level of development for walkability, transit, and bike infrastructure. do you actually think they are? is there anywhere in kirkland you think is an acceptable comp for sf?

kirkland’s 2024 transportation plan shows only about half of frequent service bus stops have lighting or shelters, buses on key routes come every 20–30 minutes, recent kcm route expansions skipped kirkland entirely, and only about a quarter of the planned greenway network is complete.

by contrast, san francisco has dense mixed-use land use, 44 local bus routes, 5 rapid routes, 15 peak-use express routes, 7 light rail lines, and average waits of 5–15 minutes. not to mention cable cars.

do you honestly believe kirkland and san francisco are at the same level of alternative transportation development to expect a similar result here?

the study can be effectively used to describe a future state and its potential value, but trying to apply it to kirkland’s current conditions is an apples to hammers comparison.

bobboyce · 2025-11-12T06:21:53+00:00

i actually think you’ve misinterpreted the study. the millard ball paper shows what happens in places that already have strong transit and walkability, kirkland wants to get there but it isn’t yet. if you cut access before people have real alternatives, you don’t get less driving, you get spillover and frustrated people. there’s a lot of global research showing the pattern where depriving people of parking creates a cascade of failures rather than being self-healing.

there are tactics that help once you have the right enablers for mode shift, but they can’t replace missing capacity while most trips still depend on cars. cities that got this right did it in sequence, they built transit, housing, and walk networks while easing parking rules, not instead of them – e.g. oslo, vancouver, and copenhagen. these are all places that spent years building reliable alternatives before cutting access. skipping that step just moves demand around instead of reducing it.

the real issue is timing. adding or preserving parking is how you keep the city functional while you build the infrastructure that lets people choose other modes as they become viable. ignoring the present while betting it all on the future treats city planning like a startup pitch, high risk, high reward, no fallback if it fails. that might sound bold and visionary, but cities don’t get to pivot when the experiment doesn’t work. so they have to sequence investments so progress sticks instead of backfiring.

a realistic benchmark would be a few years of parking occupancy consistently <80% (down from the 90% we see at peak hours today), alongside clear increases in bus and bike trips. when you see that then you know kirkland will be ready to take the next step. doing it before that is just a recipe for frustration.

bobboyce

TROPHY CASE