As work continues on the new North Creek High School, area neighbors are concerned about increasing traffic and the changing character of their once-rural neighborhood.

Charles Austin has lived on 43rd Avenue Southeast for years. His five-acre property is adjacent to the new high school.

“This situation out here is literally untenable right now,” he said.

During the past decade or so, Austin said, Snohomish County officials considered incorporating their neighborhood into the Urban Growth Area, increasing their property value.

In 2005, the decision was made not to include the neighborhood.

However, surrounding neighborhoods were included, and have since been developed. This decision made his five-acre property with a house roughly as valuable as much smaller housing plots only a block away.

“We’re basically the same as the people who live in the subdivisions that surround us, even though we have huge chunks of property,” he said.

In addition, Austin said the new high school will cause more traffic, a concern which many of his neighbors who live on the narrow street share.

Alaina Johnson has two children, including a 9-year-old daughter who uses a wheelchair.

There are sparse and inconsistent sidewalks on 43rd Avenue and surrounding streets. While Johnson’s son can walk to on the shoulder of Jewell Road to Fernwood Elementary School a couple blocks away, she and her daughter have to wait for the bus.

“I’m just really concerned about dealing with the speeding,” she said. “There’s been a few times we’ve almost been hit.”

Rachel Davis lives at the corner of 43rd Avenue Southeast and 196th Street Southeast with her younger brother. She’s also concerned with an increase in traffic the new North Creek High School could bring.

“It’s going to be dangerous,” she said.

Northshore School District spokeswoman Leanna Albrecht said the site for the new high school was chosen based on the rapidly expanding population in the northern end of their district.

“Hundreds and hundreds of homes are being constructed,” she said.

Snohomish County Planner Clay White agreed, and said his department is anticipating around 230,000 people moving to the county during the next 20 years.

This presents problems keeping pace with infrastructure maintenance and improvements.

“There’s a lot of challenges with growth,” he said.

Every eight years, the county updates its comprehensive growth plan based on population data and growth projections. A new comprehensive plan update for the 2035 plan was finalized this year. It did not include an expansion of urban growth areas near the new school.

While Austin would like to see improvements, such as more consistent sidewalks, speed enforcement and efforts made to keep 43rd Avenue from being used as an access road for the new North Creek High School, he’s also concerned with the direction the surrounding area is headed.

“They’ve taken an urban landscape and plucked it down right next to farmers and ranchers,” he said.

In his mind, the county government is unresponsive to resident’s concerns.

Austin said it’s gotten so bad, he’s started calling their neighborhood ‘Little Chechnya,’ drawing a comparison between their fight with county officials to the Russian invasion of Chechnya in the mid-1990s, where one of the war’s justifications was to save Chechnya from itself.

And dramatic action from the neighborhood may be coming soon by way of protests and demonstrations.

“Our neighborhood is no longer just going to meetings and stuff, we’re going to start doing civil disobedience,” Austin said.

North Creek High School was designed to have various parking lots on its property, each with their own access roads designed to disperse traffic without over-burdening any specific neighborhood.

The student lot accesses onto 188th Street Southeast, backroads lead to 188th Street, which was recently connected 43rd Avenue Southeast. Austin feels this could attract high school traffic along 43rd Avenue.

Talks with Northshore and Snohomish County officials have done little to ease his mind.

“We live in a war zone. Our thing here is just totally screwed,” he said. “Our concerns are literally no one’s concerns.”

The North Creek High School is on schedule to open during the 2017-2018 school year.