Mukilteo is in a stage of development where many cities eventually find themselves, which is that the community has finished growing and is ready to begin maturing. Glen Pickus, Mukilteo’s planning manager for Planning & Community Development, said one of the city’s top priorities in the coming years will be to understand what that blossoming looks like. To that end, the city is getting new ideas and data from a particularly ripe resource: students enrolled at UW’s College of Built Environments. During the spring and summer quarters of 2015, students provided the city with analysis of its options given varying budgets, and then designed concepts for an area the city is calling Midtown Mukilteo.
“It's a commercial, mixed-use area," Pickus said, "so one of the first things they did was analyze different densities that would work there and now they've built on that, and we're hoping they're going to help us with understanding other things like how views would be impacted with taller buildings in the area, how much tax revenue redevelopment might generate and things like that.”
The city will use the students' work to create plans that will be presented to the public through a series of workshops and meetings this spring, Pickus said, adding that the work was high quality and much cheaper than if they had procured from the private sector.
“We've gotten an idea first of all of what that might look like, the buildings and stuff, and then also what the actual businesses at that kind of development might attract,” he said. “Also, they've provided us with some scenarios of creating identity for the neighborhood.”
And in school, practical constraints of the real world are frequently ignored for learning purposes, so working with the city on a real development project gave the students a preview of what it will be like designing for clients after graduation, said Arum Cho, an undergraduate in the landscape architecture program.
“In a previous class, they analyzed what the city can do with specific amounts of money — very low budget, medium and high end. So, in this class, we picked a budget we liked,” Cho explained. “I picked the high end, so that was interesting to see how things can happen and how much you can design. In a studio, you don’t do that. You don’t think about money at all. So this was a little more realistic.”
Partnerships between learning institutions and governments like this one are important for a couple of reasons, said Finis Ray, a landscape designer at engineering firm Otak who serves as a liaison between the university and city planners. For one, these arrangements ease the transition that students need to make from conceptual academic study into the work world.
“When you go into landscape architecture, urban planning, urban design, you kind of have an idea of what you would like to do for cities and for people," Ray said, "but being able to sit down and engage with the mayor and the city staff who were elected on talking to their constituents, and they know what’s needed to get the city up and going -- it’s good to listen to that and take your knowledge base and grow from there."
Perhaps most importantly, he said, sharing knowledge with the government helps communities not to take wrong terms in their community development.
“The University of Washington is a world-renowned research institution and the government wants to tap into that fresh pool of ideas,” Ray said. “Unless the city really does something and the public is on board, Mukilteo is just going to be a stagnant community. It’s a unique situation that it’s gotten this far and nothing’s happened, but it’s a great challenge.”
Another challenge the city faces, he said, is political — convincing residents that this kind of development is not about turning their small city into another Seattle, but nurturing the resources they have so they can choose their destiny rather than letting the world choose it for them.
There’s nothing new about these kinds of partnerships, said David Blum, an affiliate instructor at the UW Department of Urban Design and Planning, but these are mutually beneficial arrangements that shouldn’t be overlooked.
“A student who’s trying to learn about how the world of government works will be much benefited by doing something that’s real and hands-on, like the project for the city of Mukilteo where they can actually meet with city staff and participate in something that is very different from sitting in a lecture in a classroom,” Blum said. “It’s also, on the other hand, beneficial to the client, because the client often can’t procure the work through the normal public procurement process, because that is extremely formal. … It’s very rigid, it’s very inflexible, and that’s the way government generally has to work, because government doesn’t want to be in the business of loosely defining work and then paying for something after the fact.”
Blum’s knowledge of government procurement was gained first-hand as he worked in asset management for the state of Oregon, among many other real-estate development positions in the Pacific Northwest. Procurement’s rigid parameters are a necessity, he said, but the importance of being flexible while designing something creates a natural challenge for government.
“Forget the fact that it would have been a lot more expensive with a private-sector company,” Blum said. “It takes a tremendous amount of knowledge to buy something when you pre-describe it, but you can’t pre-describe it here because you don’t really know what the issues are. With students and faculty working, it’s much more of an exchange of ideas. It’s much more cooperative, complementary, flexible, and there’s much more interchange of information.”
Government is frequently criticized for wasteful spending, he added, but the reason things are expensive is sometimes because government deals with complex issues for which there are no easy answers, and much of the spending goes toward figuring out exactly what needs to be done. To make things more difficult, he said, government often works within a unique set of parameters, which means oftentimes there’s no suitable option in the marketplace to even procure from.
“So in the city of Mukilteo, we’re trying to figure out from a marketing, land-use, tax, transportation, retail … it’s a rather complicated story of how to make this area better for many public and private goals,” Blum said. “I think the big takeaway is that students and faculty at a local university were able to bring some sophisticated research to this complex issue, to the city of Mukilteo that obviously they didn’t have staff capacity to do. … It’s illustrative, I think, of a possible successful model that other cities do throughout the United States with local universities, and it’s just another good example of how to cooperate and get something done.”
