relative to the proposed project. It is intended to provide a means by which the
applicant, the staff, the development commission, and the public are able to work together in
a productive and creative manner. However, options and issues raised may not be all inclusive
and no guarantees on the project outcome are made at this stage, as of this
meeting. Okay? So, that said, the first order of business today will be
the approval of minutes from the February 3rd meeting. Are there any corrections, additions,
deletions desired? If not, is there -- Chair, we'll approve the minutes of the
February 3rd, 2016 development commission meeting. Is there a second? Second. Is there any
further discussion? In which case, all those in favor signify by saying aye. Aye.
Ayes. Motion carries unanimously and the minutes are approved. So Amy, do you want
to take it over from now? The order, by the way, the order of
the meeting tonight will be a presentation by the city staff. Then there will
be an opportunity for the applicant to make a presentation. And after which there
will be an opportunity for public comment. excuse me, when the public
comment period is over, the development commissioners will individually have the opportunity to ask questions,
seek clarification, perhaps even answer a question if somebody has one, something like that. And
so that's the sequence of what we're going to be doing this evening. Okay? Amy?
Thank you. Good evening. My name is Amy Tarrs and I'm the senior planner for
the City of Issaquah. So tonight I'm going to do a short presentation for the
Clark Elementary School and Gibson Eck High School development. So I'm going to
skip this. So just to give everybody a little background, because there's
a whole history of how a lot of the school districts projects
in the last two years are interlinked. Last year, we presented the
new middle school project to the Development Commission and the City Council.
And part of that whole redevelopment of the middle school actually involves
also the Clark, the Clark Elementary High School. So what you're seeing
here is a sequential mapping of how all the new projects are
going to happen. So the ones where you see where
you see the number one are the two facilities that are intended to
be open by September 2016. The one at the bottom near the high
school This is the high school over here. Let me see if my
OK here. So this is the new middle school and over here is the
Gibson Eck High School. So in a little bit in a little later I
will be talking about how the scope of work for both the Gibson High
School and the Clark Elementary School. So in September 2017, the new
Clark Elementary School is scheduled to open and
in September 2018, the rest of the fields for the middle
school will be available. So the construction of this Clark Elementary,
the new Clark Elementary School is important for the ability of
the school district to tear down and demolish all the existing
facilities at the current Clark Elementary School, which also includes the Tiger Mountain
High School. So in order for these fields to come on, the new
middle school or the new Clark Elementary School has to be built.
So one of the things that we talked about during the
middle school review is the traffic mitigation for the middle school
which involved basically the full build out traffic impact mitigation. And
as part of that, there were four intersections that are involved. And
one of them, the Front Clark and Newport Way, is actually the
main access to this site. So we have asked the school district
or the applicant to basically go back and reevaluate the traffic impacts.
as part of the middle school traffic impact analysis and to account
for the proposed scope of work for the current Clark and Gibson
Act high school proposal. So a little bit of just a quick
orientation of where this project is. It's in the Old Town sub
area of the city and on the right is a graphic that
shows all the adjacent land uses so the project is in the
center and around it are primarily single family residential on both the
west side and the south side i'm sorry the south side is
a multi-family residential development On the north is the Issaquah Community Center
and pool and just immediately southeast bordered by the second avenue
is the Issaquah High School and the new middle school. So
it's not very clearly shown here but the Rainier Trail wraps
around the area that is currently the high school.
