SEATTLE, WA–

After more than a year of dedicated efforts, we’re entering the home stretch in finalizing Seattle’s planning guidance for the next decade! This is literally a once-in-a-decade opportunity to play a role in shaping our city’s future, and to be sure our city’s plans reflect our values.

After months of taking feedback from residents, business owners, and neighborhood advocacy groups, Council spent July drafting their final proposed amendments to Seattle’s Comprehensive Plan. Your time, energy, stories, and feedback mattered! The good news is that the Complete Communities Coalition is hard at work getting critical comprehensive amendments included in the plan…we just have to wait until August to see what gets introduced and what the Battle for Seattle’s future will look like.

What’s Next in the Planning Process

July was light on opportunities for public engagement, but there are a couple of important chances coming up as summer wanes.

August 4th: Briefing to learn about all proposed amendments from council members. Join this to learn more about each council member’s priorities in changing the comprehensive plan.

Week of September 8th: Public hearing – This will be the most important, because it’s our last chance to speak up in support or opposition of any particular piece of the plan, before Council takes a final vote.

September 17th, 18th, 19th: votes, votes, more votes. These meetings are dedicated to the votes on the amendments to the comp plan and by the end of the week we will have a clear picture of what the Comp Plan will look like before it is formally passed by the full council.

As early as September 30th: Final passage of the Comp Plan

I’ll be in your inboxes and on your social feeds with important updates and action opportunities as those hearings get closer.

Seattle’s dense, lush tree cover is an iconic part of our landscape, and part of the natural beauty that’s the reason so many of us love living here, and urban forests play an important role in both our physical and mental health. But our tree canopy is under threat; not from development pressures, but because of the climate crisis.

One of the stickier ongoing debates around the Comp Plan is: how do we best protect trees and expand our tree canopy. Luckily, we have the science that tells us how– and first things first, we need to get our transportation pollution under control. Building dense, walkable cities is the best way to decrease car-dependence, lower climate-warming toxic pollutants, and prevent sprawl that would threaten clear-cutting trees further out of the city.

So how are we protecting trees in the amendments to the Comp Plan?

• Stacked Flat incentives that encourage middle housing units to go up, rather than out, to infill middle housing. By incentivizing developers to build around trees rather than cutting them down and permitting them on every lot, we can minimize the displacement of our trees.
• Tree retention incentives: bonuses to incentivize the protection of tier 1 and tier 2 trees
• Read more here!

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That’s all for July’s special dispatch on Seattle’s Comp Planning!

Keep an eye out in August for details on the proposed amendments, and our last opportunities to make our voices heard.