112. Existing resources were refocused Six sector managers Community stewardship groups Interdepartmental teams
113. $470 million in voter-approved bond and levy measures: 2000: Parks: $198 million 1999: Community Centers: $70 million 1998: Libraries: $196 million
117. HALLMARKS OF EFFECTIVE COMMUNITY PARTNERSHIPS: Place-focused Strengths-based Community-driven
Notas do Editor
The City of Seattle agreed to add approximately 50,000 households over the 20 years from 1994 to 2014. In order to do this, the City’s Comprehensive Plan, entitled “Towards a Sustainable Seattle,” identified a set of “urban villages” that were anticipated to receive the most growth. The City then asked the people in each village to create a neighborhood plan that would address anticipated growth and the community improvements necessary to ensure healthy, pleasant places to live.
“ We’re letting the genie out of the bottle,” said then-Mayor Norm Rice, “and we’ll never get it back in.” How right he was!
Faced with this dilemma, I worked with the Mayor and the rest of the City Council to devise a three-pronged implementation strategy. The first prong recognized that the City was already spending most of its budget in the neighborhoods but not necessarily on the communities’ priorities. The challenge was to move from business-as-usual to responding to neighborhood plans.
Their valuable time, talent, knowledge, and perspective resulted in 38 plans, each reflecting the special character, needs, and opportunities of that neighborhood. They contain more than 5,000 specific recommendations: public art, playground, neighborhood identification, cultural facilities, streetscapes, trees for streets and parks … The completed plans were submitted to the City’s Strategic Planning Office for review and then to the City Council for approval.
Neighborhoods came through in a big way. In each planning area, a committee was formed, with subcommittees for key elements of the planning process, such as land use, transportation, etc. About 20,000 people, many of them new to community activism, participated in meetings, “alternatives fairs,” writing, exhibit construction, and even songs and skits. The result was a 20-year vision for their neighborhood along with recommended actions that would accomplish their goals.
We refocused City departments and their resources by hiring six sector managers to work with community stewardship groups and with decentralized, interdepartmental teams; fold plan recommendations into departmental work plans, budgets, and CIP programs; identify opportunities for collaboration with other partners such as the School District, WSDOT, and Sound Transit; and leverage resources from the community and the private sector.
This major reorientation of City government is perhaps the most significant achievement of the neighborhood plans. The second prong of implementation strategy was to generate additional resources by placing plan recommendations on the ballot in the form of bond and levy requests. Three major components of most neighborhood plans are supported by voter-approved ballot measures ...
The third prong of the implementation strategy was to triple the Neighborhood Matching Fund from $1.5 million in 1998 to $4.5 million this year. The Neighborhood Matching Fund supports neighborhood-initiated projects by giving neighborhood groups (formal and informal) cash awards to match community contributions of cash, volunteer labor, or donated good and services. The Fremont Troll was one of the first Neighborhood Matching Fund projects, back in 1998.