So the proposal, the lot size basically is the same as it is
today. It's 11.35 acres. There are seven parcels which the school district is
proposing to consolidate for this new development. So they will be applying for
a lot line adjustment. Given that in the land use code it requires
that any project over three acres requires a level three
review. This project will be a level three site development
permit. So I'll just quickly summarize the proposal. For Clark
Elementary, the school district is proposing 31 classrooms with eight
additional classrooms for expansion and four portables. There will be
664 students and 74 staff for the first few
years, plus enough facilities to accommodate another 160 students
and eight staff. And the future building will also
be a three-story classroom building. So below this
image shows you the view looking north from the interior
courtyard of the existing campus. The building to the left
is the future wing of the of the Clark Elementary
School. And this is an existing building. So for Gibson
High School, the proposal is for 11 classrooms with
to accommodate 250 students and 20 staff. And it's
primarily a remodel of another existing structure in the
campus and expansion by basically infilling the current courtyard
for a new common space. So existing conditions,
just again, a quick orientation. So what you're seeing here is the
existing campus and this is just a general idea of the existing
buildings. And In my staff report, I mentioned that there is a
wetland at the southeast corner and it's shown here as this patterned area here.
And then there's also some steep slopes primarily outside of the property along the
residential lots on the east side of the, I'm sorry, on the west side
of the property. of the campus. And then there's also some
other areas where other steep slopes occur. We have asked
the school district to provide a critical areas report first
for the wetlands to identify the buffer and also to
determine whether any of the steep slopes are actually regulated
steep slopes. meaning that they would require buffering. When
steep slopes are artificially created due to some construction, then
it's not considered regulated and they are not required to
provide the same type of buffers as a naturally occurring
steep slope. So the So as far as the proposal, they
are proposing to maintain the critical area buffers, which currently is shown. This
is just a general idea. We are waiting for their critical areas report
and mitigation plan in order to identify exactly the line of the buffer.
And this is basically just to delineate the area where the steep slopes
occur. So part of the proposal is to retain some of the
existing buildings. So this is the Gibson Act building and then these blue ones
are for the elementary school. and expanding the existing building. So
this is the area that I was mentioning earlier, the courtyard space for
Gibson Act that will eventually be covered and taken up by the Commons
and a new classroom wing for the elementary school. They are proposing to
retain the existing north parking lot and another small parking lot for Gibson
Act. and relocating the primary pickup drop off
for the Clark Elementary School to the interior of the
property and adding additional play fields and play sports areas,
areas for portables and also parking lots to serve all
those buildings. And so these just highlights the areas where
the portables are going. Um so I
yeah so the land use code requires that for
community facilities zones that uh the the the
The regulations that apply would be the most
restrictive adjacent zoning. So in this case, it's
the single family small lot. So this just
kind of highlights the different adjacent zoning for
the property. And so based on the development standards
for the single family small lot, Again, just to summarize, basically
I'm just going to highlight two items. For the impervious surface,
the maximum required is 50% or allowed. They are currently at
64.83% based on the proposal. So they exceed the limit for
impervious. And then for height, they also exceed it by 50%.
Actually, I'm sorry, I didn't show the proposed height for the Clark Elementary, which is,
what's that, 60 feet? 50 feet to the roof and then 65 feet to the
top of mechanical equipment. Okay, so 50 feet and then 65 feet to the top
of the mechanical equipment. So a little bit of... context again. If
you recall for the middle school, we had the same
situation and the community facilities zone actually has a provision
where it allows for an expansion of a nonconforming condition. So in
this case, because they do have an existing building that exceeds the height limit,
then they are allowed to expand the building height up to the proposed 50
feet. As far as the impervious area, they currently do not exceed the impervious
area. So there are two options for the applicant. One is to apply for
a variance to be able to to build the campus according
to their proposal or to basically remove some of the impervious
areas to meet the 50%. Like for instance, as far as
with the portables, it could possibly be, the site for the
portables could possibly be replaced with more pervious areas.
