SeattleNerds Legal Bill
Donation protected
Our group, Seattle Neighbors Encouraging Reasonable Development has made a tremendous breakthrough on behalf of all Seattle Residents.
As Seattle grows, the city is rapidly building to keep pace. While as Seattleites this excites us, we are working hard to ensure that development doesn't outsize our infrastructure and cause undue burden and risk to neigborhoods that exist today by using the few tools availble to residents to help balance this new growth.
Enter the design review, basically the only avenue for communities to comment and affect change on new development projects. Over the past five years neigborhoods are increasely having their voices silenced in this channel and ignored when they raise concerns about inadequate parking, overwhelmed public transportation, and tightly packed living spaces that aren't a great deal both for future and current residents.
In fighting a particularly gross example of this (the development along Avalon Way), Seattle NERDs finally were able to prove in court that the Department of Planning & Development was NOT conducting design review procedures as outlined in city policy, and as a result developers were getting a free pass to build huge apartments and apodments without parking next to small neighborhoods without the infrastructure to support them (all the while getting tax breaks that could have been used to fund this infrastructure).
Some of the mishandlings include:
- Misrepresenting building environemental impact on the steep grade it would be built
- Granting exceptions for parking when the projects failed to meet the qualifications
- Allow major project redesigns to pass through unnoticed
- Misinforming the review board on their authority to address residents' concerns
We won at the hearing! And thanks to a group of over 50 households pulling together and paying a legal bill over $100,000, neighborhoods all across the city get legal precendence to ensure that their neigborhoods are not swamped with large buildings that outsize the surrounding infrastructure.
We've dug deep in our pockets -- cashing out retirement plans, pulling into savings, slimming down our Christmas shopping -- to make this happen. Please help us make the final push. We're stretched thin finacially and any contribution you can make to cover this final leg would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you so much in advance, and here's to the hope that Seattle residents never again have to foot the bill for our planning department's missteps in maintaining reasonable growth in the place we all call home :).
Interested in what Seattle NERD is continuing to do to ensure that Seattle growth remains sustainable? Check out our website here: http://www.seattlenerd.org/
As Seattle grows, the city is rapidly building to keep pace. While as Seattleites this excites us, we are working hard to ensure that development doesn't outsize our infrastructure and cause undue burden and risk to neigborhoods that exist today by using the few tools availble to residents to help balance this new growth.
Enter the design review, basically the only avenue for communities to comment and affect change on new development projects. Over the past five years neigborhoods are increasely having their voices silenced in this channel and ignored when they raise concerns about inadequate parking, overwhelmed public transportation, and tightly packed living spaces that aren't a great deal both for future and current residents.
In fighting a particularly gross example of this (the development along Avalon Way), Seattle NERDs finally were able to prove in court that the Department of Planning & Development was NOT conducting design review procedures as outlined in city policy, and as a result developers were getting a free pass to build huge apartments and apodments without parking next to small neighborhoods without the infrastructure to support them (all the while getting tax breaks that could have been used to fund this infrastructure).
Some of the mishandlings include:
- Misrepresenting building environemental impact on the steep grade it would be built
- Granting exceptions for parking when the projects failed to meet the qualifications
- Allow major project redesigns to pass through unnoticed
- Misinforming the review board on their authority to address residents' concerns
We won at the hearing! And thanks to a group of over 50 households pulling together and paying a legal bill over $100,000, neighborhoods all across the city get legal precendence to ensure that their neigborhoods are not swamped with large buildings that outsize the surrounding infrastructure.
We've dug deep in our pockets -- cashing out retirement plans, pulling into savings, slimming down our Christmas shopping -- to make this happen. Please help us make the final push. We're stretched thin finacially and any contribution you can make to cover this final leg would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you so much in advance, and here's to the hope that Seattle residents never again have to foot the bill for our planning department's missteps in maintaining reasonable growth in the place we all call home :).
Interested in what Seattle NERD is continuing to do to ensure that Seattle growth remains sustainable? Check out our website here: http://www.seattlenerd.org/
Organizer
Amanda Nuñez
Organizer
Seattle, WA
