CNA MEETING MINUTES
February 13, 2023 6:30pm
Present:
Melissa Allen (Bigelow Highlands, Vice Chair), Judy Bardin (Northwest), Karen Sweeney (Eastside), Jenn Wulf (Downtown Neighbors), Lauren Thompson (NWONA), Jason Walker (Bigelow Highlands), Leslie Wolff (NWONA), Jim Sweeney (Eastside), Bob Jones (Goldcrest), Larry Dzieza (Nottingham), Tim Smith (City of Olympia), Michael and Jill Ivie (SWONA), Dana McAvoy (East Bay Drive)
6:30 – 6:50 Neighborhood Reports
Melissa introduced the new President of Bigelow Highlands Neighborhood Association, Jason Walker. He reported on getting ready to prepare the next newsletter and the next general meeting in April. He said he is going have a couple of speakers get the newsletter out three weeks ahead to hopefully generate people showing up and also tease the biggest event which is the block party on National Night Out. Some of the speaker ideas are somebody to speak about all of the energy rebates that are available right now. Another is Stephanie Johnson from Parks and talk about the Arts Crossing. At the last meeting the had folks from Olympia Community Solar and the one of the new neighborhood officers from OPD and that was that was pretty popular.
Jason Walker said that Olympia Community Solar presentation was very popular. They’re nonprofit, so they’re not like trying to sell something. He said they offer programs for all kinds of residents including buying into projects even if you don’t own a home.
Dana McAvoy (East Bay) said they participated in a museum solar project several years ago, donating money and buying shares. Affirming that you can participate in solar without owning your own home.
Karen Sweeney (Eastside) said they are looking at grant ideas and trying to put together a really good mailing list which has been a real issue for them. She said she sent out newsletters but got a lot of returns and are trying to verify. They have nice sandwich boards to advertise their meetings and those were done by Jim Rioux. The only the thing that we’d like to get it better is just readability. She was impressed by the Wildwood neighborhood signs that were beautifully colored and thinks they’re done by hand and are really easy to read even if you’re just driving by.
The other big thing is they are trying to spread events throughout the year rather than all bunched up in the fall and at Christmas time. They are working on an events calendar.
Bob Jones (Goldcrest) reported they had their second board meeting face-to-face with a good turnout. They are working on a couple of projects: Putting together a little library in a location in a green space with grass and trees and a swing set and a place to sit down and relax. They are also doing a recognition of a neighborhood volunteer of the year. He said there is a general meeting on the 30th of March for the neighborhood’s 179 members. He says he is spending a lot of time looking for more volunteers to assist on working on the 40 acres of Greenbelt they take care of and are trying to control costs. He said they are working on a couple things with the Olympia Police Department.
Lauren Thompson and Leslie Wolff (NWONA) have taken over from Bruce Coulter. They are working on getting newsletters together and sent out. They say they have been successful using MailChimp. They have been updating people about what’s going on with the Capital Triangle project because it’s so close to Northwest Olympia. With MailChimp they can actually see how many people are getting the emails and how many people open them (50% rate). She said she believes they are using a free account.
Jill Ivie (SWONA) shared that Dan Leahy, longtime southwest resident passed away in December and there is going to be a memorial for him on April 15th at Central Park and will e-mail the CNA about the details.
Michael Ivie (SWONA) shared that there were three proposals presented by the city at the Capital Triangle meeting: 1) Do nothing, 2) do something; 3) do a lot. The do a lot is unfunded and needs a public-private partnership. Thinking is the “do a lot” option is least likely to be funded, so the moderate proposal is thought to have a chance. The Do-nothing proposal includes some traffic improvements that in some cases will make traffic on Black Lake Blvd a nightmare.
He said they want to put in a roundabout on the intersection of Ninth and Black Lake, people who come from Ninth are going to be stuck there for a long time given the traffic and the imbalance in the traffic flows. The plan includes bicycle lane improvements on Harrison.
The city gave five days to provide comments everybody during the meeting had a couple of stickers where they could put a green dots on something they liked, the blue dot at something they hated. He said that was pretty much all the community involvement in this whole thing.
Jill said they did solicit feedback, but it was a very short time frame. She believers they’re trying to work backwards into a completion date. The consultants were supposed to take all the feedback and then put another iteration, another draft out for people to review.
Melissa stated that we’re particularly concerned about is this ongoing process of the city soliciting neighborhood input and asked if they would keep us posted.
Michael said that they could have done a much better job. He said they were searching for quite a while until they found the meeting room. There wasn’t really an agenda that he could see that was posted. David Ginther from the city gave an introduction. He was nice. He talked about the process. They said they were talking to the community, to the neighborhood associations but nobody really talked to SWONA and he was not sure anybody talked to Northwest.
