Hats for Sale

Winslow Tomorrow has sparked growing distrust in city government. City Council meetings have become increasingly rancorous, and more than 500 islanders have signed a petition calling for a stop to the effort. And yet the Administration keeps bringing forward proposals and new consulting studies to justify them. The question is why does it keep moving forward so doggedly?

You might expect downtown property owners to be one force, and they are, but this alone does not explain the momentum. What may not be as clear is that the City’s own hired consultants have become a force to be reckoned with and that some of the consultants may stand to benefit from financing or developing projects they have helped plan. With some consultants taking on multiple roles as Winslow Tomorrow Facilitators and outspoken advocates of the effort, it becomes hard to know which hat they are wearing on any given day. The recent feasibility study for a parking garage is a case in point.

One Stop Shopping?

Parking is one of the most daunting and complicated issues in real estate, and in most places a city government would start by hiring experts to identify basic needs and the various alternatives for meeting these. Here on Bainbridge Island, however, the Administration went straight to the step of paying for a feasibility study for a garage that would range in size from about 325 spaces up to over 1000 spaces. Last March, the Mayor signed an agreement with Haggar-Scribner Properties, LLC and Sandstrom Properties, LLC (together as SSH, LLC) to study the feasibility of building a parking garage on the city-owned lot adjacent to the combined property holdings of SSH. This $127,500 professional services contract has become known to many as the “Capstone Contract”, as the agreement with the City provided that Capstone Properties, LLC would perform the study on behalf of SSH.

The contract stipulated that Capstone would provide “needs programming”, “rough order of magnitude” cost estimates and a financing and development plan for the garage. This agreement, Winslow Tomorrow’s second largest professional services contract in the last two years, was not put out to competitive bid.

Capstone’s website states that the firm “plans, finances, implements and manages” commercial real estate investment for investors and organizations. Not only does the firm appear to handle everything from site acquisition to development to management for commercial, multifamily residential and medical facilities for others, but judging from its project portfolio, it is also in the business of real estate investment and development for itself.

About a week after signing the Capstone contract, the City also signed a $38,500 contract amendment to an existing contract with National Development Council (National), to oversee Capstone’s work on behalf of the City. National is locally represented by Chuck Depew. This contract also provided that National would evaluate the “function and financing of a quasi-governmental entity” to support the City’s “implementation efforts” of financing and developing the garage, in other words, a private-public partnership. This brought the total cost of these two parking garage feasibility contracts to $166,000.

Over the last four years the City has contracted both with Chuck Depew, individually, and with National, his employer, for almost $120,000 in no-bid professional services for work on Winslow Tomorrow. The National Development Council’s website bills the organization as “one of the oldest national non-profit community and economic development organizations in the U.S.”. And in municipal circles, National is well regarded for its training and financial analysis capabilities.

However, the organization also takes on the roles of financing and developing big public works projects like this garage, for which the fees for “implementation” are much bigger than the fees for consulting. In this way National’s business model is very much like Capstone’s – doing consulting work that sometimes leads to development, where the fees can be much greater.

Public/private partnerships always require squeaky-clean relationships, but these relationships become even more complicated when key players have dual roles as both consultant and financier or developer. Such was the case in Seattle where, in the late 1990s, the City of Seattle hired National to help it arrange financing for the $73 million public garage being built through a public/private partnership with a developer. According to the Seattle Times, the city’s Ethics and Elections Commission issued a report finding that National had violated a $70,000 consulting contract that barred it from having any financial interest in the project, by making an arrangement with the garage developer that would pay National $500,000.

Chuck Depew was Deputy Director of the Seattle Office of Economic Development and oversaw National’s work. According to the Times, he described the ethics commission’s report as “over dramatized”. Depew left the City to join National the following year.

National also developed an office building for King County. A Seattle Weekly article titled King Street, Easy Street carried the sub-heading “Developer John Finke cleans up with another ‘public private partnership’”, referring to the head of National’s local office. This article describes Finke as a “consultant-cum-developer” and his work with the County as “another sweet deal”.

