"Walkable Communities" kicks off

Two-day event hopes to teach residents how to create a more close-knit, healthy city

To Florida developing expert Dan Burden, walking is not all that it is cracked up to be.

It's more, and he wants Moses Lake to know it.

Burden kicked off a two-day visit to the city with a public introduction session at the Museum and Arts Center, where he explained to those in attendance the historical and future importance of building communities where walking is a priority and not a last resort.

"It has only been a brief hiccup in time where we have not used our feet for transportation," he said, criticizing what he sees as a trend to build "auto-centric" neighborhoods, dependent on cars.

This trend, he said, has affected not only the way people choose and build neighborhoods, but all sorts of buildings, as well.

Buildings, he said, used to be constructed "for walking speed," with plenty of outside detail. Now, the builders avoid that route, going for constructions that are plainly built, as well as farther and farther out from where people live.

"Every time we built that huge (building) farther out, we put ourselves into our car," he said.

Burden said he is not looking for people to say goodbye to their vehicles forever, pointing out that cars are part of our culture.

"I don't want to change the product. I want to change the process," he said.

A process that has led people farther and farther into isolation, he added, creating a nasty trade-off between the diseases that worried people 50 years ago, and those that concerned them today.

Polio and tuberculosis have been replaced by diabetes, heart failure and depression, he said, adding hypertension and asthma to the list.

"It's far more horrific and we have done this to ourselves," he said. "We have a high standard of living but our quality of life is low."

Burden offered a number of steps towards a solution, including a mixture of land use planing and transportation planning into one entity, named community planning. Above all, he suggested a return to traditional land uses.

"Not every trip has to get us out to a main road," he said. "We must build better, not bigger."

People in attendance lauded Burden's introduction of the city to the concepts.

"He is saying things that needed to be said," local resident Dennis Parr said. "That should have been said long time ago, before we got into this (mess), building things that are not people-friendly and are affecting our health."

Parr added that nowadays, when people want to go somewhere to walk, they have to get in their cars to do it.

Fellow resident Beth Laszlo said she loved everything Burden had said, adding that the prospect of a walk-friendly city made Moses Lake more appealing to her.

Laszlo pointed out that the question of what to do first, change the city around the people or change the mentality of the people in the city is a bit of a "chicken or egg" question.

At the same time, Laszlo said that it was important to do the changes to the city first, as they would help change the mentality of the people.

Moses Lake Mayor Ron Covey said he was very impressed with the introductory presentation by Burden.

"What he has to offer is what our community needs," he said.

Moses Lake Community Development Director Gilbert Alvarado said the city has the potential to develop in the fashion suggested by Burden, pointing out the importance of public involvement.

"This provides an opportunity for the public to see that there is an alternative," he said. "Hopefully this sparks more public interest, because that is what is going to make it successful."

The two-days series continues today with a series of morning events and a 7 p.m. implementation workshop at the MAC, where Burden will close his visit to the city, explaining how to apply to Moses Lake all the concepts he has talked about.

For more information, please call Lori Barlow, associate planner of community development at the city of Moses Lake, at (509) 766-9289.