Neighborhoods, developer honored by Alliance of Spokane County

Three Spokane neighborhoods and a Liberty Lake developer are being honored for improving the quality of life in the area.

Hillyard, Five Mile and East Central Spokane received “most outstanding neighborhood” awards Friday for fostering community partnership and giving neighbors a voice in local development projects. The awards are given out annually by the Neighborhood Alliance of Spokane County, a collection of neighborhood groups from across the region that, among other things, works to preserve the quality of life in areas dealing with development.

Each neighborhood will receive $300 for tackling future community projects.

Greenstone Corp. of Liberty Lake received the “developer of the year” award for designing neighborhoods that brought residents together and for working with neighbors to make Greenstone projects more acceptable to the community. Greenstone’s founder is developer Jim Frank.

“He was at the top of everybody’s list for his ability to work with neighborhoods,” said Bonnie Mager, alliance coordinator.

The three neighborhood winners each tackled significant community matters in the last year.

Hillyard earned praise for a laundry list of community projects, its Christmas festival of lights, chalk-on-the-walk sidewalk art event, and skateboard park and for redoing the facades on its buildings.

East Central neighbors were honored for working to preserve historic buildings, mapping the conditions of neighborhood sidewalks and working to mitigate the impacts of the future North Corridor Freeway expansion. East Central also developed its own neighborhood comprehensive plan to control local land use.

Five Mile received its award for working on a storm water policy to protect area basements from flooding and for partnering with Mead School District turn an old schoolhouse into a neighborhood community center.

Neighbors from Northwood, Palisade, Thorpe and Greater Morgan Acres were also nominated for the awards.