The parking garage feasibility report here on Bainbridge states that the cost figures assume “privately commissioned project delivery” of the garage. This is developer-speak for someone other than the City designing, building and financing the garage. And this would be no small project, for the possibilities under consideration range from 325 to about 1000 spaces and would cost tens of millions of dollars. The financing and development fees could range from $700,000

There is also interesting language in the Capstone contract about joint cost sharing on future work phases to include preliminary design, plan review and a “final decision process” for construction of the garage. Considering this language and the business models of both Capstone and National Development, both of these firms seem to be ideally positioned to be key players in future downtown development – potentially even in the development of the parking garage.

The Capstone and National contracts raise two key questions: 1) what care and due diligence has the City Administration taken in hiring consultants who may have a conflict of interest and 2) what roles has the City given these consultants in shaping and directing the overall Winslow Tomorrow program?

Now You See 'Em, Now You See 'Em Again

Winslow Tomorrow has a long history of a few people playing multiple roles. Don Audleman (Capstone), Chuck Depew and Tom Haggar (Haggar-Scribner Properties) have all been ardent supporters of and participants in Winslow Tomorrow. Depew was heavily involved in preparing the financial pro formas used by the Administration to argue for bigger buildings, and was a member of the Winslow Tomorrow Feasibility Committee that voted to send these studies along for public use. This committee was chaired by then City Council candidate Kjell Stoknes, who is now a sitting City Council member. Other participants in that committee included former Winslow Tomorrow project manager Sandy Fischer, John Waldo, former Bainbridge Island Downtown Association president Will Langemack, retired health care consultant Howard Kirz, Winslow developer Bror Elmquist, and others.

Some members of the Feasibility group had also served as facilitators for the Winslow Tomorrow citizen congress, including Depew, Stoknes, Waldo, and Kirz. At least one, Depew, was apparently paid for that work. The City also subsequently contracted for professional services with at least two other citizen group facilitators, including Julie Shyrock and Michael Read.

Don Audleman of Capstone has served as a member of the Winslow Way Streetscape Advisory committee along with Tom Haggar, co-owner of the property occupied by the Virginia Mason Clinic, and his wife. Haggar has been actively involved in lobbying the planning commission to approve proposed increased building heights and density in the Winslow Core and both he and his wife also served as citizen participants in the Winslow Tomorrow congress.

So, when someone gets up to speak in favor of Winslow Tomorrow, or to lead a “public outreach” effort, do we know whether they are they speaking as citizens, as Winslow commercial property owners, as paid facilitators, as financing consultants, as financiers or as developers? Or, are they performing multiple roles at the same time?

It is clearly the City administration’s responsibility to keep participants’ roles and responsibilities clear, to protect against conflicts of interest in the way it runs planning efforts and to disclose potential or actual conflicts of interest once they are discovered. In fact, the American Planning Association states quite clearly, in its ethical principles that planning process participants should “make public disclosure of all ‘personal interests’ they may have regarding any decision to be made in the planning process in which they may serve, or are requested to serve, as advisor or decision maker".

The Way Forward

There are at least three qualities that most City governments seek to embody in their planning and public works projects. The first is an open and transparent process, so that citizens know if the person at the microphone is simply an interested citizen, is a paid consultant supporting an Administration policy or is a developer, land owner or potential future developer who will benefit from a particular outcome. Secondly, the work should produce real and alternative options. A good process starts with a good analysis of needs, and then presents the various solutions in a balanced way. Thirdly, there should be solid support in the community for any proposal that is likely to change the nature of the place. In cities with a council/ manager form of government, the manager usually wants to pass controversial measures with a majority of two, if not three passing votes – if only because he or she does not want to be one vote away from being fired should the politics reverse themselves.

Bainbridge has a “strong mayor” form of government which makes the Mayor the elected chief executive responsible for hiring the right people and ultimately responsible for running a fair and open process. Her signature is on most of the contracts, and the buck stops with her on management issues and the performance of her administration.

