Experts see bright future for Soap Lake

Downtown revitalization workshop scheduled for Monday

SOAP LAKE — Aided by grants and a handful of experts, the city is staking a claim to a better future.

Three consultants working together handling the urban design and the architecture of the city's downtown, plus a couple of them working on marketing strategies and transportation issues, are hoping to improve the look of the central core.

Now these consultants want the citizens on their bandwagon, too.

Michelle Whitfield, a planner from Seattle's Arai Jackson Ellison and Murakami has announced that a workshop will take place Monday night to inform the residents of their plans for downtown Soap Lake. All the consultants are expected to be there.

The workshop, taking place at Soap Lake High School from 6 p.m. to 8:30 p.m., will touch upon topics such as marketing sectors, the study of the kind of customer and visitor Soap Lake wants to attract and marketing strategies to get it done.

"We are going to show images and pictures of some ideas that are common in urban design," Whitfield said. "We are going to have the people of Soap Lake select between those images."

The majority of the consultants, paid for by grants awarded to the city of Soap Lake, specializes in the development of downtown areas in rural communities such as Soap Lake, Whitfield said, noting that citizen input is crucial and will be a key part of the workshop and beyond.

"We are going to have some ideas written on cards and have ideas that people can relate to," she said. "We are going to have them choose."

As far as having an abundance of jargon and a scarcity of understanding among the residents, Whitfield said that the technical issues would be explained in a manner that is easy for the majority to understand.

One of the keys to the workshop will be to show how the kind of person that could visit Soap Lake would be attracted to certain elements in the design of the future downtown area.

The design is scheduled to be completed in mid-January and expected to be adapted by the Soap Lake City Council in mid-March of next year, Whitfield said.

People should come to the workshop, she said, in order to play an active role in shaping up the future of their city.

"It helps their opinions be heard as to which directions the city should move toward," she said. "It would help us select what kind of market sector is a good one for Soap Lake."