By DOTTY DECOSTER

Four years ago, the Seattle City Council began an experiment: would it be possible for Seattle citizens, given funds and staff assistance, to develop their own long-range neighborhood plans to accommodate growth and development expected by 2014? Would it be possible for these neighborhood plans to be used to guide City policy and funding priorities over the next 20 years?

The Neighborhood Planning Office was formed with a four-year timeline and a mandate to "make it happen." The City Council established a special committee to ensure that it did happen, and each Councilmember selected neighborhood planning groups to steward the process. City departments appointed staff members to be point people in this interdepartmental enterprise and the Mayor developed clusters of department directors to "make it happen."

Citizens came through. By the end of March, 37 neighborhood plans will have been validated through community discussion, and prepared for City Council review. All of the areas of the City expected to grow by 2014 are included in one of these plans, with the exception of Northgate which already has a neighborhood plan that predates this effort. All plans are to receive City Council adoption and approval by the end of 1999.

The City Council has set aside Early Implementation Funds as a kind of down payment on projects identified in neighborhood plans. Each NPO-supported planning group was given until April 1 to apply for $50,000 to do a project, or to leverage other funds to do a project that can be accomplished within a couple of years.

The City staff is preparing lists from the neighborhood plans. One list is of policy issues raised by the plans that need to be resolved by the City Council. Another is a prioritized list of projects proposed by the neighborhood plans. These lists will become the City's work plan for implementing the neighborhood plans. Oversight will be conducted within the City's Department of Neighborhoods by the neighborhood development group of staff headed by Anne Fiske-Zuniga.

Most neighborhood plans have identified projects that are either better conducted on the neighborhood level or that would be easier to implement with a partnership between interested citizens and funding sources. Each neighborhood planning group is developing a stewardship process for their neighborhood plan recommendations. Sometimes this is a new group of citizens serving as a coordinating body, sometimes neighborhood plan recommendations have been assigned by the planning groups to already existing organizations such as a chamber of commerce or an environmental group or a PTA.

The Neighborhood Planning Office is closing down. Staff are scattering on the four winds, taking on their own next projects or next jobs. Records of the projects are being collected, inventoried and stored. Copies of the plans will be made for distribution to public repositories. Contractual obligations between the City and Neighborhood Planning are being completed. On June 30, Karma Ruder, NPO's director, will turn out the lights. Seattle will have 37 community-initiated Neighborhood Plans.

No other city in the world has ever done this before. Thank you, each and every one of you, for participating.

For more information about the plans, contact your local City of Seattle Neighborhood Service Center Coordinator.

Dotty DeCoster has been working for the City's Neighborhood Planning Office as project manager for several planning groups in North Seattle including the North Districts Neighborhoods Planning Effort (Lake City), the Broadview-Bitter Lake-Haller Lake Planning Group and the Aurora-Licton Planning Group.