So far the costs of Winslow Tomorrow are more than $4 million and the revolving door of consultants, financial stakeholders and other planning participants spins on. The Winslow Way Streetscape project and other downtown redevelopment efforts have taken on the force of a steamroller, with the Mayor firmly at the wheel. Together they are rolling towards projects with costs five and ten times what she has already spent. Are the same people who developed the map for these ventures also along for the full ride? And without a more open and transparent process, how will we ever be able to trust that planning decisions and recommendations reflect the interests of the community and not those of a small group of people wearing many hats?

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Downtown Conspiracy 101

Take one part over-representation of financial stakeholders in downtown planning, add a series of proposed projects that remove all hindrances to increased height and density, sprinkle in a few “amenities” to woo the public – be sure to leave all public comment in a box on the shelf – and stir it up with a few threats and misrepresentations. Bake in an oven warmed by a rush to beat the 2008 Council. Voila: Winslow Tomorrow Surprise.

If Saturday’s editorial page is all the Winslow Way gang and their good friends at the Review can come up with to dispute allegations of a “downtown conspiracy” (their words, not ours) then perhaps we’re on to something.

The exact ingredients may vary – only the cooks know the secret recipe – but what is clear is that there are many individual pieces of information and series of events that don’t add up, and the spin and blatant “errors” on last week’s editorial page haven’t explained any of them.


The Secret of the Hidden LID

The feigned shock from property owners and the City Administration (not to mention the editor of our fine paper of record) to the suggestion of an LID (Local Improvement District) to help finance the Streetscape would be comical, were it not so serious a matter for the rest of us.

We have been told that (1) an LID would not be appropriate for the Streetscape because we all benefit from it and that (2) an LID would fail because property owners won’t go for it. Winslow Way property owner Bruce Weiland goes so far as to state, in his op ed piece attacking Bob Fortner and the BRG in last Saturday’s Review, that “the City, by law, cannot impose an LID; it must be approved by 60% of the parcels being taxed”. That statement is wrong on so many levels, that one has to wonder why Weiland, a lawyer, would not do his homework before publicly admonishing a fellow citizen’s understanding of the law.

An LID can indeed be imposed by a municipality, though it can be blocked if it’s opposed by property owners representing 60% of the of the dollar amount assessed (not % of parcels). In other words only 41% of the affected financial interests need be in favor of the LID. Thus, in this case, the City could impose an LID and leave it up to the property owners to determine how essential this project really is. Unless of course we want to capitulate to the threat of LID protests in the same manner the City has been seen as capitulating to the threat of lawsuits.

In response to the argument that an LID is not fair because the Streetscape benefits us all, we need only look to Seattle where LID’s have been considered for both the Alaskan Way Tunnel and the Lake Union Streetcar. LID’s are standard operating procedure for financing a broad range of capital improvements that confer a special benefit to adjacent landowners even as they may provide a benefit to the entire community.

So, if LID’s are so ubiquitous, why the claims of impossibility from the City administration and why the disinfomation campaign in the Review? The answer may lie in a plan to reserve that funding mechanism to fund the proposed parking garage.

Streetscape project Manager Chris Wierzbicki told a friend of the PostScript in August, that an LID would not be appropriate for sidewalks and street trees, but would be appropriate for, say, a parking garage. Lo and behold, the funding recommendations for the Haggar-Scribner/ City parking structure, to be presented to Council tonight, include a special assessment for benefited properties. Recall that Tom Haggar, his wife Priscilla Zimmerman and Don Audleman (of Capstone Partners, technical consultant on the $127,000 parking garage feasibility study – yes that’s taxpayer money) are all members of the Streetscape Advisory Committee, and that Dr. Haggar also sits on the committee that created the Streetscape funding strategy.

It will certainly be interesting to see how this apparent hypocrisy is finessed at tonight’s meeting.


