Neary-Sighted

If you live in my neighborhood, or use 112th Street to get to and from places, you may have done a double-take to see a real estate sign on the Pierce County property there. This building, of course, used to be the sheriff's substation, and then later the Lakewood Police station.

It's interesting to see a sign on it, because it's an unusual property. The city has zoned it for 'public institutional' uses: so it would be a great museum, or library, or government office. You couldn't buy the land, tear down the building and put condos or houses there, or a minimart.

The Pierce County listing says it's suitable for office use, but I assume they mean for government.

Friday afternoon update: a Reader asks, could a church go there? That's a reasonable question, since there are churches on either side of the property.

Answer: any use other than a public institutional one would require a zoning change by the City Council. Churches are not included as they fall into other kinds of zoning. Now maybe a church is up for discussion, but someone will probably have a lot of trouble convincing the council to put something that's not a public institution at the property, given how so many homes are nearby.

The most famous property in Lakewood to have 'public institutional' zoning is Western State Hospital. As you can imagine, Lakewood wants to be very precise with what the state could do with their huge land holdings there.

Here's the actual definition of public institutional:

The following uses are permitted within the PI zoning district, subject to approval of a discretionary land use permit and all applicable development permits. The unique nature of this zoning district and the uses that may be placed there require flexibility in administration. Therefore, any proposed use, whether new or an expansion or change of an existing use, shall be evaluated individually to determine whether it will be treated as an administrative or conditional use, based on its size, overall functions, and anticipated level of impact, including, but not limited to, such factors as hours of operation, relationship to adjacent land uses, trip generation and parking needs, storage needs, and environmental impact.

a. Continuation of uses already legally existing within the zone at the time of adoption of this title. Maintenance and repair of existing structures shall be permitted.

b. Any use that, in the opinion of the Community Development Director, constitutes an essential public facility as defined in LMC 18A.20.400.D, or public and semi-public facilities beyond those specifically identified in state law, including a broad variety of both listed and unlisted uses, which may be liberally interpreted to meet essential community needs. Examples may include, but are not limited to, schools, libraries, and hospitals, including the Western State Hospital campus, but specifically excluding Religious Assembly use types for which adequate provision is made in other zoning districts.
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Tonight's Lakewood City Council study session is 7 p.m. at the police station community room. There will be discussion about federal community development block grants, but likely the liveliest discussion will be a preliminary conversation about a draft neighborhood and economic development plan for Tillicum.

We've been waiting about four years for this day. A lot of work has been done or is under way in that area, and what happens will make a difference to all Lakewood (but especially the Tillicum area).

The Tillicum neighborhood, which originated at the turn of the last century as family campsites around American Lake, with teeny tiny lots, is a hard area to describe in a short blog post. But Tillicum arguably has the most community spirit of any neighborhood we have; even as most people know the area has struggled with crime issues for decades.

The crime situation has improved dramatically, but there are still problems from time to time and certainly reputations take a very long time to change. Meanwhile, at least one out of three families lives below the poverty level, and many more are struggling. And yet it's a community with enough oomph and pride to organize what promises to be a great centennial in a few weeks.

The neighborhood plan is very involved, covering everything from design standards to economic analysis. But as usual with very complex questions, public attention will likely focus on just one controversial matter. Fortunately, this is at least a very important matter: how wide to make Union Avenue, the main road that runs parallel to I-5.

It's 40-foot wide now but the area will grow; should it be 50 or 60 feet wide? And if we make it wider, which properties would have to be trimmed to widen the road? There have been a lot of discussions among residents in the area, such as one grand vision the community designed a couple years, ago, and three of the city's citizen advisory committees, and there's no clear consensus at all about the best width of Union Avenue - or what 'best' means for Union Avenue.

Stay tuned. Tonight's discussion is exploratory. I'm checking to see if the most recently draft plan is online. Even if you don't care about planning, it's got a lot of interesting info about the history and current situation there and makes for interesting reading if you are interested in Lakewood public policy.
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So how's this for looking ahead? We now know the fiscal year 2014 figures to be a tough one for Lakewood, DuPont and Lacey. It's a good year, though, for Fort Lewis and our military.

That's the year that Army and Air Force Exchange Service, which offers shopping and food on military bases, predicts their 475,00-square-foot supermall will open at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, according to a presentation today at Lakewood's "Coffee with the Mayor." Handily, the presentation is online already, based on one delivered to the Tacoma chamber. (4 p.m. note: Eh, phrased that badly. What I should have said was, the Tacoma presentation, which looked a lot like the one delivered in Lakewood, is online. You get the idea. It's the Tacoma presentation that was posted) You can look at it here.


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At this end of this post, there are some hard questions related to the number of Lakewood police officers on the streets. It takes some background and even some statistics to get to the questions, so I ask for your patience.

My loyal readers, both of you, know I used to be editor of the Lakewood Journal, back when Lakewood had a community print paper. We are blessed with some fine substitutes, a strong regional paper and a local blog, but local weekly papers did have their uses. One things community papers still do in the towns where they survive is report on weekly or monthly crime statistics.

