Neighborhood won't accept unwanted development without a fight

By ROB TAYLOR
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

Mr. Bill's restaurant is decked out to evoke a 1950s diner, with chrome fixtures and photos of hot rods, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, even Howdy Doody. In a way, the place on North 130th Street recalls the heyday of the nearby Haller Lake area, which grew up with rock 'n' roll, television and, most of all, the automobile.

But today, Haller Lake is struggling to retain its 1950s innocence. Many people in its small-town, Ozzie-and-Harriet neighborhoods feel besieged by what the auto has brought them.

Flanking the narrow residential streets of the neighborhood are Interstate 5 and Aurora Avenue North. Their lanes offer quick access to jobs downtown or beyond, but they have exacted a price.

Increasingly, they flood Haller Lake's rows of small homes and quiet streets with traffic, noise and congestion.

Warehouse stores and apartments rise above the fringes of one-story homes; parking lots gobble up acres of Aurora Avenue frontage; and 18-wheelers roar across the heart of the neighborhood on 130th Street.

Some Haller Lake residents are trying to shield themselves. Instead of more roads, they are fighting for sidewalks, footpaths, trees and shrubs. Instead of more parking lots, they want to expand storm drains and sewer mains, which are unable to swallow the growing runoff from the acres of asphalt and concrete. And to seal off Aurora Avenue's booming commercial strip, they are requesting a wall along Stone Avenue North.

"People are happy to live close to those kinds of things," says local activist Sue Linnabary, "as long as there is a decent space in between."

The demands are the latest version of a neighborhood's repeated refusal to accept unwanted development without a fight. Not since 1963, when Interstate 5 sliced through its eastern extremities, has Haller Lake been pushed without pushing back.

"We're a feisty group," says Chuck Cady, president of the Haller Lake Community Club. The neighborhood beat back a proposed garbage transfer station, a dog pound and a bus barn -- twice. Today, local activists are fighting Northwest Hospital's medical waste incinerator and telling the city where it can put its proposed urban village.

Jo Dawson, a veteran of decades of neighborhood battles, says Haller Lake activists are hard to ignore. "They used to call us Holler Lake." (See background article.)

Hospital's incinerator has neighbors simmering

It appeared he might finally have won in August 1998, when the medical waste burner -- the last one in the city -- shut down its incinerator after it flunked a test for hydrochloric acid gas emissions.

But a few weeks ago, the hospital announced plans to fire up the incinerator again. Spokeswoman Suzi Beerman calls it the most efficient means of disposing of medical waste.

Many area residents use the hospital. "It's a vital part of the north end of town, and it's nice to have it there," says Faye Garneau, executive director of the Aurora Merchants Association.

But community club leaders and the local planning group say many residents oppose the incinerator, fearing the toxic metals and dioxins that the stack emits in small quantities.

Jim Nolan, compliance director for the Puget Sound Air Pollution Control Agency, said that, with one exception, the facility has complied with state and federal air pollution rules. The hospital believes the exception -- the high acid reading -- can be fixed by removing some materials from the waste stream, including plastic containers. Nolan says the acid emissions may face closer scrutiny than in the past.

Community takes on a village

Local activists wanted no part of that. Fearing silence would be deemed acquiescence, they formed a local planning group and drafted proposals for new drainage, sidewalks, bike paths, more trees and shrubs, and a pedestrian walkway along Linden Avenue North one block beyond Aurora.

Conspicuously absent from the plan were the high-rise apartments and new businesses. "If you're going to name this an urban village, we want the infrastructure first," says Sue Linnabary, head of the community planning group's land use committee.

According to Linnabary, local storm drains are incapable of handling the rainfall that runs off the spreading asphalt lots along Aurora.

In 1997, she says, flows off the Aurora strip helped fill Haller Lake so high it flooded sewers and the water flowed into basements.

The city bought out three homes that had been flooded repeatedly, but Barrett says lake residents had to rebuild their crumbling sewage pipes with their own money.

The lack of sidewalks has been a sore subject for Haller Lake ever since it was annexed by the city. Some pedestrians have been struck by cars on neighborhood streets.

On Aurora, a high-occupancy-vehicle lane sends cars whizzing down the shoulder, with no curb to separate cars and pedestrians.