Magnolia resident John Cain is fed up about something that's partially his own fault.
He took part in an effort to spruce up the neighborhood more than decade ago when angled parking in the middle of Thorndyke Ave-nue West was replaced with six landscaped
medium strips between 23rd Avenue West and West Plymouth Street.
Dirt from a tunnel dug for an expanded West Point sewer plant was used for the medium strips, which were edged with railroad ties, Cain said.
"Then we started to plant this stuff," he added, gesturing in disgust at an overgrown medium strip half a block from his home on West Boston Street.
One of the medium strips between 23rd Avenue West and West Plymouth Street is nicely mowed these days, thanks to a nearby neighbor, Cain said.
But the rest have turned into a mess of overgrown flowerbeds, grass and weeds as neighborhood interest has waned or disappeared altogether, he said. "So anyway, I called the mayor's office to get someone out here to do something."
He's still waiting, but a fix won't be easy, as Cain found out at a meeting last week of the Magnolia Community Club's new land-use task force.
Committee chair Elizabeth Camp-bell conceded that it was originally a neighborhood project that was "kind of maintained" by nearby residents until three to five years ago. "I'll try to shepherd it through my committee and then to the community club," she said of the issue.
Myra Williams, president of the Magnolia Chamber of Commerce, also sat in on the meeting and said she had received complaints about the overgrown medium strips.
"They're a traffic hazard, ugly, unsightly, and something needs to be done," Willliams complained. "Magnolia can do better."
Perhaps, but the problem is currently in the hands of the Seattle Department of Transportation. "At this point, certainly there can be discussions about what to do in that area," said Roy Francis, the department's manager of urban forestry.
However, there is a problem about community promises. He said the project went through "with the understanding that the neighbors would be responsible for maintaining it."
If the medium strips were simply planted with grass, mowing them would not be that much of a problem for SDOT, according to Francis. But taking care of the flowerbeds is more labor intensive. "Basically, our position is we can't afford to maintain it."
SDOT is responsible for taking care of approximately 2.5-million square feet of landscaped areas, but the agency has only 10 gardeners, he said. "It's an awful lot to take care of."
That's not to say that the city doesn't maintain some landscaped areas; the medium strip on 15th Ave-nue West is an example. But the landscaped parts are in areas of high traffic, like 15th, and high visibility, like the city's waterfront, Francis said.
Cain thinks the problem could be taken care of by transferring the medium strips to Seattle Parks and Recreation ownership, claiming that Thorndyke was originally part of the department's boulevard system in the 1920s.
Whether that's true is unclear; Francis didn't know anything about it. But transferring the property to the parks department would require that SDOT get paid for the land, he said.
"Certainly that's an issue the mayor would have to take up," Francis added. But he sounded skeptical the transfer could be made because the parks department is facing the same budget constraints SDOT does.
Parks spokeswoman Dewey Potter agreed. "We're sort of at capacity right now, and would need to make a case with the budget office for additional funds," she said.
Another suggestion made at the committee meeting was to simply rip out all the flowers and replant the mediums with grass that SDOT could easily mow.
Committee member Shary Flenniken suggested that the Plant Amnesty organization could be tapped to salvage the flowers. "It was poor planning to start with," she said of the beautification project, "and here were dealing with the relics of poor planning."
Francis said he thought the city might agree to take out the flowerbeds and solve the problem that way. "The real problem here is ongoing maintenance," he said.
Cain was somewhat mollified. "It would be better than nothing," he said.
Staff reporter Russ Zabel can be reached at rzabel@nwlink.com or 461-1309.
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