Well... I got back from two weeks in Montana, mostly off the grid, to find another new group in town about to start running an actual initiative campaign about exploring putting a park on the isthmus (apparently the first ever in the city??) I'd like it better if the content were more like a levy, so people were actually signing or voting about paying for it, but apparently there are a lot of legal limits on what you can actually do by initiative in Oly. (In particular, you can't levy any taxes, and you can't amend the comprehensive plan, etc.)

The petition and instructions are at:

http://groups.google.com/group/olycapitolparkfoundation/web/welcome

There's also a press release with a little more information.

Tuesday evening, the City Council's going to decide how to run the public hearing on the isthmus rezone, which is scheduled for September 16th. Over six hundred people turned out for the hearing about the isthmus rezone request that the Council turned down in 2002, so this meeting will probably be considerably bigger. How to run it fairly is a complicated question.

At the Planning Commission hearing this June 142 people signed in to speak against the rezone and 62 people signed in to speak in favor of it. In spite of this, the Commission had people take turns back and forth, pro and con. People in favor of the rezone got to speak half the time - in addition to the extra 15 minutes at the beginning Triway got all to itself to present its proposal (another five turns). The public comment period lasted three hours; 63 people actually got to speak - 31 opposed and 32 in favor.

A really clever animation that John Leisenring (JCL Animations in Olympia), did for Friends of the Waterfront. Click picture to start animation:

Download it (It's a 3.2 MB Quicktime file, if you have a slow connection...)

Best,
Thad

I've been working away on the Friends of the Waterfront website, adding stuff about how the owners of the million dollar condos Triway wants to build would be excused from paying property taxes for ten years, etc. But personally, I'm most interested in thinking about exactly what images politicians, and people on the Planning Commission and the rest of us use in deciding what the city will look like for years and years.

I'm pretty much done with commenting on Triway's images for the website. Now I'm starting to make my own versions, roughing out what the city might look like instead of having high rises down there. It's interesting — maybe we should have a virtual redevelopment contest... above-ground Moxlie Creek in Photoshop, etc.

Here's a start