Larry described his efforts to get the meeting to be available through Zoom which turned out to be a last-minute thing by the city and did not work well. The online participants couldn’t really participate. Basically, it was just an open mic for people to listen into but with no context or input. David Ginther said he will speak to other neighborhoods if requested.
Melissa asked if David Ginther said anything about what they were going to do with the post-it notes? She was told they said they would incorporate input in an updated plans.
It was shared that they’re doing some update and communication but not a report out back to the attendees. One of the most important things was what the public had no appetite for a scenario that people absolutely hated involves the ambitious proposal that would be a rezoning changing to building codes allowing buildings to go up to 14 stories for residential areas.
The medium proposal they said would create about 1,000 residential units and 4,000 people. The bigger proposal was around 2,000-2,500 new units. The city cites a problem that Cooper Point Road and Black Lake Boulevard suffer from not having a complete street grid. That would make it easier for people to get to those places without really going along a major street. They also want to create a new on-ramp onto Highway 101 so people that come from 101 North wouldn’t have to go all the way to Black Lake Blvd.
Of concern is that there is already flooding on 4th Ave. during the high tide, and with the rising water levels downtown is going to be in trouble in 20 or 30 years if the ambitious proposal might actually not look all that ambitious if you have to construct a new downtown.
Jenn Wulf of Downtown Neighborhood Association said things have been kind of chill this this last month as an association. They are looking for a couple of new board members and looking for a new secretary and somebody who might be interested in being Vice President.
Larry said that Nottingham had the annual meeting, they adopted the 2023 budget. One of the things they wanted to do more of is social events. He said they talked about doing their first National Night Out and that he would be be reaching out to the membership who’ve done it before to learn how.
6:50 – 7:20 Subarea Planning Update – Leonard Bauer, Jim Sweeney
Larry said he wanted to have Jim and Leonard share what the benefits are and what they are intended to provide and what benefits that might come unexpectedly from the process.
Leonard explained that the comprehensive plan has two kinds of subarea plans. The first is really kind of those larger commercially oriented areas like the triangle, the capital mall triangle, Lily and Martin and Pacific on the east side and downtown. Actually the Kaiser, Harris and those are all named in the comprehensive plan along with several others as areas that the city should sponsor a more in depth, more detailed plan for those areas. He said the city has actually accomplished a few of those in the downtown strategy from a number of years ago. Then the Kaiser-Harrison plan, which some neighborhoods participated. Now they’re working on the Capital Mall Triangle plan. These are being done one at a time for those larger commercial areas.
There is a different planning process for areas that are primarily residential. And downtown is both, residential and commercial. Some areas don’t have a neighborhood association associated with them, except on edges. The Comprehensive Plan sets up a collaborative process between the associations and the city, led primarily by the neighborhood associations.
In those cases, there has to be discussions among the neighborhoods about their priorities and let the city know about those priorities and work on how they can work together to move towards those.
The first one was a coalition of neighborhood associations, ONNA Northeast Neighborhoods Alliance. Five different neighborhood associations partnered in OONA. There was a priority about what could be done about particularly the property across the street from San Francisco Bakery which has a derelict gas station. Mike Dexel of that neighborhood has continued working since that plan was adopted with the new property owners. The owner is now working with the city on a potential demolition permit to get that gas station removed and then the property owner is interested in potentially have food trucks there for short term use. Leonard said it was an example of kind of how that prioritization can eventually lead to some action in partnership between the city and the Neighborhood Associations.
The second subarea plan was the Eastside which Jim Sweeney and Roger Horn, and others did the lion’s share of the work on. One of which was a neighborhood center that they continue to work on. It’s really a process that’s initiated by the neighborhood associations and the city will have a contact staff person and then bring in other staff people as needed to work with you to help put that plan together.
Jim Sweeny provided background on Eastside’s Subarea plan. He said they started around 2016-2017. The groundwork was talking to community planning and development staff, and they found they were very informative and very engaged. He says they met for two or three years, and Neighborhood Association appointed a core team of four or five of members. It was a very long-drawn-out process. But every step of the way they were assisted by city staff. The cooperation of the city was key, and the planning staff also put them in touch with other subject area experts from the Parks Department, Public Works and so forth.
Jim said it was a great opportunity to get more involved with the inner workings of the city. The process itself involved working up a Charter which went all the way to the City Council that they bought into. Once they had the Charter in place, they began to actually design the plan section by section deciding that they would follow basically the same format which is primarily writing policies; what would we like to accomplish; and then action steps, which were very specific things that they hope to do.
