Private use of public land: Who's watching the waterfront?

Ah, Laurelhurst. Land of Lexuses and leaf blowers, landscapers, and big fights over small places. Consider the saga of Waterway 1, the latest long battle over neighbors encroaching on public waterfront.

Betwixt and between mansions, with no signage to indicate its public ownership, Waterway 1, despite its venerable, more than 100-year history, has suffered a long spate of indignity.

Just a quarter of an acre or so in size, fights over this tiny bit of land, intended to provide public access to Lake Washington, have so far generated a police report over an alleged wrongful hedge chopping, engagement of at least one lawyer to take on the encroachers, and uncounted staff time invested by the city and state to sort out the mess.

All this over the "The Vacant Lot," as the property at 43rd Avenue Northeast and Northeast 35th Street is known in the neighborhood.

Intended as a place to launch a kayak or enjoy the view, the appeal of the waterway — a grassy swale leading down to the lake — has been diminished by a dock, fences, landscaping, a towering hedge, and other encroachments into the public space by adjacent landowners over the years.

Enter the state Department of Natural Resources (DNR), with its new sheriff in town: Commissioner Peter Goldmark, who inherited the encroachments on the waterway. There has been progress: After more than a year of negotiations, the landowner on the south side of the waterway now is paying $10,000 to the state for the dock built on its tidelands, on top of more than $2,400 they already were paying the city for a permit.

But on the north side, Doug Armintrout and Elizabeth Gates Armintrout — sister of Bill Gates, from whom they bought the property in 1994 — as of last Friday were behind in paying the city's $4,129 annual fee to keep a towering hedge that occupies about 2,400 square feet of the public's property, according to Brian de Place, manager of right of way for the city.

The city has assigned the bill, unpaid in 2008, 2009 and 2010, to a collections agency, de Place said. The couple also this week declined to sign a $20,000-a-year lease with the DNR, which owns the land, after more than a year of negotiation to work out a land swap for the property fell through.

A corner of his deck, the hedge, a dogwood tree and other plantings are all in the public's side of the property line, Armintrout said.

"My wife and I decided that either owning or renting the encroachment isn't feasible, so we are doing whatever they require of us, as far as vacating the encroachment," Armintrout said this week. "If they ask us to cut it, you bet," he said of the hedge.

Armintrout said neither he nor Bill Gates had planted the hedge, and that he didn't know about the encroachment when he and his wife moved to the property. "I hope it doesn't come through that we were trying to grab any land," said Armintrout, a real-estate investor and homebuilder. "It is something we stumbled into, and when the DNR approached us we explored every option, and now we have decided the best course of action is to vacate the encroachment."

'It is the principle'

Seattle, a city graced by its setting between fresh and saltwater, has long been traversed by water, since the first peoples visited, traded and traveled by canoe. When the newcomers platted Seattle, the streets ran clear to the water, and waterways were set aside as part of the public's domain, to provide places where anyone can launch a small boat, fish and enjoy the water.

The community of Laurelhurst was platted in a fan shape around the waterway in 1906. In 1909, steamships provided service between Madison Park, a boat launch for the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exhibition, and Waterway 1, according to a history written by Judith Thornton, a professor of economics at the University of Washington, and a neighbor who has lived near the waterway for some 40 years. She notes the neighborhood's first one-room schoolhouse was built by the waterway, where families could deliver and collect their children by boat.

The saga of Waterway 1 is hardly unique. Be they parks, shoreline street ends or waterways, public agencies time and again have been forced to defend the public commons from hot tubs, fences, decks, landscaping and more.

"It is the principle of the thing," said Dewey Potter, spokeswoman for the city parks department. "Many park lovers feel very passionate about it, and many private-property owners feel entitled to whatever they can take."

It took a whistle-blower and a front-page story in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in 1995 to remind the city parks department it owned a pocket park in Laurelhurst just down the street from the waterway. The city had acquired Belvoir Place in 1958 but never did anything with it. Eventually, "it just got forgotten," Potter said in a recent interview.

Neighbors over time put in irrigation systems, fences and landscaping and mowed the grass. One neighbor's deck poked into the park.

After the publicity, the Parks Department turned the area back into a park. Today, a sign at the curb invites use of public-shore access to launch nonmotorized craft or just enjoy the park's public dock, the grassy park and view of Lake Washington.

The city Department of Transportation has similarly been on a campaign to open up its shoreline street ends and return them to public use. Eventually, the city would like all 149 to be pocket parks, bringing breathing space and enjoyment of Puget Sound to everyone, de Place said.

Since 1999, the city has not allowed any new private uses of street ends, and it has required permits from 35 encroachers, grandfathered in their use when the city adopted a street-end ordinance in 1999. The city receives about $150,000 a year in fees from the permits.

Next steps

The DNR similarly is charged with maintaining dozens of waterways all over Lake Washington and Lake Union as public access to the water. Dealing with encroachments is par for the course. The agency will collect almost $200,000 in 2010 in lease payments from encroachers. But more cases remain unresolved.

As for Waterway 1, Aaron Toso, spokesman for DNR, said the agency will require the Armintrouts to remove the hedge and pay for the work.

"No decision has yet been made on the timing or what will fill the void, but the hedge is going," he wrote The Times in an e-mail.

Thornton, who is a member of Friends of Waterway 1, a community group opposed to the encroachments, said she's not celebrating just yet.

"It's a good start," agreed Patrick Williams, a Seattle attorney hired by Friends of Waterway 1. But, he added, as long as the hedge is still there, the encroachment continues.

"It would be a double kick in the stomach if the hedge stays, and the public doesn't even get paid for it."

Lynda V. Mapes: 206-464-2736 or lmapes@seattletimes.com