The Times did a story about the downtown Symphony development the city just approved. They point out that the towers would each individually dwarf the city’s current tallest building (which I presume is the Courtyard Marriott). (They also get the location wrong — it’s the southeast corner, not the northwest corner, of 316th and 20th.)
As the article warns, there are going to be people who think that towers are not suited for FW. But there are bright sides even for the NIMBYs:

1. Towers downtown means less density in the neighborhoods.
2. It also means less traffic in the neighborhoods.
3. More retail downtown means less commercial zoning in the neighborhoods.

Another plus to having towers downtown is that it will finally give Federal Way some recognizable visibility from I-5. Driving through Federal Way on I-5 today probably looks a lot the same as it did 20 years ago, save for the HOV lanes and the 317th St. HOV Bridge. Aside from the name on the 320th St. exit, would a car passing through even know they were in Federal Way? Assuming any portion of Symphony’s top 20th story peeks above the roadside evergreens, people will be able to recognize the tall towers of Federal Way. And it’s seemingly dumb things like that that brings people to your town — and all that retail you’re trying to feed.

Did anyone happen to visit the Federal Way Technology Expo last Thursday? By the time FWayan got there it looked sort of over.

There was the Microsoft RV (bleh), and a ClearWire booth (which I guess just recently started service to FW), and of course an Honest John booth. There weren’t a lot of people manning the booths so I guessed they were shutting down.

I’m really quite floored that the East Federal Way annexation vote is looking this badly. Meanwhile the Auburn Lea Hill vote, which a Times story seemed to suggest was going to be a tough fight, is flying through.

I can’t imagine why EFWans would not want to become part of the city. When will they wake up and realize that this region’s semi-rural timberland days are over? All the talk of higher taxes and lower services under a city, which is what they are actually certain to get under the county, was what we in the tech industry like to call FUD — Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt — and it’s always unfounded nonsense. Was it simply misguided foolery, or the endemic knee-jerk anti-growth sentiment (as FWBlog suggests), or is there someone with a vested interest against incorporation? FUD of this sort often stems from the latter. Do developers get more zoning flexibility under the county than under cities, or something? Is this interest behind the Vote No Annexation blog, which spreads it? (Though I have to say I agree with VNA’s attitude towards the FW News.)

So much for FW breaking 100K, becoming the state’s 6th largest city, and becoming a clear-cut SKC leader. At least not this year. Maybe Feb 08? Maybe waking up to the sudden prospect of Auburn being literally right next door will make EFWans rethink the whole cut-off-from-government thing.

Federal Way isn’t the only city with an annexation vote coming up. Auburn and Renton both have expansion areas in the 10-20K population range slated for an August vote. Beyond that, Bellevue, Kent, Kirkland, Issaquah, and Burien all have Potential Annexation Areas (PAAs) that the county wants to see become municipal within the next few years.

Federal Way
Everyone should know about Federal Way’s “East Federal Way” proposal, which combines 5 different areas which have been in the city’s PAA since 2002 and have strong association with the city. With Federal Way’s 87,400 people, the 22,000 will propel FedWay to almost 110K, blowing it past Everett (102K) and within a stone’s throw of mighty Bellevue (118K).

Auburn
Auburn’s Lea Hill and West Hill comprise most of the remaining space in the I-5/SR-167 corridor and are up for an annexation vote this month. Unlike Federal Way’s clever one-fell-swoop proposal, the Auburn neighborhoods are in two separate proposals, though Auburn may be stuck if only one passes (a situation Federal Way is avoiding with its proposal), as the viability of the annexations depend on each other’s passage.

Between the two, Lea Hill and West Hill would add 15K to Auburn’s 50K. If they pass, Auburn will shoot up from 17th to 12th largest by pop. in the state, just under Kennewick. However, there’s visible opposition brewing in the Lea Hill area which could jeopardize the whole thing.

Renton
Renton has 4 distinct open annexation areas, though only one is on the ballot this year. Benson Hill, a subset of a larger original Fairwood-Benson area, would add 16K to Renton’s current 60K, pushing it from 13th to 11th just ahead of Bellingham. As a smaller subset of the previous larger area, Benson Hill looks fairly solid.

Overall, Renton’s four PAAs — Benson Hill, Fairwood, East Renton, West Hill (aka Skyway/Bryn Mawr) — could add 64K to Renton’s 76K population, which would notably push the city’s size past crane-happy Bellevue, to over 120K. However, Fairwood-Benson previously failed an annexation vote, with the 26K Fairwood neighborhood seeking self-incorporation instead of Rentonization. So the best Renton can hope for through annexations is a measly 98K.

