Heads-up thinking in downtown Sequim

Northwest Passage
By Jim Casey

About three decades ago when I wrote for The Herald in Everett, I worked out of its south Snohomish County branch office in Lynnwood.
At a loss for a better story idea, I set out in search of that city’s downtown — knowing that there was no such place amid a jumble of strip malls and overloaded arterial streets.
I got blank stares and a few quizzical looks from those I queried, “Where’s downtown Lynnwood?” Several people nominated the exhaust-choked intersection of 44th Avenue West and Highway 99, and one person said it was the civic center.
However, that seat of city government looked more like the concrete-and-gray-glass home of some Northern California think tank than like a municipal nerve center.
Besides, it had only a ground floor.
Switch scenes and times to here and now. Were I to ask the same question of passersby outside the Gazette, they’d immediately name Sequim Avenue and Washington Street as our downtown.
It’s not only home to the longest cycling traffic light in the Pacific Daylight Time Zone, it’s where buildings rear back on their hind legs and rise to a full two stories. Yes, as I can attest, folks really can ply their trades a full 12 feet above the ground.
Thinking about it, isn’t any town’s downtown the site of its tallest buildings? Bellevue, for instance, was just another sprawling burg until it built itself a skyline. And even in the Seattle of old, a visitor always could orient himself if Mount Rainier was clouded over by spying the Smith Tower or the Space Needle.
Sigh.

An elevated idea
That brings us to Ron Fairclough, a Sequim property owner with literally high ideas about where the city should build a new city hall.
The current thinking is that a government center should be like those in Lynnwood or even Port Angeles, a low-slung campus-style edifice covering the maximum space with impermeable surface (a “green roof” in these parched parts being unlikely).
Such a building certainly couldn’t be constructed downtown.
Fairclough, however — who admits to a very vested interest in the question due to owning lots adjacent to the Clallam Transit Center — proposes building on the site of the current City Hall and nearby property.
His plan would keep the seat of government downtown rather than drawing city workers and City Hall visitors out of the area, thus keeping the central business district alive.
And Fairclough would go the notion one better: Build upward, not outward, dedicating the street level to parking and locating offices on second and even — no joke, Blanche! — third floors.
At the outer limits of Fairclough’s thinking are multi-floored buildings downtown linked by walkways above the street, a sort of second-story man’s dream of pedestrians walking on air.
While some might not like the idea of a Sequim City Hall with a smaller footprint and others may mutter about losing “viewscapes,” contractors might rejoice at the prospect of a larger structure on a smaller piece of land.

Security and vitality
Fairclough also says it would improve downtown security, especially at the nearby Transit Center, if police headquarters were included in the edifice. Furthermore, city staff could walk to restaurants, banks and other downtown stores, further invigorating downtown.
It could, of course, come to pass — years from now, probably, considering the economy — that the city elects an outlying location for a campus-style civic center.
That though, could put Sequim’s downtown at risk of losing its vitality to the city’s periphery, perhaps inspiring a new civic slogan:
“Sequim: Biggest Li’l Strip Mall West of Everett!”
Stings a big, doesn’t it?
Well, how about “Sequim, Little Lynnwood by the Bay”?
Still don’t like it? OK, here’s my third and favorite suggestion, although I can’t vouch for its originality:
“Sequim: More Than A Suburb Searching for a City.”

Jim Casey is the editor of the Sequim Gazette. His column appears whenever he thinks he can get away with it.