I think one of the more offensive things about this proposal is the stifling silence that surrounds it—apparently a greased process creates no squeaky wheels.

The City is eager to help in this effort, apparently, by assisting the developer with an intimidation tactic that is well-known amongst lobbyists for controversial projects. Borrowed by Nazis about to round up Jews in Germany and later by Richard Nixon who kept his lists within his cabal of conspirators, the publication of an “enemies list” is meant to either cow people with fear or alert the protestors, present and future, that “we know who you are, we know where you live.”

People don’t like petitioning their government only to see that they are, potentially, being singled out as a minority of troublemakers. Furthermore, the creation, publication and use of lists of this sort, especially when attached to a politically controversial subject, are precisely why Initiative 517 will be on our ballots during the next election cycle.

Where the City assisted Ambling University Development, in this case, is by re-posting the enemies list—which the developer’s lobbyist, Patrick Morrill, provided but which is mysteriously lacking any of his usual company logos and citations of pedigree—and they did so by devoting a separate tab on the University Ridge page that is called, simply, “comments from neighbors.”

The appearance of this stand-alone item, without proper notation of the source, implies that this list represents an official City of Bellingham roster, perhaps the complete and total roster, of people irritated by this project’s devastatingly stupid scope and location. Although it is underneath the heading labeled “Public Inquiries,” the lack of citation creates the illusion that this is a City of Bellingham product. It is not. It is not even a “Public Inquiry,” in fact, since it came directly from the proponents who, already, have special access to City of Bellingham officials. This list should more properly be located directly below the letter it is associated with to both show us citizens the truth as well as to illuminate the scare tactic itself.

To find the developer’s Trojan Horse one needs to search through the site and find the original e-mail upon which they had, ever so helpfully, separately attached this anonymous enemies list. It can be found under the tab labelled “applicant’s correspondence” and the letter associated with it bleats soulfully about how weird it is that neighbors close to this project are, apparently, the ones who are writing letters! Patrick Morrill, who lives in Irvine, California, even helpfully maps out each individual household, via Google Earth, and notes that some of these irritating people (GASP!) are trying to rig the game by not writing one comment but perhaps even two or three. (Given that the City does not respond to the correspondence, one suspects that the uninitiated—people likely not used to complaining to government—tried multiple sources, sometimes simply resending the same letter, in hopes of hearing that someone cares.)

I’m not sure why this list of names and addresses bothers me so much. I cannot pinpoint my irritation with it. But, nonetheless, I think it suggests actual or mistaken collusion with the developer from the City of Bellingham, potential intimidation of future letter writers opposed to this cause, and, since the list only represents the first few volleys of letters submitted, outright deception related to the actual scale of citizen opposition.

I think it is entirely proper that an updated and honest tally of “comments from neighbors” be made and that it not harvest selectively by the definition of who is, or isn’t, a neighbor. I think this task, given the months of propaganda this enemies list has freely provided for the developer, should properly be assigned to the City of Bellingham and posted, on a separate tab, on the Web site for this development proposal.

Seeing how the City will not do this, I volunteer to help opponents to this project to collate, by date of submission, a list of comments sent by ALL Bellingham residents (minus the full addresses that the developer so helpfully provided) and, on each page, note the number of correspondences sent by the completely OUT-OF-TOWN proponents of this development during these corresponding time periods. If these ankle-biters want to somehow shame us into silence, presumably for caring enough about the place we live to bother writing one or more comments on its imminent destruction, then I say we throw their game back into their face and up the ante.

Alex, can you provide a hyperlink or some other means of reviewing the list?

dammit
PDF=Pernicious Data Fleem

The location of the original correspondence from the proponent’s lobbyist, Patrick Morrill, of Irvine, California, can be found here and references the phantom attachment he so helpfully created for the City of Bellingham. The City’s webmaster has this tabbed under the heading: “City Correspondence” > “Applicant Correspondence”

http://www.cob.org/documents/planning/neighborhoods/university-ridge/applicant-correspondence.pdf

The “enemies list” attachment, created by Morrill and yet lacking any citation denoting the fact, is then inserted under a completely separate tab labeled: “Public Inquiries” > “Comments from Neighbors”

http://www.cob.org/documents/planning/neighborhoods/university-ridge/comments-neighbors.pdf

