CIVIC CENTER PLAZA AND GRAND OPENING

On Saturday afternoon, May 14th, the City Council and Mayor will host a celebration at 2 PM to mark the opening of the City Hall Plaza on 4th Avenue. There will be music, dance, and poetry performances, and the stream that runs through City Hall will begin to flow. The Plaza opens up to 4th Avenue and is the grand entrance to City Hall. After the program, Council offices will be open to the public for tours of the offices and public art.

On Monday, May 2, the Council approved a resolution affirming that we intend to keep to the adopted plan for open space on the southern two thirds of the Public Safety building site west of City Hall. The Public Safety Building is now in demolition, and the Civic Center Plan continues the stream and open space onto that site to create a large public park. The Mayor had proposed selling off most of the block for additional housing, concerned that the open space would be too expensive to manage, activate, and keep safe.

The majority of the Council agreed that selling this publicly owned property would be a mistake at a time of dramatic increases in downtown residential population. These residents will need open space. While many downtown open spaces have failed, we believe that the right design and management can keep this space safe and ensure that it will be a civic asset for many generations in the future. The mixed use building planned for the northern third of the block will provide eyes on the park and help to make the open space work.

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CROWN HILL PEDESTRIAN LEGISLATION

On Monday, April 25, the Council approved legislation I developed to create an interim pedestrian district in Crown Hill. This legislation will prevent car-oriented development that would be incompatible with the Neighborhood Plan along 15th Ave. NW, from NW 83rd to NW 87th Streets. The Council's goal is to support neighborhood desires to create a pedestrian urban village compatible with transit needs. The rezoned section includes property owned by Safeway and is designated in the monorail plan to host the Crown Hill station.

Community members on Crown Hill were concerned about Safeway's plans to build a large gas station at the corner of NW 83rd St. and 15th Ave. NW. They feared a gas station would generate dangerous traffic patterns and hold back land development potential in this urban village preparing for a station on the planned monorail line.

A gas station would conflict with the transit and pedestrian-oriented vision of this area, and the City's plan for monorail station areas would include regulations that would adopt the Pedestrian 2 designation. However, this legislation has been delayed because of the uncertainty created by the lengthy monorail negotiations. The community asked me to develop this legislation to prevent the compromising of their vision for the future and the encroachment of car-oriented development on their pedestrian area.

The legislation creates an interim Pedestrian 2 zoning designation that expires April 1, 2006, when permanent station area regulations could come into effect. It also directs the Department of Planning and Development to prepare new legislation for Council consideration to permanently add the Pedestrian District designation to Crown Hill's 85th Street, Northwest Market Street, and the Morgan and West Seattle Junction Station Areas.

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PORT PLAN FOR INTERBAY

On Monday, May 2, the Council agreed to consider in 2005 a proposed Comprehensive Plan amendment sponsored by the Port of Seattle that contemplates possible rezones of the Port-owned industrial land in the Interbay area to support a large mixed-use development. Amendments added to the legislation made it clear that the City would not consider changing the zoning from industrial to residential. In addition to prohibiting consideration of residential use, the Council added amendments requiring an industrial land study, requiring the proposal to evaluate consistency with the current neighborhood plan, and requiring that industrial uses be given preference in development.

This amendment could overturn Comprehensive Plan policies promoting industrial use in limited areas of the City. These policies were adopted as part of our implementation of the Growth Management Act and the neighborhood plan process. The manufacturing sector employs more than 120,000 people, but is under pressure to leave the City as a result of rising land prices. Manufacturing zones in the Ballard-Interbay area and the Duwamish are critical to this important source of economic vitality and family wage jobs, especially in the maritime and fishing sectors.

