Saturday, Jul 31, 2010
The Gristle
And then there were none?
AND THEN THERE WERE NONE?: On the eve of their momentous vote to reverse the decision of a more progressive council to limit the size of Whatcom’s cities, the new County Council majority suffered a reversal of their own when two of the remaining three cities left complaining of that earlier decision decided they really didn’t want the council’s help on this issue right now after all. Sumas and Nooksack administrations reviewed comments they’d received—including those delivered in a lengthy County Council session two weeks ago—and decided they wanted no part of the tattered and flimsy ordinance the council was trying to ram through. The cities asked to withdraw from consideration at this time, leaving only Ferndale remaining. Council pulled their crayon-strewn ordinance from this week’s agenda.
Last December, the Washington State Supreme Court upheld a 2005 Growth Management Hearings Board decision that found Whatcom’s urban growth areas were overlarge.…
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News
Immigration Nation
State initiative falls short, but E-Verify continues in Whatcom County
Washington will not be among those states following the lead of Arizona in considering limits on immigration and immigrant labor—but not for a lack of interest.
Failing to gather enough petitions in support of their effort, backers of an initiative that would require state and local agencies to enforce federal immigration laws say they will make another run at getting the measure before voters next year.
The initiative, which would have also required all employers to use the federal “E-Verify” system to check their workers’ immigration status, fell far short last week of the 241,153 signatures needed to put the measure before voters. Organizers said they collected only about 30,000 signatures.
Sponsors of Initiative 1056, Respect Washington, blamed the low number on a lack of funds.
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Words
Transportation Tailgate
Big ideas, great view
Penthouse views are the first thing you might notice when on the top floor of downtown Bellingham’s Parkade on a clear day. The sparkling bay, Mt. Baker and a sweeping view of the burg where they work and play are all on display, making one want to get their car up there just to take in the view.
Come Sat., July 31, leave your vehicle at home and head to the Parkade’s pinnacle for the first-ever “Transportation Tailgate”—a free event that’ll feature downtown business owners and transportation experts speaking about ways to bring Bellingham up to speed where multimodal transit issues are concerned. Additionally, there’ll be short films and, um, root beer floats.
Nick Hartrich, Sustainable Connections’ Green Building & Smart Growth program manager, explains what the event’s all about.
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Outdoors
Front Yard Fun
Water you doing later?
On the day I cross the railroad tracks next to the Fairhaven bus terminal to visit the Bellingham Bay Community Boating Center for the first time, it’s a windy, brisk summer morning and there’s absolutely nobody on the water.
This, Executive Director Mike Callaizakis says, is because it’s simply not safe to be out and about on small craft when the currents of air are blowing at more than 12 knots. And because the waterfront nonprofit focuses on safely getting people in and out of the water, it’s likely one of the first things people will learn about when they make their way to the space.
If you haven’t heard of—or, like me, haven’t yet visited—the Community Boating Center, you’re not alone. Although they’ve been running as a nonprofit for three years, Callaizakis says they rely heavily on word of mouth and social networking sites to get the word out about who they are and what they do.
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Visual
Street Sights
Chalk it up to a good time
For 363 days of the year, Bellingham’s Cornwall Avenue acts much like normal streets do: People park their cars next to its sidewalks, plonk a quarter or two in its meters, walk a certain number of feet, yards or blocks to their desired destinations and look both ways before crossing to the other side.
For the two days it’s not acting as a byway for vehicles to get to where they’re going, however, certain sectors of the downtown throughway take on a different role—they become what can only be deemed an “art party.”
Specifically, they transform an average tree-lined thoroughfare into the Bellingham Arts Festival, an event spearheaded by Allied Arts that takes the concepts of creativity and fun and transforms them into a two-day soiree dedicated to promoting all that is good about summer in the Northwest.
