Vote no on Prop. 1

Those who spent years developing Spokane’s Comprehensive Plan know the project ran out of time and money, so the plan was truncated and adopted with little attention to most poor neighborhoods. It now incorporates some great ideals, but rigorous rezoning attention was mostly limited to downtown’s needs and those of adjacent neighborhoods. Hardly any rezoning was done to remediate outlying neighborhoods. Problems in those neighborhoods still need to be addressed.

North Side neighborhoods are diced up as half-mile traffic grids, bounded by intersecting arterials. There are stoplights where arterials intersect. Most of these intersections had de facto neighborhood centers long before there was a Comp. Plan, but the plan never got around to rezoning them as neighborhood centers.

Proposition 1 treats the Comp. Plan like the final word, making it nearly impossible for neighborhoods or developers to attain the Comp. Plan changes (zoning changes) necessary to bring run-down neighborhood centers up to centers-and-corridors standards.

While I share many of Envision Spokane’s ideals, the group shuns advice from elected officials, the Community Assembly and neighborhoods – denigrating them as the “evil establishment.” Their good, but ill-informed, intentions are paving the road to hell.

Please vote no on Proposition 1.

Mickey Thompson

Spokane