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Ruling: Student housing project can proceed The five-story building will have 124 units, 75% of which must be rented to students at Everett Community College, which had objected to the development. By Lizz Giordano Herald Writer
EVERETT — A five-story student housing project on North Broadway can move forward, according to a recent ruling by a Snohomish County Superior Court judge. The judgment upheld a hearing examiner decision. Everett Community College filed the litigation against the city of Everett and Koz Development in October over the project. A proposal for the triangleshaped piece of land at 1020 N. Broadway, where Lilly’s Garden restaurant operated for many years, was approved by Everett’s planning department in June 2018. The college argued the building should not be considered student housing because the project had no connection to EvCC. It also didn’t offer services associated with college lodging, such as support services, supervision or planned activities, “which are considered
essential elements for safe and supportive college student housing,” according to court documents. The college said the developer was using the term “student housing” to reduce the required amount of parking, which EvCC has called inadequate. EvCC officials also worried the project will siphon residents from the college’s two dormitories. In court documents, EvCC said there was a small unmet student housing demand near the college. Other objections included the size of the building which the college says would “aesthetically impair the entrance to the college by inserting a bulky, view-obstructing, six-story structure.” The project has been scaled down over the past year. Updated plans call for a fivestory building with 124 units, and 62 parking spaces on the ground floor. Most of the furnished apartments, 104, will be studios, with the remaining 20 one-bedrooms.
Planning for a 124-unit student housing building near Everett Community College is under way.
The new plan eliminates retail space and reduces the height of the building. It also shrinks the apartment unit count by 16. The redesign was done as a compromise with EvCC, said Cathy Reines, a founder and owner of Koz. “The retail space was eliminated and the number of rooms reduced from 140 to 124 to condense the overall mass of the building as well as allow for the setback off of Broadway,” Reines said in an email.
Koz and EvCC have a history of working together. The college signed a long-term lease with Koz, which owns one of the college’s two dormitories, Mountain View. The college has a similar agreement with another company that built Cedar Hall. The city of Everett is requiring Koz to rent 75 percent of the units to EvCC students, said Julio Cortes, a spokesperson for Everett. And the developer also cannot lease to a student with a car unless a parking
KOZ DEVELOPMENT
stall is available. “Access to housing is a significant issue facing our region and the city sees this project as a positive addition along the North Broadway corridor,” Cortes said in an email. The college is considering appealing the ruling, said Katherine Schiffner, a spokesperson for EvCC, but no final decision has been made. Lizz Giordano: 425-374-4165; egiordano@heraldnet.com; Twitter: @lizzgior.
Out of prison ... $7.6M in the hole Christine Hendrickson, of Bothell, sold stolen software while she was employed at Microsoft. Now she has a lifelong fiscal sentence By Zachariah Bryan Herald Writer
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Christine Hendrickson owes $7 million in restitution for stealing and selling software from Microsoft while she worked as a group assistant at the tech giant in the early 2000s. She says she will never be able to pay it off.
addicted to methamphetamine and heroin, she celebrated seven years of sobriety in June. She’s found a passion, and a job as a writer. And she’s found a new hobby and meaning in fitness. Sometimes though, she said, she feels like she’s been set up to fail. “I just find it a little sad, that justice is like me being ridiculously poor,” she said. “If I could go back to prison right now for five years, even 10 years, and not have that debt, I would do it in a heartbeat.” Under the U.S. Mandatory Restitution Act of 1996, federal judges have little to no discretion when ordering restitution.
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According to the law, a person convicted of theft must either return the property or, failing that, pay the value of it at the time it was stolen. As of 2016, there was more than $110 billion in outstanding federal restitution payments, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office — much of that due to people being unable to pay. As a result, there is some skepticism about whether the restitution helps either victims seeking compensation, or convicts trying for rehabilitation. In a paper published in the California Law Review, attorney Matthew Dickman
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wondered if the pressure of paying impossibly high restitution leads convicts to commit new crimes. At least, he wrote, having an unpayable debt hinders their ability to reintegrate into society. He suggested that judges should have at least some flexibility in assigning payments. Nick Allen, an attorney with Columbia Legal Services in Seattle, has dedicated a lot of his work to the subject of fees and fines in Washington’s court systems, which have a similar approach to the federal system. He believes that courts should See IN THE HOLE, Page A4
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BOTHELL — Christine Hendrickson never knew the scale of her crime. As she flipped through old charging papers last week, she was shocked to see the numbers. In the early 2000s, she and three co-workers took tens of millions of dollars in software from Microsoft, where they were employed, then sold it to people across the country for their personal profit. Nearly 20 years later, Hendrickson still owes $7.4 million in restitution to a company now worth over a trillion dollars, for stealing software that’s long outdated. Now in her late 40s, she said she’ll never pay it off, barring incredible circumstances. It’s effectively a lifelong sentence. The stress seeps into her daily life. She avoids checking the mail, and she’s long stopped bothering to answer the phone, in fear that the courts are coming to collect. Job searches have become obstacle courses of explaining her felony history. And when she is working, her checks can be subject to garnishment. Romantic relationships are few and far between and seem like far-fetched fantasies. “I don’t think anybody in their right mind would marry a girl with $7 million in restitution,” she said. If she does get married, questions will lurk about how her spouse’s finances would be affected. Same goes for her parents’ estate when they pass away. And forget about getting a house in her name; she’s afraid to just own a car. If something has a dollar symbol attached to it, she has to assess: Will it get taken by the court system? She admits that she’s lapsed on her payments in the past, which are supposed to comprise no less than 10 percent of her paycheck. In the past, she was paying a couple-hundred per month, but at that rate it would take three millennia to pay off. It’s pointless, she said, but she does wonder what will happen if the U.S. government ever decides to collect. Despite everything, Hendrickson has managed to turn her life around. Formerly
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