First look at the Nagle Place plaza plan, plus Saturday transit oriented development meeting

We reported Wednesday about Sound Transit's new plans to create a public plaza as part of the Nagle Place extension  behind the Capitol Hill light rail station. We have now received a document showing details of the planned layout and can share it with you.

Above is the new design concept for Nagle that Sound Transit has unveiled. Its creates a a southern plaza and a northern section which will be a service and parking entrance. The original Nagle concept floated by Sound Transit last year treated the street as a maintenance route that would be sometimes closed to traffic and repurposed for the market. You can see how they illustrated it previously, below.

The new plan will be discussed at a public forum next Tuesday, August 3rd at the Century Ballroom. One issue raised by many about Tuesday's meeting is that it's an awful night for a community meeting with theNight Out 2010 block parties happening around the neighborhood. We asked Sound Transit about the possibility of a reschedule or follow-up meeting. Here's what spokesperson Jeff Munnoch said about that via the CHS comments:

The Capitol Hill community is very active and there are a variety of public activities and events on almost every night of the week during the busy summer months. Sound Transit attempts to avoid schedule conflicts with agencies and community groups, and unfortunately we cannot always find a time that works for everyone . This meeting was rescheduled once already to avoid a conflict with a another community group event on Wednesday night.

We want to provide everyone in the community a chance to participate and provid feedback. The materials from the meeting, will be available on our website following the meeting. We will also make the materials available here on this site, along with a link to send us in your comments or feedback.

We'll definitely report on the meeting and gather materials to share here on the site. On one hand, it might be more productive to move meetings like this to online resources more and more. On the other, it doesn't seem impossible to find a night on Capitol Hill with a lower level of schedule conflict. Meanwhile, a group from the Capitol Hill Community Council is planning a follow-up meeting on Thursday night to discuss the forum at 7 PM at Roy Street Coffee.

If that's not enough transit wonkery for you, consider spending Saturday morning at the Century Ballroom for a second session introducing the Creative Crossroads Committee to the Hill's transit oriented development process. The group, backed by King County, the Cascade Land Conservancy and a $15,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, is holding kick-off sessions to gather support for its effort to work with community groups like the Community Council-Chamber of Commerce Capitol Hill Champion joint effort. If you're a little confused about how it all fits together, so are we. So we asked.

Alison Van Gorp, urban policy director for the Cascade Land Conservancy, sent CHS the slides embedded below from the presentation the group went through during this week's first session on the Hill and will walk through again on Saturday. She pointed us specifically at slide 7:

Here is what Van Gorp wrote in her e-mail:

Our effort is pulling together a number of experts who are developing recommendations for the Champion (as well as the City and Sound Transit) on a strategy for creating community cultural space in the light rail redevelopment.  We look at our effort as informing the work of the Champion going forward.  The Champion will continue to advocate for the community’s vision for the light rail station, including this community cultural space component.

CHS asked Van Gorp about the possibility that Capitol Hill community groups and her organization's agendas might diverge and make it more difficult to counterbalance Sound Transit's goals. Van Grop writes that she and others will be "making sure that these two pieces are closely integrated so that we're all advocating for the same vision and no 'divisions' emerge."

Want to help make that goal a reality? Below are the slides and details of Saturday's session. If you went to Monday's meeting, how did it go?

Network Building Parties PPT_FINAL

NETWORK-BUILDING PARTIES: 
Learn more and meet others who are working to make this happen. Please attend one of our two gatherings. 

WHEN: 
Monday, July 26, 5:30-7 pm
Saturday, July 31, 10:30 am – noon

WHERE: 
Century Ballroom, East Hall 
Oddfellows Building (915 E. Pine St.), 2nd Floor

These events are free, but space is limited. RSVP at creativecrossroads.eventbrite.com.