Looking back on the whole process, he said that no one really estimated how many volunteer hours would be involved. There was a lot. To get engagement outreach workshops, community plans, community meetings, they were inviting folks in to tell them what they thought was important in the neighborhood.
Maybe #2 in on the importance scale is that they were able to connect to a lot of community members that aren’t typically involved in things like the Neighborhood Association Board meetings. So that was very valuable.
Jim said, looking at the Triangle Plan process that they would have benefited from a consultant. Having consultants working shoulder to shoulder with the volunteers and the city staff would be a tremendous benefit. It would have been great to have that consultant there to help them walk through the process and keep it moving and do a lot of the work that volunteers typically aren’t very good at. There was no environmental assessment process involved in our neighborhood plan and that might have been very useful.
He said they have kind of dropped the ball during the pandemic. The second thing they talked about is updating the plan periodically, they didn’t necessarily define the period, but they knew that yearly annual updates would probably out be beyond their capabilities. They were hoping to do updates maybe every other year and they have yet to do that.
Melissa asked if the community and city connections are stronger as a result of doing sub area work? Jim said he would agree with that wholeheartedly and related the experience around the First Street reservoir and the Armory that just happened to pop up at the beginning of the subarea process.
Larry asked about takeaways and whether the city received his recommendation about consultant? Jim said he doesn’t think so. He said there are no current subarea neighborhood level initiatives but that the Westside had expressed an interest but he’s not sure where that went. He believes that RNAs should take advantage of the.25 FTE staff help if it’s still on the table.
Bob Jones asked if any of those action plan actions been accomplished yet? Jim said some things we were able to like removing a lot of disease trees and working with the city’s urban forester. Other things ongoing is more Community activities and they’ve done candidates forums in conjunction with other neighborhoods, and popular talent show.
Melissa said that the biggest benefit for her was getting to know the other four neighborhoods and can now call on each other on a first name basis. They did get a matching grant that came for the entire sub area, known as Olympia NE Neighborhoods Alliance. They got a neighborhood matching grant to have a local map maker make a whimsical map of the entire northeast side. It’s a walking map. Unfortunately, Melissa said it was finished right when COVID hit. As a group they’ve identified safety issues, sidewalk issues and have high hopes for a Community Center around the San Francisco Street bakery. But that’s a very slow, tedious process.
Larry asked if the subarea process itself works like a group project that brings people together? The general answer is yes. Jim recommended those doing a subarea plan should lighten things up a little bit and have some fun activities or retreats. They did annual picnics and in fact we worked that into their process.
Larry asked Leonard, what the status of subarea plans in the comprehensive plan which is up for review. Leonard says the council values it and it is likely to stay and maybe improved.
7:20 – 7:30 MOU Update – Larry and Melissa and Tim
The MOU expired last December. What the city and the city representatives agreed to a year ago was to develop a new three-year memorandum of understanding. The city brought in a facilitator, named Jason Robertson. He interviewed City staff, senior representatives as well as council members about what some of the core issues were. Also, to bring the MOU up to current standards to reflect the work that the city is doing on improved communications. A meeting was held about six weeks ago. Direction was given to Jason to redraft in MOU and we’re going to have a meeting in about a week. If it’s good it will move forward to council for approval. It may make changes on how to best bring staff to these meetings, how to set up some quarterly meetings where we have more robust discussions on big topics and also find ways to have this better communication between the RNAs through the CNA and City staff and elected officials.
Melissa said the city planning staff, the City Council and the CNA sort of have different ideas about how business ought to be done amongst us, so we’re really trying to find some common ground. She said she knows planners have said that it sometimes was difficult for them to come to CNA with a with a prepared plan and then get lots and lots of questions when they’ve done so much work already. Whereas we’re saying why don’t you ask us earlier and those kinds, it’s pretty standard communications issues that we’re going to try to find a better way to do business.
Tim said what councilmember Gilman was real important is that the City Council created this structure so the city has a stake in making it work. It’s in partnership, it’s not, it’s not against one another and that’s our direction.
Melissa said she always wanted to see CNA engaged earlier in planning processes. Because by the time the plan is brought to us the plans are completed and it feels disrespectful to the planning staff to tear it apart. Maybe if we were engaged earlier talking about our neighborhood issues and have that fed into the planning process it would be different.
Bob Jones asked if the plans include what we used to do when CNA many years ago we used to attend by invitation what they commonly call the Council work group or work session, or study session. Do they still do that and invite the CNA to come participate?
