The Olympia City Council on Tuesday recognized the Olympia Northeast Neighborhoods Alliance (ONNA), particularly its board member Mike Dexel and property owners Yu and Jung Kim, for successfully transforming a blighted service station into an enhanced neighborhood center at San Francisco and Bethel Streets.
In partnership with the city, ONNA, a coalition of five neighborhood associations, worked together to develop a plan and identify the top priorities of improvements in their neighborhoods.
The former service station, which most people know as an old garage or gas station, at 1400 Bethel Street was identified as the top priority.
Community Plan and Development Director Leonard Bauer said the service station has been empty and derelict for decades.
Bauer said Olympia's Comprehensive Plan has a vision of creating 17 neighborhood centers, serving as hubs for services, activities, and gathering places. The city's comprehensive plan included a sub-area planning process, which ONNA initially undertook.
The city and the neighborhood leaders have continued collaborating with the former and current property owners to remove the dilapidated service station and rehabilitate the site.
According to Dexel, the property owners are pursuing their plan to put food trucks on the site and have that become a gathering place. On April 26, they contracted to demolish the service station.
Dexel recounted the day when the building was demolished. He said the community felt excited when the bulldozer showed up.
Dexel said they have been working on the project for years. "It has been many years of community engagement… and now we can create that community space."
The neighborhood associations applied for and received from the city a grant to provide seating and landscaping.
The site also received the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Brownfield grant for funding that has been used to assess and better understand the needs for long-term environmental remediation.
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BobJacobs
Congratulations to Mike Dexel and all the others who made this happen.
The lesson is that if you have a good idea, you have to be willing to keep working on it for years in order to make it a reality. We all need to remember that.
Bob Jacobs
Thursday, July 20, 2023 Report this
FrostedFlake
Okay, okay, I can see the upside. But. Where are people going to fuel their electric cars and how are the kids in the school across the street going to learn about petrochemicles?
This is tradition, people !! Now, get to doing what everyone always has because everyone always has. OR ELSE, ... tradition will change... And you know what happens when that does. We bury Grandma.
Or maybe tradition changed BECAUSE we buried Grandma. Worth thinking about. Progress waiting on old people to DIE. Serious pain in the @ss, that.
Friday, July 21, 2023 Report this