More Public Input Needed In City Plan

After five years of hard work, missed deadlines and unprecedented public input, the city of Spokane has drafted a tentative plan to guide growth and development for the next 20 years.

What’s needed next is more work, more deadlines and more public input. Especially public input.

Under current projections, planners expect the population of Spokane County to grow by more than one-third in the next 20 years. That’s more than 150,000 people countywide with 45 percent of it, some 68,000 people, anticipated to settle inside the city limits.

Where will they live, work, shop, worship and attend school? How will they get back and forth safely and efficiently? All this will be sharply affected by the decisions reflected in the final comprehensive plan. Those are quality-of-life considerations.

The City Council hopes to finalize the plan by year’s end but right now the citizens of Spokane have the next four months to study the document and let city officials know what they think of it.

Two public hearings have been held already and others are scheduled throughout the summer - the next from 7 to 8:30 p.m. Wednesday at the Unitarian Church, 4340 W. Fort Wright Drive.

(Citizens who want to know more about details of the proposal and how to get involved can call the Spokane Horizons hotline at 625-6787.)

Given what’s at stake, there should be no reason to expect anything less than the broad and vigorous public participation it will take to assure a valid product.

Unfortunately, however, Spokane’s track record is not encouraging on that point. Political scientist Nicholas P. Lovrich, who studies civic engagement patterns, finds that despite their professed interest in having a say, people here are less likely to turn out for this kind of public forum than folks in other communities.

Whatever the reason for that reluctance, this is a time to overcome it. It is informed public input that will help the City Plan Commission recommend a final course of action to the City Council next fall.

It is informed public input that will create a framework of accountability for the council itself.

In order to provide knowledgeable counsel on a decision as complex and significant as a planning guide for the next 20 years, citizens will have to invest time and energy. Emotion-based, off-the-cuff pronouncements will be of little value.

Will future growth continue along current, sprawl-intensive patterns, be focused in the city core or be distributed to neighborhood and commercial centers and along transportation corridors? Important tradeoffs are involved so anyone who plans to stick around (and 92 percent of those who responded to Prof. Lovrich’s latest survey plan to be in Spokane at least another five years) must count on living with the consequences.