Neary-Sighted

I know you are sitting there, waiting for Post No. 498 about community policing. Well, we do talk about other things from time to time. Like local history, for example.

I've heard for awhile that there was a story about the fountain in front of Washington Mutual on Gravelly Lake Drive. Somehow the fountain came up in conversation with Dennis Higashiyama, one of the city's parks and recreation staff. Dennis provides support to the new arts commission. So perhaps it is not surprising that Dennis knew all about the fountain, and sent me in the direction of some informative URLs.

I bet a lot of you know the story, but just in case: The fountain was designed by the Northwest artist George Tsutakawa, who is profiled on this great site about UW alumni and professors. He designed dozens of fountains, which are found from the National Cathedral in Washington D.C. to the University of California, Los Angeles. Tsutakawa was also profiled on HistoryLink, in an essay titled, "Master of Fountains," where I thought this sentence was a good summary: "Tsutakawa's fountains look as if they are shaped by the water itself."

Of course, the alert among you may have known of this treasure in Lakewood thanks to the Tacoma Public Library's photo series in The News Tribune. This photo and caption from a January 2007 issue shows the fountain at its original location in 1970, at Pacific First Federal Savings in Tacoma. You can get a better sense of how the fountain fit into its original location by looking at another photo at a wider angle from the Tacoma library, though you have to peer a bit at the bottom of the photo to see the fountain. The fountain was moved to Lakewood in 1974 when the bank opened the branch here. How great that we have it in Lakewood!

Perhaps it is a tribute to this artist's popularity that you can even find a video taken outside a WaMu in Bellevue and now posted on YouTube, of, well, a Tsutakawa fountain:

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News is only starting to get around town that the Lakewood City Council took a strong stand last night on community policing. It only took one email to make my morning a happy one:

I was back on the blog this morning and saw the wonderful news. Thank you for keeping me informed so I could speak in favor of the neighborhood policing. I know first hand that this is a great program that works. When you have neighbors looking out for each other with the help of the police department, it makes for a better community all the way around. When citizens get to know the officers in their area and learn how to help them it makes the job of the officer much easier too. Witnesses are more willing to talk to someone they already know. Again this was the best news ever.
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The Lakewood City Council, by a voice vote tonight, agreed to extend community policing throughout Lakewood in 2008. (see several of the posts below for what areas would not have been included under the original budget draft) If I heard the voices right, the voices for public safety were myself, Helen McGovern, Doug Richardson, Claudia Thomas and John Arbeeny.

More later. Thank you for all the expressions of confidence you've been sharing. Thanks in particular for the many of you who testified for empowering neighborhoods. We won. Community won. Neighborhoods won.
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As the Lakewood City Council marches toward a budget for 2008, there are two more loose strands to consider: how we allocate funds for human services and for tourism.

In the case of tourism, the Legislature requires that money collected from the hotel tax be spent on tourism. It has been a neat way of allocating seed money and marketing money to build economic development. The volunteer lodging tax board presented its proposals last night. You can read the recommendations here. There are a number of neat ideas to promote the community. Remember, tourists come and spend money, and then leave. They support a lot of the things we all enjoy.

Human services funding is more discretionary. Back when Lakewood incorporated, the original council agreed to set aside 1 percent of the general fund for programs that help the needy. For the first couple years I wrote this newsletter, my lists of these proposals got all the reaction of a yawn at a sleep apnea convention. But last year, a couple people decided to use the human services spending as an excuse for gay-bashing. (One of the several groups that would be funded provides a drop-in center for gay youth) And there were lively questions about to what extent these programs serve illegal immigrants. So who knows - this year's debate could also be lively. Meanwhile, you can read what our citizens' committee proposed for human services spending here.

In theory, these proposals will all be discussed on Monday when the council reaches a final decision on the budget. If people decide that Lakewood is the beachhead in the United States for where we can address nationwide issues involving gay people, illegal immigrants and public employees salaries, then it could be a long evening. But that's part of the job, and the challenge of balancing any and all of this is what keeps us all involved.
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Once again, we are live from the floor of City Hall in yet another budget hearing. It's 8:50 p.m., and it's still unclear whether a majority of council members will agree to extend community policing throughout our community. The formal vote on the budget may come as early as next Monday's council meeting.

In case you are wondering, I am posting this courtesy of the wifi from the Starbucks across the parking lot. I hope this post is worth to you the $10 I paid to sign on!

I'm afraid we don't have much of an update. Only Doug Richardson and I have said we support community policing in all six neighborhoods. The Lakewood CARES group is criticizing city spending in general: how awful the budget process is, how overpaid the emploeyes are, and so forth. They don't like spending, period. Neither do the rest of us, of course. But they sure like to talk and talk and talk about how awful spending is.

As always, they have a point. We need to do a better job of monitoring spending and priorities. We can always do better. What I want to know as I type this is whether we will fund adequate police protection in 2008 or not.

Well, the hearing ended and we still don't know where people stand on community policing. Well, there's always Monday ...
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You will find the results of my annual Lakewood budget survey below. Only a pretty cruel guy would post yet another survey, but that's me, I guess. I like getting - and in this survey, sharing - opinions. Sharing ideas is crucial to the success and credibility of what's still a relatively new city.

These questions are designed to not only survey opinion, but make a point. In addition, I am also trying to decide what I should be doing about all those Lakewood CARES emails flying through the Internet. In both cases, I would welcome your feedback. Let me know what you think. You will find this survey more pointed than usual, but so are the subjects.

Click here to take Walter's Survey
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Many thanks to those of you who filled out my 2008 budget survey. I've been worrying about how I can summarize the findings to you, but I just learned my survey company now issues the results in HTML. That makes it easy to post results on the Internet. How cool is that?

I apologize for the length of this post, but especially for those of you who filled out the survey, hopefully it will be worth the screen time. One thing that helps make sense of all the data: the numbers on the far right of the columns. They represent averages. So, for example, you will see the average score for the statement "Lakewood needs more police officers" was 2.28; the average score for the statement "Lakewood has too many police officers" was 4.24. You can quickly see which idea was more popular.

As I have said before, I do these surveys to find out what people are thinking. I don't make up my mind based on surveys. But it is helpful to know, for example, that the majority of citizens agree with me that we need more police. It is helpful to know when I disagree with people. For example, I was surprised how many people either want Lakewood City Council members to be watchdogs of the Clover Park School District, or were ambivalent on the question. That's intriguing. I like knowing that my hunch was wrong because it helps me interpret some of the things I see.

I was also surprised with how many people were OK with tougher design standards for Tillicum. I am not a big government guy, but I think people are saying we should be open to considering ways to make Tillicum better. This tells me that people who propose such tougher design standards are not as lonely as I thought they would be.

Because my survey questions tend to meander, it's almost as if I was able to have coffee with 50 different people at once.

Speaking of meandering, there were a lot of responses that were comments, or lists. You may recall that I asked people to list their main sources for information about events in town. So obviously those lists of answers are not reflected in these numbers. More information about those responses will come later. Meantime, feel free to let me know what you think of the trends shown here:



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