Love Your City: Join Us at the WSCC Public Benefits Reveal on Thursday

Posted on by Scott Bonjukian

Happy Valentine’s Day! If you love the Lid I-5 vision of a more unified, vibrant, and sustainable Seattle, we hope you can join us Thursday morning.

Seattle Design Commission Meeting
Thursday, February 16th
9:00 AM – 10:30
Seattle City Hall, Room L2-80 (600 4th Avenue)
Facebook Event
The Washington State Convention Center (WSCC) will present an official public benefits proposal for its major expansion project. We will be there to respond to the presentation, and hope you can join us in supporting the Seattle Design Commission’s intent for strong public benefits. After this meeting the package will be negotiated and refined for several months before moving to City Council.If you can’t attend in-person, it’s not too late to contact the Design Commission. Send your support for Lid I-5 to Director Michael Jenkins: michael.jenkins@seattle.gov.

You can also send a message of support to Beverly Barnett, with the Seattle Department of Transportation, who will conduct an analysis on the public benefits: beverly.barnett@seattle.gov

With a $1.6 billion price tag, this will be the single most expensive real estate project in Seattle history. It will be more costly than Safeco and CenturyLink Fields combined and will be built on publicly owned land, by a public entity, using public money.

We’ve joined forces with seven other community organizations to form the Community Package Coalition and make sure the public gets a fair deal. In exchange for street and alley vacations, we’re asking the WSCC to use this opportunity to invest at least $79 million in what Seattle needs most: public open spaces, safe crossings for pedestrians and cyclists, and homes affordable to working families.

Our Goals

Consistent with the Seattle Comprehensive Plan for lidding freeways for open space and development, the Lid I-5 Steering Committee continues to seek two specific projects as part of the Community Package:

1) Funding for a City-led feasibility study of where freeway lids for parks, housing, new connections, and other civic uses will be most needed as Seattle grows over the next 20 years. We estimate this study will cost $1-1.5 million and take up to two years to complete.

2) We endorse the Seattle Department of Transportation’s proposal to build a 14,000 square foot lid park at the east corner of the Pine Street and Boren Avenue intersection, expanding the existing Plymouth Pillars Park in Capitol Hill. Based on other projects we estimate this will cost $8-10 million.

sdot-pine-boren-lid-park-conceptThank you for your continued support.

Best regards,
The Lid I-5 Steering Committee