So site access and circulation, I hope you can distinguish these two
colors. So for the pick up and drop off of the students,
since this is an elementary school, they are expecting a lot more
cars, parents picking up and dropping off the students. So there is
They are using their existing site access which is along Clark Street and following
the same route that currently the parents use to access the site but instead
currently the parents would usually just come here drop off the kids or pick
up their kids and then come back out. So the proposal is for the
new drop off to to go all the way in and the parents will follow
this route, go all the way south and then on the way north they could
drop off their children and then go back out. And once they're over here, they
have two choices. They could use the bus loop if the buses are not using
it or they can take this route which is the current route that
they would take to get then leave the site. For children who are
walking to school basically they will follow this light blue and the school
currently has the primary access here to the building and
this will still be open for the children to use
as well as this outside hallway or I guess, access
point between Gibson Act and the current middle school. So that will still
be open and available for the kids to access the site. For the
buses, they will continue to use the same bus loop and use the
same route. So what's not shown here is for Gibson Act,
basically for the first two years that the school is open, they're
not expecting the students to drive because they're transitioning into, you know,
from, you know, first and second year to the junior and
senior year. So, but eventually this will be the route for
the students to use and then to park. for staff they will be
able to still use this is again an existing driveway they will be able
to use that to park here so for the gibson act building what the
school district had requested is for us to to to treat this as a
building permit with no site work improvements currently proposed they will continue to use
this this existing parking lot here. Um and there are some minor um
uh ADA required changes to their to their uh walkway. So those are all
going to be temporary until we have an approved site plan for this whole
campus. So two things that we've asked from
the applicant is how to how to ensure that when with
the new drop off that there won't be this congestion and
and and the whole idea of or are concerned about the
students basically getting off the cars and crossing and not waiting until
they can come around, especially when it's a very congested time of
year. the day. And then the other question we had that we'd
like them to look into is how to address the fire department's concern
about having cars queuing up here and in times of emergency for the
emergency vehicles to be able to access this with all the cars.
So these are just some photos of the existing conditions. So this
is the bus loop currently with the entry to the middle school.
And at the bottom, the foreground is basically a part, you'll see
a part of the bus loop with a sidewalk that basically comes
around here. And then in the background is the parking lot that
currently exists. So these are existing conditions for
Clark and for First Avenue Southeast. First Avenue Southeast is the
street that leads to the bus loop and Southeast Clark is where they
access, where parents access to school. So again, you see a small walkway
or sidewalk here, but along First Avenue, basically what we see is what
looks like just a line to delineate where, you you know, I guess kids
can walk and this building to the right is the community, the city's community
center. So one of the things that we are asking them also is to
look at pedestrian access, safe pedestrian access, especially for the students along these two
streets. Another part of the site that
we will be continuing to look at is the area,
the existing driveway that's eventually going to be the primary
access to the pick-up and drop-off area. So currently it's
shown as a paved area with basically this is their property line at
the very edge. The narrowest point of this access is between the wall of
this building and their property line and it's about 20 feet. The rest of
the site, once you go and enter further south, you see that there's a
lot more space for them to use for the drop off and pick up
area. So all of these areas here will eventually be redeveloped.
So as far as parking, our initial analysis determined based on the
number of classrooms and faculty that they are proposing, 216 spaces are
required and they are proposing 242 plus 81 in the overflow area,
which is this yellow area. So as I mentioned earlier, there are
two existing parking spaces that they will retain. and they're shown
as blue here and these are in purple are all the new
parking areas so items that we'd like to bring back to the
development commission at our our public hearing would be the impervious area
compliance we'll we'll know by then what the school district would like
to which option Basically, if they determine that they would opt for
a variance, then instead of going to the development commission, they will be
going to the hearing examiner for their project approval. So we are also
going to take back, but assuming we're coming back to the development commission,
we're also going to have a more detailed presentation on the critical areas.
the traffic impact analysis, the transition and compatibility with adjacent residential
areas, architectural materials and color, and the tree preservation plan and
mitigation plan. So for tonight's discussion, we thought that there's four
items that we'd like to hear. for your review and comments.
That would be, as I discussed earlier, the vehicular access and
circulation, both the vehicular, I'm sorry, yes, I'm sorry, the pedestrian
amenities and connections, compatibility with adjacent residential areas and critical areas.
