Revitalize the Town

We all have a tendency to think that things are the way they ought to be.  We work hard to understand our surroundings.  We volunteer to perfect our built environment.  We tend to think that the systems developed to maintain community structures and spaces are the best.  People tend to believe that the result of all this effort is beautiful.  And we don’t want it to change.

Nevertheless, the key to living in a nice town is the ability to imagine structures, uses and spaces that enable us to live, work, and play in an accessible, healthy, attractive, sustainable town.  Sometimes, this means things ought to change a little.

For instance, we’d be better off in our urban area if all the power poles were undergrounded.  Our vistas in the basin of the harbor would be better and our power reliability would be improved as well, without the specter of someone being burned to death from contact with a broken hot wire like the pedestrian and his dog on Shirley Avenue a few years ago.

For another example, consider Burnham Drive.  Just nicely repaved, this roadway would be better as a tasteful boulevard with sidewalks and a central raised median, especially considering that it must be connected to Harbor Hill Boulevard in the next five or six years.

I know, adjustments like undergrounding power or building attractive boulevards on Burnham Drive cost a lot of money.  But, if that concern held sway in the past, this town wouldn’t have even one modern road, would still have only one 4.5’ wide sidewalk, would have only one park, and would sport a 60’ city dock, like in the 1980s. 

Or, some houses would still be dumping raw sewage into Gig Harbor Bay, like they did up to the 1970s, when Mayor Jake Bujacich and the City Council took difficult steps to modernize the sewer system.

So, as a positive example, I applaud the City Council, Mayor, city staff, and local residents from inside and outside of the city, for taking a hard look at what to do with the downtown before a lot of it sags with its 1960s facades and falls to the ground. 

And while we’re at it, let’s not envision a future where we just add more aerial power lines for redundancy, or just pave over an existing roadway to keep it from disintegrating.  Let’s improve our quality of residential life and help sustain our capacity to maintain it. 

[By the way, Walt Smith and Active Construction did a first-rate job of paving Burnham Drive in the early 1990s, or the city would have had to dig it apart just to preserve it.]

Let’s do more quality civic projects like the Maritime Pier project, about to begin in early August.  Some people think “improve” is a dirty word; I’m not one of them.  As long as we can preserve the residential essence, human scale, and historical content of the town, I think we should improve it now.  We have the means.