Kent
While not currently up for vote this year, Kent has a potential annexation area in the Kent Northeast neighborhood. The area would add 23K to Kent’s current 86K. There are no plans in the works to make this happen — but would East Federal Way’s passage change Kent’s mind?

Elsewhere in King County:

• Bellevue has a wholly-contained enclave of unincorporated land in the South Eastgate area, a hilly, sparsely populated area of 4600 people. The city has opted to pick up the land in bits and pieces as landowners specifically request it.
• Kirkland has an unnamed PAA of 32K people, which would launch the city’s population by nearly 70%. The city is actively researching the feasibility of such an annexation. The resulting combined area would hold 80K, pushing it up to 11th (or 12th if Renton’s Benson Hill annexes).
• Issaquah has its eyes on the Klahanie neighborhood, a 45% boost to its 24K population. But a previous annexation vote failed, and the area is split on whether to annex to Issaquah or Sammamish.
• Both Burien and Seattle have identified the North Highline area (aka White Center) as a PAA, but neither have made any moves to absorb it.

All city population numbers are 2007 estimates. PAA population numbers are from various places including the King County Annexation page.

It seems every time someone in town advocates that Federal Way could use some changes in order to grow into the city it says it wants to be, someone comes out and insists that Federal Way is fine the way it is and never needs to change.

And when that happens, the Federal Way News always seems to be the conduit.

Fact is, though, the city is changing, and eagerly. A remote little residential village for decades, Federal Way became a city around 15 years ago and shortly thereafter began a course of growth, entering what is the South King County royal rumble between the growth-focused cities of Renton, Kent, and Federal Way, with the venerated Auburn as an underdog and Tacoma as a grinning upper-league spectator. So far, FW has navigated this growth via the structure of a small town.

Roy Parke says that’s simply not maintainable. Parke has presented the latest challenge to the city’s ingrained sense of inertia: he wants to replace the strong-council government with an elected mayor system. With diligent collecting at bus stops and city events, he has succeeded in getting the required number of signatures to get the measure on the ballot in the next few months.

As always seems to happen in these matters, a resident spoke out against Parke’s efforts in the News. The city government is perfectly fine, the author insists, and therefore there is no need to change it to the sort of government normally used by growth-oriented cities.

A few years ago, the Federal Way Mirror lamented the city’s lack of leader figures. With the mayor being selected by and among a small group of people and changing every two years, it’s hard to look up to the mayor as a city leader. The residents of Federal Way neither get to select their city’s leader, nor their city’s manager.

What boggles my mind is that Donald Dennis, the writer of the anti-elected-mayor letter to the News, suggests that this is actually a good thing:

An elected Mayor may be someone who has no experience running a city, a business or anything else that gives them the skills for the job.

The successful candidate may just be the person who gives the best speeches and makes the best impression with the voting public.

They are not subject to an interview or reference checks by the voter. There is very little guarantee that the voters will elect someone who will really be qualified to be the “CEO” of the city.

It’s hard for me personally to be swayed by someone who suggests that democratic elections are inferior to electing a once-a-week oligarchy to make these decisions for us instead. I like democracy. And (to my surprise) I have better faith, in principle, in the ability of the populace to make decent decisions as to whom should lead them; and at least as well as the city council.

Dennis tries to bolster the city-manager model by pointing out that the city manager gets picked by a nationwide search and can be from anywhere. He presents this as a good thing — but I don’t think so. Just as I want a boss who understands the work I do, I want a city manager who understands the city. I want them to have a personal connection to it beyond just a job, bouncing from city to city over their careers. Someone without a personal connection to the city isn’t going to be in a great position to help the city form its identity, either.

Let’s forget about the city manager (or “city CEO”, a term I really hate, because I don’t think cities should act like businesses — businesses are for making money, cities are for benefiting their residents) for a minute. Let’s talk about the city mayor. In theory, the city mayor is the representative of the city to the outside world. Shouldn’t the people be able to pick their own representative? Instead, they pick one of seven people, who has a 1/7 chance of becoming that representative. We don’t elect members to a Senatorial Council to pick our senators for us, nor a Governor Council to pick our state governor for us. Why then is it better for us to have a council pick our closest governmental leader?