And again, this is at a very high level and the
technical report will probably be available provide us with more information
regarding the critical areas. So that concludes my presentation and I'm open
to any questions otherwise if you'd like to save that for later
we have the applicant and their architect here to complement my presentation
with some additional information. I'd like to suggest and it's open to
discussion that we hold the questions, let the folks
go through their presentations, including the members of the
public, and then we can deal with the questions
later. Is that all right? Okay. Sounds good. Good.
We'll do that. Thank you, Amy. And we'll hear
from the applicant now. Thanks for getting us started,
Amy. The Clark and Gibson Act projects are a
part of the triumvirate. I have you, Crawford. Thanks.
Steve Crawford, director of capital projects for the Issaquah school district, 565
Northwest Holly Street, Issaquah, Washington, 98027. So the Gibson, Eck, and Clark
are a part of the package, as Amy explained, that involves the
construction of the new Issaquah Middle School. As we started
to look at the future of Issaquah schools about seven or eight years ago, it
became really apparent that this current Issaquah Middle School site is really compact. It's dense.
We don't have all the play fields there that we really need to support a
middle school program. We currently bus kids to Tibbetts for softball, et cetera. That the
Clark Elementary site was one that had a lot of adjacent underdeveloped use.
and that the Clark building being built in 1955 was older and smaller than
it needed to be and that we needed additional capacity in the core area.
That's kind of been confirmed by the fact that we've grown over 2,000 students
in the last five years, over 500 last year, and since October's enrollment we've
grown 120 kids so far this year, which is unheard of. So we're seeing
pretty explosive growth. The Iskua Middle School is under construction, opens in
September. Then in June of this year when the school is out,
we will plan to begin demo and reconstruction of the existing Iskua
Middle School campus to support the new Clark Elementary. And in September
17, that's planned to open. And as Amy explained, when that's done,
then we can move the kids in June out of the existing Clark Elementary into
their new home and start the demo of the existing Clark and finish the play
fields and such for the high school. So all of these projects are interlinked in
terms of timeline and schedule and impact. So here we're looking at the existing front
parking lot. This is currently the entry canopy, and this is the existing admin
area, library, commons, food service area here. And from beyond this point,
there are classrooms here which are all exterior circulation classrooms built in
an early California campus style with outside hallways, safety security issues and
concerns, single glazing, minimal insulation. It's just an energy hog building. And
so that will come down and be replaced with the new --
whoops. How do we go back? Amy?
Three-story elementary classroom wing, new gym, new music
rooms, et cetera. And in this corner over
here is the existing 200 building, which is
a two-story section of this called Middle School
that was built in the mid-'90s. It was originally
planned to become the new home for the Tiger Mountain Community High School and over
the years that's evolved into a new program which is called Gibson Eck. And while
it was initially going to house Tiger at its 70 to 90 kids population level,
the projections are that in the future it could become a 250 student school.
The plan is to open in September 16 with about 100 students in grades 9
to 10, and then it will add 50 or 60 students each of the next
two years as new ninth graders so that it eventually becomes a four-year high school.
A very innovative, creative program, one that's similar to a number of other programs around
the country that's been in operation for up to 20 years. but something
that's new and pretty exciting. So as we went through the
permitting process for Issaquah Middle School, the traffic impact analysis was
completed for not only the Issaquah Middle School but the Tiger
Move and the Clark Elementary. As we've seen the program change
for Gibson Eck, and the increase in numbers there, we've gone back with
the traffic engineer and that's what they're doing in terms of a re-evaluation, a
reassessment of the work that was done before to bring it up to current
levels. You saw the site plan. This is just kind of a refresher. First
Avenue comes in, front parking lot, the existing, this shows the existing footprint of
the current Issaquah Middle School with the Commons, library, admin areas, classroom
wings, and gym facilities here. This is the existing two-story area, which
as Amy noted, we're looking to infill the Commons here, which is
currently a concrete impervious area, stairwell, and an elevator shaft to facilitate
the program for the Gibson Act. An
exterior perspective from the southwest, this is the existing building and the infill of the
commons for their new -- or infill of the courtyard area for their new commons.
