Analysis: Oly City Council gets to work for 2014

The annual retreat is the Olympia City Council’s chance to talk about the big picture. Putting aside their weekly agenda items – approving the design of a new city building, authorizing funds to repair a sewer line, or the like – the council can instead look to the big priorities they want to achieve and the fundamental principles they want expressed through city government.

At its retreat two years ago, the council began its recovery from the isthmus controversy. The public backlash to the council’s 2009 decision to raise build heights on the isthmus between Capitol Lake and Budd Inlet led, directly or indirectly, to the replacement of all seven members of the council in the 2009 and 2011 elections.

The change was so dramatic that, during its early 2012 annual retreat, the new councilmembers learned a traditional Japanese dance of rebirth. More substantively, they choose a whole new set of city priorities. But most urgently, because they were so new to the job – at that point the most “senior” councilmember had served only two years – they needed to learn how to work together and become an effective council. In Mayor Stephen Buxbaum’s words, they started “the process of inventing ourselves.”

Thus, during both the 2012 and 2013 retreats, the focus was inward, on their interpersonal relationships and council interactions. Councilmember Nathaniel Jones described those years as a “maturation process for the council as a whole.” It seems to have worked. Today, the quality of relations is way up and the amount of drama is way down. (Years since a council retreat involved the word “flogging”: 4)

And so the time was right at this year’s January 10-11 council retreat for the city council to shift the focus from internal relationships to city issues – and to how to make their visions become reality.

Council Priorities

In 2012, the new council crafted a new set of priorities that remains essentially unchanged today: adopt a sustainable budget, champion downtown, plan for the future, and inspire strong relationships.

To the council, “adopt a sustainable budget” means maintaining core services and city infrastructure, but not starting big new projects or adding new services. Most members of this council truly want to increase city services. Ideologically, they believe in pro-active government, and would love to fund more investments in downtown, neighborhoods, social services, parks, and more. However, they recognize the city’s financial outlook remains difficult for the foreseeable future. The council cut staff positions from the budget several years in a row, and though they did not do so this year, City Manager Steve Hall says they are “a year away” from having to cut again.

The only recent budget increases were voter-approved measures for a new fire station and restoring the downtown police walking patrol and avoiding other public safety cuts. At the retreat, councilmembers expressed their willingness to ask voters again to raise taxes to maintain city services, but made no decisions on how or when.

The desire to “champion downtown” also focuses mainly on a collection of smaller efforts, including the improvements at the artesian well, the walking patrol and ambassadors, graffiti abatement efforts, an Alcohol Impact Area, and the recent replacement of the parking pay boxes with more traditional meters. Through these relatively small projects, according to Councilmember Nathaniel Jones, “we are actually building some cumulative impact in downtown.” However, the council also has two big new downtown projects this year: a Community Renewal Area (see below), and the writing of a downtown master plan designed to express the goals of the (nearly complete) Comprehensive Plan update via specific changes to downtown zoning and development regulations.

Regarding “plan for the future,” the council is pleased with the progress it has made in updating the city’s Comprehensive Plan and Shoreline Management Plan, though not satisfied with the quality of the process of completing those updates. Both updates are mostly done and should be finalized this year. At that point, councilmembers want to move on to updating the specific development regulations that implement the plans, and start writing neighborhood-level development plans with heavy local community involvement. In 2014, they intend to conduct a “sub-area plan” for the northeast Olympia neighborhood, as well as the downtown master plan.

In 2013, the council changed the name of this priority to “change the culture of planning and performance.” The point of this new language was to not only write new land use plans, but also change the way the city thinks about land use planning in general – instead of a focus on issuing building permits as quickly and painlessly (for the developer) as possible, the city would facilitate discussions among developers and neighbors about what kind of development will happen, and even enforcing the community’s wishes against developers who would contradict it. This last role was best demonstrated when the council rejected a proposed plan for the massive Trillium development in southeast Olympia because, among other reasons, it was not pedestrian and transit friendly enough. (The developer sued, but the city won in court.) In general, the council feels pleased about how this change is going.

