SEQUIM — In the final 45 minutes of an 11-hour retreat, the City Council homed in on nine ways to brighten this town’s future.
The annual goal-setting session, which stretched through Friday afternoon and most of Saturday, brought the seven council members together at The Lodge at Sherwood Village in Sequim.
Despite their confinement indoors on two sunny days, they stayed in good humor, with none of the bickering and tension of the past two years.
All agree on small-town vision
Mayor Ken Hays and the rest of the council, along with City Manager Steve Burkett, agreed on a vision of Sequim as a prosperous, environmentally conscious, still small-town friendly place.
Professional facilitator Julia Novak, flown in from Cincinnati, Ohio, kept the body tightly on task, so the members translated that vision into nine objectives to tackle this and next year:
• Turn “sunny Sequim” into a “solar city” by encouraging residents to install solar-power systems and by putting solar panels on the new City Hall, whenever it’s built.
• Find a site for a new City Hall.
• Finish the process of annexing the Battelle Memorial Institute campus and provide water and sewer extensions so the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory facility there can add clean, well-paying jobs.
• Study whether the Guy Cole Convention Center should be renovated or torn down.
• Rethink Sequim’s transportation grid to make it friendly to pedestrians and bicyclists.
• Ask the Sequim Speaks citizens’ advisory group to organize and hold town-hall meetings.
• Develop a vision, with height and density standards, for downtown revitalization.
• Expand the Sequim area parks and recreation taxing district to offer recreation programs for all ages.
• Reform the city’s zoning to encourage more affordable housing, neighborhood grocery stores and a small-town atmosphere.
The council members also talked about how important they believe it is to hold on to Sequim’s rural nature, even as the city swells in population.
People wave
They agree that it still feels like a small town because people are still friendly here, waving and saying hello to one another while walking downtown, in Carrie Blake Park or on the Olympic Discovery Trail.
Member Don Hall recalled that when he lived in Rhode Island, nobody said hello to anyone on the street.
Now, “I can’t go anywhere in Sequim without people waving and honking,” he said.
City Manager Steve Burkett added that on the Burke-Gilman Trail in King County, no one ever says anything as they walk by.
He liked to shake them up by bellowing, “How y’all doing?”
Hays, an architect who’s practiced on the North Olympic Peninsula for decades, believes Sequim “can be a wonderful small urban center,” and “in 40 or 50 years, it’s going to be a remarkable place.
“It may take that long, whether we help it along or not,” he added.
A place to walk
But if he’s to encourage anything, it would be a downtown rich with housing as well as shopping, a “physical and emotional center,” surrounded by neighborhoods where people can go on foot to whatever they like.
“People love to and need to walk,” Hays said, adding that if a city is to stay lively, it must be a good place to promenade.
Mayor Pro Tem Laura Dubois headed in the same direction.
“We need to develop a transportation plan, and it should focus on moving people, not vehicles,” she said.
She wants Sequim to be friendly to all kinds of movement: walking, bicycling, driving and riding the bus.
The council retreat wrapped right on time at 3:30 p.m. Saturday, after Novak invited the members to sum up their feelings in six words.
“Encouraged” and “hopeful” were repeated and Hays, like the others, waxed optimistic in describing the long but energetic discussion.
“We’re hearing the sounds of progress,” he said.
Then the mayor joked, “Hard to believe I have a cohesive thought. Once in a while they leak out.”
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley Reporter Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.