Floor plan, again, the L-shaped portion is an existing building. There's a little bit of
remodeled work that will occur in there for some new administrative offices and some reconfiguration
of some instructional spaces. And the majority of the new work is the infill of
this concrete courtyard area for a commons. So the
overall site plan is what's submitted as a part of
the Clark Elementary and issues that came up or access
the steep slopes. This is currently a paved driveway fire
lane here. Pavement at the top of the slope kind
of helps protect from infiltration and any potential for
sloughage there. Again, it's an existing condition that's been there since probably
the mid-60s. You can see that it is fairly intense development. We
really are looking at trying to utilize our existing school sites to
the best and highest use that we can. We are looking for
continued growth. Property is It's hard to acquire. It's going to be very expensive.
So we want to be able to utilize our existing sites as well as we
can. And that's one of the things that led to the classroom wing being a
three-story addition. We've been building two-story elementaries since 2000. But we're seeing the need to
go to three. It actually works out really well with kindergarten and first grade on
the first floor, second and third on the second, and fourth and fifth on the
third floors. So it works out really well. We've been through that
programming process with Clark and their staff and the district administration. That comes together
well. Amy noted that impervious surface area is something that this plan exceeds the
current regulations on. And a 50% allowable area, that's really kind of a suburban
standard and something that we would hope to work with in the future.
The city also does not consider pervious pavements as a
pervious surface. That's counted as an impervious surface. So while
other jurisdictions allow that and it helps mitigate significantly paved
surface areas, that's not something that's counted here. Currently the
entrance circulation is in off of Clark from the front.
and loops around through here for a drop off and back out. It's a very
short pickup drop off area. It becomes congested and we find that traffic backs up
at the light sometimes. The intent and goal here was to provide as long a
stacking distance as we could on incoming vehicles, bringing them all the way down to
the south end of the site and currently back up and dropping off in this
area here. Provides good direct access into the classroom wings, gets as much of a
stacking distance as we can, and I can't foresee any way that we would ever
stack up cars onto the roadway. And there is a little section right here that's
fairly tight. This is an existing building, which we're We want to retain food service
in this area. This is the commons. And it just makes good sense to save
the good parts of the building. But we do have staff. We do have EAs
that help in our pick up, drop off times. We don't anticipate that there's
going to be any different numbers that pick up and drop off here than the
current Clark. Another positive move is that currently as a middle school, there's about 22
buses that pick up and drop off here and use First Avenue. Clark currently has
about six buses and might expand to maybe eight. So it would be roughly about
a third of what the current total is there. We have planned for the
ability for traffic to exit both out Clark to front and back
into first to help disperse that traffic into a variety of different
traffic patterns depending on an individual's destinations. This is an elevation of
the front of the building and this canopy structure is currently what
exists and has been the front for Esquaw Middle School. It's going
to be redeveloped and modernized and new metal roof, new colors,
et cetera, freshened up. You can see the three-story wing back behind,
three stories from the inner hard surface play area. Again, this is
the hard surface play area and the three-story classroom wing.
The west side, the existing commons building here. This is new music, new
service yard which becomes fully screened as opposed to the current yard which
is open and exposed. And the three-story classroom wing back into the central
hard surface play area again. The existing Gym locker room buildings are slated to remain
in place at this point in time. Gibson-Eck will use some of the gym facilities.
