Saturday Central Area Plan Meeting

I recently drew your attention to a meeting this Saturday to re-interest neighbors in the Central Area Neighborhood Plan (1:30 to 3:30 PM Saturday, Garfield Community Center, 23rd & Cherry).

My previous post started with a facsimile of a postcard sent out by the Neighborhood Plan Implementation Team. Several of the bullet points (OK, frowny-face points, ☹) on the postcard appeared critical of developers. The team wants to emphasize that they are aware of both well-intentioned and less well intentioned developers, and were not wanting to paint with a broad brush.

I might add that I have been extremely impressed with Jim Mueller, a developer who's involved both in the Madison corridor and the 23rd & Union area. He's met with many of us, turned up at a neighborhood cleanup, and is clearly sensitive to many of our issues as well as those of others in the area. He's selected an architecture firm that we've had positive experiences with, and I think we'll all enjoy working with him to guide our neighborhood in its inevitable redevelopment.

I invite you to come along on Saturday to talk about the Central Area Neighborhood Plan, and how we can use it to guide our neighborhood in the direction we'd like to see it go.

(As noted, in part, before). The Madison-Miller area took part in neighborhood planning as part of the Central Area plan process from 1996 to 1998: the resulting general plan is posted on the City website together with the scary and incomprehensible "Approval and Adoption Matrix" .

The Madison-Miller area, with the guidance of some very talented consultants, also produced its own Master Plan as part of the planning process, although it was never posted online by the City. I have now scanned and posted the Madison-Miller Master Plan: see the "Madison-Miller Neighborhood Plan" list of links, on the right of this page, just below the "Miller Links" list.

(Just found this great 1 page explanation of the Comprehensive Plan and Seattle's neighborhood planning efforts!)

For a flavor of the neighborhood planning process, check out the Spring 1996 "Miller Times" For some early results of the planning, see the Fall 1999 "Miller Times" and City's 2004 Fact Sheet on the plan.

Previous views of where the plans might be going are in the 2004 Priority Report and the 2005 Priority Update, which seem to be the City's last obvious neighborhood plan related activities. Councilmember Clark (a Neighborhood Plan Steward in a previous life) has expressed special interest in auditing and updating neighborhood plans. You can watch a video of the 5/19/07 Neighborhood Plan Workshop hosted by Councilmember Clark.