Framework had an exciting week at the Washington APA conference in Bellevue this past month! In addition to setting up an exhibit to share some of our recent projects and hosting two presentation sessions, we accepted an award for our downtown planning and implementation work with the City of Pasco. During the past few years that we have been working in Pasco, we have formed meaningful relationships with the community and have grown invested in the City’s success—we were honored that the project received an Excellence in Planning Award from the Washington Chapter of the American Planning Association (APA WA) and the Planning Association of Washington (PAW). We wanted to take a moment to talk about the process of writing and implementing this plan, and how we intend to continue to help the City achieve its goals through ongoing implementation efforts.

**Award Ceremony**

The team, including members from Framework and the City of Pasco, accepted the Excellence in Planning Award at the 2024 Washington APA conference.

downtown pasco

Downtown Pasco has many of the ingredients for a successful downtown: windowed storefronts lining 12’ sidewalks make for a walkable and engaging shopping experience; historic architecture creates a distinct character, including a brick post office and stucco former movie theater; more recently, the City invested in Peanuts Park, a central plaza with a structure for hosting weekly farmers markets.

Beyond the infrastructure, Pasco’s culture is also an asset to its Downtown. With a largely Spanish-speaking population and a strong relationship with its sister city Colima, Mexico, Pasco’s culture is visible in its yearly Cinco de Mayo Celebration and Fiery Foods Festival.

But between its weekly farmers markets and yearly festivals, Downtown often feels underutilized. Vacant buildings reveal a lack of investment. A lingering reputation as being unsafe deters people from choosing Downtown as their destination for social outings. And like many downtowns, it lacks housing and instead relies on commercial uses to generate foot traffic. These conditions make it difficult for local businesses to survive, furthering the cycle of disinvestment. The City decided to invest in a Master Plan to outline a strategy for reviving Downtown.

**A Walkable Downtown**

Windowed storefronts add interest along a fairly wide sidewalk.

**Historic Architecture**

Buildings such as the former Empire Theater create a mosaic of history and culture Downtown.

forming a vision

During public engagement efforts for the Downtown Master Planning process, people made it clear to us that they didn’t want a plan that would just sit on the shelves. They wanted to see a regular schedule of Downtown events, the addition of coffee shops and other places to spend time, and better uses of public space. They pointed out areas that could benefit from better lighting, decorative pavement, or pedestrian street closures to encourage more people to spend time Downtown. And they identified barriers such as outdated municipal codes and permitting processes, poor connection to the Columbia River, and a lack of services available for people struggling with poverty.

The engagement process was crucial not just for shaping the visions, goals, and strategies that formed the basis of the Plan, but for generating community capacity. Through the stakeholder meetings, visioning workshops, presentations to City Council, and outreach at events, we built relationships with Pasco residents and those invested in its success. These relationships have been key in helping us implement the community’s vision.

**Vision Realized: Cafe con Arte**

Updates to parking regulations permitted the use of this building as a cafe. The then-empty building has now been transformed into a coffee shop, art gallery, and community space by local high school art teacher and artist Saul Martinez.

the master plan

Rather than a plan view drawing that outlines a preferred layout for new development, Pasco’s plan takes the layers of Rather than a plan view drawing that outlines a preferred layout for new development, Pasco’s plan takes the layers of Downtown and its stakeholders and devises a set of strategies for making steps toward attracting the investment of both money—in public private investments into buildings, businesses, and public space—and time— by encouraging people to want to be in and spend time in Pasco’s Downtown. Four key visions guide a set of goals and strategies for improving public ways, attracting and guiding private investment, and developing collaborative and sustainable infrastructure for the care and management of Downtown.

For example, the vision of “Active + Safe Streets for All” means programming Peanuts Park for more regular use, right-sizing Downtown streets to make room for bike lanes and wider sidewalks, improving lighting, introducing parklets and other uses of public space, and creating a wayfinding program. These distinct approaches all contribute to streets that are regularly used for a variety of activities, which help people feel safe and comfortable using public spaces.

**Visions, Goals, Strategies**

*Pasco’s Downtown Master Plan was designed to be actionable, with a matrix of action items that correlate with community-formed goals for the future of Downtown.*

Implementing the Downtown Plan

After the Plan’s adoption in January 2024, the City hired us on to help make it happen. One of the first things we did was to update the municipal sign code to allow full scale murals on Downtown buildings. Murals were previously treated as signs and allowed to occupy only 25% of a building façade, limiting what people could create and causing tension around the removal of murals that did not meet this requirement.

Murals made sense as a place to start because of the priority residents placed around expressing Pasco’s culture and bringing more art Downtown. They also serve as way to revamp buildings and signal that Downtown is a place that is celebrated and taken care of. While in many cases, redevelopment and infill are not feasible, revamping existing buildings with murals is a relatively low-cost and low-barrier way to start investing into Downtown and breathing life into the public realm.

