The agendas for tonight’s Emerson-Garfield Neighborhood Council and planning stakeholder meetings are available for download. Save paper and grab your copy here:
Remember: the meetings start at 6pm (planning) and 7pm (neighborhood council) at the Corbin Senior Center.
As much as we wish everything was always sunshine and rainbows in the world of Spokane neighborhoods, there are some pressing issues to consider on both of these agendas. Many of those issues stem from decisions made by various departments within the city bureaucracy.
Earlier this year our neighborhood submitted a request for traffic-calming measures to the city. The request was for curb bump-outs along the 1100 to 1400 blocks of W Mansfield Ave. They were intended to slow speeders and discourage drivers from using it as a cut-through between N. Monroe and NW Blvd.
City engineers recently investigated the request (we think that’s when the electronic speed limit signs appeared) and they discovered that the problem included W Montgomery Ave as well. If anything, Montgomery had a bigger problem than Mansfield. A traffic light at the intersection of Montgomery and Monroe means that people hotfoot it for a block or two when the light is green. Trinity Catholic School is along that road, too, which makes inattentive speeders doubly dangerous.
Instead of curb bump-outs, the engineers proposed something more effective: traffic circles (aka “roundabouts”). They will address Montgomery Ave immediately and Mansfield will follow later, although it might require another application process next year to ensure that the project remains a top priority. Their preliminary plan for a total of six roundabouts — with trees and flowers, no less — is depicted below.
Mansfield & Montgomery traffic calming proposal. Click for a larger view.
Over the next few weeks, the City of Spokane will be sending out letters to residents and businesses in the Montgomery area. If you’re in support of the project — and why wouldn’t you be when it means less transient traffic, fewer accidents, and fewer speeders? — you should promptly sign this letter and return it to the city. A group of volunteer residents will also doorbell with signature sheets to ensure that everyone understands the positive impact the project will have. We’ll need signatures from 50% +1 of properties for approval.
It’s important to note that this is not being funded by tax dollars. It comes from Photo Red funds. Photo Red funds come from people who are fined for running red lights. This money is pooled and then allocated to implement these types of traffic-calming projects. In other words, red-light runners are paying for you to be safer and your property values to go up.
More info will be posted as it becomes available. If you’re interested in helping to gather the required signatures, please get in touch. It will only take an afternoon at the most.
About two weeks ago, we made a request to have a written status update on North Monroe Revitalization, which, according to previous reports, was scheduled to break ground shortly.
On September 7, we received (via our appointed city rep, Tirrell Black) the following statement from Andrew Worlock, who is helping to oversee the N. Monroe revitalization project at the city level:
We are working on finalizing the contract with Studio Cascade. We have re-scoped the consultant’s work plan to provide a greater emphasis on economic development and identifying the public actions (infrastructure, etc) that are needed to stimulate private investment within and along the corridor. The approach uses a more refined focus given to three nodes along the corridor: a northern node, a “mid” node and a southern or “Northbank” node. We think this will mesh well with the neighborhood planning efforts of the EG Neighborhood as well as the other planning efforts (Kendall Yards, Spokane County) ongoing along the corridor. We hope to have the consultant under contract early this fall.
We’ll present this statement and discuss its impact at the neighborhood council meeting this week, which takes place on Wednesday, 7pm at the Corbin Senior Center.
The new sidewalks along Walnut and Madison are now completed.
W Mansfield & Madison
Along Madison
W Montgomery & Madison
From what we can tell, this is all the work that will be carried out on sidewalks in our neighborhood this year. Next year might bring more sidewalks to additional blocks along Madison — or it might not. That all depends on funding, formal requests, and grassroots pressure.
Have new sidewalks gone in near your house? Please send us photos so we can add them to the blog. Taking pictures of concrete slabs might not seem that important, but it’s the only way we can document all the improvements that are taking place across Emerson-Garfield.
Electronic speed limit signs like the one below have appeared on the 1200/1300 blocks of W Mansfield and W Montgomery.
Electronic speed limit sign on Mansfield
They don’t seem to have been put into operation since they were first spotted on Friday, August 31, but the ID tags certainly indicate that they’re there on behalf of the City of Spokane. We’re assuming that they mark the first step of a traffic-calming study for these two busy cut-throughs, although we won’t be certain until we receive official word from the city (and that likely won’t come until after Labor Day).
Have you recently seen one of these (or something like it) on your block in Emerson-Garfield?
In what might be related news, someone in a DayGlo orange vest with a clipboard has been seen counting trees that fall within the city right-of-way in the southwest corner of our neighborhood. It seems to be just an administrative procedure, and not because there are plans to claim the right-of-way for development.
Please get in touch or leave a comment if you have any additional information on either of these matters.
