Three visions for downtown Mountlake Terrace’s future were on display during a packed Oct. 30 open house at City Hall, where citizen opinions ranged from exuberant to cautiously optimistic to skeptical.
It was the latest in a series of public meetings designed to allow residents, business owners and developers to design a new downtown.
The Town Center Planning Project seeks to create more pedestrian-friendly amenities like wider sidewalks and more public spaces. It also aims to encourage tourism and commerce and act as a cohesive, central magnet for residents.
The City Council hasn’t decided on which plan to pursue, height limits or final zoning for the re-worked downtown.
Town Center encompasses 40 acres along 56th Avenue West between 244th Street SW and just south of 228th Street SW. The most intensive and dense portion is a 10-acre block that inlcudes several existing businesses across from the Civic Center
Portland-based consultant John Fregonese of Fregonese Calthorpe Associates created the three options based upon feedback at previous meetings. They include:
• No change: Leave downtown as it is and limit building heights to 35-feet.
• Redevelop 30 percent of the downtown area with 6-story mixed-use residential, office and ground-floor retail buildings. Increasingly shorter buildings would spread out from the core
• More intensive redevelopment of half of the Town Center area with 6-story mixed-use buildings that include a combination of terraced or “wedding cake” design, in which a building’s height increases in a staggered succession of layers to make it less visually daunting. Some sections of the building could go as high as 10 stories.
A fourth, middle option will be presented at City Hall at 7 p.m. on Nov. 8.
The prospect of such changes worries some residents.
Doris Cannon, a city resident for 45 years, called the third option “an infringement on the people who live in our downtown area.”
And she worries that all those taller buildings will increase the number of “private spying eyes.”
“No one’s going to know who’s watching whom,” she said, as about 70 people listened.
Sharon Maynard, a city resident who has been critical of high-density development, said Mountlake Terrace needs to find its unique, small town identity in a village-style development without resorting to buildings taller than three stories. Maynard and city resident Leonard French are collecting petition signatures that call for a lower level of redevelopment.
At the meeting, French said city officials have neglected to consider quality of life in the planning equation and have been overly intrusive in the planning process.
“Stop making the perfect the enemy of the good,” he said.
Others liked more development.
“I happen to be in favor of redeveloping this area,” said Patrick McMahan, 76, who runs a vehicle license agency downtown. Potholes and vacant storefronts, he said, should be enough of a reason to redevelop.
Larry Sowle, an Everett real estate appraiser who’s interested in developing property in the Town Center, said concerns about rising property values in the city are over-blown.
“I don’t think they’ve gone up nearly in proportion to other areas,” he said after the meeting.
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