Members of the Covington City Council have a vision for the city’s downtown core which has boomed in the past few years, but the council believes it still hasn’t reached its potential.

Nearly four years ago Covington adopted a downtown plan but in the past year the City Council has realized that it was a big picture document and that it needed to provide more detail as well as guidance to developers.

To that end, according to Richard Hart who serves as the city’s planning manager, there has been a concerted effort to revamp that downtown plan.

“Last year the council identified as one of their highest priorities redoing the downtown plan,” Hart said. “Going into more detail with a specific zoning study to hopefully encourage the kind of development they wanted to fulfill their vision of a mixed development as well as being a leader in transportation.”

City staff put out a request for proposals to find a team that could help evaluate the plan and work with the city to update it so it fits the council’s vision.

“The goal of the council is to reverse that trend of the past 20 years of single story flat strip malls and go up … with better parking, better pedestrian links, more parks, more public spaces,” Hart said. “What kinds of incentives do we need to put in our codes and what kinds of disincentives do we have in our codes that discourage development.”

Hart said there were eight proposals submitted which staff whittled down to four then they “did some interviews in January then eventually selected AHBL, which is an engineering and planning firm in Seattle.”

AHBL then teamed up with Mathoun Architects, Nelson Nygard which is a transportation planning firm based in Portland, Ore., and Property Counselors which offered an economic development consultant.

At its meeting last week the council approved a contract with the consultant and followed that up with a tour last weekend arranged by Hart of five area cities in various stages of downtown development or re-development: Burien, Renton, Mercer Island, Mill Creek and Kirkland.

“We picked those because they’re five different kinds of town center re-development projects with different approaches so council can get an idea how other cities larger and smaller are addressing the idea of going up,” Hart said. “Some of these are examples of strong city involvement. Others involve them putting in the design standards and a plan and letting the private sector take it on. Some of them sailed through very smoothly without any contention and others had some push back from the private sector.”

One challenge for Covington as it looks to strengthen its downtown core through more detailed zoning and design standards is the fact it’s an “edge city” because it is at the edge of the urban core of the region.

“It’s more difficult for edge cities to do this because you’re so far out from the transportation centers,” Hart said. “We don’t have good public transportation out here and that’s something the council is really looking at.”

A six month study starts this month, Hart said, with public forums slated for April as well as a developer’s focus group scheduled April 15 at City Hall.

David Nemens, Community Development Director for Covington, said it’s critical for residents to offer input.

“There are going to be multiple opportunities for public involvement,” Nemens said. “We’d encourage everybody who has an interest in the future of Covington’s downtown to get involved in some way.”

The results of the study will then be considered by the Planning Commission and the City Council as part of the comprehensive plan amendment process — the downtown plan is an element of the comp plan which serves as an overall blueprint for the city’s development — with adoption of the re-vamped plan tentatively expected in December.

Nemens said that someday Covington could be someplace that encourages people to get out of their cars.

“One other goal and this is a longer term goal of this study, we realize that for the foreseeable future is that people are going to drive to downtown Covington to shop,” Nemens said. “We’d like increasingly for our downtown to become a ‘park once’ downtown which means you park once and you don’t drive from store to store because you’re either walking or taking some other public conveyance.”

The hope is that in the long term downtown Covington will become more than just a place to pick up the essentials at big box businesses.

“We’ve heard time and time again there is not that identifiable place of what is downtown Covington,” Hart said. “That is what council wants to build, that gathering place that people say, ‘I’ll meet you in downtown Covington.’”