The priority of “inspiring strong relationships” began because this council wished to distinguish itself from the previous city council, which new councilmembers saw as being defensive and adversarial toward those who disagreed with it. The current council places great importance on building better relationships with the public at large, neighborhoods, the city’s citizen advisory boards, other government jurisdictions, and seemingly everybody else.

For example, in the last two years, the council signed a formal agreement to work cooperatively with the Coalition of Neighborhood Associations (an umbrella organization for local neighborhood groups), assigned councilmembers to serve as liaisons to citizen advisory boards, and created a budget-writing process (“Budget 365”) designed to gather more public comment earlier in the process, all in contrast to the approaches of the previous council.

While these priorities have held constant for the past two years, the council’s new emphasis is on taking practical steps toward realizing these priorities. They described this retreat “as a launching pad” from which they will make big “decisions about how to bring those goals to fruition.”

Community Renewal Area

One such decision confirmed at the retreat is to push ahead on a project that could dominate council and public discussion over the next year or so: a Community Renewal Area (CRA).

A CRA is a tool offered under state law for local jurisdictions to clean up and redevelop “blighted” areas. Broadly speaking, it gives cities and counties more authority to buy property, including to condemn it against the will of the property owner, and resell it to facilitate redevelopment. In the council’s plans so far, a key definition of “blighted” parcels is that they have been “vacant and economically unproductive for five years,” which would sharply limit the number of eligible properties. (In other words, it would not include just any property the council wants to grab.)

The intent is for the city and community to lead the process of redeveloping such parcels, rather than waiting passively for a developer to propose something. This is part of a larger theme of this council wanting more economic development – which they generally define as promoting smaller businesses, not large manufacturers or big box stores – to promote the overall economic health of the community and generate more city tax revenue.

The initial CRA will likely encompass most of downtown Olympia, but the real targets are three spots: the burnt-out Griswold’s Building on 4th Avenue, the empty Reliable Steel building on West Bay Drive, and the isthmus. A CRA might be applied in the future to non-downtown spots such as the old city landfill behind Top Foods in west Olympia, and a few unused properties along Harrison Avenue, Pacific Avenue, and Martin Way.

Within downtown, the council has selected the isthmus as the first place to apply the CRA, and they plan to do it this year. Though only some parcels on the isthmus are officially “blighted,” the council wants the discussion to result in a plan for the whole area: the city-owned buildings on the west end (formerly the Health Department and the Housing Authority), the privately-owned Capitol Center building (“The Mistake by the Lake”), the fountain block, Bayview Thriftway, the yacht club, Percival Landing, everything.

There is already a CRA Citizen Advisory Committee, which includes mostly property owners and institutional stakeholders such as the Thurston County Economic Develop Council, Olympia Downtown Association, and the Olympic Capitol Park Foundation (the group advocating for a park on the isthmus). The next step includes a workshop wherein this advisory committee would develop a set of “scenarios” for what the isthmus could look like, presumably ranging from all-park to intense development, for public consideration. Though the public process is not defined, the council emphasized its intent to have extensive public participation in the discussion.

In fact, councilmembers and staff seemed nervous even to be talking about the isthmus when they didn’t yet have their public process finalized. Even as they want to get moving, they don’t want to appear to be moving too fast, or in a way that suggests that the public will not have a sufficient role. Councilmembers are well aware that the lack of sincere public process was a major factor in the previous isthmus controversy. As if to hammer home the point, only a few members of the public attended the council retreat, all of them were isthmus activists, and all of them attended only the portion that included discussion of the isthmus.

Also, though some individual councilmembers have previously expressed support for different futures for the isthmus, at the retreat they carefully avoided endorsing any particular outcome. Instead, in the words of Buxbaum, this is a time for “dreaming and visioning” what the isthmus could become.

A New Councilmember:

Rogers Out, Selby In

There is one new councilmember in Olympia this year, as Cheryl Selby was elected to replace Councilmember Karen Rogers. (Councilmember Julie Hankins also won her first election this year, but she has served since being appointed to a vacant seat two years ago.)

