Belltown has been waiting nearly 10 years for its community
center, which was to be funded with $1.9 million from the 1999
Community Centers Levy.
But thanks to a series of bureaucratic snafus, false starts by the
housing agency hired to make the project happen, and escalating land
prices that have made the community center’s already paltry funding
look like a pittance, the project remains in limbo, unlikely to
ever reach fruition. The latest proposal from the city’s parks
department (which did not return a call) would reportedly relocate
Belltown’s community center to South Lake Union, into the crumbling
parks department headquarters in Denny Park. After renovating the
building, Parks would move elsewhere, leaving the facility for Belltown
to use at some point in the future.
But, Belltown activists note, at no point in the future will
Denny Park be in Belltown. That makes the city’s Denny Park
proposal look less like a compromise and more like a broken
promise.
The demise of the Belltown Community Center is a tangled story
involving several city departments, community groups, and a nonprofit
housing developer. The Low Income Housing Institute was supposed to
codevelop a piece of land with the community center—first as
low-income housing, then as condos, and finally on only half the site,
according to city housing director Adrienne Quinn. (LIHI’s director,
Sharon Lee, did not return a call for comment.) After LIHI tied up
“millions of dollars from several different departments” with no
visible progress, Quinn says, “the city decided to decommit the
funding.”
“Parks didn’t come back with Plan B,” says Zander Batchelder,
president of the Belltown Community Council. “They just said, well,
we’re not doing this. That really pissed me off, because it was
approved by a vote of the people.”
The timing couldn’t be worse for the city. On Tuesday, June 24,
after The Stranger went to press, the city’s parks levy
oversight committee was scheduled to vote on the project list for a new
parks levy that could go before voters later this year. The council
could find itself in the position of soliciting voter support for
another levy when it hasn’t finished building what it promised in
the last one.
Another element of the new parks levy that’s likely to be
controversial is $11 million in funding for upgrades to the
75-year-old Seattle Asian Art Museum building in Volunteer Park, which
is owned by the city. The funding is the single largest item in
the latest levy proposal, and comes at the expense of upgrades to two
other facilities, the Green Lake bathhouse and the Langston Hughes
Performing Arts Center. Supporters of the SAAM renovations say it will
be tough to pass a levy that doesn’t include the improvements; Cara
Egan, a spokeswoman for the art museum, says the $11 million “is about
half of what the total renovations will cost.” 