Piecemeal Planning - Popping Poison Pills
Piecemeal Planning - Popping Poison Pills
Unpleasant material is messily whapping its way through the whirling blades in neighborhoods throughout town as the City attempts to patch together a fatally flawed beginning to their Comprehensive Pl
Unpleasant material is messily whapping its way through the whirling blades in neighborhoods throughout town as the City attempts to patch together a fatally flawed beginning to their Comprehensive Plan update, already years behind schedule.
In Fairhaven, property owners in the commercial district have formed a new neighborhood organization and petitioned the City for recognition as a planning district, like other neighborhoods. Fairhaven Neighbors, the existing neighborhood organization, have traditionally represented the area in City planning processes.
However, Fairhaven has changed radically in recent years. In particular, the commercial core may now, or will soon, house more residents than the residential neighborhood. And their priorities may reasonably differ.
Such differences are common to matters political. It's all about having a process to parse them. In this case, the City dealt with the traditional Fairhaven Neighbors, relying upon them to involve other interested parties within the Fairhaven Neighborhood Planning District. That includes the commercial core. Somewhere along the line, that process broke down, resulting in squabbling, finger pointing and various bad feelings, like property owners feeling excluded as the Neighbors moved to limit building heights without seeking commercial input.
And Fairhaven is not alone. Next door, in Happy Valley, there is strife over re-opening the Neighborhood Plan for a Low Impact Development Overlay. Many feel that the overlay could establish thresholds for development that will determine whether the daylighting of Padden Creek will actually serve fish populations or, conversely, become necessary as a storm sewer to carry runoff away from densities that were doubled during the last opening of the Neighborhood Plan. Others feel that opening the Plan could lead to more similar neighborhood indignities, forever altering the character of the neighborhood. After all, once the Plan is open and before the Council, staff can recommend and the Council can add anything.
In a similar context city wide, the Public Works department has asked neighborhoods to pick up to three traffic-calming measures within their districts - like where speed bumps might be placed.
Wait a minute! Neighbors are not qualified to analyze and plan traffic. Such piecemeal measures could create more problems than they solve. Furthermore, the City has never really met their mandatory element requirements under the Growth Management Act (GMA) to comprehensively plan for traffic circulation. Happy Valley has been promised such a planning effort for over thirty years. Meanwhile, their long-standing policy of restricting through traffic has been systematically trammelled by the City and University.
The problem originates with the last administration's unwillingness to follow the law. Past Mayor Mark Asmundson and past Planning Director Jorge Vega stood before a crowd of more than 600 citizens at Fairhaven Middle School and stated that the City would no longer - had grown too large and complex - to plan by neighborhoods. Of course, they didn't bother to change the law. Title 20 of the Bellingham Municipal Code (BMC 20.04.030) states:
Back then, both Asmundson and Vega proposed that each neighborhood (though probably not Edgemoore, etc.) would receive a so-called "urban village" up-zone to help the city meet its population targets under the GMA. Obviously, without a strong public transit backbone, a hearty transportation demand-management framework, huge investments in public facilities and public space, these up-zones were doomed to perform like any other badly planned up-zone - exporting impacts, destabilizing the surrounds and driving the creeping crud that lowbrow developers thrive upon. Folks aren't dumb. They would object. Hence the strategy of simply excluding neighborhoods emerged as an expedient to get the plan updated without a big fuss. After all, the State was already threatening to sanction the City if the plan didn't get done.
Similarly, the City figured it could avoid a lot of headache by not implementing a GMA-compliant Public Participation Process. Instead, they held a number of Growth Forums. Citizens asked the consultant presenters and their City Council reps on numerous occasions whether these forums would constitute that process. "Oh no!", they said, "These are merely informative, as a matter of public education." Lo and behold if they didn't later change the name to something like Community Forums on Growth Management, and now say that was our public participation! The neighborhoods were never consulted. That's Hogwash.
What we are witnessing now is a systematic breakdown stemming from that early deception with ulterior motives. It is not the neighbors' job to implement a "widely disseminated" public participation process. And everyone has the right to feel offended if they were left out. What is happening now - and it's not just on the south side - is a natural and reasonable response to bad planning.
It's time for a do-over. Start afresh. Bellingham would truly benefit from taking a little time off to think about it, have a nice summer and get started on the right foot again in the fall. Otherwise, I have a feeling the City will waste a lot more time explaining itself in front of the Growth Management Hearings Board, waste a lot of money doing so, and probably end up being ordered to do it properly anyway.
