Sammamish says streets in Inglewood are private; council to seek prescriptive easement to continue city services

Sammamish City Manager Scott McCall told a packed community meeting that the city has concluded streets in the Inglewood neighborhood are legally private and plans to ask the City Council to assert a prescriptive easement so the city can continue to maintain and regulate those rights of way.

McCall said the issue surfaced during a late-2024 permit review and subsequent legal research, and that council has already adopted an interim action to keep city services in place. "The permanent solution is called a prescriptive easement," McCall said. "It allows the city to continue to serve and regulate the right of way." He added the city is drafting legislation and hopes to bring it to council by July but said timing could slip to ensure the work is correct.

Why it matters: If a court or statute recognizes the streets as private, the city lacks authority to regulate the right of way or spend public funds on private infrastructure without first establishing a legal basis. Officials said the prescriptive-easement route would recognize as public those streets the city has openly and continuously served for the statutory period (cited by staff as 10 years of continuous, uninterrupted public use), while leaving truly private roads that the city has not served unchanged.

City presentation and legal background City staff told residents they found no…