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HomeMy WebLinkAbout08272014 Historic Preservation Laydown - John French 41° 1^-41"f°1474A1 5� 27 �L/ From: John French <PESA@gci.net> Sent: Monday,August 18, 2014 3:36 PM To: Valarie Kingsland (vkingsland@cityofseward.net); Suzi Towsley; Linda Lasota (lalasota@alaska.edu) Cc: Rachel James (rjames@cityofseward.net) Subject: SHPC Meeting and draft HPP Attachments: clgstateguidelines.pdf;Alaska preservepin.pdf First I want to apologize to Valarie for giving you the wrong date for the next SHPC meeting when we spoke about calendars at the RBHS Conference Host Committee meeting last week. As you probably know by now the SHPC regular meeting and work session are next week 27 August not day after tomorrow as I told you. At the last SHPC work session we did discuss both keeping our regular meeting date (20 August) or pushing it back a week to 27 August. I mistakenly thought we had decided on keeping the 20 August meeting date and entered it into my calendar accordingly. Sorry for the confusion. Regarding the Draft 2014 Seward Historic Preservation Plan: I have reviewed the Plan and I have to say it falls well short of my hopes or expectations. I am working on my comments and proposed edits, which will be extensive. They will be available by the 27 August work session. I am beginning to have grave doubts about following the timeline for Plan approval we laid out at the prior work session. These are as follows: I. Half the SHPC Commissioners were not on the Commission for any of the discussions leading up to the draft HPP being dropped into their laps. 2. We have not been very successful in"casting the broad net" to capture public opinion as promised to both SHPO and the Alaska Historic Preservation Commission. I know Linda feels we met our goals, which we may have done on paper, but we did not meet them very well. a. The survey instrument was prepared without final SHPC review. It was intended to be capture opinions following discussion, not as a standalone survey. That is not how we used it. Lee Poleski, a prominent Seward historian has described it as"a bad survey". b. Student involvement: Commissioner Fink did a good job setting this up. However as she reported to SHPC, she met with one class spoke briefly and distributed the survey. c. Senior Citizen involvement: Commissioner Lasota and I interviewed the handful of Seniors who happened to be at lunch when we arrived for a meeting which had not been announced. d. Business community involvement: We distributed the surveys at one Chamber of Commerce luncheon without any lead in regarding what SHPC was doing or why the HPP revision should be important to the business community. e. Community"town hall" or"listening session": We had planned to request input at a meeting which discussed an aspect, or aspects, of Seward history. We could have done it on commercial fisheries if the library administration had approved going ahead with my prior leg work. They wanted to arrange it themselves. We ended up without an introductory topic for a meeting which barely received proper public notice and virtually not publicity. 3. The HPP needs to clearly state the authorities for a local Historic Preservation Plan. This draft does not. It should cite the CLG requirements, and Goals from the Alaska HPP, with which the local HPP must be "compatible". The definition of historic preservation should be derived from those plus the four Criteria(A-D) for the National Register of Historic Places. These our roots, this is where CLG and SHPC came from. ' 4. The HPP needs to be dynamic enough to catch the interest of those less interested in Seward's history. It needs to have an optimistic tone. It should present a plan and layout ways to get there. It needs public buy-in which we have not achieved. 5. The final question must be, is the draft HPP before us an improvement on the 1996 HPP? If not we should either reject this draft HPP, or find a way to continue the process of improving it. I see three ways we can continue working to improve the Draft 2014 Seward Historic Preservation Plan. They all include continuing our process of edits and improvements on the existing draft. Then we should use that revised draft to seek another round of well-planned and well-publicized public input. 1. We could allow our contract with Nuka to end but request an extension for the CLG grant which ends with completion of the revised HPP. This would leave us to do the final public input and editing. 2. We could apply for a supplemental CLG grant to facilitate further public input, and extend Nuka's contract to do further writing and editing. 3. We could apply for a supplemental CLG grant with the same goals at#2 but hire a different contractor. Perhaps one with more expertise in the economic benefits of historic preservation. I don't have any ideas who this might be, and I expect it would be more expensive than our current CLG contractor. These are my thoughts for now. I will pass along specific comments/edits on sections of the draft HPP as I complete them. John S. French, PhD Vice Chair, SPHC