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Music
Summer Meltdown
Ten years of music magic
Admittedly, after growing in size exponentially and high-tailing it to Darrington, Wash. when Whatcom County was no longer large enough to contain it, we can hardly consider Summer Meltdown to be our little local event anymore. However, with roots in Whatcom County and a roster that still draws from talent in our proverbial backyard, this is one homegrown music festival we are only too proud to claim as our own. And, so far, the powers that be at Meltdown don’t seem to mind, so until they take umbrage of some sort, we will continue to insist upon retaining some sort of ownership of this now-ginormous event.
Now in its 10th year, Meltdown (or MDX, as it is known this year) has grown into the kind of event fans plan vacations around and folks come from far and wide to attend. The lure of the festival is many-pronged yet simple: a weekend’s worth of bands of all stripes, styles and genres (although they tend to fall into the feel-good, danceworthy category) set in a location that calls for camping and camaraderie, all served up with a heaping helping of Meltdown’s now-trademark hospitality. It’s closer than the Gorge and considerably more laid back than, say, last weekend’s Capital Hill Block Party, Bumbershoot, or any other big-city, multi-day musical affair. Granted, Bumbershoot headliner Bob Dylan won’t be setting up shop on the MDX stage, but in the time it takes you to find parking near the Seattle Center, you can probably travel to Darrington’s Whitehorse Mountain Amphitheater, set up your tent, find your friends and start sussing out the music. Not a terrible trade off.
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On Stage
Summer School
A is for action
What does summer school look like? Well, if you’re one of the four Western Washington University dance program students who auditioned to take part in “357 Repertory,” by this point in the process you can rest assured there will be no squeezing behind uncomfortable desks and spending your afternoons gazing blankly at a blackboard.
Last week, at the university’s Ving! studios in downtown Bellingham’s Odd Fellows Hall, summer school closely resembled a classroom in some ways—as in, there was an instructor and there were students—but in many other aspects, it was completely different than what people think of when they picture higher learning in action.
For one thing, there were costumes. And the not-so dulcet sounds of “Jungle Boogie” blaring through the high-ceilinged room. And, of course, lots and lots of movement that defied the basic laws of gravity.
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Film
Dinner For Schmucks
Laughter on the menu
Paul Rudd plays the straight man, while Steve Carell charitably tackles the lonely loser who stumbles into his humiliation scheme, in Dinner for Schmucks, an uproarious odd-couple remake of Francis Veber’s hit French farce The Dinner Game (once second only to Titanic at the French box office). American adaptations of Veber’s works have been all over the map, from The Birdcage to Father’s Day (when DreamWorks optioned Dinner, it too was intended to star Robin Williams). Here, helmer Jay Roach takes the wickedly un-PC premise and renders it positively benign, emerging with a nutty crowd-pleaser in the process.
The setup is simple: Find a schmuck; bring him to dinner. The guy with the biggest idiot wins. (Also, no mimes. Too obvious.) The film’s goal, established over the course of one disastrous evening, is to demonstrate the idiot isn’t necessarily the guy you expected going in. Except Carell’s Barry really is an idiot—a bumbling yet blissfully unaware imbecile in the grand tradition of such Steve Martin characters as Navin R. Johnson (The Jerk), Ruprecht (Dirty Rotten Scoundrels), and Clouseau (The Pink Panther)—which makes the silliness that ensues all the more entertaining.
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Film
Cats and Dogs
The Revenge of Kitty Galore
Although critter movies have performed extremely well at the box office, Cats and Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore will put that trend to a tough test.
This isn’t so much that the story and characters are weak—though they very much are—but that animatronics and computer animation so anthropomorphize these critters that they bear more resemblance to cartoons than actual flesh-and-fur animals. When cats and dogs, not to mention a bird and a mouse, don’t act like animals, those story and character weaknesses really stand out.
Which is not to say young audiences won’t embrace these critters too. CGI is so accepted now in video games and movies that these “Cats and Dogs” may look goofy rather than grotesque. Let’s just hope no youngster returns home and flings the family feline across the lawn to see if she can fly like Kitty Galore.
