 December 2005/January 2006
Board
Meeting Walkability
Wireless Regs
Neighborhood Notifications
The NENA board
meting will be held on Wednesday, January 18, 7:00 -9:00 P.M.
in the music room at Roosevelt Elementary school. All are welcome!
We got the grant!
Our Neighborhood Matching Grant for Intersection Repair (at the corner of Bethel and San Francisco Streets) was approved for the full amount we requested by the City Council last week. We should get formal notification soon. I've met with the Village Improvement Project and we've laid out a preliminary schedule for the design workshops beginning in the Spring of next year that we'll discuss at our Board meeting in December. These workshops will be a unique opportunity for you to participate in shaping and designing the future of our neighborhood.
Click here to read a copy of the grant.
Fun in the sun...
Melinda Spencer, our vice-president, and I traveled to Newport Beach, California in mid-November and together with Linda Stewart from Thurston County gave a presentation on our walkability work to about 70 folks who are connected with a CDC-funded disease prevention program called Wisewoman. The Wisewoman program is looking for ways to effectively address the policy and built environment barriers to physical activity and other healthy behaviors. Some of the CDC folks working in the program heard that there were some exciting and effective work being done in Thurston County and invited us to share what we're up to.
Our presentation was well-received in part because we were the only real "community" voices who presented. Melinda did an extraordinary job representing why she got involved in this work and how powerful the process we're using has been in allowing us to finally get some traction on issues that we've been struggling to address for many years. My message was more about the need to strengthen the relationship between public institutions and the people and communities they serve - and that if government is not being responsive, then it's our responsibility to change our behavior and approach and to provide our elected officials and public employees with a clear and credible sense of what's important to us and what we want our community to become and some ideas on how to get there. To be successful in meeting our goals, we need to stop spewing a litany of insults at them and stop complaining about all the things that are broken and instead acknowledge the role we've played in creating the community problems we face, and that we need to step up and do our part to solve those problems.
Testimony to Council on the budget - I think they heard us....
I attended the City budget Open House and the public hearing on the budget the week before Thanksgiving and presented our highest priority requests for 2006 improvement projects in our neighborhood to Council. The packet I gave them included a letter summarizing our requests, our walkability action plan, a map of the neighborhood with the locations of the projects, and the results of our walkability assessment. Councilmembers were impressed and thanked us for our hard work and our proactive approach. From the tone of their response, and the kind of questions they asked, I am hopeful that Council will decide to move the Miller St. sidewalk up on the list of sidewalk projects in our neighborhood next year and that the Parks Dept. will work with us next year to develop an "interim use" plan for the Mission Creek Open Space. Once a plan is developed, we can begin to make things happen. The interim use planning process is a new approach the Parks Dept. is currently developing that will allow some planning and some improvements to be made to properties that the City has acquired but does not have the resources to fully develop at this time. This is driven in part by City's current focus on land acquisition and the concerns they have that without some plan for interim use, they'll end up dealing with the problems we've been experiencing in the MCOS on the other properties they are currently purchasing.
Invitation to our community partners
This is a copy of the email we sent to City Council members, Olympia School District Board members, Thurston County commissioners and others we are interested in partnering with to further our walkability work. It lays out the approach we're taking to this effort and encourages them to work together with us and to tap and build on the momentum and excitement that's growing in our neighborhood around these issues.
Last night, the "Wireless Gang," a group of neighborhood leaders including yours truly who have been working with Thurston County Regional Planning to completely rewrite the City's current obsolete wireless ordinance presented our recommendations to the City Council. The recommendations we presented were endorsed by 9 neighborhood associations. Overall we think the new ordinance is a great improvement over the City's current regulations, but we think the draft presented to Council can be improved. Our recommendations were well received and the Council will discuss the ordinance at a study session next week in preparation for finalizing and adopting the new ordinance early next year. We'll keep you posted.
I've been working with Kent and Linda Davis, who are new arrivals to our great neighborhood, to change the City's public notification process (or lack thereof) for small developments (9 units or less). Currently, there is no requirement that adjacent property owners be notified if one of these sorts of developments is in the works. Kent and Linda experienced the consequences of this first-hand, when, without any notice, a plot was almost completely cleared of trees to make way for 5 two-story homes and 2 ramblers across the street from their home. Because of this lack of notification, there was not opportunity to have discussions with the developer about his plans and discuss ways to address neighborhood concerns. Where we've have learned of these types of developments, like the Arbor Square project on Bethel, we've been able to persuade the developer to make some modifications to their original plans. We’ve recently meet with Keith
Stahley, the new Community Planning Development Director to discuss strengthening the City's notification requirements for these sorts of developments, and took him on a tour of our neighborhood. The next step is to draft a request for Council to consider changing the notification requirements. We'll be discussing this at our Board meeting in December.
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