Four years ago, Rogers was one of the new councilmembers elected almost solely due to their opposition to the isthmus rezone. Because that single issue so dominated that election, voters had little sense of other aspects of each candidate’s governing philosophy.

As it turned out, Rogers was much more conservative than other councilmembers and most Olympia voters. She took positions for lower taxes and less government and against public employee unions and public arts, frequently being the dissenter in 6-1 council votes. She sharply criticized council decisions she disagreed with, notably the transfer of the Smith Building for use as a shelter for homeless families, which she called an improper giveaway of public resources. She lost elections for Olympia Mayor and county commissioner, expressing conservative views in both campaigns.

At council retreats, Rogers commonly sought influential committee positions, such as chair of the city’s budget-writing Finance Committee, only to be rebuffed by the rest of the council. Buxbaum in particular pushed back, taking the Finance Committee chair for himself and last year ousting Rogers as the city’s representative to Intercity Transit. In both cases, when Rogers resisted, the council voted 6-1 in favor of Buxbaum.

When Selby announced her candidacy for city council, she specifically targeted Rogers’ seat. (Rogers had not yet announced her decision to retire.) In her first weeks on the council, Selby seems to be making of point of being extra cooperative and friendly with the other councilmembers, in stark contrast to Rogers. For example, at the retreat, she told them she “ran to be a part of this council” because she admired it so. She expressed her preference for which committee to serve on, but didn’t argue hard – and she ended up with one that meets early on Wednesday morning after late Tuesday night council meetings (an assignment that seems always to be given to rookie councilmembers, including this author).

In fact, in the absence of Rogers, there were no major disputes over committee assignments. Councilmembers worked out a few minor disagreements among themselves with resorting to a council vote. More broadly, without ever mentioning Rogers by name, several councilmembers described the current council’s “good fresh start” and having a sense of “unity.”

Selby described herself as the council’s small business representative, especially of small businesses in downtown Olympia, as the owner of Vivala. (Technically, Councilmember Steve Langer is also a small downtown business owner, with his psychology practice, but Selby discounted that as not being a “seven days a week” retail business.)

Other Issues

Here are some other issues that were discussed at the council retreat, but that are not necessarily council priorities:

Homeless Shelter: The debate over a low-barrier homeless shelter grabbed much attention this year. Councilmembers mostly expressed disappointment over the process, that it didn’t lead to a thoughtful public conversation about addressing homelessness (“It seems we should be further along,” said Cooper), and that the city was blamed for something it didn’t actually propose. On the latter point, Buxbaum, clearly irritated, said “the shelter was NOT an initiative of the city of Olympia” despite the Olympian getting it wrong “over and over,” as he pointed directly at the Olympian reporter across the room (though that particular reporter is new to the job and didn’t write those stories). Broadly speaking, the council wants to address homelessness, especially in downtown, and seems sympathetic toward some form of shelter. However, there is no plan for a shelter, and this is the same council that voted to ban homeless people from sleeping in the relative safety of the covered area outside city hall.

Minimum Wage: The minimum wage was mentioned only once, when Councilmember Jim Cooper said that, in Olympia, “we have one of the most progressive city councils in America, if not in the world,” and that he want to look at the minimum wage, paid sick leave, and similar issues.

ArtSpace: Selby said she plans to promote an arts center and affordable housing for artists in downtown. She initially mentioned ArtSpace, though when asked whether she was endorsing that specific proposal, she backed away, saying that ArtSpace was just one possibility for promoting artist housing.

Capitol Lake: Councilmember Jeannine Roe called for “a resolution of support for preserving the lake.” No other councilmembers endorsed that idea.

Farmers Market: Buxbaum encouraged creation of a strategic plan for the future of the farmers market, that would address parking and ownership, among other issues. Currently, the city owns the building, while the Port of Olympia owns the land.

Olympia Library: Buxbaum also encouraged the council to engage with the downtown library about its future. Past ballot measures to expand or build a new downtown have failed. When Buxbaum described the library as “Olympia’s living room,” Roe objected, saying “I think that makes it look like a very nice homeless shelter” – though, as Buxbaum pointed out, that’s how the library describes itself. ◙