The 2-year-old neighborhood planning program has generated citizen enthusiasm and high levels of involvement of people new to participation in government as well as some level of controversy, heightened expectations for government responsiveness and acknowledgement by city departments that "business as usual" is changing. The first plans to be finalized through the program will make their way to City Council for approval and adoption this summer.
The program resulted from Seattle's adoption of a Comprehensive Plan in response to the State of Washington's Growth Management Act. The plan's core urban village strategy, which was designed to attract Seattle's share of new growth to commercial and multifamily zoned areas with development potential and appropriate infrastructure, had created considerable public consternation. In response the city decided to initiate a community-led process to develop a neighborhood planning program which would provide for a substantial level of local decision-making relating to the plan's specifics.
An initial citywide workshop drew over 300 participants who elected a "gang of 11" who worked three months to create the framework of the neighborhood planning program.
They devised a system which provides planning money to eligible neighborhoods, those expected to absorb growth, so that they can locally customize certain aspects of the plan, agree on a vision and priorities for public and private investment in their neighborhoods and organize local volunteer self-help efforts. A central element of the process is to require that planning groups represent a coalition of interests; to be funded, people with different perspectives have to join forces and agree to work together.
City staff devoted to the project are assigned to help neighborhoods get organized and access government resources, but not to actually produce the plans. Groups can use their neighborhood planning funding to hire consultant expertise and pay direct expenses.
The goal is that citizens will negotiate among themselves and agree on planning recommendations; they will not simply be responding to government suggestions as to what is best for them but rather working collaboratively with one another and city agencies to establish shared and broadly supported priorities. The hope is that as a result government decision-making will be freed of much contention; voters will support at the polls ideas which were theirs to begin with, and city agencies will find it logical to take ownership of goals and objectives established through neighborhood plans.
The city's requirements relating to the content of plans are minimal:
Now, two years into the four-year life of our program, 37 different planning groups are in operation, representing urban centers, urban villages, distressed areas and manufacturing/industrial areas. Every organizing and planning committee includes representatives of the spectrum of stakeholders in their community, including businesses, residents, property owners and others. Each group has succeeded in involving both "veteran" citizen volunteers and newcomers to public life.
During 1996, these groups held nearly 1,000 community meetings, activities and events focused on neighborhood planning. Participants totalled over 14,000,
Every group is different, and some are achieving early and spectacular success. Others are struggling.
In the Pioneer Square community at the southern fringe of downtown the atmosphere is electric. A major property owners has announced a multi-million dollar plan to renovate a dozen historic structures and is wholeheartedly joining forces with a new locally-generated community development corporation, the association representing businesses, the community council representing residents, the Landmarks District, Historic Seattle and Allied Arts to develop a common agenda uniting the efforts of all under the umbrella of neighborhood planning. What might easily have defined themselves as competing interests have decided to work together to build community.
Past legacies of disappointment and skepticsm about working with government are being overcome. One 85-year-old resident of West Seattle's Delridge neighborhood had nothing but mistrust for government, planning and bureaucrats until she attended a community meeting at a local school and saw the demonstrated personal enthusiasm of her neighbors and their hope for shaping the future. Now she's leading a project to create a community quilt; school children in the neighborhood will create a community history mural.
Every week brings new evidence of creativity as groups design and execute their individual outreach strategies. There are community parties, focus groups at subsidized housing projects, surveys mailed and handed out at banks and grocery stores, drawings for prizes to award participation, University of Washington student projects, sponsorship of youth essay contests, grants to community organizations to involve their membership, paricipation in fairs and parades and meetings in individual living rooms.
We also have groups which have been mired in process and dissension for months and in which participation and buy-in from the community are on the wane. Difficult and volatile people can slow down the work. We can't make these groups function smoothly; we can only try to help them decide to confront their problems and assist them in finding ways of working together effectively.
The process is not particularly orderly, but its messiness is one of its hallmarks. We recognize that the flexibility of the process and our lack of control over it mean that it allows groups room to succeed on their own, but that it also provides more than enough room to fail.
City departments have been watching warily, even as they assist groups with technical work, data needs and staff advice. Citizen expectations for city response to neighborhood recommendations will pose challenges. We face the problem of integrating neighborhood needs with those of the city as a whole and with the on-going missions and agendas of our various operational departments.
An interdepartmental initiative is under way now to define how we can link neighborhoods and departments and their funding sources together in a coherent fashion, so that we are not simply adding another layer of demands or creating conflicting priorities. If neighborhoods are knowledgeable about how departments operate they can tailor their plans to reality, and government can be strategic about how funding and operational decisions are made and communicated to the public.
Involving neighborhoods in helping to establish criteria for funding , for example, will serve both to temper expectations and to generate public support for funding proposals about which citizens are knowlegeable and which they support. We have to be clear that there are both citywide needs and local priorities and that not all constituencies government serves are local, geographically specific ones.
One result we are seeing from our first planning scopes of work is that the plans are not "pie in the sky," but actually achieveable. Another result seems to be that plans are looking beyond bricks and mortar. Our neighborhood plans are not going to be chiefly lists of desired capital projects, transportation improvements and zoning requests. Scopes of work developed so far give equal or greater play to issues such as creation of an arts council, community building, including support for local business districts, and historic preservation.
The neighborhood planning office, per se, will disappear at the end of 1998. If the plans are to succeed and help our neighborhoods achieve their 20-year vision, they will have to continue to be "owned" both by citizens and city implementors.
We are putting our trust in community wisdom, in the belief that if you bring people together they will behave responsibly and in the best interests of the city as a whole.
Is it going to work? One of the volunteers in Seattle's Wallingford community offered her perspective in a meeting with prospective consultants in late February. What neighborhood planning is all about, she said, is "overcoming the paradigm of fighting City Hall; it's about making neighborhoods sustainable." We're going to find out if she's right.
Karma Ruder, Director, Neighborhood Planning Office
Susan Dehlendorf, Project Manager, Neighborhood Planning Office