Panel Wants Park Space Along Water: City Council, Port to Make Final Decision
By John Stark, The Bellingham Herald, Bellingham, Wash.
Apr. 7–Friday, April 7, 2006
The edge of the central waterfront should be park space, not street, Bellingham Planning Commission members agreed Thursday.
In a City Hall work session to draw up recommendations for the Bellingham City Council, commission members expressed a preference for many features of an alternative waterfront design concept drawn up by Bellingham architect Dave Christensen, rather than an official design prepared by LMN Architects of Seattle under a contract with the Port of Bellingham and the city.
The City Council and port commissioners will make the final decision on waterfront design concepts at a joint meeting that may not be scheduled until June.
A key feature in the Christensen plan is a green belt, roughly 200 feet wide, along the shore from the southeast side of Whatcom Waterway all the way to the Cornwall landfill area at the southwestern end of the property that the port acquired in January 2005 from Georgia-Pacific West Inc. The most recent design concept from LMN shows a much narrower green belt in spots, with streets closely hugging the shoreline in several places.
Commissioners agreed that they wanted any streets to be pushed back from the water, and they also want the streets to be laid out in a way that discourages people from driving through the area on the way to somewhere else.
“It isn’t a place you go through,” Commissioner Chris Morgan said. “It’s a place you go to.”
Planning Commission Chairman Jim Bishop agreed.
“We definitely want to recommend no long sweeping roads through the site that allow people to race through the area,” Bishop said.
Other recommendations the commission approved Thursday include:
* Build a pedestrian bridge over Whatcom Waterway that can be moved to let sailboats through.
* Provide numerous pedestrian access points to the waterfront to accommodate adjacent neighborhoods.
* Consider the old R.G. Haley treated wood products property as a site for high-density housing development, if it is ever acquired from its current property owners.
* Maintain the existing deep-water terminal for shipping or other use.
The meeting continued late Thursday night, with discussion of the port’s plan for a marina inside the G-P lagoon still to come.
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Copyright (c) 2006, The Bellingham Herald, Bellingham, Wash.
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