City of Blaine receives award from governor’s office

The city of Blaine has received a 2019 Smart Community Award from governor Jay Inslee’s office.

Now in its 14th year, the award program “recognizes achievements by local leaders who promote smart growth planning and projects that contribute to thriving communities, a prosperous economy and sustainable infrastructure in Washington,” said a June 14 press release from the state department of commerce.

Blaine received a Smart Choices Award for its Strategic Economic Initiative (SEI). “This strategic process demonstrated innovative, thorough and meaningful public participation. This was a smart use of household surveys for targeted community outreach,” noted one judge.

According to the state’s press release, Blaine’s SEI “identified six strategic objectives, including 43 specific action tasks, lead participants, schedules and performance measures. Thanks to excellent community outreach during this strategic process, Blaine voters overwhelmingly approved a Transportation Benefit District, opened a new downtown welcome center and adopted proposals to create supportable, effective and holistic, action-oriented capital facilities programs.”

Awards are given in a number of categories, which include Smart Vision Awards that recognize outstanding comprehensive plan, sub-area plan or county-wide planning policies; Smart Choices Awards that recognize excellence in the implementation of comprehensive plans; and Smart Projects Awards that recognize outstanding projects in the implementation of comprehensive plans.

There are also Smart Partnership Awards that recognize achievements by joint public projects that implement comprehensive plans; Smart Housing Strategies Awards that recognize creative plans, policies, programs or actions to address affordable housing; and a Judges’ Merit Award that highlights a shining example of the best work in a particular topic.

In a separate June 14 release, the city of Blaine said that the award recognizes the hard work and dedication of city council, city employees, community members and the Beckwith Consulting Group. The city hired the Beckwith Consulting Group to assemble a program that would help direct the city in achieving the economic goals laid out in various planning documents, and the SEI became the final product.

“We are honored to have the work recognized and sincerely thank the governor’s office for the recognition,” said city manager Michael Jones. “We’ve taken some big steps recently with the vacant building demolition and other projects. Our job is to keep at it and find ways to move the various projects forward. Evolution and development of a community take a long time. We’ve got a lot left to do.”

Blaine’s SEI had two phases. The first phase focused on defining project scopes, costs and methods, while the second phase focused on community and tourist input through three targeted surveys. These surveys included a survey for residents, a survey for library users and a visitor survey for tourists in Blaine. The results of these surveys helped formulate an action plan that identified and rated, from lowest to highest, the 43 goals residents and visitors cared about the most.

Although many of the goals listed were medium to long-range, several of them are already in progress or have already materialized. Completed objectives include the demolition of an unsightly and condemned building (665 Peace Portal Drive), the creation of a new visitor welcome center which also includes public bathrooms and the sale of property at the Gateway site, which formerly housed the old municipal airport.

“It’s been exciting to see how some of our plans and the ‘on the ground’ projects link, and how they are truly moving the city forward, achieving the goals of our tourism plan and comprehensive plan,” said mayor Bonnie Onyon.