Tomorrow is your last chance to vote for the best community-generated park and street projects where you live.
The city revamped its community-generated park and street improvement program this year, turning the old Neighborhood Parks and Street Fund into Your Voice, Your Choice. Neighbors from all over the city submitted about 900 ideas for improvements over the winter, and a community and feasibility process whittled the list down to a handful for each City Council district.
But each district only gets $285,000, so only a few projects will actually get funding and become reality.
You can vote online or vote in person at any library or community center before the end of the day tomorrow (Friday). It only takes a couple minutes. You can only vote for projects in one district.
More details from Your Voice, Your Choice:
Your Voice, Your Choice: Parks & Streets is a participatory budgeting initiative in which Seattle residents democratically decide how to spend a portion of the City’s budget on small-scale park and street improvements. A total of $285,000 is set aside in each City Council District, and residents can cast their ballots for their top three choices in the district where they live, work, go to school, receive services, or volunteer.
Small-scale park and street improvements can include:
- Any physical project up to $90,000
- Street projects might include traffic calming (traffic circles, median islands, speed feedback signs, etc.) or short segments of sidewalk construction (less than 100 feet, or one third of a block)
- Parks projects might include accessibility improvements, trail/path maintenance and upgrades, park benches or tables, natural area renovations, minor playground improvements
Comments
3 responses to “Last chance to vote for the best neighbor-generated projects where you live”
Tom, I finally had a moment to look through some of the proposed projects. While they do appear to address pedestrian safety, I think most are a detriment to cycling. I looked at projects in the QA area. Except for Dexter, which already has bike lanes, no accommodations were made for bikes.
The drawback of not accommodating bikes in the design is that it will become more difficult to add a bike lane later, if that becomes desirable. Once a curb bulb or other projection is installed, a bike lane cannot go through without tearing out the concrete. The money spent on the project, now, will have been wasted.
To do this right, the designs should be done so that bikes can pass through the projection and not have to merge into the traffic lane, even though there is currently no bike lane. I hope you can voice this to SDOT before it is too late !
Thanks.
Because most of these projects are very cheap, it is not likely that the city will be constructing any curb bulbs with concrete. So, if a PBL were planned it would be pretty easy to change the design later.
I don’t think that’s true. Some of them explicitly say “curb bulbs”, some say paint and pylons (or some other term). All are miraculously $90K which infers that the actual costs could vary quite a bit.