Bill Taylor: Renton land use

a work in progress for 20 years

Renton today is what Bill Taylor and many others had in mind 20 years ago – and a whole lot more.

Back in 1989, Taylor chaired the Renton Planning Commission. At the time, Renton was operating on a comprehensive land-use plan that was 10 years old – written during Boeing’s dark years – and it wasn’t doing the job.

“We are determining what Renton will look like in the next 20 years – where the development will go, where the residential neighborhoods will be, what the mix of multifamily to single-family homes should be,” Taylor was quoted in the July 23, 1989, issue of the Valley Daily News.

Renton was one of the first cities in the state to update its land-use plan, designed to guide the city’s growth. Taylor said the discussions were agonizing. But the result paid off, in shaping the city’s future.

“It works,” Taylor says of the comprehensive plan, which has undergone updates in the intervening years.

“The process that was begun then was certainly critical in terms of shaping the city’s future,” he said. And, that future? “What we have today is far beyond what I would have envisioned,” he said.

For example, the city has grown, it has attracted new businesses and open space is preserved, including the Black River Riparian Forest, Taylor said.

One of the big issues with which the commission wrestled was the Barbee Mill property on Lake Washington, he said. A planned-use development was a possibility. Today, after restoration work by the Cugini family, the mill property is now home to high-end houses being developed by Renton High grad Charlie Conner.

Not on the commission’s agenda in 1989 was the Longacres Racetrack property, although it was sold to The Boeing Co. a year later and is now home to the company’s training center.

Taylor’s “real job,” as he described it, was director of marketing and business development for Longacres. He was on board when the Oregon mushroom farm that bought the horse waste went out of business. The solution was to compost the waste on site.

Today, Taylor tends to the city’s business community as president of the Renton Chamber of Commerce.