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Andrew Worlock on N. Monroe Revitalization

Andrew Worlock on N. Monroe Revitalization

Andrew Worlock, an Associate Planner in the City of Spokane’s Planning and Development Services Department who also heads the West Quadrant Tax Increment Finance District and the WQTIF Neighborhood Project Advisory Committee, was invited to speak at this month’s neighborhood council meeting and give an update on the revitalization of North Monroe — which, after several years of ambitious talk, has well and truly fizzled.

Andrew will be ultimately unable to make the meeting and no representative is able (or, one assumes, willing) to take his place, so he sent an e-mail summarizing the reasons behind the downgraded status of the initiative. Below are the relevant extracts:

[T]he City and WQTIF committee decided to terminate the process to hire a consultant for the North Monroe Corridor revitalization project as we had originally intended back in 2011. The reasons are numerous and include: (1) lack of support from funding partners, (2) lack of strong involvement and organizational capacity of the North Monroe business association and neighborhood council needed to successfully support this effort, (3) that it was premature in light other ongoing and concurrent projects such as the Comp Plan Transportation Chapter Update and STA’s High Performance Corridor planning; and (4) the realization that such an effort, while appealing in many ways, would likely prove difficult to implement on such a long and varied corridor given current and likely future funding constraints. The committee could not justify expenditure of District revenue on the corridor planning study in this light.

At the same time, it is generally recognized that business supporting infrastructure investment is still needed along this corridor and the WQTIF committee is still committed to directing funding towards the North Monroe Corridor. We have budgeted up to $60K for 2013 for this purpose and are interested in hearing what the community’s priorities are in regard to streetscape improvements along Monroe. Pedestrian safety/intersection improvements at the north end of the corridor near Alice or Dalton come to mind as an example of the type of project the committee would be interested in supporting. Landscape and streetscape improvements at the 5 corner intersection may be another. Projects with strong community and private business sector support leading to a high return on investment and opportunity for leveraging the TIF funds are likely to receive the highest priority.

Basically, this means that the idea of a comprehensive multimillion-dollar revitalization of the N. Monroe corridor has been abandoned in favor of smaller potential improvements, for which a grand total of $60k is available in 2013 over a 2-mile stretch of road. To put that amount in perspective: by rough estimates, that won’t even pay for a quarter of a traffic light.

If you were looking to gripe, you’d find plenty of material in those two paragraphs. About how downtown Spokane (the “funding partners”) assumes that it exists in isolation and doesn’t realize that thriving corridors will lead to a thriving city center. About how a city administration that’s ostensibly about small businesses doesn’t see the benefit in improving crumbling corridor infrastructure. About how so few people in our neighborhood — residents and business owners alike (see point (2)) — seem to realize why any of this matters.

But there you have it. And that last blockquoted sentence is key. If we really want it, there’s still $60k available for improvements. It’s not much, but a single pedestrian crossing or a couple of street trees is better than nothing.

So if you want to bring more customers to your neighborhood small business, if you’ve had enough of taking your life in your hands when crossing this arterial, if you’re tired of baking in the summer sun while walking on N. Monroe because there’s absolutely no shade cover except for some cherry trees by Fred’s Appliances, come to the next neighborhood council meeting and help us find ways to utilize that money and improve Emerson-Garfield.

Submit Your Sidewalk Repair/Install Requests

Submit Your Sidewalk Repair/Install Requests

Do you have broken, uneven, or missing sidewalks in your area?

Emerson-Garfield neighborhood is compiling a list of sidewalk repairs and installations for the 2013 sidewalk project.

If you have a request to repair a stretch of sidewalk or install new sidewalk, please submit your request to Sara Kimball via e-mail at kimballs09@gmail.com no later than March 1.

All requests will be examined and included in a priority list provided to the City of Spokane. Engineers from the city will then use the list to determine this year’s projects to be completed late summer or early fall.

For questions or more information, e-mail Sara using the address above or call her at (509) 863-3376.

If you would like more information on the process behind sidewalk and street repair, please see this post.

How to Apply for Street Trees & Sidewalks

How to Apply for Street Trees & Sidewalks

Of all the questions posed to the Emerson-Garfield Neighborhood Council, some of the most common ones concern street trees and sidewalks. How do you get them if your house doesn’t already have them? How do you go about dealing with old/diseased/overgrown trees or repairing cracked/uneven sidewalks?

Both are projects that must be dealt with on the city level. The EGNC (like all neighborhood councils across Spokane) acts as an intermediary in many of these cases by helping you formulate your request in the right way and bringing your project to city’s attention.

For street trees, you can download this work order form (Word .doc), fill out the required fields, and submit it to the address provided. Our neighborhood council allocates a certain amount of funding for street trees every year, so if they are made aware of your request, they can try to ensure that there are sufficient funds.

If sidewalks are your concern, your best bet is to come to the next neighborhood council meeting (typically the second Wednesday of each month; see the calendar) and speak directly with the people who handle sidewalk installation and repair requests for the neighborhood.

Every spring, missing or defective sidewalks are documented by our neighborhood on a map provided by the city’s Engineering Department. Areas in need of new or repaired sidewalks are highlighted with marker pens on the map.

