UCUC Plan Supervision Meeting Notes

Courtesy The University Park Community Club
27 March 1999
(as taken by R'ykandar (Dar) Korra'ti while trying to be involved in the meeting at the same time.)

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Needs, as provided by facilitator:
     - Ensure City et al fulfill promises
     - Provide focal point for co-operation bet. agencies & public sector.
     - Encourage good implementations, discourage bad ones
     - Supply oversight for UCUC plan implementation.
     - Assume fiscal responsibility to raise funds, apply for grants, pay for mailings.

Added to list at meeting:
     - Need a forum to resolve issues
     - Accurate & timely information.
     - Particularly w/Sound Transit.
     - Notification for WHOLE COMMUNITY. (U. Heights will be starting newsletter.)

Goals:
     - Make U. District premier place to live & work
     - Support (not supplant) existing community orgs.
     - Keep UCUC work alive

Do we make a full, formal, chartered, separate org.? Or do we make a coalition which is ad hoc.? Or can an existing org be expanded do the job? Or do we just blow it off and assume the city will do the right thing? (Nobody supports that last.)

The AdHoc Forum:
     - Unofficial sounding board, no formalised legal existance/structure, meets quarterly or as needed, avoids a board. Set up to provide information sharing & discussion, to interface between city & community, open to all. Organisation would have no official commenting capacity; people and organisations would form coalitions around individual issues.
     - Could result in multiple positions. Many in group think this is basically OK.

A more formal organisation:
     - A small, focused group focused on the plan and nothing else. It be an impetus to get all the major players involved.

A REMINDER:
     All of this is to make the city follow through on various promises and plans. It's not to make a new plan or make major modifications to the existing plan, which has already been adopted.

Various comments:
     - Sound Transit & UW will set up their own advisory groups regardless of what we do.
     - Implementation plans depend on other groups. (Sound Trasnit, UW, etc.)
     - Strong reccomendation AGAINST trying to take away authority or autonomy of individual groups. The hyenas will descend!
     - Duplication of responsibility may be a problem.
     - City wants citizens involved in solving difficult problems that come up in plan stuff. The city wants to see the compromise worked out across all the neighbourhood groups. If the city sees that, it follows that. If not - if it sees a bunch of individual groups presenting it with different opinions - it'll make it's own decisions based upon what it thinks is best.
     - UCUC (as the plan-making group) can't run it any further, it's sunsetting and has no more budget as of Monday.
     - The NE District Council (suggested) can't do it, has much too broad a mandate and doesn't have representation from UW, U. Village, et al.
     - Existing groups are too narrowly focused.
     - Appears to be something of alack of trust between the four major types of groups in the U. District - neighbourhood groups, business community, UW, Social Servlces. Plus there's unaffiliated people (individuals) making sort of a fifth group that doesn't have formal recognition.

     After much discussion, the group present appears to be generally happy w/the Ad hoc forum/joint committee. People present seem to agree w/that mostly. A few people are very unhappy that a more formal organisation isn't being set up.

THAT DECIDED:
     Who "runs" - or "conveins" - this thing? Someone suggests the city and is laughed down. (Included amoungst the laughers are the City representative... the city certainly doesn't want it.) Who convienes it, who helps set stuff up, etc. Patty from The Ave Group is nominated but doesn't have time.

Various comments and questions from this phase of the discussion:
     - Where will the plan's "ameneties" come from? (Various places including Sound Transit and The Ave Group, but the majority will be from private business as encouraged via zoning changes, etc.)
     - There will be public meetings on various specific topics (Sound Transit and UW in particular) over the next several months, regardless of anything we do.
     - The Ad Hoc group relies on consensus, has less ability to do a majority vote override of very unhappy minorities.
     - Do more doing, less talking (HA!)

(And we take a break - officially five minutes, more like fifteen...)

The Decision:
     The group present will, for practical intents and purposes, be the convener. The U. District Chamber of Commerce offers to convene the first time, and will do so in cooperation with Julian (who says he'll keep doing it after the first meeting or two), U. Washington (Bridgit), a social services group (Eileen), and Neil and John. They'll find a space, set a time, type up an agenda and even get presenters. UW and the conveining committee will try to arrange a facilitator from UW faculty.

Possible agenda items:
     - City actions to date
     - Sound Transit
     - UW - how they'll be working with residential concerns
     - Who owns monitoring what parts of what projects? Who are the advocates & allies?
     - 50th St. Station/area oversight?

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