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Food
Thinking Ahead
Keep the garden train rolling
It’s the height of summer and the harvest has only just begun, but it’s already time to start over in the garden. The seeds we sow in summer will produce this autumn, after which they will hopefully linger a while into winter.
Fall gardens behave differently then spring gardens. They start off more quickly and peter out more slowly. They have more relaxed personalities. The weeds don’t grow as fast. And while baby spring crops are vulnerable to cold, baby fall crops are threatened by heat and dryness. It may all seem like a bunch of unnecessary work when you’d rather go tubing down the river, but the potential rewards of a fall garden are many.
For some, a fall garden offers redemption. If your regular season garden came up short, or didn’t come up at all, a summer planting can help you salvage the year.
News
A New Waterfront
Tall buildings, tall price for redevelopment
Years in the making, the Port of Bellingham last week released the preliminary draft of the master plan for Bellingham’s Waterfront District. A citizen’s advisory group received their copies of the plan and walked the site with port staff. The public will soon get its first chance to see and comment on the joint port and city plan to redevelop 220 acres of waterfront industrial land.
“It is a huge task, a huge waterfront and a huge project with lots of moving parts,” commented Jeff Hegedus, who chairs the Waterfront Advisory Group. The WAG has been helping the port authority develop the plan for more than four years—the group held its 50th meeting last week. “Largely, I think, the goals expressed at the outset of this process have been carried forward.”
A tome of more than 100 pages plus supplemental materials, the plan imagines a redevelopment scale that could take 30 to 50 years to complete, with the first activity expected in and around the Granary Building area at Central and Roeder avenues. Officials envision the effort will strongly tie the port’s plans for economic development along the central waterfront with city plans for urban renewal and revitalization of Old Town and adjacent areas.
The port expects to deliver the plan to Bellingham planners in September. That triggers a series of public reviews that will continue through the fall.
“The Port of Bellingham and the City of Bellingham have joined together to create a vision and develop a clear path to transforming this vacant brownsfield site into a thriving mixed-use urban neighborhood,” the plan notes in opening chapters. In 2005, the port acquired approximately 137 acres of waterfront property and tidelands adjacent to Bellingham Bay. Much of the property had been owned by the Georgia-Pacific Corp., which operated a pulp and tissue mill on the site.
The pace of redevelopment depends on uncertain factors, such as the health of the economy, the willingness of private investors to take on a waterfront project of this scale, and the availability of city dollars to construct utilities, bridges and streets for the site. Primary funds for the planned environmental cleanup of the site are mostly in place from state and federal sources.
Overall cost to prepare the site for development is pegged at $364 million, up from a cost of $330 million the port estimated in 2006.
“But let’s pull the issue apart a little bit,” Mike Stoner, the port’s environmental director, said. “From my vantage point, it looks like we’re staying pretty well on track. In 2008 the port and city updated the project cost total to be about $358 million, and the current cost estimate is $361 million. It’s true that things tend to cost more over time, but the current estimate is relatively comparable to the original 2006 estimate.”
The new estimate includes $11 million for the relocation of the Burlington Northern-Santa Fe rail line that cuts through the center of the site. A plan to move the rail line along the bluffs failed to receive federal stimulus grants last year, although the state has agreed to absorb some of the cost.
Economics only tops the list of continuing concerns, which include the level of cleanup planned for heavily contaminated areas of the site, the amount of space devoted to public use, buffers between the shoreline and built environment and even the character of that environment. A proposal to connect the site to Central Avenue—an area long planned for a public boardwalk—was cast aside for a modified street design. Several buildings, once slated for demolition, are retained in the latest plan.
The plan anticipates building heights and view corridors, with heights approaching 200 feet nearer those bluffs. Buildings of up to 100 feet could be built in against bluffs in the southwest portion of the site. That’s roughly the height of the 14-story Bellingham Towers. For comparison, the old GP digester, the tallest structure remaining on the waterfront, is about 150 feet high. Building heights would be lower nearer the water, with open space near the shoreline.