Tim said it hasn’t been done it recently, I know that, but it’s certainly something they can talk about in the MOU.
Bob Jones said he would recommend it be included. He thought it was very fruitful and used to get 10 or 15 people from CNA to come and sit around the table with this with the Council members at a work session. In most of the cases every City Council member was there and the city manager and many members of the CNA, it was, it was a fairly large group and it happened in the City Council chambers.
7:30 – 7:45 Tim’s Report on Development – Tim Smith
Tim reported that the department is short staffed as Gary Cooper, a project planner is now a planning manager for the city of Yelm. He was working specifically on our changes to our parking regulations in addition to our permit process. Leonard is taking a portion of that permit review process and he’ll be going to Planning Commission in about a month with a draft of some changes to the parking regulations. Joyce Phillips is taking that on and she briefed the Planning Commission. It involves other changes such as work that the city is doing with climate program on EV charging stations and readiness for development.
They need to reassign the staff to keep moving forward to meet the deadline for neighborhood centers. The city had hired Makers to work with the city on it but it’s been stalled because Cari Hornbein, the staff planner retired the lead consultant, John Owen of Makers, passed away over the holidays. The project is on hold until we get a new staff person hired and John can be replaced. It will be coming back probably second quarter of this year.
The comprehensive plan update is required by the state due in June 2025. The city is starting that that update process in earnest this year. There will be public engagement opportunities beginning around March looking at first the Community values and visions chapter.
It will be a public process that is about 2 years long. He said the city can get stuff to the CNA in time to have early involvement.
Tim shared a screen showing the location of projects. One is called Green Cove Park, a preliminary subdivision that’s been in review for about four years located on Cooper Point Rd. on former gravel mine and there’s a subdivision your plan for about 180 homes and the applicant has been through four rounds of review and now they’re in for a fifth and maybe final review and will need to do a SEPA appeal. The hearing examiner and the city agreed to allow them one more chance to come in for a final review to see if they have enough in order to move forward to the hearing examiner for a preliminary plat hearing. They will be scheduling a hearing this spring for this project.
Another project is the village of Mill Pond and this is on Lilly Rd. This project has been going on since about 2011 and he hopes it’ll resolve some of the drainage issues that properties to the North have experienced every winter where they flood.
Tim was asked about people without homes who have RV’s. He showed an area that has been purchased for an affordable housing project called Landsdale Point. And this will be specifically for low-income housing and will probably take advantage of some of the city exemptions or reductions in impact fees. There was a neighborhood meeting on it recently and it goes to the Design Review Board shortly.
Tim talked about the project on Franz Anderson Road (used to be called Stole). It ends at the freeway at one end and at the other end almost connects to Martin Way. When that goes in, the city will be connecting from Anderson to Martin Way. He pointed out the property that Melissa was talking about is where the city has purchased most of these properties for permanent supportive housing — long term and short term emergency tiny homes which would be built on this portion of the site. The city is going to have to go through a permitting process for about 80 tiny homes.
Once built, there’s a lot of coordination with some of the other encampments around the area where they could start relocating folks from those locations. The proposal right now is the city would extend sewer and water down to this point and then put in the tiny homes and long term the site would all be used for permanent supportive housing or and low-income housing for residents.
In downtown, off Legion Way, is the site of a drive through facility for Washington State Credit Union. There is a large building going up that’s another project by Urban Olympia which is the Walker John ownership. The project is about five stories with ground floor retail and then market rate housing above. At Percival Landing, you’ll see a building coming up called the Madrone for market rate housing and ground floor retail and restaurant. There are about 40 projects currently in review or under construction.
A question was asked where the RVs have been moving to. We were told that many went to Plum Street tiny homes just South of Les Schwab and the RVs are towed for demolition.
Larry brought forward the issue of adopting the updated bylaws that were developed by the Bylaws subcommittee. He reviewed the major changes such as formally including neighborhoods from urban growth areas. This is important, he said, as they become absorbed into the city and the city is looking at a large annexation this spring following the RFA vote. The new bylaws were unanimously adopted.
Larry then spoke to the need to have the executive committee positions filled. A communications coordinator position, a program and event coordinator position and a secretary are needed in addition to the chair and vice chair that are filled right now.
Larry and Melissa urged the membership to consider filling these positions as the CNA is a bigger job than one or two people can do and it will benefit from having more viewpoints and perspectives.
He urged the RNAs to think about participating on the CNA in these roles. They don’t need to be the president or chair of their neighborhood association, it could be someone who a RNA Board appoints.
It was also suggested that the position duties could be split up among two or more people to make it less work on any one person. For example, a communications person, could be two people or three people sharing the duties.