Another gripe I have, among many, is that the zoning maps (also under the “Public Inquiries” tab) fail to reveal the wetland/swamp which should be labeled as Public Open Space. It is property owned by the City of Bellingham and is a large parcel, occupying the whole trapezoid directly beneath the “17” printed on the map, and it directly abuts the proponent’s property without any physical barrier or infrastructure separating the two plats (which could be implied by the property line seen on this map as, for example, a street.) Needless to say, this development proposal could negatively impact this public asset which, I’m guessing, was acquired almost exclusively for mitigation purposes. I think it is useful public information to know that this wetland exists, who owns it, and what its actual zoning or composition is.

http://www.cob.org/documents/planning/neighborhoods/university-ridge/zoning-map-puget.pdf

@Alex,

Yes, the Herald has run two very thin articles on the topic and, as I remember, one letter from the public.  Nothing from the city council either, except that Seth Fleetwood visited the single mother a few days ago after reading her letter to the Hearing Examiner.  A very large group of citizens showed up in July to the Mayor’s Neighborhood Advisory Commission meeting and the Mayor and Jeff Thomas, the Planning Director, were entertained with strong comments from the residents of Puget and Samish neighborhoods who will actually have to live with this project.  No discernible result followed this meeting.

Some may interpret the list as being sinister, however, I think Mr. Morrill’s analysis of the public comments is more an indication of his being totally, and likely irredeemably, out of touch with the communities he seeks to invade.  It is his attempt to minimize the impact of our comments, a silly gesture by a man who should know better but whose mind is regrettably fogged by the pursuit of profit. Nevertheless, I would urge you, Alex, to send your comments to the Mayor and the city council members.  They need to hear about these problems.

As for Mr. Morrill, he does not speak at all to the content of the response from the Puget and Samish Neighborhood Residents.  Whether it is one or twenty who make an accurate observation of a problem with this project does not invalidate or call into question such observations.

This project has drawn substantial crowds as the applicant (Mr. Morrill included) witnessed first on 3 Jan 2013 when it hosted a presentation to the affected neighborhoods.  Puget Neighborhood meetings on this topic have on three occasions drawn 50 or more concerned neighbors.  As mentioned above, a recent Mayor’s Neighborhood Advisory Commission meeting drew 35 of the most affected neighbors along Nevada St. and Marionberry Ct.  What the applicant seems to forget here is that the citizenry, unlike the applicant, is neither paid nor is it given time off from jobs and family obligations to attend these meetings and to write letters to the city. 

The applicant and the city were only required to mail notices to property owners within 500 feet of the boundary of the proposed development, a fact that Mr. Morrill seems to ignore.  He also is not aware that the neighborhoods do not have a easily available or low cost way to get in touch with ALL the residents.  His are petty observations from a man whose sees only the bottom line and who ignores the effects of his actions on people. 

On Facebook you can see more of Alex McLean’s comments on this development at https://www.facebook.com/alex.mclean.549?fref=ts&ref=br_tf

This project, considering its supposed purpose of dormitory housing for students, would be better located in my neighborhood. Happy Valley has already been ghetto-ized by single-family rental houses, which are becoming the only sign of habitation, and tower blocks housing great nests of sin and debauchery attended by police to nanny the deviant whelps inside. I don’t care much about the Puget Neighborhood. When I’m honest about it, I don’t know anyone there well enough to have a phone number and will nod awkwardly when I see them on the streets, struggling to name a face. The thing that has knotted my kilt, then, is the horrific precedent this ramrodding represents and—more generally—the nearly complete sterilization of civic concern, the blanket of silence, which seems to have swaddled the rest of our population centers.

The well-heeled gentry of recently-spared Chuckanut Ridge, for example, do not seem to be offering the Puget Neighborhood support and resources for how to skewer this dragon of piss-poor planning that they have so thoroughly vanquished from their neighborhood.