I say let us pick our own mayor, and bring out the city’s leaders to show themselves and take up the role.

While I was off on vacation, my recent post regarding James Lamb and the Federal Way Graffiti Blog made the rounds of the local blogosphere. I don’t have any desire to kick off this blog with a cross-blog war about graffiti, but I should respond.

I was raised in a more urban area than Federal Way. To me, the graffiti “problem” in FW is slight. Many of the photos on FWGB are like a game of “Where’s Graffiti?” for me. It takes a few seconds to notice the barely visible scribbles in the corners of the back of street signs, or the two dots and a line on a utility box behind a strip mall, etc. While FWGB certainly finds some obvious cases of damage — graffiti on business signs, for example — a lot of them seem to have been taken by going off the beaten path and scouring obscure places for fairly insignificant squiggles. I think that when you have to climb behind dumpsters to find examples of graffiti, you don’t really have the sort of serious problem that warrants a citywide state of emergency and a custom Google Maps hack. To some extent, graffiti is a fact of urban life. Either Federal Way is a budding urban center, or it’s a nice quiet small town. You simply can’t have it both ways.

Federal Way Blog and a fellow named Mark in the comments dismissed my claim that kids in Federal Way might not have enough to do. I did some original research and asked a kid I know if there was enough to do in Federal Way, and got a definite, solid “no.” Maybe if you have some spare cash, you can get into EX3 (with its limited hours) or hang out at the mall (without being a deplorable mallrat) or whatever else FWB and Mark had in mind when they insisted there is plenty to do. If you have a lot of spare cash, and a lot of parental freedom, you can hop on a 25-mile bus ride and spend time in Seattle, as FWB’s author suggested the local youth do (though it seems to miss the point to suggest that you can make up for Federal Way’s shortcomings by going to another town — or, to put it another way, for us to offload our bored youth onto them).

The consensus also seems to be that kids who tag are simply troublemakers, not bored kids; even if there was lots of fun, free activities for youth in Federal Way, they’d be out literally painting the town red. Having known kids who tagged when I was a kid, I’m not at all convinced it’s so conveniently black and white. Most kids who tag don’t think they have a lot to look forward to. Not every kid can be honor roll, or star athelete, or talented performer. The wide majority of kids aren’t — more so the lower class they are from. And Federal Way, as much as some might wish, isn’t a nice stratified community of upper-middle-and-higher classes. The trend in fact is that more lower class families are moving to the suburbs as Seattle (as well as other major cities) becomes increasingly gentrified. Poor kids have low hopes; tagging is a way for them to leave their mark on the world and express themselves in it.

I think growth-oriented suburbs like Federal Way — which is looking to gain 20,000 people in the low-overhead county land and construct about 1,000 new downtown housing units in a crop of landmark towers — are increasingly going to need to prepare and develop their communities for the realities of growth. We’re going to attract more households, with kids, and less disposable cash. And yes, that’s probably going to mean more crime, whether it be graffiti, car theft, or violent crime — unless we do something to accomodate and handle this growth first, instead of devoting the effort to just cover up its symptoms and pretend the problems of growth aren’t really still there.

In today’s News Tribune (which tends to have more meaningful FW coverage than either of the actual local papers) comes the story of James Lamb, author of the Federal Way Graffiti blog (which we’ve covered before elsewhere), and his crusade to rid Federal Way of all spray paint and permanent marker residue. As we mentioned, Federal Way recently called an “emergency” on graffiti in the town — which seems an awfully lame thing for the state’s soon-to-be 6th largest city to have an emergency about. The city’s declaration emboldens people like Lamb, an email marketer at WorldVision, to become graffiti vigilantes.

I’ve already ranted about how, in my opinion, graffiti is an expression of a culture existing within the community, whether or not you in your esteemed wisdom grant it that acknowledgement, and is not necessarily always bad. A fair amount of graffiti actually shows some artistic talent. While random scribbling of your made-up name on a private person’s fence isn’t very neighborly, it’s hard for me to see the victims hurt by a colorful, creative piece of work on an otherwise plain, boring grey concrete public wall, or the side of an abandoned store that has been vacant for years (and is probably going to be demolished whenever it finally gets occupied).

But granting that the Rockwellian mindset that still pervades part of this Seattle suburb probably doesn’t agree with my urban sensibilities, here’s another bone to chew on: Ammonia and turpentine can erase enamel and alcohol marker, but what it doesn’t do is give the youth who make those marks something else to do with their time, their sense of daring, their desire for expression or their creativity. Eventually the Commons gets boring (and expensive), EX3 shuts down (and probably has uncool rules), and the climbing wall at the Community Center loses its excitement.