Larry raised the concept of increasing neighborhood awareness. He said the publisher of the JOLT (Journal of Olympia, Lacey Tumwater) is interested in us providing them with information or material for a regular Neighborhood Happenings section in the JOLT. The idea is to make neighborhoods more visible to the community and to itself. Not everyone can participate in RNA activities due to their time and work constraints. But many are just not aware of what is happening and if they start seeing news about their neighborhoods they might think about getting involved in them. That could lead to more activity and more diverse engagement.
Larry raised the issue of involvement by renters. He discussed the city of Eugene which has a vigorous and robust neighborhoods program but still many of them identified the need for greater involvement by renters.
Seattle and other cities with neighborhood programs all ask how do we reach renters? How do we reach a younger population, more diverse population, they’re all having the same issue. In fact, in Eugene, the neighborhood program is in their Diversity Department.
Larry wanted to the attendees to think about ways we can get better communications and a broader set of communications methods to reach different groups. Are we just keeping to our same mailing list and end up talking to the same people again and again? Larry asked for ideas.
He said that someone suggested Next Door. There followed a discussion about how that sometimes doesn’t go well.
An idea was raised about inviting through some communications, maybe the JOLT and others, for people to come to a CNA meeting even if they are not in an RNA with the idea that perhaps they would be interested in starting one where they do live.
Facebook was suggested as a possibility events and things have things that way. There was concern about bickering in the comments.
Another suggestion was putting info into the what’s new Olympia page of the Olympian.
Bob Jones encouraged inviting Danny Stusser, the JOLT publisher to our meeting. Jenn said she loved the idea of posting to monthly to the JOLT, perhaps after the CNA meeting would be a good time. Leslie said she loves idea about the JOLT and she gets a lot of good information from there. She suggested the first few posts to the JOLT should talk about the concept of the neighborhood association and why people are involved in it as many people are not familiar with it. Bob said he recently put out a newsletter that describes RNAs and CNA roles and we could use that.
Jenn said we’ve found some of our most successful online engagement through Facebook where they have our Neighborhood Association has its own Facebook page and group, and then they go to sites that refer people. And they put out surveys to people who are who are in their group. And to join the group, they ask what the cross streets are to verify that you live in the neighborhood. And then you’re in a group and it can work similar to a mailing list. They get a lot of engagement there. Larry suggested that if we had somebody fill the communication position who understood these things it would be helpful.
A motion was made to approve the Minutes. They were approved with a minor correction.
Melissa asked for some time on the agenda to go over the roster of all the names that we have and many are outdated. It was suggest that the use of MailChimp may help keep the roster from getting outdated.
Another agenda item was to have a mini-tutorial for 15 minute overview on how to use MailChimp.
Another one was how to pay dues electronically.
Website development was also raised and suggested that perhaps a matching grant be applied for on behalf of the RNAs through CNA.
Larry reminded the members that matching grant applications are due by 5:00 PM on March 27th.
Bob suggested the Goldcrest Homeowners association might be a model for web development. He suggested the CNA would probably take advantage of it too. It is at goldcrestolympia.org. It is new and they have an online payment system as well. Bob said they have a board member that knows more about it than I do. I can volunteer her services without talking to her, and if I’m still alive after I’ve volunteered her services, I might be able to bring her to a meeting. But I’ll check. Yes, please do, because we may have the seeds of the of a solution there. He said he would talk to her.
It was suggested we put together a grant writing team. To share with the group, what would that be? What kind of technical skills does it take? What kind of costs are involved in doing it? What’s the process in setting up and maintaining it? And then if there’s anybody else who has a good website, maybe listen to and hear what they have to say. What will it take for us to pull together a grant proposal? We should invite Bruce Coulter too. Maybe 45 minutes at the CNA our at a meeting dedicated separately from the Monday meeting.
Jenn said she had people too. Maybe spend more time on the questions and answers. Jen said that Scott Bishop who did their MailChimp. But she didn’t know if she could commit to him coming next time, he might be available. Scott has set up a lot of web pages for other groups. He also knows web stuff. And then he’s done MailChimp. I think he does it for NE and his church.
Maybe create a Pilot group to adopt this new technology, to learn and adopt this new technology. So we should ask about that going forward. So it would be a stronger proposal if it had more neighborhoods in it.
Melissa asked if we’re talking about a technical assistance grant for all of the neighborhoods to show up on a single Saturday or should we start small? Also, don’t people need sort of individual help?
Larry suggested if we get a core of three neighborhoods together who become users of this whatever technologies we adopted they become a resource for the others who want to adopt.
The meeting adjourned.