My background, or more appropriately my ground-up back, is formed by nearly two decades of work in the field of construction. I am on the record stating that SOME development of Padden Trails and Chuckanut Ridge and King Mountain make good sense as infill and can fulfill the City’s need to serve an expanding population. What troubles the sane mind is that EVERY time a proposal comes forward it is vested with absurd density and scale for the housing types and, EVERY time, a location that is not only greenfield development but also very challenging to accommodate safely from a traffic or environmental perspective. The City of Bellingham seems to not have a single person in its employment who can figure out that ramming five- or 10-story towers into plats, which have stayed green and forested for a century for the damn good reason of being topographical nightmares of swamps and sheer hillsides, is not a rational approach to assuaging developers or solving infill demands. There is a toxic level of stupidity which imbues every one of these proposals for willfully encouraging maximum density on sites with the most minimal ability to accommodate it. While I would happily bang nails into houses at any of these locations, my gripe, then, is with the abandonment of even the most basic rudiments of functional urban design: This is our home, the city we have vested our time and dollars in, and we will have to live with the results of crappy design forever. Planning is not a theoretical whimsey, in my view, but a mandatory obligation to our future as a city that is still worth living in and caring about.

I find it supremely insulting and frustrating that the City of Bellingham, obviously stinging with embarrassment for their failure to insert execrable design into other locations, has now devised a militant tool to bludgeon its citizens into compliance. By stacking the Planning Commission with compliant bobble dolls, who are so devoid of interest in their decisions that they cannot bother to utter even a word of suggestion, the blitz is on and we can be assured that no other pesky interference will come from citizens and their icky demands for “process.” Likewise, I don’t see that relying on one Hearing Examiner, who may not even live in Bellingham, is exactly the textbook definition of Democracy. 

A further demerit for this particular project is the inevitable hideousness that I feel will imbue its physical characteristics. Given that virtually all of the principals involved—the developer, the property owner, and the architect—are far removed from any threat of seeing this thing once it is installed, they have no obligation to create a good product and no itch of civic pride to encourage them otherwise. As hard as it is for me to give a damn about a neighborhood two miles away, it is an outright improbability that these folks will care from their bedrooms in Texas and Georgia. We citizens will be forced to stare at City Council Towers, perhaps rotating the names of them for whichever councilmember is most eager to claim they are things of beauty, forever.

Yeah, Dick, I’ll send more ignored volleys to the City—it sounds like they have successfully rinsed their hands of this blood and only the Examiner matters—I’ll do it anyway. And yes, clearly, the Puget Neighborhood has put a huge amount of effort into this already. I didn’t mean to imply that the “stifling” silence was coming from your besieged orbit.

It is frustrating that we even have to bother, however, since this turd should have used the same metrics for its density calculations as the City does when it is trying to negotiate a property purchase: It is not our “job” to give people with un-developable tracts of swampland credit for those crappy acres so they can jam skyscrapers onto the dry ones that remain. If your grandparents gave you a piece of cumbersome real estate, so be it.

Alex,

To tell the truth, I was invited to speak to the board of Responsible Development, the organization that was heavily involved in the Chuckanut Ridge “event”.  They offered the services of their attorneys at the expense of the organization to write several letters to the city that question many aspects of the development at University Ridge.  For that I am thankful as they have set the stage for litigation should this horror show be approved by the HE. 

I do not live in the Puget Neighborhood but in Samish, on a cul-de-sac not far from University Ridge.  My interest in this travesty is that it, as you have admirably pointed out, is evidence of a much larger problem facing this city, the planning and permitting process with its attendant bowing and scraping to anyone who offers a scintilla of interest in building anything that adds a few dollars to the tax base, no matter how it affects the public, the ones who actually vote. The supreme irony is that most of the money sucked from the unwitting tenants of this project will go to Georgia and California and other places far from here while a dozen or so miserably paying jobs will be left behind.  We are being had in a most grotesque manner.

With respect to the rest of your message, I cannot agree more with both the content and the delivery.  Bravo!

Dick

My beef with how Chuckanut Ridge went—especially the bail-out via taxing Happy Valley—is a diatribe I’ve exhausted elsewhere in these pages. I’m not sad that the forest was protected but only angry that it comes at the expense of my wallet and my property values when, by the Parks Department’s own admission, this densest of Bellingham’s neighborhoods is woefully lacking in park space.

I’m glad RD still has resources and lessons to share with the Puget Neighborhood. My only gripe with that organization, and its success at Chuckanut Ridge, is that they proved they are not proponents of “responsible” development so much as “zero.” I don’t think that stance helps, long term, and is perhaps why the City of Bellingham has concocted this Panzer maneuver which aims to to lay waste to your neighbors.