The City’s Arts Commission is now distributing grants to local businesses to commission murals on their buildings. There is a simple review process for murals concepts, which allows the City some amount of control, while overall leaving the vision up to the artist and the shop owner. So far the City has received two applications and murals are already underway!

**Mural underway!**

A new mural project commissioned as part of the Arts Commission’s grant program.

maximizing the use of downtown public space

Another strategy for accomplishing the Downtown vision was to “Update Codes for an Active Downtown.” This meant looking at ways that codes could encourage active uses of public space including food trucks, parklets, and events. With parking an issue that many brought up during the public engagement process, this also meant evaluating parking capacity and occupancy to make sure that these new uses of space didn’t impact people’s ability to park close to their Downtown destinations.

Before we made these code updates, food trucks in Pasco were prohibited from being within 400 feet of schools or 300 feet of restaurants or cafes, and had to move every hour. This made it infeasible for many mobile vendors to locate downtown, preventing them from activating space by offering destinations for food and drink within the public sphere. Food trucks have history in Pasco, and in general (beyond Pasco) there are opinions about whether they pose a threat to their brick-and-mortar counterparts. But in the end, Council agreed that imposing fewer restrictions on where and when food trucks can vend in public space would help to activate Downtown, support local businesses, and serve as another venue for sharing Pasco’s culture.

Council also approved updates to code to allow the conversion of parking spaces into café seating for use by adjacent bars and restaurants. This measure, popularized during Covid-19 lockdowns, offers businesses more space for seating while also bringing more people into the public realm. It is also a chance for businesses to get creative, adorning their “street cafes” with decorative lighting, flower boxes, or colorful fencing that can add the much-craved and ever-elusive “character” to a neighborhood.

**Bringing mobile vendors downtown**

Prior to code updates, mobile vendors couldn’t locate within 400 feet of schools or 300 feet of other bars, restaurants, or cafes.

Lighting, Safety, Activation

Vibrant public space hinges on people being out and visible, which also helps increase feelings of safety through those additional “eyes on the street” (in the words of foundational urban planning voice Jane Jacobs.) Fittingly, concerns around safety and a desire to see more events and activities downtown were both brought up during early public engagement efforts. Respondents also indicated a related desire for more and better lighting.

We wanted to learn more about how Downtown lighting could improve, so we organized a “Night Walk,” which was attended by police, councilmembers, City staff, and other Pasco residents. The group walked several blocks, observing both gaps in lighting and an abundance of bright security and roadway lights. While lighting wasn’t egregiously absent, there were clear ways that more consistent lighting with more character and quality would improve the experience of visiting Downtown Pasco at night.

**Night Walk**

Gathering people for a night walk allowed us to assess conditions and talk to people about their visions for better lighting Downtown.

While we fancy ourselves a team that can roll up our sleeves and learn something new, we decided to bring in some experts to help us outline a plan for illuminating Downtown. We worked with Blanca Lighting Design, who devised a strategy for adding lighting to storefronts, alleyways, and “gems”—historic buildings, public spaces, and other features that make Downtown Pasco unique. The Blanca Lighting Design team selected a suite of low-maintenance, high efficiency, and aesthetically pleasing fixtures that the City can use to fill in lighting gaps and create a nighttime streetscape that is legible, while still eclectic.

Because lighting is an ingredient that on its own will not fundamentally change the way Downtown functions, we also built a suite of activation strategies into this plan, which we have dubbed LAS Luces: Pasco’s Lighting, Safety, and Activation Plan. These activation strategies will focus on streamlining an events program to make best use of Peanuts Park and create a regular schedule of activity that can reliably draw people downtown.

**Lighting, Safety, Activation**

Pasco’s lighting plan aims to set the stage for a vibrant nighttime streetscape by adding layers of lighting to storefronts, historic buildings, and the street.

What's next

To determine how to move forward with our next year of implementation efforts, we met with residents, business owners, and City Council to get their feedback. During meetings, people brought out the Downtown Master Plan book, pointing to images and asking “how do we get this done?” They voiced a desire to see the Lighting Plan implemented, the need for increased capacity for City-run events, and the potential to redesign City-owned buildings and spaces Downtown to better support business growth, recreation, and community.

Currently we are working with the City to outline its top priorities. We hope to cross many things off the list: installing new light fixtures downtown, creating a regular events calendar, proposing designs for making the best use of new City-owned property…there is still much to be done! We are honored to move forward working with the City of Pasco to implement their vision, and we are continuously inspired by those who are invested in making Downtown Pasco a unique and beloved destination.

Click here to read the full Downtown Plan

Written by Hope Freije @Framework

What comes next? putting Pasco’s downtown plan into action