The Case of the Missing Fire Flow

Within the Water Resources Element of our Comprehensive Plan is a discussion of “fire flow”, and other water storage requirements, for the downtown water system. According to that discussion, the Winslow Water System will not be able to provide adequate service (including fire flow) for projected growth without replacement of “undersized distribution pipelines in the system”. Specific recommendations are given for Winslow Way upgrades, and Winslow Way Streetscape documents cite those Comp Plan recommendations as the basis for current plans.

Why does “fire flow” matter? Inadequate fire flow means no redevelopment of the affected properties and the word on the street is that what has kept heights down on Winslow Way for so long has been fire safety issues – fire department ladder height, the need to underground power lines and inadequate fire flow. The fire department now has the truck it needs, and in 2009, the Streetscape project will take care of the last two requirements. And so the argument goes that even the basic utility work on Winslow Way will create a special benefit to property owners and should be subject to an LID.

City staff has refuted this claim, stating that the same diameter pipes would be needed for current zoning as would be needed for proposed 5-story building heights. Putting aside proposed upzoning (a potential red herring), is the relevant issue current zoning capacity, or the actual ability to build to that capacity? Is it the City’s responsibility to use our tax dollars to provide a property owner with the additional infrastructure needed to maximize the use of his property? Or are such upgrades valuable improvements to his property?

This is how the Water and Sewer Report, produced by City consultants for the Streetscape project, describe the situation:

“The proposed improvements are the minimum required to meet projected growth along Winslow Way as discussed in the Comprehensive Plan. It is important to note the improvements are not being dictated by future multi-story build-out along Winslow Way but are needed regardless of redevelopment to meet projected domestic and fire demands.”(emphasis added)

Clearly, the infrastructure need is for future development along Winslow Way – whatever sized structures are used to accommodate the projected growth. Thus, we are talking about an improvement that is a prerequisite to redevelopment. It’s incontestable that such an improvement confers a measurable, and, in this case, substantial benefit to Winslow Way property owners.


Something untoward seems to be going on downtown. Has the administration played a role in deceiving Council and the public about the viability of LID financing for the Streetscape project in order to reserve that option for the financing of the Haggar-Scribner parking garage? Has the administration played a role in misleading the community about the relationship between the Streetscape project, the proposed parking garage and the ability of Winslow Way property owners to build taller and bigger buildings, whether under current or proposed zoning?

Without credible answers to such important questions, increasing numbers of reasonable citizens will find themselves wondering whether there might not indeed be a "conspiracy" directing the redevelopment of our downtown.

Big Concrete for Little Winslow

What has 1,000 parking spaces, is one and a half football fields long and runs from Madrone to Ericksen? How about a mega- parking garage proposed for the heart of Winslow. If anyone had any doubts left about the vision for our City shared by a small group of property owners, urban planners, realtors and architects, surely this will be the nail in the coffin of that doubt.





The “Winslow Core Parking Feasibility Study” will be presented to Council this Wednesday night and will suggest the building of a city funded parking garage on City property immediately south of the Farmer’s Market plaza and possibly connected to an even larger private garage, for a total length of 600 ft. To be fair, the study does not “suggest” the garage, it presumes the garage. Despite it’s title, the sole purpose of the study was to determine how to build the proposed garage, not to study “parking” in the Winslow Core. The study is the result of a public-private partnership between the City and two major property owners, Haggar-Scribner Properties and Sandstrom Properties.

With cumulative ownership of half the property fronting the north side of Winslow Way between Ericksen and Madison, these property owners have much to gain by City participation in a parking garage adjacent to their holdings, not the least of which would be facilitation of redevelopment under proposed upzoning. But what would the community gain, and what would it lose with this venture?


For Love of Parking

According to the Feasibility Study, “The Winslow Tomorrow planning process concluded that downtown Winslow is deficient in parking supply.” This premise has been a driving force behind downtown planning for years, despite the fact that the on-the-street experience of most Islanders has been to the contrary. Why this insistence that a problem exists, and that the community is in dire need of a comprehensive solution? When we consider the origin of the claim and the identity of the parties that will most benefit most from increased parking capacity, at least one possible explanation arises.

