1. Let's talk to each other in productive, useful ways. There are a number of parts of Lakewood that sometimes occasionally operate at cross-purposes. More often, they operate independently from each other when it really would make more sense for us to talk and coordinate.
The two biggies that come to mind are Lakewood city government and the Clover Park School District. But there are many, many groups that have a profound interest in our operations, including parent groups, the Lakewood Chamber of Commerce, other business associations, Lakewood Cares, Western State Hospital (one of our largest employers), service clubs and many other groups. There is a lot of whispering going on about many of these entities. AAnd how the heck do we end up with events in Lakewood on the same day when people have been planning months in advance? Etc...
City Councilwoman Claudia Thomas and I have been working as a subcommittee with CP school board members Carole Jacobs and Marty Shafer. We're hoping to set up some community conversations to get a better sense of how the government and other entities of Lakewood work together and share information. Stay tuned.
2. Let's celebrate the 10th anniversary with gusto and joy. Over the years, Lakewood's annual SummerFest event has had more faces than Jim Carey. We either need to give that festival an identity so it can grow and flourish, or try something entirely new. The official birthday of 10 years of cityhood falls in 2006. I hear there are 10th anniversary events planned, but we need to organize more and take advantage of this anniversary and celebrate the good. For example, check out what our neighbor DuPont is already planning.
3. Start an arts and heritage coalition or council. Lakewood has just enough arts and heritage groups to organize, but not enough that we can be complacent that arts are flourishing in our community. Pretty much any of these groups will tell you they are holding on to at least some of their goals. But these groups will tell you they need support from their home base, the community of Lakewood itself. Our chamber, our city parks department, our historical societies, our theater group, our estate mansion and gardens - all could benefit from working together. We need to formalize some sort of process to get these groups to help each other. One way to start would be for the city to give priority to funding projects in which two or more of these groups work together. I'm going to talk to the various arts and heritage groups and try to come up with just such a proposal. (Comforting note: the funding for tourism projects does not come from sales tax or your property tax - it comes from the tax on people who spend nights in Lakewood hotel rooms)
4. Preserve Fort Steilacoom Park by demanding new projects fit it with its historical character. Look, I love kids. I love playgrounds. I love soccer. I love dogs. I'm even OK with the judicious use of split-rail fences. Really. I'm fine with dog parks and anything else that people will come up with like cat parks, llama parks, ferret parks and trout parks. But enough is enough.
There has been enough tampering with the precious gem we call Fort Steilacoom Park. 2006 is the year that our City Council needs to enact stringent protections so nothing out of character goes in the park again. We need a moratorium on new projects in the meantime. Setting such stringent regulations would prevent people who come to us with the best of intentions for native plant gardens, water parks, skateboard parks, amusement parks or whatever.
We risk loving Fort Steilacoom Park to death. Because it's such a wonderful place, people with the best of motives will always be proposing new things here and there. Eventually, we will have so many things here and there that the park will become the recreational equivalent of an acne outbreak. We need to create enormous hurdles before anyone can change the park because people will always be able to come up with good reasons to change the park. And it makes sense to ground our regulations in the park's history: prairie, Native gathering area, military fort, mental hospital farm and community park.
5. Hire more police. If the city's revenues grow thanks to sales tax and other reasonable revenue growth, we need to hire more police. Every $1 spent on police saves $4 of the potential cost of crime, not to mention increase the safety of individuals. (you can click here or here to read the original study, if the links are still working). Every officer adds to a sense of safety in the community. If someone tells you that we can rest now that the crime rate is down, shake your head sadly at human overconfidence and press on.
I sometimes think that some of Lakewood's leaders tend to view public safety the same way that residents of the Salinas Valley viewed preparing for drought. Here's what John Steinbeck wrote in "East of Eden:"
"And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way."
There's more ... Walter's other New Year's Resolutions can be found by clicking here.