Our View: City backs down despite lot’s paucity of trees
Seven years ago the city of Spokane adopted a set of planning standards that elevated the importance of street trees downtown.
Those standards have been tested in the past year, and they have failed.
The city has dropped its objections to the way developer Wendell Reugh finished a surface parking lot on the site where the historic Rookery and Mohawk buildings once stood.
Even though the standards prescribe 25-foot spacing between street trees on such a site, and even though the plans Reugh submitted to the city with his application for a building permit indicated the 25-foot standard would be met, and even though the city required a performance bond when he didn’t follow through – despite all that, officials in the city building department backed down because another city agency reportedly gave Reugh conflicting information.
So, while many developers have honored the 2001 standards – at least as closely as they could while accommodating streetlamps and access and egress cuts – the Reugh project is off the hook even though it’s seven trees short.
Leroy Eadie, director of Planning Services for the city, had been on point in the enforcement effort to make Reugh’s lot conform to the code. Then he found out the public works department had already asked Reugh to replace the sidewalks fronting his parking lot and restore them as they were before.
“We kind of got some egg on our face,” he said, and that made it awkward to hold Reugh to the 2001 requirements that his own plans reflected.
That’s not likely to set well with other downtown developers and property owners who subscribe to the urban-vitality spirit behind the tree standards. Many of them, according to Marty Dickinson, president of the Downtown Spokane Partnership, have gone so far as to tap their own irrigation lines to keep the trees watered.
Several trees that do stand along Reugh’s lot, meanwhile, are dead or dying.
There’s wide agreement that the irrigation system installed under city streets three decades ago is unmapped, damaged over the years and unreliable for keeping downtown trees watered. That’s a situation that will be costly to fix, and it’s a credit to Dickinson’s organization that its Clean Team, which removes and cleans up litter and graffiti, also hand-waters trees in the Business Improvement District daily.
With so much civic commitment to do downtown right, it is disappointing to think the rules can’t be followed – or enforced – equitably. And to the degree that miscommunication and confusion in City Hall contribute to the problem, that problem needs immediate attention.