Of all the Winslow Tomorrow committees, it seems that the Parking Committee has been the target of the most criticism in the community. A number of former participants have described the process as “predetermined” and exclusively focused on the opinions and goals of a key minority. Among the members of the committee were Winslow property owners Tom Haggar (of Haggar-Scribner properties), his wife Priscilla Zimmerman and Larry Nakata (of T&C) as well as a number of other individuals with professional ties to the downtown core.

Tom Haggar is now a key player in the proposed parking garage. Why would Haggar and other property owners have such an intense interest in establishing a phantom need for a massive parking garage?


Promises, Promises

In 2005 Dr. Haggar sought and was granted “The Haggar- Scribner Comprehensive Plan Amendment” which rezoned his holdings to allow property fronting Ericksen to share the much higher density zoning status of his adjacent Winslow Way parcels. The goal was to facilitate the redevelopment of the 5 contiguous parcels together. At the time Haggar-Scribner proposed the rezoning (upzoning) of their property, concerns were expressed by some about the effect on the Ericksen District of a structure built to maximize height and density allowances. Dr. Haggar reassured the Land Use Committee and the Planning Commission that parking restrictions for the site would effectively prohibit maximum development, and that the upzoning was sought to allow increased “design flexibility” and to “allow a greener, more energy-efficient structure”.

Two years later, the Haggar-Scribner position on the development of the property has gone from reassurances that maximizing building size would not be likely given parking restrictions, to soliciting the participation of the City in the building of a massive parking structure that would in fact allow that full expansion. The feasibility report cites the “future” building of a 30-50,000 sf clinic as the motivation behind the Haggar-Scribner participation in the garage.


B.Y.O.C. (Bring Your Own Cart)

Whatever the forces were at play on the Winslow Tomorrow Parking Committee, it actually proposed a number of alternatives to address the presumed “parking problem”, including short term parking zones, increased enforcement, smaller satellite parking lots, employee shuttles and non-motorized improvements (aka: the poor stepchild of city projects)

As citizens we must ask how the City came to spend tens of thousands of dollars (or more?) on a “Parking Feasibility Study” focused on only a parking garage concept and only one location for that garage. Certainly a more candid name for the study would be “The Haggar-Scribner Parking Garage Feasibility Study”.

Why isn’t the City partnering with Larry Nakata in his consideration of developing a garage at the post office site? If we were to locate a garage downtown, and ask patrons to “park once” and walk, wouldn’t we put the garage adjacent to the business most frequented by Island citizens, and where the most volume is purchased, on a site with excellent existing ingress and egress? Maybe T&C can put a shopping cart rack up at the Haggar-Scribner garage instead.


Hint, Hint, Nudge, Nudge

On the subject of ingress and egress to the monster garage, there’s a bit of a wrinkle in the proposed design. Not surprisingly, Madrone Lane is seen as an obvious access route for the project, what it surprising for most in the community to learn, is that Madrone is a private road. This would not be a problem for the garage lobbyists if the owners were willing to hop on board the Winslow Way Urban Planning Express along with the rest of the North of Winslow Way gang. But apparently the owners have other ideas. They are considering closing off the lane and further emphasizing the quiet courtyard feeling that has naturally developed among the bordering businesses.

But the fact that these folks are seeking to protect the sanctity of this space from traffic and noise isn’t going to stop Haggar-Scribner et al. They propose somewhat cryptically that “the City should develop a strategy for what it needs to accomplish in the Madrone Way corridor and engage in discussions with the property owners to resolve future direction.” Some might say that sounds rather ominous. Maybe it’s just optimistic, after all, all eight of the drawings showing ingress and egress to the garage, show Madrone Lane as open and in use.


For a community that claims to be seeking to discourage reliance on the automobile, parking has played an incredibly prominent role in most aspects of our downtown planning. Perhaps that is because the vision for downtown has been written not by the community but by a few individuals who have more than a small conflict of interest with regards to issue like parking, height and density and whether or not benefiting properties pay their fair share.

To read the entire feasibility study go here.