What Are The Plans To Update Downtown Pullman?

The Pullman City Council is discussing a master plan for updating downtown Pullman. Inland Northwest correspondent Nick Deshais gives his insight into the topic.

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Full Transcript:

Talk a little bit about what's going on in Pullman and Moscow in terms of how they envision their downtowns and how that might change.

Yeah, well, Pullman right now, the city council is discussing a downtown master plan. Now that's just a plan. So it doesn't, if they pass it, which it looks like they're going to pass it, they still have to fund it and do everything in the plan so they could pass the plan and nothing will happen. But the plan itself has some interesting tidbits. You know, main street, everybody who has been to Pullman knows main street is the three lane one way that runs through the historic downtown. The plan says take it down to two lanes, put in a wide bike lane, get rid of the parallel parking and make it angled parking. So that would really change the feel of downtown. Just that one aspect of the planet also has other things in it of you know, increasing the trail system, making the Plaza's a little bit nicer kind of it. Just kind of shining up the downtown and making it as they say, people centric. And it'd be a big change for Pullman. Everybody knows downtown Pullman is pretty car centric. You compare that to Moscow, which doesn't really have a highway running through the center of its historic downtown. It has a little tiny two way street, you know, going both ways. Very lively feels very different. It's much smaller than downtown Pullman, but it feels very different. So to me it's very interesting to see these two towns and I have a lot in common they've got universities, they're really close to each other, kind of twins in a way are siblings. They have very different downtown. So I think Pullman is on the cusp of getting closer to the Moscow model or pulling back to a more historic Pullman downtown that was around before everybody started driving everywhere.

But uh, at Pullman's specifically, they care less about what Moscow does and thinks and more of how the university thinks about it, how the Chamber of Commerce thinks about it, how the downtown Pullman association thinks about those, and of course, the city council or the city itself. Those are the four entities that are involved in this plan. So getting those four to agree, I think is the first order of business. And that's no easy order.