Wenatchee neighbors urge action on Skyline Drive speeding concerns

WENATCHEE — Two Skyline Drive neighbors told the Wenatchee City Council on Wednesday that speeding on the hill has gone on long enough, and that the city has the tools — and even a way to pay for them — to slow cars down.

First up was Tracy Gelb, who lives on Skyline and said he’s watched drivers blow past the speed-monitoring readerboard in front of his house for the five years he’s lived there.

“I’m here out of a concern for safety on Skyline Drive,” Gelb said. “There’s people that walk … they walk in the morning, they walk in the evening, when it’s dark, even this time of year. So speed is really a hazard.” He said “pretty much everybody speeds,” but it’s the people doing “40 miles an hour plus” on the narrow street that worry him.

A few houses up, on the same (odd-numbered) side of Skyline, Suzanne Hartman backed him up — and she brought receipts and even a petition full of signatures, which she handed out copies of for all the councilmembers. Those signatures came from nearly every resident on Skyline Drive from Red Apple all the way to Number Two Canyon.

Hartman thanked the city for putting gates on the Skyline Drive overlook, saying “they’ve worked” and that bad behavior there is “cutting down.” But on the speeding question, she said the neighborhood has been getting brushed off.

She reminded council she’d invited them to her house in May to watch the speed display, that only Councilmember Cuevas called her back (despite it not even being his district), and that when the issue finally reached the city’s public safety committee on June 17, the speed data staff produced “was flawed, inaccurate, and simply useless.”

That’s because there was an anomaly in the data that showed 40% of the speeds recorded on the street as being under 15 miles per hour, something that was statistically impossible given the posted speed limit, meaning that there was an error in the data collection from the speed monitor, a fact that was acknowledged in ongoing emails Suzanne had with the city. But that flawed data, she said, was still used to recommend doing nothing except another study — a study neighbors were told would happen in September but “no study has occurred.”

“In nearly 10 years, no speeding tickets have been issued on Skyline or Red Apple Road,” Hartman told the council.

Then she pointed to the fix she wants: Automated photo enforcement for speeding.

“The state law allows you, the City Council, to pass legislation to require photo-enforcing cameras that will identify a car that is speeding and issue a ticket,” she said. “Other municipalities have used this successfully, and the revenue generated from those ticket issues is far in excess of [the cost of the equipment].”

In other words, Hartman argued, the system can pay for itself.

She also pushed back on something she said she’d heard from the police chief ahead of that June meeting — that “the neighbors seem to want a private road.”

“The neighbors on the petition I am submitting to you don’t want a private road,” she said. “We want the speed limit enforced. It is a matter of public safety.”

Hartman added a smaller, seasonal request: Now that it gets dark earlier, she said, the city should consider closing the overlook gates before 9:30 p.m.

Council didn’t take action Wednesday, but the testimony puts Skyline back on the radar — this time with a specific, revenue-backed ask.

Andrew Simpson: 509-433-7626 or andrew@ward.media