When I joined Citizens for a Liveable Northgate, I came with the perspective of someone fresh from the final stages of city-wide neighborhood planning, still somewhat giddy over the wonderful vision for the future we had crafted together in our two-year planning effort.

Diving into the process of evaluating the development proposals for Northgate Mall, the centerpiece of the entire Northgate Area Comprehensive Plan, has been a much different experience, intellectually, emotionally and politically.

Traveling between both processes at the same time has been an experience akin to traveling at "warp speed" between two unique points in history: the hopeful beginning of a fresh new plan, and the hard edges and noise of real development colliding with citizen expectations.

It has been an opportunity to see all at once how a comprehensive planning effort translates into actual events, actual "products." It's almost like looking at something familiar and finding it suddenly transformed, with unfamiliar and even unfriendly changes - not the way you thought you would be.

Frankly, it's unsettling.

The Northgate Area Comprehensive Plan is the model for how all our neighborhoods will achieve our goals. But it is also a "Superplan" in the sense that Northgate is an overlay district and is covered by a separate section of Seattle's Municipal Code pertaining to Land Use, with specific development guidelines, a mark of distinction other neighborhood plans will not enjoy.

In practice, however, there are few real protections of the vision built into our recent processes. Who was there as a steward or "citizen watchdog" when the Northgate Area Comprehensive Plan was handed to the Simon-DeBartolo Development Corp. (the mall's owners who are now known as Simon Properties Group), or when City of Seattle representatives had multiple meetings with Simon Properties regarding their General Development Plan for this huge 67.5-acre site, which is the core of the planning area? Who was there to hear how the vision of the plan, the citizens' voice, was expressed by our city officials, as they guided and influenced the developers' choices?

We all assumed, with justification, that the city officials had the right tools and would do the right thing to implement the plan and that the public processes were in place to assure that they did.

We have all been wrong.

The development plan for Northgate Mall and its southward expansion as proposed by Simon Properties and as approved March 18 by the Department of Design, Construction and Land Use (DCLU) disappoints and angers us, because so much of the promise of the great Northgate Urban Center will be lost...

I think we need to insist upon tailored code provisions which will stand the test of time to enforce our neighborhood plans. We should not tolerate city officials who whine that we must accept less, in order to benefit a little from a developer's willingness to invest here.

Why can't we be proud enough, confident enough to say: "This is SEATTLE. We know what we want. If you can't build it, then please take your unimaginative, uncooperative dollars somewhere else"?

We do not have to be hand-wringing beggars in this process. In our 37 neighborhoods, we have had the stomach to look at our problems honestly, and the forthrightness to suggest real solutions. If we don't have the confidence in our plans to demand that they be translated into enforceable code provisions, then we have just squandered two years of our collective lives.

I think we need to put the tools of vision-making aside, and to find the tools for real, confident, LIVEABLE city making. The lesson we are learning at Northgate is that we need elected officials who will write and pass the codes that will give us the results we have planned for.

Let's not waste the lesson of Northgate.

-JAN BRUCKER, Licton Springs