Devoting all this effort to erasing graffiti from Federal Way is an attempt to cure the symptom and not the disease, and that will remain until minds expand to realize that a community forms when it accepts itself as one, instead of forming factions and going into battle with each other.

John Moe’s July 22 story about Federal Way was laughable to say the least. Certainly Moe’s audience wasn’t anyone who lives in the city, but perhaps the Seattlites and others north of the South King area who look down on the rapidly burgeoning south-side cities. Where does one start? Lisa Johnson’s letter to the editor kicks it off nicely: “The thrust of the article was Federal Way then and now, yet The Times included a nine-year-old picture, which could be easily perceived as a current view of downtown.” While some of the businesses in the picture in question are still there, the telltale sign is, well, the signs — Federal Way passed a commercial sign-height ordinance many years ago, and pretty much all streetside signs over 10 feet (strip mall mega-signs seem to get a pass) are long gone.

Moe spoke to the manager of the Commons, noting amusedly it used to be SeaTac Mall, as if the mall’s name change ruined a prime opportunity to make fun of the city. And he took a blurry picture of himself supposedly standing at the corner of 320th and Pacifc Highway. If his story tells us anything, it’s that he didn’t travel much further. You’d think a native of Federal Way and a journalist would bother to travel more than a half mile into town in order to do a story on it. But to Moe, it seems like the Federal Way of his youth is the Federal Way of today minus the things he remembers; his story deriding it lives squarely in the past. He cites a QFC on 312th and Pac Highway that hasn’t been there for about 2 years. Had Moe ventured a block north from the former skating palace he would have seen the Korean supermarket in its place, notable as a cornerpiece of the city’s downtown boom in Korean-oriented businesses on that strip.

To some extent, he’s not entirely wrong about, at least, one of Federal Way’s problems — its propensity of strip malls — but to blast the city for being addicted to commercial development is to have never visited Kent, Renton, Covington, or Bellevue.

Don’t get me wrong. Federal Way has plenty of faults, but development itself isn’t exactly one of them — it’s what gets developed that tends to be the problem. I can’t say I agree much with Lisa Johnson’s rebuttal points (the existence of million dollar houses, in far-flung neighborhoods, doesn’t exactly strike me as something to be proud of), but Moe (and Seattle’s other isolationist anti-suburbanites) certainly aren’t doing anything for the city, either.

This week’s issue of the venerated Federal Way News included a letter from an upset East Fed resident who just recently, apparently, found out about the city’s long-standing intention to annex the majority of the land to the east of town. Since as far back as 2002, the areas of Camelot, Star Lake, Jovita, Lakeland, and Parkway have been in the city’s Potential Annexation Area (PAA). North Lake and the south part of Parkway was added in 2004, along with a sliver of vacant commercial land that Des Moines didn’t want.

Sure, like the other South King megaburbs, Federal Way has ambitions (though what they are is not entirely clear), and would love to grow. But it isn’t exactly mere manifest destiny that propels the city to grab the land. King County itself has asked cities to take over unincorporated developed land. And what Federal Way doesn’t take, Auburn likely will.
The valley of aloof quasi-independence between Fed Way and Auburn is no doubt one of the county’s eyesores. Certainly they would prefer not to have to trek down into that isolated corridor to police crime, plan zoning, and maintain roads. They want the cities to do it instead. Of course, the cities can’t just take over the cost of maintaining new territory if the financial math doesn’t work.

The writer makes at least one good point, sort of: the way the current East Federal Way proposal was designed was a little creative, but it was done that way for the math. In order to incorporate the whole committed annexation area, the city managed to include a snippet of Peasley Canyon road that tethers the two otherwise noncontiguous segments together, making it one single swath of territory which can be annexed in one whole swoop. This is basically because the city couldn’t afford to annex (and start paying for) one section without the tax revenue of the other, so if they put out two proposals, one passed and one didn’t, the city’d be in a bind.

But nothing in the current proposal is a surprise. The areas have been on the annexation table for years, and if a resident didn’t know that, they weren’t paying much attention to their local news.

The telegram for the East Fed residents is this: You’re going to become incorporated, if not via annexation with FW, then with Auburn, or maybe Kent or Milton. The county just doesn’t want you anymore.