New Puget Neighborhood Plan moves toward approval.

Bellingham’s Puget neighborhood may be moving one step closer to updating it’s official neighborhood plan for the first time since 1996.

The Bellingham City Planning Commission will be reviewing the proposal at a public hearing on May 13, at 7:00 p.m. in the City Council Chambers. If they approve the measure it will move on to the Bellingham City Council for final approval.

Neighborhood Plans are documents, which identify current problems and offer solutions for a neighborhoods traffic, parks, trails, and other infrastructure systems. Some neighborhood plans also cover zoning changes, but the new Puget plan includes no changes to zoning because of the complexities of law involved, Mary Chaney, the president of the Puget Neighborhood Association, said.

The new neighborhood plan has taken well over three years to write and has taken many hours of hard work from a core group of dedicated volunteers, she said.

“ There is really only four or five of us who have been permanently active throughout the long process,” she said. “I love doing it out of a sense of civic duty.”

Current neighborhood plan obsolete

Bellingham’s neighborhood planning is left up the 24 individual neighborhoods who must revise and update their own plans, before submitting them for eventual approval by the City Council, Greg Aucott, the city planner working on the Puget project, said. He said that the City of Bellingham is just too badly underfunded for their planning department to tackle the challenge of continuously updating the plans. This has lead to some neighborhoods still working off of old plans, which have been obsolete for years, he said.

“A few of our neighborhoods have been successful in updating their plans in recent years,” Aucott said. “But others are pretty old and obsolete, and a lot of those plan’s recommendations have already been implemented.”

Transportation policy highlight of new plan.

Some neighborhood members have high hopes that a new plan may be able to ease Puget’s increasing traffic congestion on Lakeway. Puget resident Kelsey Sullivan said that he becomes frustrated when trying to move East to West in his neighborhood because none of the streets or trails connect.

“It’s a really annoying part of living in Puget,” Sullivan said. “Lakeway is just so crowded and dangerous, but it’s really the only option if you need to go in that direction.”

According to Chaney, transportation infrastructure is a highlight of the new plan. The Neighborhood Association is calling for more connectivity of streets and trails so that Puget will become a more walk-able and family friendly place, she said.

The public is encouraged to attend these hearings, and anyone who attends will have the opportunity to voice any concerns or ideas which they may have about the community, Aucott said.

“ We would invite anyone from the community to come and voice their support or concerns on the thirteenth,” Aucott said. “ We really love hearing from the community, but most of the time the turnout to these things is pretty low unless there is a hot-button issue on the table.”

The new plan which has been submitted is available for viewing at the Puget Neighborhood Association’s website, www.PugetNeighborhood.com.