The Seattle City Council Needs You

Now that the elections are over and we know who is in charge, it’s once again time to engage politically.

The Committee on the Built Environment recently met and discussed, for one thing, the Roosevelt Neighborhood Legislative Rezone. They discussed a number of topics but deferred the discussion of the high school blocks until the meeting scheduled for November 30, 2011, which they hope will be the last meeting before they take their recommendations to the full council.

Councilman Burgess brought up two points I tend to disagree with. The first one was his desire to come up with a design overlay for all transit stations so that there would be guidelines for the urban villages to utilize in the formulation of growth planning. While it sounds like a good idea, none of Seattle’s urban villages have enough in common to think that one set of guides will work for all. The topography is different. The current commercial centers are laid out differently. Present or future light rail stops are not similar at all, with some being elevated, some on the surface, and some being subterranean. Some stops are located near the village commercial core while others are on the periphery of the commercial area. If the citizenry of a particular village is engaged in the process of planning for growth, all of their concerns should be heard and considered more pertinent than plans conceived on a drafting table.

Mr Burgess’ second point, which he’s said many times before, was that he didn’t want to wake up in 10 years and discover that we have made a terrible mistake. I have the same fears for Roosevelt but that there is the possibility that mistakes could happen here that we would all regret. The Roosevelt neighborhood has lived with a purposely created slum for the better part of 30 years now. The recalcitrant land owner and his chosen developer have been pushing for an extremely high level of density on an limited number of parcels with no regard for the years of planning by the Roosevelt Neighborhood Association. The developer, Roosevelt Development Group (RDG) has purchased several parcels of land in the area. Their interest lies on the development of their leased and owned properties. Their website is all lip service with no community engagement.

MY POINT: The big argument about allowing for 40 or 65 foot zoning on the fruit stand block is not the issue, but it is the key. RDG presented the neighborhood with a plan to develop around 50 properties both north and south of NE 65th Street and also both east and west of 15th Ave NE. They initiated an Environmental Impact Study and then suddenly withdrew those plans and shifted their focus to the fruit stand block and the block immediately west.

But have their plans changed? Certainly not. They fully intend to develop all of the property they control through ownership or through leaseholds. If they are allowed 65 or higher zoning on the northwest corner of the 65th and 15th intersection, they will have set a precedent for the other three corners of that intersection. That much development at the intersection would cause a major shift in the Roosevelt commercial core. Moving the core 5 blocks to the east (and half out of the Roosevelt urban village) would certainly have a negative effect on current and projected businesses, on single family homes, and on traffic flow to neighborhoods east and north of Roosevelt.

The city council is being pressured by top-down planners who like to make their designs for utopias on flat sheets of paper. All of the work of the people in the Roosevelt neighborhood and your work in your neighborhood is wasted when small special interest groups impact City Council decisions more heavily than the better locally educated citizens of a particular neighborhood can.

The solution is for everyone to be a neighborhood activist. Whether you agree or disagree with a particular neighborhood plan, a developer, or the mayor, in this country, it is still quite all right to voice your opinion. The time to do so is now, before November 30th and the next COBE meeting.

You may not agree with my opinion about how Roosevelt should grow over the coming years, and I may not agree with you. But the more varied opinions we can listen to and discuss, the better future in store for all of us. I don’t want to wake up in 20 years surrounded by a project that just didn’t work out.

You can email the Seattle City Council using the addresses below. Share your opinions with the people that will make the decisions.

sally.clark@seattle.gov, jean.godden@seattle.gov, tim.burgess@seattle.gov, richard.conlin@seattle.gov, nick.licata@seattle.gov, bruce.harrell@seattle.gov, mike.obrien@seattle.gov, tom.rasmussen@seattle.gov, sally.bagshaw@seattle.gov

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