After decades of discussion and about eight years of planning, it appears that the swap of land between the Seattle Parks Department and the Port of Seattle to create a park on Smith Cove may finally be moving forward.
Parks representatives and Port of Seattle officials will meet with the public tomorrow, March 3, from 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. in the Catherine Blaine K-8 cafeteria building to discuss the project and lay out their reasons for the land swap.
The idea behind the swap is to exchange a section of land located at the foot of the Magnolia bluff and adjacent to the Magnolia Bridge that is currently used for soccer fields with a rough patch of waterfront property that is currently used for storage by the Port of Seattle.
Donald Harris, manager of property and acquisition for the Seattle Parks and Recreation Department, said the idea for the meeting is to share ideas with members of the public about the project.
“We are interested in ideas and finding out what people’s reactions are to the proposed land swap,” Harris said. “We have three or four different concepts of how the property might be configured. The one that seems the most logical is to swap the two sites.”
Harris said the current park, which is configured as soccer fields, is blocked from access to Elliott Bay by 23rd Avenue West and West Marginal Way. The new configuration would give residents using the park direct access the beach and the bay. It would also preserve that section of waterfront for public use. If the land remained in the control of the Port of Seattle, the public would not have access to the beach area.
Another part of the land equation is that the King County Wastewater Treatment Division has proposed construction of an underground Combined Sewer Overflow holding tank in the area of the land swap to protect water quality in the Puget Sound. The location of the 1.8-million gallon overflow tank hasn’t been decided yet, but King County officials have targeted the basin area near Smith Cove as the site.
In 2003, the Seattle Parks and Recreation Department, in cooperation with King County, purchased 7.3 acres from the U.S. Navy. The land included a section of land at the top of Magnolia Bridge, now known as Ursula Judkins Park. It also included 4.9 acres of mainly flat land at the southeast foot of Magnolia Hill, between the Magnolia bridge and the Elliott Bay Marina. In the ensuing years, the city has spent about $300,000 improving the plot of land, bringing in clean soil and turning it into soccer fields.
Whether or not the Seattle Parks Department and the Port of Seattle would foot the bill to improve the waterfront property, which would require the same work as the current soccer fields, was not immediately known.
While Magnolia officials and residents have discussed the plan since 2009, at least one local activist wants the swap stopped. Elizabeth Campbell, who was involved with developing opposition to the Highway 99 tunnel, is now turning her sights on the Smith Cove swap. She maintains the project wasn’t discussed with the Magnolia residents in an open manner. She also accuses officials who developed the project as “defrauding the public of its legal environmental review rights, its community participation rights and its actual public interest rights in the lands in question…”
Campbell has also asked city, port and King County officials for a mountain of documents pertaining to the project. No word on whether the officials plan to comply with Campbell’s extensive requests.
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