Winslow looks like a safe bet

Published 3:00 pm Wednesday, December 10, 2003

Here’s a bit of heresy for you: More people use Winslow Way in a week – perhaps a day, even – than visit Gazzam Lake in a year.

This is not to diminish the community’s efforts to preserve our cherished open spaces. But this observation by one of our local businessmen does offer a bit of needed perspective on the importance of downtown planning and concomitant

public investment. We need to accommodate the evolving needs of Winslow’s many commercial tenants, and the countless patrons – us – who use their services.

On today’s front page, we offer the first of several stories on bold proposals for Winslow Way, including traffic roundabouts, a gateway park, pedestrian enhancements, and more parking. With our reportage, we have included a recent aerial photograph of our downtown core, to suggest that the planning effort has implications beyond our main street; perhaps 1,000 local jobs and thousands of residents (more than 5,600 in the greater Winslow area) are now within a stone’s throw of the Winslow Way hub.

Our little downtown is growing up.

Indeed, tens of millions of dollars in private money have poured into Winslow in recent years. Last fall, the Review counted no fewer than 12 projects in various stages of development, bringing new commercial space and several hundred multi-family units; site plans for the Alliance project west of Winslow Green and the Seabreeze development at Madison/Bjune were approved by the city just this past week.

Chamber of Commerce Executive Director Kevin Dwyer may have said it best: “People are certainly betting on downtown Winslow as a good place to invest their money, and to get a good return.”

Will the community ante up as well?

While the proposals to be presented Monday are by no means the final word on Winslow Way’s future – ample public involvement begins at this very point – they do force the community to confront some pressing issues.

The first is parking, upon which continued patronage and any physical expansion of commercial spaces is predicated. Previous efforts to develop a parking structure have failed for want of a suitable funding strategy; we trust that question will finally be resolved.

Another is more rhetorical: If a bond issue is needed to help keep downtown vibrant, it should be thought of not as an expenditure, but an investment. We hope the process brings out new information on the economic engine of our business core, the jobs it sustains, the tax revenues it generates.

Downtowns face any number of challenges from Big Box America; they can succumb to dessication and vacancy (Bremerton) or “quaintness” (Poulsbo). Yet we remain blessed; by walking a single block on Winslow Way, we can visit such vital services the grocer, the post office, the hardware store and the druggist, then buy a good book and have an excellent lunch. This strikes us as grossly underappreciated in an age of wasteful strip-zoning and hellish malls.

A thriving downtown economy is essential to island living, and we hope the community continues to acknowledge it as such. It’s integral to making our many other perks, and parks, possible.