 VOLUME XX, ISSUE 7 JULY 2007
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PRESIDENT'S MESSAGE
If there’s one constant in life, it’s change. This is equally true of the many communities we serve, Washington Chapter APA as an organization, and even the practice of planning as it has evolved through the years. In every long-range regional growth scenario, in every neighborhood plan alternative, in every development project no matter how small, the constant theme is one of change. Change has been much in my thoughts lately. In the past several years, I’ve undergone a change in residence (from Bellevue to Edmonds), a change in workplace (from Covington to Shoreline) and a change in life cycle (the last of five kids is now off to college. Yippee!) Another major change facing me now is the challenge of leading our chapter as your president. I am glad to have the perspective of being active in the chapter for quite a while now, serving in a variety of positions. This helps me understand the broad range of ways there are for volunteers to serve Washington Chapter APA’s mission. I can better appreciate what a great job is being done by our chapter’s legislative committee and our conference 2007 committee (Tacoma Oct. 3-5 – don’t miss it!) because I was involved in earlier iterations of both legislative and conference activities. I know whereof I speak - this chapter has grown by leaps and bounds in recent years – we have both grown and changed as an organization in very positive and important ways. I am telling you this not just to make you feel good about belonging to such a happening organization. Partly, this is by way of acknowledgment and thanks to the dozens of our members who are serving as chapter and section officers and committee members. But my main point is to solicit a commitment from those of you who have not yet been active in chapter efforts. For a chapter with over 1500 members, there’s plenty of room for additional volunteers to step up. By taking the step of involvement, you can make an enjoyable and rewarding change in your own professional life – and one that will benefit your colleagues, profession, and our state through the chapter’s activities. An immediate need I see is to power up the chapter’s continuing education efforts. As you know, APA national recently adopted a requirement for certification maintenance for AICP members. Although many of the details are still emerging, there certainly will be a need for AICP members to find and take a minimum number of credit hours of continuing education. The chapter and our sections are logical ways to help provide at least some of these learning opportunities. I am looking for at least a dozen chapter members from throughout the state to serve on a chapter committee to help us develop a robust and accessible chapter program for continuing education. If this interests you, please contact current Continuing Education Chair Judy Fani at jfani@seattlehousing.org. That’s it for my inaugural President’s message. In future messages, I will report on upcoming chapter activities, recognize the many contributions being made by our colleagues to the chapter’s success, more on what’s happening at national, and share with you more of my vision for the chapter’s future. Please let me know if you have ideas or questions by emailing me at jwtovar@comcast.net. For those of you pondering my invitation to get more involved in your chapter – remember that change is opportunity. 
OREGON TAKES A BIG LOOK
Oregon is re-examining its land use system in a project called the “Big Look.” Thirty-five years ago, Oregon was the first state to implement a comprehensive growth management planning system. Washington’s own Growth Management Act in 1990 was patterned partly after Oregon’s but has a number of differences, including more local flexibility. Spurred by public support of Measure 37, an initiative that sought more development rights for property owners, the Oregon legislature adopted Senate Bill 82 to create a process for analyzing the state’s land use system and considering any changes. The process, nicknamed “the Big Look,” includes having a 10-member task force that will study and make recommendations on the following:
Since its appointment in early 2006, the task force has been meeting and tackling the issues. Members get support from state agency staff and a team of researchers, led by Fregonese Associates, a Portland-based firm. The effort includes looking at the land use systems of other states and identifying the “best and brightest” of their approaches, as well as getting input from Oregonians on what they want their system to do. The task force issued a progress report in February 2007. A final report, including specific land use policy recommendations, is due to the legislature in February, 2009. Whether Oregon will make targeted changes to specific aspects of its current planning system or adopt a significantly different system remains to be seen. Certainly, the outcome will be influenced by the public’s impression of Measure 37 results as they continue to unfold. In addition, the ability of the Big Look task force to parlay what they learn into a clear proposal that matches with Oregonians’ values will be critical. For an insider’s view of the Big Look, planners can learn more at a special session to be held at the joint Oregon and Washington APA conference this October.
AICP EXAM NEWS
The application and registration period for the November 2007 AICP exam is now open. Visit the chapter website for more information. AICP Calendar
Reduced Fee Scholarship Available The Chapter has one reduced fee scholarship to offer for the Fall AICP exam. For more information and an application, see the AICP page of the chapter website www.planning.org/certification/. Applications are due Friday, July 23, 2007.
WHAT’S DIFFERENT ABOUT ARLINGTON’S TDR PROGRAM?
As an example for the future of growth management planning, the Arlington Transfer of Development Rights (TDR) Program, which was adopted in 2006, holds promise. That it may actually work in transferring development rights should be reason enough to take a look at the departures from other TDR programs around the State. One significant difference in the Arlington TDR model involves balancing the Growth Management Act (GMA) goals for regulating where growth takes place with protecting property rights, the major issue in the recent Initiative 933 campaign. To be sure, what is proposed in this article could make a sweeping change in how future growth would happen in the State to the benefit of present property owners and future generations. First, Arlington’s TDR Program is different because it is market driven, meaning that developers buy development rights directly from farmers with the object of preserving agricultural lands designated in the TDR Sending Area. Taxpayers and government bureaucracies are not involved in the transaction either financially or in the sale price negotiation. Snohomish County and the City of Arlington were involved in establishing the TDR Sending and Receiving Areas and rules by which TDRs are certified and subsequently extinguished but without assistance from any public funds in the purchase of development rights. Second, since Snohomish County is mandated to allocate growth using a buildable lands analysis, the growth allocation for an expanded Urban Growth Area (UGA) in Arlington used a reallocation of rural population growth to urban population growth. While the City needs to accommodate more growth, it was not new population projected for the area, but instead it was taking growth from nearby areas with households that would be using municipal services and placing them in a new neighborhood with a compact urban service area and development pattern that was relatively easy and affordable to serve. This reallocation of rural growth constitutes a direct, meaningful reduction in sprawl and protection of private property rights, dramatically visible in a fifteen minute tour of the Stillaguamish Valley abutting the Arlington city limits and in sight of the City’s sewage treatment plant. Third, the City and the County agreed that the policy of expanding the UGA adjacent to Arlington should be dependent on benefiting landowners whose property rights are regulated to preserve agricultural lands when they could sell their farmlands for more money to suburban residential developers. The value of the land for development other than agricultural production is a transfer to the farmers by urban land developers who can absorb that cost in their market for urban residential and commercial new construction. This third point could be so successful in taking the burden of agricultural land preservation off the farmers and/or the taxpayers that the City and the County will require future UGA expansions in Arlington to follow the same requirement. This third aspect of the Arlington-Snohomish County TDR Program could be what becomes very significant, if all UGA expansions in Snohomish County had the same requirement of protecting 63,000 acres of agricultural lands for 6,300 acres of compact urban development adjacent to existing municipal service areas. I believe other GMA goals for other resource lands protection, habitat conservation, and affordable housing development could also use a similar concept of transfer of development rights for new urban growth. The certainty of better rural and urban growth patterns, the protection of property rights from more regulatory restrictions without (TDR) compensation, and the balancing of a variety of GMA goals through the marriage of rural and urban development objectives are not that difficult to accept for those who understand we must manage growth to protect quality of life for a Livable Washington. A generation of planners have been in practice since the adoption of GMA without a significant change in the rules for development. If we as planners and communities want to seriously “reduce sprawl”, then the time has come to do something direct and meaningful in accomplishing not only the GMA goal of reducing sprawl but at the same time “protecting private property rights” and actually “creating open space corridors.” Not much has been done to implement these three critical GMA goals, which may appear to be in conflict, but which can be accomplished together through a TDR program like the Snohomish County-City of Arlington model.
