Draft amendments to Seattle’s Comprehensive (Comp) Plan, recommended by City staff as part of the 10-year update process, were released on April 1, 2004. City Planning staff conducted a series of public workshops on the changes in April and May to answer questions and gather comments.

While the overall direction of the plan—the Urban Village Strategy—remains unchanged, recommendations include substantial revisions to the Comp Plan’s Land Use, Transportation and Environment elements. To ensure opportunities for public comment and discussion on each of these elements, the City focused on each topic at separate workshops. Recommendations include:

• Land Use Element - Staff revisions to the Land Use Element aim for reducing redundancy between it and the City’s zoning code, creating a new Urban Village element to place growth management policies in one element, and designating South Lake Union as an Urban Center. At the public workshop, attendees raised a number of important issues, including: strengthened policy guidance for locating cell towers; the role of concurrency standards in the Comp Plan; whether high-density development is appropriate outside Urban Centers and Villages; and how to improve the effectiveness of recommended revisions to policies addressing growth monitoring.

• Transportation Element - The Transportation Element revisions are intended to clearly establish a relationship between the Plan’s policies and actual implementation strategies, which will be found in the Transportation Strategic Plan. The revisions also include proposed mode split goals for urban centers, establishment of street classification and street type policies, and new policy sections addressing regional transportation issues and maintenance/operations. Issues raised at this workshop include: establishing performance measures for transit, bicycles and pedestrians in addition to the ones for automobiles; the role of neighborhood plans in setting transportation priorities; and improving neighborhood parking policies to reflect neighborhood needs.

• Environment Element - Revisions to the Environment Element focus on consolidating environmental policies found throughout the Comp Plan to avoid redundancy between elements, and emphasizing the value of natural systems, restorative development and urban sustainability. Among the issues raised at the workshop for the Environment Element were the ”precautionary principle” and how to incorporate it into the planning process; broadening the Environment Element to address human health; and establishing sustainability indicators.

Review of Comments and Future Public Hearings
During the next two months, City staff will be reviewing public comments, proposed amendments, and updated information to prepare a final recommendation for delivery to the City Council in early August.

Once again, the public will have the opportunity to review and comment on the plan at a public hearing, as part of the City Council’s consideration of the proposed Comp Plan amendments. That hearing is tentatively set for September.