In recent years a small group has also walked the neighborhood and identified addresses that are in need of new or repaired sidewalks. These addresses are added to the map as well, and the whole thing is submitted back to the Engineering Department in late spring.

The city’s combined neighborhood sidewalk contract (in the $500,000 ballpark) goes out for bid and is awarded in early summer. If desired, the chosen contractor then walks the areas indicated on the map with the neighborhood rep to talk about the work to be done. Construction occurs in the late summer and early autumn. (And, yes, it does happen.)

If you have any other questions about sidewalks, streets trees, or neighborhood-related issues in general, please don’t hesitate to get in touch using our contact page.

Neighborhood Council Meeting Recap

Neighborhood Council Meeting Recap

Last night’s Emerson-Garfield Neighborhood Council meeting was one of the more satisfying ones. That’s because it was the one where we decide how to allot the Community Development funds (since that’s a term that keeps cropping up, we’ll soon have an explanatory post on what CD funding is and why it’s so important).

A small volunteer group of council members met prior to the neighborhood council meeting to review funding applicants. From a list of 28 organizations with 39 separate requests for service funding, the actual recommendations were narrowed down to six. Those were decided on some basic criteria:

  • Did Emerson-Garfield fund the organization last year?
  • What is the organization’s stated reason for applying for funding?
  • Does the organization have a physical location in our neighborhood? Or is it at least active there in some form?
  • Has a representative of the organization ever attended an EGNC meeting to personally “pitch” the funding request and field questions from the public?
  • Does the organization have access to additional funding sources beyond E-G’s Community Development funds?
  • Will the organization’s services directly benefit residents of our neighborhood?

On the basis of those criteria, the following six organizations were put forward and later approved by all voting members of the EGNC:

These organizations will receive letters of recommendation on behalf of the Emerson-Garfield Neighborhood Council to be granted all or part of their funding request. (In previous years, the neighborhood council used to exercise almost complete control over funding recipients, but that process has changed this year to save administrative costs.)

From a separate pot of capital funding, the EGNC allotted the following amounts for the following purposes:

  • $2,600 to Corbin Senior Center for repairing a parking lot entrance and miscellaneous improvements like heat tape
  • $20,000 for sidewalks — which receives 1:1 matching funds from the city, therefore a total of $40,000 will be available for sidewalk installation and repair throughout E-G in 2013
  • $34,650 for home rehabilitation — which receives 3:1 matching funds from the city, therefore $103,950 will be available for initiatives like SNAP and Lead Safe Spokane throughout E-G in 2013

A representative of the City of Spokane’s Community, Housing and Human Services Department was on hand to answer our questions about funding procedures and possibilities. During the discussion about apportioning of funds, he informed us that we still have $17,000 remaining in unallocated funds for street tree removal and replanting.

New this year in the CD funding process is an additional $100,000 general pot. All neighborhoods are allowed to submit project applications for part or all of this money. After some discussion on whether or not the looming deadline (December 6) was feasible, the EGNC decided to put forward its own application for a covered bus shelter on the southbound corner of Monroe and Montgomery.

Other project ideas included a dog park, a pedestrian crossing at Grace and Monroe, and a picnic pavilion in Corbin Park. All of these were seriously considered, but voting members decided unanimously to concentrate on a single project so that it stood a better chance of being approved. It’s likely that all these ideas will be revisited in the future.

Also discussed at the meeting: recent crime hotspots, park improvements, a forthcoming mailer, and this year’s snow plow protocol. These will all be covered in a second post tomorrow (because this one’s getting awfully long).

If you are a resident of Emerson-Garfield and would like to apply for street tree planting/removal or sidewalk installation/repair, we will soon have posts that describe how to do that and that will provide the relevant forms. Please stay tuned.

Materials for the Nov. 14 EGNC Meeting

Materials for the Nov. 14 EGNC Meeting

We’ve just posted the minutes (often imitated, never duplicated) from the October 10 meeting as well as the agenda for the upcoming November 14 meeting. Get ’em here:

We’re still waiting on confirmation that this month’s Neighborhood Planning meeting will take place as usual. As stakeholders and attendees of last month’s neighborhood meetings will know, E.J. Iannelli has stepped down as planning manager for a variety of reasons (some of which are noted in the above minutes); Jay Cousins has stepped up to fill the role.

As always, the Emerson-Garfield Neighborhood Council meeting will start at 6pm at the Corbin Senior Center. We’ll be discussing how to allocate the approximately $57k in funding that the neighborhood will be receiving as part of the Community Development Block Grant in 2013. The process and stipulations for CDBG funding have changed this year, and there are a number of issues to address if we want to ensure that Emerson-Garfield sees the same (or greater) level of attention as in years past.

One of the big changes is that much of next year’s CD funding is designed to be used for capital projects (i.e., bricks and mortar). Some examples of what other neighborhoods have done — as well as some of the facts and figures behind 2013 CDBG funding — are outlined in the previous post.

And remember: the neighborhood council isn’t a cabal of insiders. It’s open to everyone and anyone who wants to attend. Please come to find out what’s going on and help shape Emerson-Garfield for the better.