2007 APA/PAW JOINT AWARDS PROGRAM
For the past 21 years, The Washington Chapter of the American Planning Association (APA) and the Planning Association of Washington (PAW) have jointly sponsored the annual planning awards program. The goal of this program is to bring public attention and recognition to public and private sector planning efforts throughout Washington State. The program also recognizes student planning projects in university planning programs. In past years, separate award categories have included:
The 2007 Joint Award Program Announcement has been mailed. Submittals are due July 27. The announcement can be downloaded from the chapter website www.washington-apa.org/events/awards/2007CallforNominations.pdf. Award winners will be announced at the 2007 Joint Conference of the Washington and Oregon Chapters of the APA to be held October 3-5, 2007 at the Greater Tacoma Convention & Trade Center in Tacoma, Washington. For more information on the 2007 Award program, please contact Bob Sokol, AICP at bobhsokol@earthlink.net. Over the next several issues of the newsletter, award winners from 2006 will be highlighted. The Chapter website (www.washington-apa.org/events/awards/index.shtml) also includes a summary of all of the award winners for the past several years. This month, we will take a closer look at the merit award winners in the Student Plan and Citizen Involvement Plan categories. Merit Award – Student Plans
This Plan focused on the main corridor of Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, which has suffered economic decline in the recent past, resulting in decreasing business revenues. The goal was to explore ways to promote future growth, while retaining and enhancing the many qualities that make Broadway unique. The studio incorporated the basic tenets of the city’s vision for the corridor, combining traditional research and fieldwork methods with advanced digital technologies to fully explore the impacts of the proposed policy changes on the spatial and social characteristics of the street, and the neighborhood. The students participated actively in the public debates over policy changes, and interacted with the different stakeholders involved in its outcome. The use of advanced digital technologies in all facets of this work particularly ArcGIS for analytical mapping, SketchUp for three-dimension modeling and animation, and Adobe CS2 Suite for visualizing scenarios and production of the report, all greatly enhanced the overall quality of the work. As new regulations are implemented along Broadway in the near future, this work has the potential to provide baseline information for future projects so that they are better integrated with the existing fabric of the corridor. In addition the community can assess the information generated by the studio to discuss ideas about their neighborhood, and the proposed changes. Finally, the "all-digital studio" experimented with a new pedagogical approach for integrating design and planning in a digital environment, which for the most part yielded successful results.
Merit Award – Citizen Involvement Plans
The Vision for Skykomish identifies and describes a Vision for the future of Skykomish that represents the aspirations and intentions of the community for its future condition. It was drafted by members of the community, local students, town staff, Berryman & Henigar, University of Washington’s Northwest Center for Livable Communities, Washington Department of Ecology, BNSF, EnviroIssues and King County from March through August 2005. The Vision project was undertaken in conjunction with clean up planning efforts by BNSF Railway as overseen by the Department of Ecology. A large area of Skykomish is affected by contaminants in the soil and groundwater from the former BNSF Skykomish maintenance and fueling facility from the late 1890’s until the 1970’s. Starting in 2006, BNSF is conducting the clean up of the contaminated soils under the oversight of Ecology, providing the town with an extraordinary opportunity to carry out projects and actions that will contribute to implementing this Vision. The impacts of contamination and now the resulting clean up, which will likely disrupt the town and its businesses for more than a year, threaten the existence of Skykomish. The Vision for Skykomish works to preserve the future of this historic small town. It gives the community a sense of what the town will be like in years to come. It establishes strategies – from economic planning to infrastructure development – designed to help local businesses survive and grow post-cleanup. Notably, the Vision hopes to take advantage of the clean up by making Skykomish a model of environmental restoration.
REMINDER Last year the board approved a new chapter-only group membership opportunity. This membership is available to planning commissions, city councils and commissions, tribal councils, and board members of non-profit organizations and other professional associations. Up to 10 members may be included in a group membership. The group rate is $150 and is administered by the chapter office. To obtain a group membership form or learn more about the benefits of this membership, contact Anna Nelson, AICP, Membership Committee chair, at (206) 382-9540 or anelson@buckgordon.com.
MONTHLY NEWSLETTER Have a project you want to highlight for planners across the state? An issue you think more planners need information on? Planning Northwest is always looking to highlight projects and research of our members. If you are interested in having an article published feel free to contact the editor. The deadline for the newsletter is the first of every month, preceding the publication month. Please submit all newsletter articles to newsletter@washington-apa.org. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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