Mike O’Brien’s Seattle Public Utilities and Neighborhoods Committee (SPUNC) approved Resolution 31204 Tuesday afternoon, moving forward to begin a year of public comment and other work toward finalizing the Neighborhood Plan Updates for North Beacon Hill, North Rainier, and Othello. The full text of the resolution is available here. You can watch the SPUNC meeting online at the Seattle Channel website.
Council members charged the Department of Planning & Development (DPD) and Dept. of Neighborhoods (DoN) with “making everyone happy” by creating an implementation process and urban design guidelines. The resolution calls for extensive community involvement, including continuing outreach to underserved communities.
DPD and DoN will also be offering the opportunity for interested parties to share ideas online. The timeline calls for the development of Action Plans from April to August 2010. Work groups will begin forming to develop Urban Design Framework Plans from June to November 2010.
There is a public meeting scheduled on Friday, May 14 at Asa Mercer Middle School, 1600 South Columbian Way. Â Childcare and translation services will be available. Further information about the meeting will be coming soon.
This flew under the radar at this month’s NBHC meeting, but on the neighborhood meeting schedule sheet that Frederica Merrill put together I noticed a neighborhood planning meeting on Monday, April 19 at 5:30 at the Library. There wasn’t time to bring this up during the meeting, but I quickly asked Freddy about it and she stated that this is a planning committee meeting with the new DPD representative. I’m not sure I got all of that correct, but it definitely sounded like an important meeting, in light of the upcoming process with DPD and DON. If anyone else knows a bit more details about what this meeting is about it would be great to hear about it, particularly in relation to the proceedings of the council committee meeting and the public meeting on the 14th, and since the 19th is only a few days away. I just wish the meeting was a bit later than 5:30. That is a bit tough for us 9-to-5’ers.
The meeting on the 19th did fly under the radar, and could be important. I’m gathering more info (including contact information so those who can’t attend in person can make comments via email/phone).
I’ll also try to see if Freddie has an agenda to share.
The other thing I notice after reading the resolution is that the city is pushing hard to evaluate alternatives “that further optimizes the region’s investment in light rail”. This makes some sense, but I thought that was the driver from the beginning. It sounds like some of the council members have driven this process back a few steps to come up with a different preferred scenario for the neighborhood plan update. The push seems to be to expand the lateral extent for upzoning, rather than going higher than the preferred 65 feet, and potentially upzoning some existing SF, which is a substantial change from what was presented to the community over the last year or so. I wonder how this affects the SEPA process. I suppose if the process is delayed anyway and the potential exists for performing a revised SEPA, they may as well get substantive changes in now.