Ray Dubic­ki writes about the future of the Inter­bay Armory in Seat­tle and the pos­si­bil­i­ties to trans­form the mil­i­tary facil­i­ty site. A new report from the Wash­ing­ton Depart­ment of Com­merce pro­pos­es good ideas, he says, but it does not go far enough.

“It sees the poten­tial at this crux of infra­struc­ture, devel­op­ment, and a boom­ing pop­u­la­tion. It rec­og­nizes what could be there. Then it stops short of mak­ing bold pro­pos­als,” says Dubic­ki.

He points out that the report does not ade­quate­ly con­sid­er all the stake­hold­ers involved and coor­di­na­tion around var­i­ous infra­struc­ture projects. He is also crit­i­cal of how pub­lic com­ments were incor­po­rat­ed into the analy­sis and the report’s focus on cur­rent con­di­tions instead of future chal­lenges.

Dubic­ki dis­cuss­es what he thinks are a slew of bet­ter ideas being devel­oped for the Inter­bay Armory site. He does, how­ev­er, sup­port the report’s pro­pos­al to estab­lish a pub­lic devel­op­ment author­i­ty. “It gets us clos­er to hav­ing a func­tion­al rela­tion­ship between the city and the land it owns. It gets us clos­er to rec­og­niz­ing the City can be an investor in its own future,” he says.