SNOHOMISH — The inaugural meeting of a city advisory board for planning First Street’s far-out future was last week. The appointed group of business owners and residents will dig into many aspects of the street plan over the next 10 months.
July’s meeting agenda will discuss traffic circulation and congestion, and also parking strategies. Talks on parking will go on for four successive meetings into the fall. Winter topics include pedestrian needs, plus the streetscape.
Meetings are planned to be each third Wednesday of the month at 6 p.m. Some will be online only over Zoom, while many will be held jointly in-person in the Carnegie Building and on Zoom. The board also holds a public comment period in each meeting.
The city also released an online public survey about First Street’s design. People can take the survey at the shortlink of www.tinyurl.com/SnoFirstStreet In it, people can suggest changes, such as adding types of parking or jutting curbs for pedestrians, by electronically putting pins onto a map of the street.
People can also email comments anytime to master
plan@snohomishwa.gov
All this work is toward making a master plan — to decide the concepts for how First Street should look or feel — but not the final design let alone constructing it.
The intended end goal is “so First Street works for everyone,” Mayor Linda Redmon said at the top of the June meeting.
The board will also work through which public suggestions are feasible to try and which ones are out of reach.
The city says it needs to change First Street because the utilities underneath need replacing. If it rips up the road for that, the city says any replacement needs to be rebuilt to meet Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) standards. Making First Street’s sidewalks ADA-compliant is another top reason for this plan.
The June meeting focused on orientation for the group. Many members said they are interested in ADA-compliant sidewalks. Some said they’d like to see parking spaces retained. One mentioned she’d like to see bicycling moved to the Riverfront Trail and off First Street.
The First Street story map from the city of Snohomish website, embeddable via Storymaps.arcgis.com:
