Saturday’s Neighborhood Forum - last post ’til then.

Here are some challenges and questions that attendees to the Saturday forum are being asked to think about.

Civic Engagement for the 21st Century Project

Neighborhood Planning Forum

As part of today’s discussion, we are interested in learning more about what you—the community—think are the biggest challenges and opportunities facing neighborhood planning in Seattle, and how you think those challenges should be addressed.

Questions to consider during today’s deliberations:

Are values of protecting social equity, economic opportunity, diversity, and environmental stewardship from the last round of neighborhood planning still relevant? If not, then what’s missing, and how do we provide that?

How much of the neighborhood planning process should be led by the city, and how much by the neighborhoods?

How could the city make the neighborhood plans more consistent with each other in the planning phase? Drafting and adoption phase? Implementation phase?

How can the neighborhood plans meet city-wide goals and the neighborhood’s needs?

Should the neighborhood plans be more focused on vision and strategies, or specific actions and steps?

How should the city manage expectations of neighborhoods, and communicate the financial and legal limitations to proposed recommendations?

How can the city and neighborhoods work together on outreach to engage underrepresented groups?

How should residents who are new to the planning process get the civic skills needed to engage with the neighborhood planning process in an effective way?

How could the city align departments for better management and ownership of implementing the neighborhood plans?

After the plans are adopted, how can the city support neighborhood groups who want to advocate for and implement their neighborhood plan?

Civic Engagement for the 21st Century Project

Neighborhood Planning Forum: Local Backgrounder

History of Seattle’s Neighborhood Planning Process

In 1994, the Seattle City Council adopted the Seattle Comprehensive Plan in compliance with the State of Washington’s Growth Management Act requiring state and local governments to manage growth in the state by:

Designating urban growth areas
Identifying and protecting critical areas and natural resource lands
Preparing comprehensive plans and implementing them through capital investments and development regulations

Seattle’s comprehensive plan promoted an urban village strategy by concentrating growth in areas already zoned for substantial additional development. As part of this process, Seattle identified urban centers and villages in 38 neighborhoods throughout the city where growth would be encouraged and concentrated.

Shortly after adopting the comprehensive plan, the Seattle City Council created a neighborhood planning program for the 38 neighborhoods through the adoption of City Council Resolution 29015.

The purpose of the neighborhood planning program was to provide a way for the city and its residents to work together by:

Involving community members in determining the best way to achieve established citywide goals
Providing neighborhood plans to serve as guides for how city officials determine funding allocation and the time of paid city staff for development projects
And allowing residents to create a vision for their neighborhood that would make the densely developed areas more livable through increased social services and public safety, and infrastructure improvements such as road maintenance, libraries, and community centers.

The program aimed to protect the core values of social equity, economic opportunity, diversity, and environmental stewardship while also allowing for the creation of new jobs and housing in the 38 neighborhoods.

The neighborhood planning process began in 1995 and concluded in 1999 with the City Council’s adoption of policies from each neighborhood plan into the Comprehensive Plan chapter on neighborhood plans. The City Council also adopted a process of implementing the 4,200 total recommendations from the neighborhood plans and tracking their process through a database currently maintained by the Department of Neighborhoods.

More than 20,000 residents participated in the neighborhood planning program, which ended up costing an estimated $8.5 million – almost 50 percent more than the $4.7 million the City Council had allocated for the project.

Benefits and strengths of the pervious neighborhood planning process

A recent survey of 876 Seattle residents conducted by the city auditor’s office showed more than 93 percent of the respondents believed the neighborhood planning program produced positive impacts in their neighborhoods. Respondents noted large city capital investments made in parks and libraries, and improvements in pedestrian facilities and traffic control.

The survey also found benefits of the program on the planning process included:

Better coordination across organizational boundaries that can ordinarily create barriers, such as:

Among city departments
Between communities and city government
Among future city planning efforts
Between the city and outside government agencies

Reduced conflict between citizens and city government over the pace of new development and increased density in neighborhoods. Former City Councilmember Richard Conlin, who served during the time of the program, said it showed, “Big projects fail when communities aren’t involved, and react with their anger, their votes, and their lawyers. Inclusion, not exclusion, is the way to get things done.”

Increased community engagement through outreach strategies funded by the program and targeted to underrepresented groups. The outreach strategies helped neighborhoods identify and communicate with different stakeholders affected by the planning process

Improved civic skills among citizen participants through training offered in the first two years on how to:

Organize through outreach and involvement
Facilitate and lead community meetings
Develop community websites and reach out to the media
Understand city government processes and plans for housing and business development.

Continued participation in neighborhood planning through:

Community clubs and councils
City-sponsored groups (District Councils)
Neighborhood websites and newsletters
A system of reaching out and sharing about the neighborhood plan to those who have recently moved into the community

Criticism and challenges of the previous neighborhood planning process

Some of the criticism and challenges noted about the neighborhood planning program both during and after the process have included:

Inconsistency among plans and difficulty implementing them due to:

Loose guidelines and a lack of templates during the planning process
Varied skills levels of consultants hired by neighborhoods
Simultaneous planning sessions that didn’t allow for the sharing of best practices.

The 38 neighborhood plans varied widely in their content, quality, and level of detail, making it difficult for the city to verify if plan recommendations were addressed in an equitable manner during the implementation phase. The plans with clearly detailed recommendations have seen more implementation than others with more vague recommendations.

Unrepresentative of minorities, immigrants, senior citizens, youth, and renters is what some critics of the program have said. Many of the evaluation studies conducted after the program ended found evidence to the contrary, and that significant attempts were made to engage all stakeholders. However, the recent city auditor’s report found sustained engagement among these stakeholders has dwindled and white homeowners represent the majority of those still active in the process.

Fall off of implementation and paid city staff dedicated to neighborhood planning after significant budget cuts in 2002 and 2003. The staff cuts resulted in having no one at the city level in charge of initiating action on the plans, leaving the task of initiation up to citizens.

No ownership of plans by city departments after the responsibility for implementing plans was decentralized from the Department of Neighborhoods and delegated to a variety of city departments. With the passage of time and staff turnover, the attention to and knowledge of the plans have become uneven among and within departments.

Intense investment of residents’ time and resources over a period of years, leading many to drop out during or after the process.

Unmanaged expectations resulting in disappointment and frustration among citizens after the city introduced, late in the planning process, the need to consider budget constraints and prioritize recommendations. The feasibility of recommendations was not addressed by city staff until after the plans were completed, with many recommendations found to be too vague or unworkable because city revenue streams.

What’s changed since the neighborhood plans were created?

Citizens passed a nearly $200 million library bond measure to fund construction of a new downtown library and build, expand, or renovate 27 branch libraries. The following year taxpayers approved a levy to fund community centers, and the year after that a levy to fund parks and open space, with an overall total of $470 million, much of which was for specific recommendations in the neighborhood plans.

Many new citywide plans, policies, and growth targets have been adopted, especially through the 2004 review of Seattle’s Comprehensive Plan, 2005 adoption of the Transportation Strategic Plan, and 2007 approval of the Seattle Bicycle Master Plan.

Sustainable development is a stronger part of the public conscious because of significant progress in the field of environmental management and better understanding of the effects development has on global warming and other environmental health issues.

Subsequent booms in property value and development has outpaced what many people thought they would ever see in the city.

Over 10,000 new residents have moved to Seattle.