“Virtually all of the shoreline will be retained in public ownership” primarily for parks, Stoner explained. “Of the 22 acres that will be left available for development, about six is planned to be sold to Western Washington University. Of the 16 remaining,” he said, “the city has expressed interest in acquiring some portion around the Granary Building. So the property available to sell to a private developer ends up being quite small, maybe 10 acres.”
“I continue to have doubts that the building heights or proposed densities will be achieved,” WAG member John Blethen said. Blethen proposed an alternative site plan in 2008 with a few of the features of the current plan, including a realignment of streets along an east-west axis. “Will the public accept buildings of that height on their waterfront? We’ll see.”
Part of the complexity of the master plan is due to the fact that a number of groups control critical portions of the site, Stoner said, with the port owning the largest share. The State of Washington retains ownership of the tidelands and certain other areas.
“The Port owns about 165 acres of the 220-acre project area, including 137 acres that was purchased from GP, 4.6 that we purchased from Chevron, about 17 that we already owned in the Marine Trades Area,” Stoner said. The Marine Trades Area includes the site of a new marina. The port also owns another five acres at the shipping terminal at the end of Whatcom Waterway.
“The city owns property at Colony Wharf and the RG Haley property at Cornwall Beach,” Stoner commented. The city plans to remediate the RG Haley property and connect that with a boardwalk extension south to Boulevard Park. Work on that extension could begin as early as 2012.
“The port intends to retain ownership of all its property in Marine Trades, including the Clean Ocean Marina,” Stoner said, as well as the shipping terminal. “In the forseeable future, the port will retain ownership of the 42-acre Log Pond,” an area in the midsection of the site that received extensive contaminants from decades of GP industrial operations. Contaminants were capped in place, a remedy the agency plans to extend to most of Whatcom Waterway.
During the walking tour of the site, Stoner noted the port was still considering what to do with the extensive GP wharf. In the near-term, he said, the agency could sell moorage to idle ships. Long-term, the agency plans to disassemble the hard edge of a wharf and replace it with a soft, natural shoreline.
“I think the group continues to have concerns that a 50-foot setback from the shoreline for construction may not be enough,” Hegedus said. “We have assurances it is sufficiently protective, but does it create sufficient crowd space, room for pedestrians and bikes, public access, amenities and so on? That stretch—from the Granary Building to the Log Pond—is the jewel. That is the key to the success of this site.”
Overarching all, though, is the economics, Hegedus admitted. That dominates advisory group members’ thoughts.
Responding to the group’s questions about the burden of redevelopment on local taxpayers, Stoner replied, “That is certainly not the intent. From the beginning, the intent of the port and city was to rebuild the waterfront economy and the tax base and reconnect the community to its waterfront. The goal is to have the waterfront lift the rest of the community, not be a drain on local citizens.
“During its industrial heyday, the waterfront was a big tax generator, but that tapered off as GP downsized,” Stoner explained. ”Estimated city taxes for the GP property in 1994 were $177,000, in 2004 that had dropped to $71,000, but by full buildout the City was estimated to receive $2.2 to 3 million annually.” Stoner admitted the full buildout of the site may take longer than originally planned, “but in the end, the improvement to the tax base should be about the same.
Similarly, he said, the port will pay for its share through state environmental cleanup funds paid for by oil companies, moorage and property leases. “Again,” he said, “we’re planning on paying for our share of public investment through revenue streams from within the project area itself.”
“I have yet to hear an analysis of this plan by experienced developers and would welcome that dialogue about its inherent costs and practicality,” Blethen commented. “We need to figure out some ways to partner with developers and let this development pay for much of its infrastructure costs as we require of other developments.
“I am concerned about the cost of this plan, at a time when the city has many needs, without private sector participation. I believe that a realistic staged development is doable, but I have concerns about the cost of this plan even in its staged form,” he said.
With the Master Plan approved by the end of the year, or early 2011, officials hope to begin work on a couple of areas as early as next summer.
