A Look Back: Decisions on land use will shape the region

From rules that dictate how cities grow to the region's biggest forestland protection deal, decisions made this year will shape what kind of place the Puget Sound region will be a decade from now.

A new neighborhood around South Lake Union began to take form. The city of Seattle announced that it wants to reconnect downtown to the waterfront by getting rid of the Alaskan Way Viaduct.

Cities and counties around the Sound updated rules to protect streams, wetlands and sensitive areas, which in King County touched off a rural landowners revolt.

But despite all the painstaking planning and policies to sculpt our region's landscape, events such as the abrupt reawakening of Mount St. Helens reminded us that there will always be curveballs.

"The thing about volcanic eruptions that intrigue us is that nature does work on its own time scale and in its own way -- and it's different every time," said Cynthia Gardner, a geologist at the Cascades Volcano Observatory.

"We often say amongst ourselves that if it was predictable, we wouldn't be here. Because there wouldn't be any fun."

Some surprises were captivating, such as the so-far-benign extrusion of lava in the mountain's crater, which began in October. It has delighted tourists and given scientists a precious chance to investigate how volcanoes work.

Others -- such as the discovery of an oil slick in the middle of the night by a passing tugboat -- caught us unprepared.

The October spill, which fouled 20 miles of beach, primarily along Vashon and Maury islands, was still small compared with previous accidents. But it forced the region to acknowledge that it needs better procedures to avert oil spills or to respond in less-than-ideal conditions.

A task force convened after the spill has recommended buying equipment to detect oil in bad weather and updating plans that protect ecologically sensitive shorelines. It also favored studying how a citizens oil spill advisory council might work here.

"There just seems to be the human foibles factor in preparedness that gets complicated and multiplied by darkness," said Naki Stevens of People for Puget Sound, an environmental watchdog group. "The biggest lesson learned is not a new lesson -- it's that what we really have to be focused on is prevention."

That's a lesson the state took to heart a decade ago, passing landmark legislation to get a handle on suburban sprawl, which was blithely transforming the region's farmland into subdivisions and strip malls.

This year, the Growth Management Act required cities and counties to update their plans to accommodate population growth and protect sensitive areas around streams and wetlands.

In King County, new rules that would require some rural landowners to leave between one-half and two-thirds of their property covered in native trees have sparked an effort to overturn them by referendum.

The county also protected a prized timberland property -- the former Snoqualmie Tree Farm. It pledged $22 million in September to buy the development rights on 90,000 timbered acres along the Cascades, thus preventing that working forest from being converted into home lots.

John Healy, spokesman for the anti-sprawl group 1000 Friends of Washington, said the decisions made across the region during this watershed year will determine what our communities look like far into the future.

"In this day and age, with all the development money that's poised to be deployed, the question of what we build next is really, really important and really, really long-term," he said.

The city of Seattle, which expects to add 47,000 households and 84,000 jobs over the next two decades, has been working to encourage people-friendly neighborhoods and more housing in its urban centers.

The newest planned high-density neighborhood is South Lake Union, which is being developed by Microsoft Corp. co-founder Paul Allen's company Vulcan Inc. and others as a biotechnology hub. Apartment buildings, office and research space, a grocery store and hotel are under way.

Debate over how much money the city should invest in transforming the neighborhood with a streetcar line, zoning changes and parks and road improvements will continue next year.

Elsewhere in Seattle, the city was transformed in ways large (a sparkling downtown library) and small (space-age, self-cleaning public potties). But nothing has the potential to change the city's face so much as this month's announcement that the city and state prefer to replace the aging, quake-damaged Alaskan Way Viaduct with a $4.5 billion underground tunnel.

So far, there is no money to do any kind of fix.

But that hasn't stopped architects from envisioning what the city's heart would look like without an elevated freeway separating it from Elliott Bay. In a design free-for-all in February, they envisioned terraces of residential buildings stitching the city to the waterfront, with roofs functioning as garden sanctuaries and a gondola ferrying residents up steep hills.

Others called for transforming the viaduct space into an elevated greenway, creating beaches and providing places for people to watch salmon travel through eelgrass terraces and marshes.

Not since the Denny Regrade project -- which, at the turn of the 20th century, used hoses to blast through hills that blocked development north of downtown -- has the city had such an important land-use opportunity, Mayor Greg Nickels has claimed. "Today, we are making history," he said in announcing the preferred option. "This region is not going to make the mistake of building another viaduct."

P-I reporter Jennifer Langston can be reached at 206-448-8130 or jenniferlangston@seattlepi.com

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