Roosevelt Neighborhood

Seattle, Washington
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Roosevelt Neighborhood Association Old Blog
When our old domain name expired, we lost access to our old blog. Sorry for the confusion.

February 18

Seattle City Council Visits Roosevelt

On Saturday morning, Feb. 14th Seattle City Councilmembers Tim Burgess and Jean Godden joined a small group of Roosevelt and Ravenna residents for a tour of the neighborhood.  A few hours later, CM Burgess posted an entry on his personal blog.

It was great for the community to have this opportunity to speak directly with their elected officials.  I think they enjoy coming here, too.  That's because we have struck a resonant chord in our approach to the City.  Instead of shrieking and pounding the table, we've taken a calm, rational approach to pressing land use issues.  What we're asking for, essentially, is for the City to help us realize the vision in our Neighborhood Plan.  Its a sincere request that's hard to refuse.

I encourage you to follow up with Tim and Jean and all Seattle City Councilmembers, as well as the Department of Planning & Development (DPD) to express your concerns and aspirations for the neighborhood.  All City employees can be reached via e-mail using the simple address formula firstname.lastname@seattle.gov, e.g. tim.burgess@seattle.gov.  Now is the time.

Jim O'Halloran
Chair, RNA Land Use Committee

7:51 PM GMT  |  Read comments(1)

February 06

Light Rail May be coming to Roosevelt Earlier Than Planned

An email message I received recently reads as follows:
 

Accelerate Light Rail to Northgate:In the Sound Transit 2 plan just approved by voters, the extension of light rail from the University of Washington to Northgate is scheduled to open in 2020. This extension will provide additionaltravel capacity in the highest ridership corridor in the region. For commuters, travel time savingsare significant: the trip from downtown Seattle to llorthgate on a bus takes 26 minutes, and only13 minutes on a train.

With federal stimulus funding, final design could begin in 2009 - two years earlier than planned.Stimulus: $180 million

 
Looks like we need to be prepared for Station Area Planning sooner than later.
 
Posted by: Randall Weers


6:07 PM GMT  |  Read comments(2)

January 31

Nominations are open

I wanted to title this entry, "Activism, what does it mean?" But "activism" seems to be a scary word to people, unless of course it's about an issue that could have significant impact to themselves. Sure start talking about the Sisley properties and you'll get a whole bunch of people who will attend a meeting. In fact I'd say that many of the meetings attended lately have been because of the assumption that there would be discussion about what to do about the Sisley properties.

 

The thing of it is, the Sisley properties are not the only thing happening in this neighborhood. Take today's meeting about the City's workplans for 2009 and beyond. Does anybody care that we might have an opportunity to increase open spaces in our neighborhood by keeping in touch with the City about their plans to decommission the reservoir at 75th and 15th? And what about the Light Rail station that's coming?

 

The real thing of it is that there is a lot happening in this neighborhood besides the construction that might happen in one corner of it. There’s Land Use and Transportation. There’s a whole Sustainability Group that just getting organized. There is safety to consider. There’s the workplans we talked about today. There are Board meetings to attend, the monthly meeting to organize, minutes to take, finances to keep up, a web site to maintain and so much more. And there is a need to have a central team of people who are willing to spend a few hours each month talking about those things and keeping them organized.

 

The Roosevelt Neighborhood Association President has decided that after two terms that she wants to focus more of her time on her family and career. The Nominating Committee is looking for people who can fill her shoes as well as people to fill a whole slate of positions.

 

What about you? Are you willing to be a part of what makes Roosevelt such a great place to live? If so, send an email to rna@rooseveltneighborhoodseattle.org.

 

5:47 PM GMT  |  Read comments(0)

The City Prioritizes work for the Roosevelt Neighborhood

Mark Troxel from the City of Seattle brought a wall full of Strategies and Priorities for neighbors to review at the Calvary Christian Assembly gym from 10:00 to Noon today. These are the 109 Strategies from the Roosevelt Neighborhood Plan that volunteers from the Community prioritize last summer. These are also the Strategies that were prioritized based on the Survey that around 150 of our neighbors responded to.
 
Mark began the meeting by making it clear that the meeting wasn't going to be about the Roosevelt Development Group - the group that is developing plans for the properties at the corner of NE 65th and 15th Ave NE (a.k.a. the Sisley Properties or the Fruit Stand corner). This meeting would be about informing the neighbors about the work that the City would do in our neighborhood if they have budget for it.
 
John Adams, co-project lead for the Neighborhood Plan Prioritization project, described how the priorities were assigned.
Jim O'Halloran explained the events that led up to the need to revise the plan - the descision to align the Light Rail station on 12th Ave NE being the key driver of this action.
 
There was some discussion about the Environmental Impact Study that will be required for the RDG to move forward with any plans. Barbara Warren, a Ravenna resident and neighborhood activist, pointed out that the EIS was too late to have much influence over the plans. Now is the time to get involved. O'Halloran talked about the RDG meeting that would be held on February 17th to discuss plans with RDG (see http://rooseveltseattle.org/EventsInRoosevelt.aspx for schedule and location). O'Halloran also mentioned the February 10th meeting which will have Sally Clark attending.
 
Troxel, Clark and members of the RNA Board fielded a number of questions from the 75 or so attendees.
 
My thanks to all who attended to support the prioritization and to the volunteers who spent countless hours helping get all of this together.
 
Randy Weers


4:29 PM GMT  |  Read comments(1)