Neighbors gird themselves with patience to take on the city's 'process'

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Neighbors gird themselves with patience to take on the city's 'process'

Monday, August 12, 2002

By SUSAN PAYNTER
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST

Ah, the joys and challenges of working with the city.

Say the Parks and Recreation Department, which seems bent on destroying your favorite patch of green in order to save it. Or the Department of Neighborhoods, which refuses to share your vision of the perfect public project but finds $10,000 to buy a P-patch tool shed.

And, ah, the joys and challenges of working with the public.

The gardeners who see golf courses as the Evil Emerald Empire. Or the passionate exterior designers with their mind's eye set on a park that makes a personal statement.

When the tizzy over the planned removal of wine-themed tiles at Seattle's tiny Lynn Street pocket park boiled briefly into headlines just over a week ago (their removal was canceled), some broader questions came to mind. What does it take, besides grim determination and pathological patience, for citizens to accomplish a park or project in their neighborhood?

And what does it take, besides a Zen-like spirit and a drawer full of Paxil, for a project manager to embrace all that public input?

All over this city are plantings and play spaces, benches and bumper squash crops that stand as testaments to the ability of human beings to get through this stuff together.

For the folks -- mostly house boaters -- who live near the Lynn Street Park, the tile flap was only the tip of the you-know-what.

Laurel Doody, for one, was involved in the park from its jump-start. Simply following the ever-changing plans for the itty-bitty park may have taken years off her life.

The thing went through four Parks Department project managers. Now, what was once a green space shaded by mature trees and shrubs is denuded and gray, if colorfully tiled.

Elderly shut-ins call Doody, wailing and wondering what the heck happened to the cherry trees that bloomed even in winter, promising that spring would soon return?

Designs kept being changed without consulting the neighbors who had raised $20,000 in matching money. And now there's no more dough for replanting and irrigation.

It's true, says Barbara Donnette, it takes tenacity and a long-range way of looking at things to collaborate with the city. But, someday, this will be a lovely little spot for folks to walk and talk. "And, to me, that outweighs the multiple obstacles we have to overcome," Donnette says. "The Neighborhood Matching Grant program still has to be one of the best things to come along. It empowers a neighborhood to really accomplish something for itself."

Donnette's patience may have been born of working inside the system. Before retiring four years ago, she worked at the Department of Neighborhoods in the P-patch program. And she saw what materialized, with time and sweat equity, on the University Heights site, for example. The ripping out of asphalt and the putting in of life-giving water and the building of raised beds of growing greens.

The process can seem overwhelming, she admits. And fraught with unfathomable delays. But, then, there's that feeling of accomplishment that keeps people coming back.

Well, Dewey Potter of the Seattle Parks Department knows something about process and patience, herself.

Much of the tile fuss fell on her desk, a place where angry e-mails also land.

She gets calls comparing the gassing of Canada geese to the Holocaust. And questions about why the signage in a particular park can't contain a favorite poem or legend that seems to bear no apparent connection to the park itself.

There is a thick-paged and detailed public policy statement calling for public involvement in every single project. Some are big, such as the Jefferson Park site plan, which pitted pro- and anti-golf activists against each other. And some are small and boring, requiring only the replacement of a public restroom roof.

And, eventually, comes blessed resolution.

Take the Wallingford Steps project to create a pedestrian connection between Gas Works Park and the upland neighborhood. When money from one condo developer dissolved, the project was ingeniously rejiggered to fit the remaining funds from the builders of the Regata Condos.

And the once-contentious Alki Bathhouse renovation has finally found a balance between the needs of artists and potters who wanted the place for work and storage and the desires of those who had their hearts set on other uses for the space.

Potter admits that the turnover of project managers on the Lynn Street Park was both unusual and detrimental. But she says that, when a plan works well, it's a tribute to the flexibility of neighbors willing to see beyond their own noses and to project managers who can sit through public meetings without their ringing ears falling off their heads.

When the department interviews applicants for the project manager job, it poses a series of "what would you do?" scenarios, Potter said.

One question is "What would you do if someone at a meeting takes over the microphone and won't give it back?"

(The right answer is that, ever so gently, you wrest it away from them and then move on.)

Susan Paynter's column appears Mondays, Wednesday and Fridays. Call her at 206-448-8392 or send e-mail to susanpaynter@seattlepi.com.

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