I became involved with CFLN (Citizens for a Liveable Northgate) by way of the Maple Leaf Community Council ... I had been uninvolved in community activities for 20 years, but returned as my life now allows for such activities, and the traffic has become so ridiculous that I wanted to do something about it if I could. That involvement led by my becoming aware of the Northgate Comprehensive Plan.

Serendipitously, I ended up at Simon Properties' initial presentation of their vision for the Northgate Mall Redevelopment. The room was hardly full to say the least, the presentation was not well received to say the most. Most of all I remember the sense of anger, frustration and disappointment that filled the room most of the time. Such emotions continually repeated themselves over the past nine months.

Why did this happen after all the planning effort? (To those in other parts of the city:) Is it going to happen to your neighborhood and your neighborhood plan as well? Here are a few observations that might be of some use so it may not happen to you:

First ... you must be very careful and observant in the translation of your plan to City ordinance... Please realize that the planning process that you are involved in doesn't end until the vision, concepts and ideas are turned into law.

Second, our method of notifying the citizens of upcoming development in our neighborhood doesn't work. Here we have the largest economic development that is going to occur in Northeast Seattle for the next 15 years. It involves an area adjacent to a bit over 10,000 people. While the attendance at most meetings was quite admirable given the limited resources at hand, the number of people left out and unaware of the process was still far too many. If we don't begin to become more creative in ways to elicit community involvement, all the planning efforts may turn out to be ineffectual at the time of implementation.

Third, plan to identify as soon as possible the elected and appointed city officials who will help see your plan through to law and then to implementation. We found our elected officials unfamiliar with the Northgate Comprehensive Plan. We found our city officials working at cross purposes. I was dumbfounded to discover how unaware our elected officials were of a plan of such magnitude...

Fourth, begin to develop your issues with as many media sources as possible...

Fifth, make your meetings not only interesting, but personal and forward moving. All too many meetings seemed like restatements of what had transpired the meeting before. By the end of two hours we had moved one foot from where we were the meeting before. The result was that people dropped out of the process...

Sixth, in your planning process, you probably had pockets of resistance, animosities that grew beyond differences of opinion and the like. Don't expect those to go away like magic. Bring in trained negotiators if that's what it takes as soon as possible to get the disagreements worked out. Consensus doesn't happen in a day and ignoring differences doesn't and won't work...

Seventh, have some fun with this if you can.

-KEVIN MCKEIGUE, Maple Leaf