Laurelhurst Community Club
Serving 2800 Households and Businesses in Seattle’s Laurelhurst Neighborhood
September 4, 2007
Dr. Tom Hansen Diane Sugimura, Director
President and Chief Executive Officer Department of Planning and Development
Children's Hospital and Regional Medical Center City of Seattle
P.O. Box 5371 P.O. Box 34019
Seattle, Washington 98105-0371 Seattle, Washington 98124-4019
RE: Misrepresentations in Children’s Concept Plan
Dear Tom and Diane,
The Laurelhurst Community Club Board of Trustees was very disappointed to learn of the misrepresentations in the Concept Plan submitted by Children’s Hospital regarding existing building height zoning designations. The concept plan incorrectly shows the bulk of the hospital structure with a Major Institution Overlay (MIO) height of 90 feet, whereas the actual heights should have been listed as 50, 70 and 90 feet. We ask that you take immediate steps to provide correct information in a very public manner to our neighbors and others. We further ask that you reinitiate the scoping process to allow a new comment period after appropriate notice has been provided.
Children’s misrepresentations, whether intentional or inadvertent, have caused us added expense and resulted in incorrect information provided to our community. Our neighbors distributed hundreds of flyers noting a height increase from 90 to 240 feet. Neighbors relied upon the incorrect information in preparing comments during this scoping phase of the environmental review process. It is likely that more neighbors would have attended the scoping meeting had they known that the height increase on certain portions of the campus would be almost five times the current height limit. Children’s should immediately alert neighbors, the media and others to its mistake. In addition to materials prepared for the Department of Planning and Development, the media and our community, Children’s should promptly provide notice of its mistake on its master planning website. Children’s should revise its concept plan to reflect accurate information.
Because the deadline to provide scoping comments is tomorrow and many neighbors have already submitted comments, we ask that you start the process over. Neighbors are entitled to correct baseline information. The process is complex enough without having to worry whether Children’s has provided correct information in the extensive documents that it has prepared.
Thank you for considering our request to remedy misrepresentations in Children’s concept plan.
Sincerely,
Jeannie Hale, President
3425 West Laurelhurst Drive NE
Seattle, Washington 98105
206-525-5135 / fax 206-525-9631
cc: Suzanne Petersen, Ruth Benfield, Desiree Leigh, Children’s Hospital; Scott Ringgold, Department of Planning and Development; Steve Sheppard, Department of Neighborhoods