SEQUIM — This afternoon, seven men and women will look into Sequim’s future and envision what the downtown, the parks, the neighborhoods and the job market will look and feel like.
The Sequim City Council is starting a two-day, 11-hour goal-setting session at 1 p.m. today at The Lodge at Sherwood Village media room, 600 Evergreen Farm Way just off Fifth Avenue.
Leading the public meeting — which will wrap at 5 p.m. this evening, resume at 8:30 a.m. and adjourn at 3:30 p.m. Saturday — is Julia Novak of the Novak Consulting Group.
Sequim is paying her a fee of $5,000, plus her travel expenses from Cincinnati, Ohio.
Why should the city spend this much money and time on another meeting?
City Manager Steve Burkett has strong feelings on that, as does senior council member Bill Huizinga.
Time to talk things out
“Things keep changing,” in Sequim, Huizinga began. “You’ve got to keep up. Preconceived ideas don’t hack it . . . You’ve got to talk things out.”
Burkett has already assigned homework to the council members, asking each to prepare a seven- to 10-minute speech on his or her personal vision for the city, and deliver that soon after the meeting starts today.
Then comes the Sequim map exercise, in which Mayor Ken Hays and the other members will draw onto a map where they want what: parks, affordable housing, pedestrian and bicycle paths, shopping centers, and anything else to answer the question of “If you were God, what would you add or remove from the cityscape?”
It’s high time for Sequim’s leaders to engage in this visioning process, Burkett said.
“We are in a transition mode,” turning from a small town to a small city, yet “what I’ve heard from some people is that in the last 10 years, there hasn’t been a lot of energy around discussing our future.”
Many ideas
Council member Don Hall, who takes daily walks across the city, has abundant ideas: a trail connecting Pioneer Memorial Park with the rest of downtown, better planning for roads that make it easier to get across town fast, more softball fields at Carrie Blake Park, lawn bowling courts at the Water Reuse Demonstration Site, light industrial development around the Battelle campus on Sequim Bay.
The council must look hard at financing and building a new City Hall and reshaping the downtown, possibly with new height and density standards, Burkett added.
The city manager also wants to review plans for Wayne Enterprises’ large resort development at John Wayne Marina.
After being divided on many issues for the past two years, Burkett believes the council is getting along relatively well, with Hall and Ted Miller newly elected to succeed longtime members Paul McHugh and Walt Schubert — two who often disagreed with Hays, Susan Lorenzen, Laura Dubois and Erik Erichsen, the so-called “new four” who took office in 2008.
Council dynamics
But during the retreat, Burkett and Novak will initiate a discussion of “council dynamics.”
“We’ll spend some time doing what I call ‘marriage counseling,'” Burkett said.
But the retreat’s emphasis is figuring out what the council members want Sequim to become.
Dubois, former mayor and now mayor pro tem, said she’s looking forward to prioritizing goals for the city.
She and the council will have their hands full, with a current work plan listing 46 projects.
They’ll try to narrow those down to eight or 10 initiatives, Dubois said, to tackle in the next two years.
“Hopefully we’ll have a common vision,” Burkett said. “Most often, the conflict is not our vision for the future, but how to get there.”
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley Reporter Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at diane.urbani@peninsuladaily news.com.
