Neary-Sighted

Last Monday's council meeting was a little funny, because several of us council members sounded like kids who had just came out of the Harry Potter movie. There was really only one thing some of us wanted to talk about.

The 127-page goodie showed up last Friday in our council packets, like an early Christmas present.

The Woodbrook Business Park Development Report

That won't mean much to folks outside Lakewood, and it may not mean much within Lakewood. If you don't know the potential of these 117 acres next to Interstate 5, then you should consider reading the document. This area has the potential to become a huge economic driver .... as opposed to, and yeah, its most recent note in history the place where AdrAnne Jackson was found.

There are good people living there - a majority of them living in poverty there - modeling the life of good citizens for their children. We need to remember and care for these people too as redevelopment of the area progresses. The astonishing potential for jobs in this area is ... well, astonishing. But it is also going to take a ton of work, cooperation, work, sensible public policy, work wise private investment and work.

It is also going to take a lot of work.

The document was prepared by six commercial consultants listed on page 3. But the big delight on page 3, are some names you don't usually see on city of Lakewood documents: the names of the commissioners of the Port of Tacoma. This economic powerhouse has interests that far transcend just us in Lakewood. The Port, which is charged with managing overall industrial interests throughout Pierce County, paid for the report because the port recognizes the investment potential of this area. Our council will have a joint study session with the commissioners on Aug. 24. I'm counting the days.

Like the Tillicum project described below, Woodbrook is a big darn deal and potential game-changer for Lakewood.

It's also going to be a lot of work.

What the report says, in essence, is don't get overconfident because you've got 117 acres next to a highway. Someone can easily go start a business in DuPont, where no one is living and where you can build from scratch. Woodbrook has a massive presence of historical land uses and especially housing: there are real people living there. The roads and other infrastructure need work. There are very detailed and potentially controversial and costly things we as a community can invest in that might create a lot of jobs in Woodbrook, or few jobs there, or maybe even no jobs there.

The report makes some tough recommendations; it says, for example, that it's going to be tough to develop that area industrially if Woodbrook Middle School stays where it is.

A lot of different citizen advisory groups and others are going to be going through this report and talking about the contents and especially about the area itself. This is going to be a long conversation. Look at the PDF you will find at the link above, then you'll be at the front of the dialogue.

It's going to be a lot of work.
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My loyal readers, both of you, will recall that before serving on the city council I chaired the Lakewood Landmarks and Heritage Advisory Board. As such, I gave a speech about historic preservation to anyone who would either have me to their meeting or who could not away from me fast enough.

One thing we covered in that speech was the economics of historic preservation. Yes, old buildings look nice. And yes, history is a great thing to know. Yeah, you can learn from what our predecessors said and did. But cities have to make hard choices about what to get involved with. For a city, historic preservation makes sense when it develops the economy. And my talk thus focused on how history and historic presevation building drive jobs, tourism, and so forth.

This becomes relevant as we roar past summer into the season when we set the Lakewood budget for 2010. Talk about a Fall that's coming. With the economy down hard, the council will have to decide what to fund. Members of our parks commmission are circulating an interesting newspaper story that illuminates something I'd not thought much about: that just like historic preservation, parks and recreation have a real economic impact.

The story is out of New York, so of course the numbers are crazed. But if you read through it, you see implications for any community. And thre's a link to a broader study that connects economic development and parks in several ways:

•Property value
•Tourism
•Direct use
•Health
•Community cohesion
•Clean water
•Clean air

It's worth reading and remembering this material as we enter the rough budget seas ahead.
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Interesting vote last night of the Lakewood council. For a couple years now, the Lakewood council has been regularly passing what's effectively an emergency moratorium on any proposals to put new minicasinos into Lakewood.

Recently, there's been discussion that this could be stretching the definition of an emergency moratorium a bit far. So last night, we had a proposal on the table that would let the moratorium expire. In its place would be a rule that existing minicasinos would be grandfathered in, but no new casinos could apply.

There's a lot of argument about whether any of this is effective. State law appears to prohibit cities from regulating casinos. It's a bit bizarre ... imagine a state law that said a city could either allow a gas station to open anywhere in a city, or there are no gas stations at all. That's the way minicasinos seem to be regulated in the state. The law seems to say, and this is just odd, that a city cannot regulate casinos though it can ban them entirely. A number of cities have responded to this legislative oddity by passing measures to assert regulation of minicasinos, one model being the ordinance in front of us last night.

However, council memebers Ron Cronk, Pad Finnigan, Helen McGovern and Don Anderson said they didn't want to pass a measure that may not be effective under state law. So the replacement measure failed last night. I supported the measure. I got no problem with the legal right of minicasinos to operate, but at the existing number. Just as we don't want Lakewood to be the only place where you could find a gas station in the area, you don't want Lakewood to be the main place to find minicasinos.

That raises the question of what's next. The people who voted against the regulations can make the same argument about the moratorium that the council has been renewing for quite some time. So will the council majority let the moratorium expire in several weeks? We'll have to see.
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