We need a comprehensive plan, not more piecemeal planning. We definitely need to do it, but we should do it right.
In Fairhaven, property owners in the commercial district have formed a new neighborhood organization and petitioned the City for recognition as a planning district, like other neighborhoods. Fairhaven Neighbors, the existing neighborhood organization, have traditionally represented the area in City planning processes.
However, Fairhaven has changed radically in recent years. In particular, the commercial core may now, or will soon, house more residents than the residential neighborhood. And their priorities may reasonably differ.
Such differences are common to matters political. It's all about having a process to parse them. In this case, the City dealt with the traditional Fairhaven Neighbors, relying upon them to involve other interested parties within the Fairhaven Neighborhood Planning District. That includes the commercial core. Somewhere along the line, that process broke down, resulting in squabbling, finger pointing and various bad feelings, like property owners feeling excluded as the Neighbors moved to limit building heights without seeking commercial input.
And Fairhaven is not alone. Next door, in Happy Valley, there is strife over re-opening the Neighborhood Plan for a Low Impact Development Overlay. Many feel that the overlay could establish thresholds for development that will determine whether the daylighting of Padden Creek will actually serve fish populations or, conversely, become necessary as a storm sewer to carry runoff away from densities that were doubled during the last opening of the Neighborhood Plan. Others feel that opening the Plan could lead to more similar neighborhood indignities, forever altering the character of the neighborhood. After all, once the Plan is open and before the Council, staff can recommend and the Council can add anything.
In a similar context city wide, the Public Works department has asked neighborhoods to pick up to three traffic-calming measures within their districts - like where speed bumps might be placed.
Wait a minute! Neighbors are not qualified to analyze and plan traffic. Such piecemeal measures could create more problems than they solve. Furthermore, the City has never really met their mandatory element requirements under the Growth Management Act (GMA) to comprehensively plan for traffic circulation. Happy Valley has been promised such a planning effort for over thirty years. Meanwhile, their long-standing policy of restricting through traffic has been systematically trammelled by the City and University.
The problem originates with the last administration's unwillingness to follow the law. Past Mayor Mark Asmundson and past Planning Director Jorge Vega stood before a crowd of more than 600 citizens at Fairhaven Middle School and stated that the City would no longer - had grown too large and complex - to plan by neighborhoods. Of course, they didn't bother to change the law. Title 20 of the Bellingham Municipal Code (BMC 20.04.030) states:
In utilizing the comprehensive neighborhood plans as a basis of land use implementation, it is recognized that Bellingham is made of many unique and diverse areas each with its own characteristics, and further it is recognized that to treat these areas uniformly -- on a city-wide basis -- would not conserve or encourage those peculiarities which distinguish Bellingham from other communities.
Back then, both Asmundson and Vega proposed that each neighborhood (though probably not Edgemoore, etc.) would receive a so-called "urban village" up-zone to help the city meet its population targets under the GMA. Obviously, without a strong public transit backbone, a hearty transportation demand-management framework, huge investments in public facilities and public space, these up-zones were doomed to perform like any other badly planned up-zone - exporting impacts, destabilizing the surrounds and driving the creeping crud that lowbrow developers thrive upon. Folks aren't dumb. They would object. Hence the strategy of simply excluding neighborhoods emerged as an expedient to get the plan updated without a big fuss. After all, the State was already threatening to sanction the City if the plan didn't get done.
Similarly, the City figured it could avoid a lot of headache by not implementing a GMA-compliant Public Participation Process. Instead, they held a number of Growth Forums. Citizens asked the consultant presenters and their City Council reps on numerous occasions whether these forums would constitute that process. "Oh no!", they said, "These are merely informative, as a matter of public education." Lo and behold if they didn't later change the name to something like Community Forums on Growth Management, and now say that was our public participation! The neighborhoods were never consulted. That's Hogwash.
What we are witnessing now is a systematic breakdown stemming from that early deception with ulterior motives. It is not the neighbors' job to implement a "widely disseminated" public participation process. And everyone has the right to feel offended if they were left out. What is happening now - and it's not just on the south side - is a natural and reasonable response to bad planning.
It's time for a do-over. Start afresh. Bellingham would truly benefit from taking a little time off to think about it, have a nice summer and get started on the right foot again in the fall. Otherwise, I have a feeling the City will waste a lot more time explaining itself in front of the Growth Management Hearings Board, waste a lot of money doing so, and probably end up being ordered to do it properly anyway.
We need a comprehensive plan, not more piecemeal planning. We definitely need to do it, but we should do it right.
