Rob Putaansuu has been mayor of Port Orchard for just a little over four months, but he’s already seen positive movement in his efforts to seek out funding sources for area transportation projects and restructure city government.
Putaansuu outlined his time so far as a first-term mayor to a Port Orchard Rotary audience May 17 at Puerto Vallarta restaurant.
So, what has been the new mayor’s biggest surprise as city government leader? Meetings, meetings and more meetings. Putaansuu said earlier that morning, he was involved in city employee union negotiations and at a Kitsap Transit meeting in Bremerton. He said policy board meetings with CenCom, the Department of Emergency Management, the county health district, Puget Sound Regional Council, as well as the Kitsap Regional Coordinating Council, dominate his work days.
“Today was a typical day,” Putaansuu said. “There are a lot of meetings. I’m running around a lot.”
Despite those time-consuming obligations, the mayor said he has no regrets about his career course change to city government.
“While I loved my banking career very much (he was a vice president with Columbia Bank), I truly love life now with what I’m doing. The great thing about this job is that I don’t live far from City Hall and I can walk to work. I can come home for lunch, so it’s pretty cool.”
The burgeoning Puget Sound economy offers Kitsap County, and Port Orchard in particular, some new opportunities for growth, Putaansuu said. “These are exciting times in the Puget Sound region. We have one of the fastest-growing job markets in the nation. It adds 150 jobs a day.”
Port Orchard is growing, as well. He said the city is the fifth fastest-growing incorporated area in the Puget Sound region.
“The majority of our growth is happening on the west side of our area, across the freeway in the McCormick Woods area,” Putaansuu said.
He recently met with new owners of the remaining parcel of land in McCormick Woods, who have development rights to build new homes there. The mayor expects at least 150 houses will be built in that community each year over the next 10 years.
That growth will help “infill” commercial and residential development for the rest of Port Orchard and, he hopes, spur redevelopment downtown and in other areas in town.
Speaking of the downtown area, Putaansuu said he’s happy to see facade work progressing on the exterior of the Myhre’s Building on Bay Street. But that doesn’t mean he’s satisfied.
“Our community deserves much more than we’re getting,” he said of the real estate owned by investor and owner Mansour Samadpour and his property-holding company Abadan Holdings, LLC.
“I’m trying to engage the property owner, who owns a block-and-a-half of downtown,” Putaansuu said. “There’s a housing crisis out there, and there’s a need for housing.”
The mayor foresees a need for some downtown housing properties that have first-floor retail space. Samadpour, he said, “doesn’t seem convinced there’s a market for it.”
A significant part of a master plan for downtown, Putaansuu told the gathering, is one for the Port Orchard waterfront. “I think we’re wasting our money and resources if we proceed without the participation of our property owners.”
As part of a master plan, the mayor sees a need for building design standards for downtown. “I think the outcomes for a developer needs to be predictable,” he said.
“We currently have a design and review committee, which is great for our downtown, but we can take this one step better and take it throughout our commercial borders so that builders have some options to go along with our (city) standards.”
Putaansuu said he believes building standards are needed for development along Bethel Road. He said that stretch of commercial property is “potentially being developed haphazardly. The same is true for Tremont. Let’s have some standards.
“I’ve seen a couple of projects come through our planning department that has (exterior) corrugated siding. I don’t think that’s what we want on our commercial corridor. Our standards currently allow that.”
Putaansuu said he’s bothered by the fact that the city allows vehicles to park on “the most valuable real estate downtown on the waterfront,” he said. “We’ve been saying that for years. I would say 100 or so of those parking spots are over by the Marina Park and are used by commuters. We need short-term parking to support our businesses. But we should be able to develop some park-and-ride lots and cut up some of that blacktop for more park space.”
The mayor is planning to meet with a Port of Bremerton commissioner next week to see if the Port and the city could partner and come up with a solution.
He expects the waterfront boardwalk will be rebuilt in 2019. To complement that work, Putaansuu wants to see the first row of parking next to the boardwalk removed.
“If you’ve walked down that first row of cars in the lot, their bumpers hang over the boardwalk. I think that row of parking needs to go away so that we have something green — shrubbery and hedges bordering our pedestrian pathway — and not bumpers of cars.”
Next week: Putaansuu addresses transportation issues and city communication with the community.