A number of Councilmembers were concerned that consideration of this amendment is premature, because the Port does not have a sufficiently detailed plan for the area, but is still exploring a variety of development schemes. Representatives of both labor and the industrial community asked the Council to wait to consider this amendment until there was an actual proposal that could be reviewed. Depending on what proposal was advanced, the Port might not even need an amendment to the Comprehensive Plan. An amendment to move consideration to 2006 failed on a 5 to 4 vote. I joined with Councilmembers Della, Licata, and McIver to support this amendment.

The Council's actions sent a strong message that we place a high value on keeping the maritime and other industries in Seattle. Even though consideration in 2005 was allowed to proceed, this does not represent approval of the Port's plans. While it is important that the City is flexible and responsive to changing economic conditions, we must consider the Port's proposal carefully before making permanent land use changes that may imperil a key sector of our economy.

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URBAN CENTER PARKING REQUIREMENTS

On Monday, May 2, the Council unanimously approved legislation reducing the requirements to provide parking spaces for multi-family buildings in First Hill, Pike-Pine, Capitol Hill, and the University District, four of the city's designated Urban Centers. The council also adopted regulations to address concerns of University District neighbors by closing a loophole that has encouraged a proliferation of student congregate housing in inappropriate zones.

The goal of the legislation is to reduce costs and obstacles for redevelopment, while realistically assessing needs for parking and considering the impact on surrounding communities. It is clear that parking requirements are not an exact science, and that no one size fits all neighborhoods. In the densest neighborhoods of downtown, there are no parking requirements, and the parking developed in buildings is driven by market requirements. However, in less dense neighborhoods, the availability of nearby on-street parking can lead developers to be able to off-load resident's vehicles onto the public, which is why there are parking requirements in most of the city.

Urban Centers are designed to ultimately be places so well served by transit and other alternatives that car ownership will be reduced, and this legislation is the first step towards that vision. The revised regulations were based on actual data about car ownership from the 2000 census, which showed that only 50% of rental households in the Pike-Pine and First Hill neighborhoods own cars, with somewhat higher percentages in the two other neighborhoods.

In First Hill and Pike-Pine, both community and business representatives endorsed reduced parking requirements, so the Council adopted reductions from the previous 1 to 1.5 spaces to .5 spaces per dwelling unit. In Capitol Hill, the development community preferred reductions from the previous 1 to 1.5 to .8 spaces per unit, but the community council was hesitant to support any reduction beyond 1 space per unit, noting that there were many older buildings that have no parking. The council adopted a standard of 1 space per unit for Capitol Hill.

Community councils in the University District also opposed parking reductions, but were especially concerned about the loophole in the townhouse regulations that allows construction of so-called townhouse units that have as many as 7 bedrooms and 7 baths with only one parking space. Rightly noting that these are generally occupied by unrelated students, many of whom do own cars, the Council reduced parking requirements for studio to 2 bedroom units to 1 parking space per unit, but adopted a standard of approximately .5 spaces per bedroom for units with more bedrooms and applied this to the town house zoning as well.

This should help with the issue of congregate housing, but it only applies within the Urban Center boundaries, and I have asked DPD to prepare legislation that would extend it into the other University District communities.

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QUOTE
"A democratic society is more than a collection of people developing their individual talents and shouldering responsibility. It is also the dynamic of the common life itself, in which citizenship means joining in public dialogue to uncover and give shape to our common values and to decide how to act upon them. Citizenship... promotes a public arena of deliberation over common concerns, an interchange that is itself morally transformative, inseparable from our individual moral development."

--Frances Moore Lappe

DEEP THOUGHT:
"To be great, one does not have to be mad, but definitely it helps."

--Percy Cerutty

Citizen participation and engagement are critical for maintaining democracy -- fostering it is a key task of elected officials. It's my hope that this newsletter will inform you about issues, inspire you to get involved, and that together we can make things work better in this great city. Please send me your feedback, so we can keep things lively, interesting, and useful. And please forward it along to friends who might be interested. You can get more information or send me feedback through the City Council website at http://cityofseattle.net/council/

Richard Conlin
Your Seattle City Councilmember

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