Imagining Everett in 2025
Published 4:37 pm Tuesday, July 31, 2012
Seven years is an instructive yardstick. Committed relationships occasionally soldier on as long, while the human body produces fresh, unwearied cells every decade (if only the latter wasn’t apocryphal, we’d have newly animated brains.)
Time, perhaps, to dust off a digital copy of the 2005 Everett Vision Committee Report, a blueprint conceived in the city’s halcyon, pre-Great Recession days. A few years ago, buoyant stakeholders and the public brainstormed unimpeded by dystopian thoughts of a Boeing 787 assembly plant in Charleston, S.C., or a shuttered Kimberly-Clark mill. Bromides about drawing the “creative class” (Social Scientist Richard Florida’s inspired but over-stretched thesis about knowledge-based workers and communities that cultivate them) were kicked around and debated. The “Pittsburgh of the East,” Everett’s original motto and de facto mission statement, quickly morphed into a dynamic, post-industrial vision. It was a sublime exercise, with no inkling of the coming low-grade, economic flu. (We were dreamers once … and young.)
Some report goals, such as advancing access to higher education, fell together thanks to the farsighted efforts of Everett Mayor Ray Stephanson. WSU/Everett makes whole the vision of a new, four-year college offering baccalaureate degrees. The attendant vision of “scientific research facilities” is more long-term and will require a significant investment by the state.
Another recommendation that will come to pass before 2025 (the committee’s arbitrary, imagine-what-it-will-look-like date) includes commercial air-passenger service at Paine Field (a two-gate terminal just like the Bellingham airport.) Notwithstanding issues of noise abatement and reflexive NIMBY-ism, it’s a wee ironic that an aerospace nerve-center doesn’t offer commercial air travel.
Improvements on the 41st Street interchange were a post-report victory and, earlier this year, the Everett City Council adopted a transportation corridor plan that will begin to mend the north-south divide and elevate high-capacity transit (Swift buses are a godsend.) Ideally, transportation improvements will translate into a grafting together of a bisected city, enhanced by more public support for south-end parks, trails, and gathering places.
A few once-cool notions now seem fanciful. With no major university anchoring east Everett, the idea of a trolley connecting Everett Station with a revitalized Harborfront is a non-starter. Facilities for windboarding and windsurfing on Port Gardner Bay? Not this year.
Where are the fractures? Everett still needs a Main Street-style program for its central business district; a pedestrian-oriented waterfront; creative, environmentally sensitive development of the Simpson and landfill riverfront sites; and a Public Development Authority to bolster infrastructure, capital, and transportation projects.
Vision Committee reports can be Panglossian (or grim) or simply entertaining (a new millenium and still, alas, no jetpacks.) A prudent strategy involves revisiting the report’s goals, actions, and outcomes annually, separating the wheat from the whimsical.
Everett can be a thriving, attractive town. An undusted copy of the Vision Committee Report points the way.
