City, developers hear some feedback on new Highlands Library

Published 5:32 pm Friday, January 13, 2012

The City of Renton needs to do a better job of reaching the diverse populations of the Renton Highlands community if officials are to get real dialogue and feedback on plans to create a new and expanded Highlands Library.

That was the message repeated by community members at an open house for the project on Wednesday night.

City officials, King County Library System staff, developers and Portland-based THA Architecture team staffers all outnumbered the community members who attended the event.

“My biggest concern was the fact that the people who usually use that library right now are the ones who are not represented here,” said resident Cynthia Burns.

Burns has lived in the community for 30 years and said English is not a first language for many Highlands residents. Having served on community boards, she said it’s a problem she’s seen with the City of Renton repeatedly. There is a tendency for the people most impacted by a facility or development not to show up.

“I don’t know if it’s because it is a population where the adults are not the first-generation Americans,” Burns said. “So, the kids do a lot of translating for the parents. Or, if it is the parents not being first-generation Americans, they don’t want to be near officials.”

Michael Riley did not like what he saw of the library conceptual plans that THA Architects presented.

“There’s not enough room for library facilities,” he said. “There’s too large a proportion given over to a large meeting room, which is not used. And it’s using a huge portion of the space for staff activities and back-of-house stuff.”

Riley felt the plans were interesting and paralleled similar use-of-space ideas in the newly proposed downtown library.

THA Architecture team member, Jane Barker, felt that the exchange during the open house was pretty typical of what she is used to experiencing in community meetings for design projects.

Sometimes the atmosphere is much more contentious, she said.

“It was a wonderful dialogue as far as what the issues are and hopefully we’ll address them and make sure that as the project moves forward it meets everybody’s community needs as best it can,” Barker said. Despite her concerns about the open house’s attendance, Cynthia Burns called the architects plans “wonderful.”

She has regarded the Highlands library as a children’s library all the years that she’s lived in the community. Burns said it’s nice to see the library grow up but still have space dedicated to a children’s and teen area.

The library expansion is part of the larger Sunset redevelopment project, which seeks to add a neighborhood park, four- to five-story apartments, townhouse and mixed-use housing.

Renton Housing Authority and Colpitts Development had representatives at the meeting. The housing authority is redeveloping its Sunset Terrace apartment complex.

Chris Burns, Cynthia’s son, told the representatives that she was concerned that current residents would be priced out of the new housing and unable to return to the community.

“So, I would not like to see that, that’s not a community value of mine to displace the poor and people of color in favor of higher income areas that are attracted by things like new buildings and more expensive housing,” he said after the meeting.

Alex Pietsch, community and economic development administrator for the city, said that Renton Housing Authority has a strategy for redeveloping the housing with respect to preventing this from happening. People displaced by the redevelopment would have the first opportunity to come back to the development, Pietsch said.

“The goal here is to create a mixed-income neighborhood,” Pietsch said. Colpitts portion of the development will be market-rate housing. Others are supposed to be affordable. Right now the library is the only piece of the redevelopment project that is funded.

City of Renton and KCLS staff said they would work on ways to get the presentation out to the community and consider the ideas presented at the event.