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On the slope of a hill in Jefferson Park, there’s a little picnic table area from which, on a clear day, you really can see forever — or at least all the way from the Olympic Mountains to downtown Seattle skyscrapers to Mt. Baker.
One of the many things that City Councilmember Peter Steinbrueck is trying to do before he leaves office at the end of December is to protect the view from Jefferson Park. So the chair of the council’s urban planning committee has introduced legislation to add Jefferson to a list of 86 city parks, playfields, and overlooks with views that the City’s Department of Planning and Development requires builders not to obstruct.
The legislation, which would also add the Mount Baker Ridge Viewpoint to the list, will get a public hearing in council chambers on Dec. 6, with the council expected to vote on the measure Dec. 10. Despite giving Steinbrueck an A for effort, however, some residents of Beacon Hill aren’t happy.
That’s because the other parks on the list have complete view protection, says Mark Holland, co-chair of the Jefferson Park Alliance, whereas Steinbrueck’s legislation will add only three specific viewpoints at Jefferson: at the park’s gatehouse plaza, at its overlook and, by an amendment that Steinbrueck will make Dec. 6, the panoramic picnic area.
Holland and fellow alliance member Willie Weir say it’s just the start of a city plan to parse the views at the other parks on the list — and they don’t want Jefferson Park to set that precedent. For years, they say, the city let the Olmstead-designed park, which is located among the poorer neighborhoods of Seattle’s south end, languish, chunking off part of it for a veterans’ hospital and twice failing to add it to the view protection list, which the city last updated in 1982.
With much of Jefferson Park now being restored, the two say it should have the same view protection as the city properties on the list today.
“In allowing just certain points of the park to have view protection, it doesn’t protect the whole park,” Weir says, “which means if you put up a gigantic condo building and it didn’t obstruct the views from that point, it would be OK.”
Mark Troxel, a city planner who helped draft Steinbrueck’s legislation, says the two viewpoints designated in the bill aren’t likely to be obstructed: They’re located on a 50-foot bluff, he says, and new buildings below the bluff are limited to 35 feet in height.
At least for now. At some point, the zoning could change, he says, but, as a result of this legislation, such a rezone “would have to take these future viewpoints into account.”
The city needs to revamp the entire viewpoint list to be more specific, Troxel says, because, after conducting an inventory of the 86 viewpoint properties in 2002, he found many places protected “from which there really isn’t a view.”
Before any changes are made to the viewpoint protection, he says, residents will be invited to give their opinions. But, by then, Holland says, it may be too late.
“If Jefferson Park gets on the list with limited protection, it could be used as a precedent to limit view protection in the other 86 parks on that list,” Holland says. “That’s why I think this is a citywide issue.”
Steinbrueck says he wasn’t aware of the issue, but, given limited time and resources, the legislation was the best he could do. “I’m trying to accommodate as much as I can that’s good for Seattle and our neighborhoods before I leave office,” he says, “but, unfortunately, time is running out.”
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