The challenge in Lakewood today is that the community as a whole really doesn't have to think about crime unless they're a victim or have some other special interest. This troubles me. There was a lot of value in analyzing the numbers, because sometimes tactics had to be adjusted to prevent or fight crime.

One reason I'd really love to see more focus right now is because of some trends I've noticed in the monthly crime reports given the Lakewood City Council. The last month I looked at was April because I was able to get Tacoma's numbers for comparison. (=thanks to a kind member of the Tacoma City Council)

Violent Crime
Lakewood Down 12 percent year to date January-April 2009 to 2010
Tacoma Down 18 percent year to date (Statistically, these are pretty similar numbers)

Property Crime
Lakewood Down 10 percent
Tacoma Down 3 percent (again, like the comparison above, within 7 percentage points of each other)

Prostitution
Lakewood down 33 percent
Tacoma down 3 percent (now that's a difference)

Total Drug Crimes
Two Tacoma Categories of Drug Crimes They Report to Council: Up 74% and 14%
Three Lakewood Categories They report to Council: Down 14%, 68% and 24%

Forgery and Fraud
I don't have Tacoma numbers for these categories, but in Lakewood, the categories are up this much year to date from 2009: 25 percent, 56 percent, 75 percent and 160 percent.

So ... here are my questions:

Have incidences of prostitution and drug crimes decreased in Lakewood, or is our budget allowing us to put enough officers on the street to catch more offenders?

Is forgery a bigger problem regionally or nationwide, or is our Lakewood budget allowing us to put enough officers on the street to prevent it and/or catch offenders?

Last night the council approved budget changes that included $175,000 worth of salary savings in the police department. Sales tax revenues are down, and one way the city dealt with that was to leave some patrol positions vacant. When I asked about it, the city said that salary savings within the police department was pretty much usual procedure. Then I look at the numbers above, with incidences of us catching drug criminals and prostitutes down, and reports of forgery and fraud skyrocketing.

I wish there was a way for the community to ask why. I miss my newspaper.
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Tonight's Lakewood City Council meeting includes a hearing on a transportation plan for the city. It's an annual and legally required exercise to sketch out a 6-year plan for roads in the city.

The leadup to this report has turned into an interesting annual exercise where the city's all-volunteer citizens' advisory group recommends we raise taxes to pay more for streets. They warn that the individual high-profile projects, such as repaving on Gravelly Lake Drive, are not characteristic of Lakewood roads: that if we don't pay now, we'll have to pay a lot more later as roads disintegrate.

The annual exercise includes the Lakewood City Council furrowing its collective brow over this news, but also not being willing to raise taxes especially in this economy. Something that gets considered, though it doesn't seem to get much traction, is asking voters if they want to raise their own taxes, like they do for schools, the fire department, etc...

So that cycle repeated this year. I wanted you to know. There's a group of very smart people insisting we need to spend more money on roads to avoid paving later, and another smart group of folks who don't know where we'll get the money to do it. If you want to see some of the backup data, here's a somewhat dated PDF of road conditions in Lakewood. The spending options are briefly described in this other PDF. This is clearly just a survey treatment of the topic. If I get a sense anyone's interested in detail, I'd be glad to write more. Let me know.

Meanwhile, here's a list of projects that do have projected funding for the near future. At this point in the city budget, most of the road work that gets done comes from state and federal grants. The city's budget goes as a local match to these grants. The grantmakers usually require cities to pony up some money to show we're serious.

What that means is that the busiest places, or places that look best on a grant application, get funded; it sometimes seems like the federal government would resurface Gravelly Lake Drive, as long as we came up with a local match, every month if the weather allowed it.

Here's a list of just some of what's in the plan, mostly for things planned for 2011. The crystal ball turns more to jasper-color when you start getting out in the years.

Steilacoom Boulevard, Bridgeport Way to Fairlawn, curbs, gutters, sidewalks, pavement overlay, 2011.

100th St SW, Gravelly Lake Drive to 59th Avenue, curbs, gutters, sidewalks, overlay, new signals, 2011.

Bridgeport Way SW, 75th to the north city limit, curbs, gutters, sidewalks, street lighting, widening for a 2-way left turn lane, drainage improvements, 2011

Murray Road and 150th Street corridor capacity to provide for growth of the Woodbrook industrial area: $8.6 million projected for the next six years (almost all of that from grants)

This is, as you might tell, a sampling. There are lots of other interesting details, like a pedestrian overpass in 2012 that would allow people to reach the Lakewood Station (the commuter station) from the adjacent neighborhood by walking high above the tracks, paid for by $3 mill from the feds (and, by extension, your federal tax dollars)

If you'd like the full plan, let me know. I have a PDF I could send you. The council will likely vote on it in a couple weeks.

Tuesday morning update: If you'd like to see the complete plan, the city put it online and accessible through the Facebook page.
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