March 31st Public meeting discussing amendments to Seattle’s Comprehensive Plan announced.
The city council announced a meeting today to discuss proposed amendments to the city’s comprehensive plan. The council collected ideas for amendments last month and is now ready to discuss those that were submitted.
(One constructive complaint though - the city didn’t do a very good job of communicating this amendment submission process - and I can say that because I’m on the land use board for Wedgwood and didn’t hear about this from the city).
However, I’m happy because one issue we’ve been trying to figure out in NE Seattle is included as a potential amendment:
Amend neighborhood planning goal NG-3 to make it possible for neighborhood planning for all areas of the City, not just those that are expected to take significant amounts of growth.
Below is a copy of the announcement from the city:
The Seattle City Council’s Planning, Land Use, and Neighborhoods Committee (PLUNC) will hold a public hearing to decide which proposed Comprehensive Plan amendments should be considered in the 2008 annual Comprehensive Plan amendment process. The public hearing will be on Monday, March 31, 2008 at 5:00 p.m. in the Council’s Chamber, 2nd floor, Seattle City Hall, 600 Fourth Avenue. The entrances to City Hall are located on the west side of Fifth Avenue, and the east side of Fourth Avenue, between James and Cherry Streets. For those who wish to testify, a sign-up sheet will be available outside the Council Chamber one-half hour before the public hearing.
2 comments
Of all the things that are facing Seattle neighborhoods right now — changes in SEPA trigger thresholds, Multi-Family rezoning, etc — the right to control where density ‘lives’ in our neighborhoods has to be near the top of the list.
The argument against neighborhood-level, bottom-up zoning is that it makes it tough to plan citywide issues like transportation routing. Others cite difficulties in how to handle the edges of two planning areas.
The Mayor’s proposal, functionally disposing of all 39 current neighborhood plans in favor of six district plans constructed under the control of DPD and DON, looks like it solves these issues. But the 6 district plans will be done one at a time, eliminating any benefits of citywide transportation coordination and exacerbating “edge” issues. Assuming a 2-year district plan completion schedule, it would be 12 years between the start of the first plan and the end of the sixth.
However it is done, the City should simultaneously create a “concurrency fund” so that each incremental piece of added density pays into the concurrency fund to provide money for needed infrastructure (traffic, pedestrian safety, bike lanes, transit service, parks, infrastructure improvements, etc.). A 4-unit townhome development isn’t likely to create a traffic problem by itself, but 10 of them along a single street will. We must have some way of capturing concurrency dollars from each development along the way.
That makes alot of sense. From what I gathered at the planning forum I heard neighborhoods willing to accept density but wanted to make sure the city supported that development concurrently with the type of infrastructural investments you mentioned.
This was actually our big concern in Wedgwood when a new development was proposed. We were willing to take the density, but wanted to also receive the infrastructural investment to support it.
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