Want people to support development in Tacoma? Don’t shut off their power on short notice
It was weirdly dark last Thursday night. The bar I stroll by on my evening dog walk was vacant, and headlights in the street became blinding without the ambient glow you expect in a city.
It was also quiet, which was equally unnerving. There was no windstorm or glaring emergency. There just wasn’t any power. A few blocks off Sixth Avenue shut off, while the rest of Tacoma hummed along.
Consumed by my thoughts, by my meager excuse for exercise and by the bad ‘90s rock pumping in my headphones, I kept walking. By the time I got home — to my neighborhood on the other side of Sixth, where the lights were still on — I had all but forgotten.
That’s when Marcy Rodenborn, 56, who has lived on North Trafton Street near Grant elementary for the last two decades, found me on Twitter.
Rodenborn’s house was in the dark, and she wasn’t happy about it — largely because news of the service interruption arrived just three days prior, chalked up to “system maintenance” on a yellow door hanger delivered by Tacoma Public Utilities.
We spoke by phone the following morning.
“If you walked around … our whole block and the whole area were pitch black,” Rodenborn said, validating what I’d seen for myself. “We had to go to a friend’s for the evening, make sure everything was powered up, my husband had to go buy ice and we got a cooler out. Obviously, we didn’t die or anything, but it was just one more thing, and more stuff we had to do.”
Let’s stop right there for a disclaimer: this column isn’t about one of Tacoma’s most pressing issues. In a world full of homelessness and poverty and inequality and a million other terrible things, what Rodenborn and her family endured last week amounts to little more than a one-night inconvenience. Hashtag First World Problems, north Tacoma edition. In all, 130 residential Tacoma Public Utilities customers and a handful of businesses were impacted by the outage, which lasted from 8 p.m. to roughly 3:30 a.m. Presumably all survived.
Still, as Tacoma continues to hurtle into the future, it feels like there’s a lesson to be learned.
If we want homeowners and current residents to support the kind of seismic change that’s necessary to accommodate growth while keeping Tacoma Tacoma — and win over the skeptics, which currently include Rodenborn — we should probably find a way to be a little less callous as we go about it.
Take that power outage with three days notice — which Rodenborn said left some of her neighbors without heat, and plenty of others bent out of shape.
The pressing system maintenance?
It happened because the 42-unit market-rate apartment project on North Trafton Street, undertaken by a for-profit private developer, needed to get its elevator installed on a tight schedule, according to TPU spokesperson Carrie Mantle.
Rodenborn said the short notice felt “sneaky,” like it was designed to limit push back from the surrounding neighborhood.
Can you blame her?
System capacity
According to Mantle, the truth is less nefarious, and largely tied to subcontractor scheduling. The building needed power for the elevator to be installed — more power than the existing infrastructure in the historically residential area could handle — so an overnight crew had to turn the electricity off to add the capacity.
Mantle failed to recall a similar situation during her time at TPU, but a delay, she explained, could have caused installation of the elevator to be “pushed out two to three months due to demand.”
“All of a sudden you’re putting up a complex that’s going to have a whole bunch of users in an area that’s already been built. You’re changing the density of that area, which means you’re going to have an increased demand, so you have to add capacity,” Mantle said. “We tried to notify people as far in advance as we could, so they could prepare.”
OK, sure … but just three days notice?
Really?
“We just had a really small window in which to actually schedule the work to be done to accommodate everyone,” Mantle said, telling The News Tribune that TPU sent out notices to customers on Monday, the same day the utility learned that the system upgrades would need to be completed by the end of week.
At this point in the column, I could dive deeper into the weeds of elevator installation and finer points of Tacoma’s power grid. I could bring in outside experts and try to get to the bottom of whether there was really no other way for the work to be done, and no way for TPU to know more than a few days in advance. I could hash it all out, with the likely end result being unsatisfying: it’s complicated.
Or, I could return to Rodenborn — one of the real, live people affected —which probably makes more sense.
We chatted for about a half hour last Friday morning, and — aside from her stories of making due with camping lanterns — it was a conversation like many that have occurred in Tacoma over recent years. We discussed the things we like about our neighborhoods, and the need to make sure more people have opportunities we’ve had to live in them.
We also talked about change, how jarring it can be, and the Home in Tacoma effort — which is designed to encourage more types of housing by replacing single-family and low-density multifamily zoning with higher density options across the city.
In other words, developments much like the one down the street from her, with the new elevator.
At one point, Rodenburn — who grew up in Oakland, the daughter of a transportation planner — admitted that she’s trying her best not to be a “NIMBY.” She gets it, she said.
But like many people, she also harbors reservations. There were things we disagreed on, like how much is too much for one neighborhood to shoulder.
“I understand we need more housing and all of that,” Rodenburn offered. “I just don’t like the way (the city has) gone about it.”
It’s a small thing, sure, but shutting off Rodenburn and her neighbors’ power on short notice — and the message of disregard it sent, intended or not — probably didn’t help.
Change is already hard. There’s no need to make it insulting, too.
Just a thought.
This story was originally published April 18, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
