With the Tacoma City Council finally poised to take up a recommended overhaul of the city’s waterfront rules after five years of procedural wrangling, residents flooded City Hall on Tuesday to again give council members an earful of opinions.
And once again, divergent testimony came during what became a marathon public hearing over the city planning commission’s recommended updates to Tacoma’s Shoreline Master Program.
Commentary largely broke into two camps: those who back the status quo of a working, industrial waterfront along Schuster Parkway and those who support a long-envisioned public esplanade from the Tacoma Dome to Point Defiance.
Longshoremen, seafarers, chamber of commerce representatives and other business interests implored the council to reject the planning commission’s recent recommendation to downzone the area’s industrial classification under which deep-water port user Sperry Ocean Dock and the Temco grain elevator now operate.
“We need to be creating more high-paying jobs, not less,” Scott Mason, president of Tacoma International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 23, told the council.
Meanwhile, Stadium District residents, citizen activist groups and schoolchildren urged council members to support the commission’s recommended rezone for the area to encompass Sperry, the Tahoma Salt Marsh, and the Jack Hyde and Chinese Reconciliation parks into a more public-friendly mixed-use classification.
The rezone could one day support incorporating the 1.2-mile “missing link” of industrial waterfront into an envisioned seven-mile public esplanade.
“I urge this council to put the city and its citizens first by endorsing (the zoning change) to make a pedestrian-friendly walkway from the Dome to Defiance,” Linda Heaton, a Stadium resident and member of the pro-esplanade “Walk-The-Waterfront” group, told council members.
At one point, at least 70 citizens had signed up to tell the council their views on the pending shorelines recommendations, Mayor Marilyn Strickland said.
The conflicting viewpoints Tuesday underscore the complexity involved in coming to a waterfront plan that the community at large can live with. It also further defined conflicting and entrenched positions among stakeholders that have hardened during a review process that dates to 2006 and involved thousands of pages of drafts and redrafts and more than 60 public meetings. The extensive overhaul of the city’s shoreline plan is required under state law.
Last month, the planning commission unanimously adopted recommended updates on waterfront policies and regulations, along with required new elements of the plan. The recommendations also incorporated a test for determining when private property owners must provide public access to waterfront, and provides them with a new option to pay a fee in lieu of providing such access.
Other highlights include a recommendation for the east side of the Foss Waterway to allow the NuStar “tank farm” to be rezoned entirely for heavy industrial use, while keeping mixed-use zoning and public esplanade standards for properties west of East D Street.
The council will now weigh whether a city vision to create a “clean-tech” Innovation Partnership Zone east of the Foss – a sort of public-private research cluster to be anchored by an expanded Urban Waters – can coexist under the commission’s recommendations.
But taking center stage Tuesday was the recommended Schuster Parkway rezone.
If approved, commissioners noted, Sperry’s non-conforming industrial use would be grandfathered in to the new mixed-use zoning classification, so the company could continue operating as is. But company representatives say such new zoning will increase Sperry’s costs and decrease its property-sales potential.
The council has until Dec. 1 to send an updated plan to the state’s ecology department for review. A first reading is set for Nov. 15, with a final vote tentatively set for Nov. 22.
Lewis Kamb: 253-597-8542
lewis.kamb@thenewstribune.com
blog.thenewstribune.com/politics
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