The locker rooms really probably won't be utilized at this point in time or any
time in the near future. Quickly through a
floor plan, front entrance canopy, this is the
main entrance hallway, commons, food service, existing administration
area, library. These areas get reconfigured, modernized and
basically retain the exterior footprint area. Again, from this point
back, the existing one-story open campus classroom areas are going to be taken
down and replaced with new music rooms to help support the platform stage
area. They've had a robust performance program for an elementary school. There's a
new service yard serves directly in, new gym, new toilet
rooms, and again the three-story classroom wing. There's an existing building
here which has been used as the special ed services building
and that will remain, provides very good entrance access from their
bus drop-off area right directly in and linkage into the building.
Second floor plan, third floor plan, basically a repeat there.
And that's pretty much the end of the
slides. So I'll go back to the site
plan. It seems to be where most of
the questions and issues might be. Okay. Steve,
I think what we'll do is hold questions
and comments until later. Thank you, sir, for
your presentation. We'll now go to the public
comment section of the of the conference. And again, if you wish
to speak, we'd ask you to sign up please on those papers there. And when
you come up to the mic, make sure that you give your name and your
address. And we've got a good number of people here, which we always like to
see. So we ask that you try to limit your comments to about five minutes.
Okay? Yeah, I think some folks have already signed up, but we can pass that
around. So who would like to begin?
So my name is Chris Craven and I live
at 580 Front Street South which is basically I'd
like to start my comments with a quote. You
have brains in your head, you have feet in
your shoes, you can steer yourself any direction you
choose. You're on your own and you know what you know
and you are the one who'll decide where to go. So I think
that Issaquah School District and the city of Issaquah have a chance to
inspire students, the citizens, visitors and neighbors with this facility that we're looking
at. We have a chance to make a facility that is relevant, sustainable
and loved for another five generations. This project has
an opportunity to decide where we want to go as a community, as a
neighborhood, and we should consider the unique character of the area. Right now, the
neighborhood, one of the reasons that I wanted to live in the condos that
I live in is the walkability of the area. This neighborhood has a walkability
score of 62. Not bad. It's not great. It's out of 100. But what I
would like to see is that we protect what we have and improve on that
in the future. I applaud you for your designs. I think
the buildings are well thought out. I think there are some missed opportunities
that I'd like to share. I think, you know, this site is spectacular.
It has a southern exposure. It has fabulous views to the Squawk Mountain
and Tiger Mountain. Those can be both inspiring to students, staff, and the
neighborhood. One of the things that I see as a missed opportunity is the orientation
of your long building. If you oriented it in the east-west direction, you would actually
gain a lot of solar gain to heat the buildings in the wintertime and provide
free daylight. And that would be savings over the lifetime of the buildings. It would
also be able to maybe free up some of your impervious space that you
have by being able to place some of the parking under the buildings. Having
covered parking in this environment, as we all know in the recent days, downpours
are common. It would be really nice, I think, for the students and the
parents to be able to drop their student, children off under a
covered area and being able to have the advantage of putting
the parking under the buildings creates two advantages. It gets rid
of the parking that you're covering up and having the problems
with exceeding the 50% and also provide more covered areas for
that. You talk about low impact development in your write-up and
site development which would utilize the LID techniques. This refers to controlling
stormwater runoff through grass swales, permeable pavements, vegetated rooftops, and yet I
don't see any of these systems incorporated into your design.
You state in there that the paving is not required to
be pervious and yet you're exceeding 50%. There's only 216 required
parking places and you're exceeding that by 107. So
those raise concerns with me. Bike storage, bike racks, it
seems like if they were proposed to be all congregated
at the entrance that it would actually provide an opportunity
to both be visible from people coming and going in front of the facility
as well as usually that's the security point where you have lots of eyes of
people coming and going and so people would probably be a little bit more or
a little bit less apprehensive of their bicycles being vandalized or stolen. We need to
improve and promote less dependence on cars. I think that is a given in our
society. We all need to get where we're going, drop and get going again.
And having long backup lines, whether it's on the streets or within your site,
isn't a long-term solution.
So I could go through the parking standards, IMC 1809-010, but
I'm sure you've read them. I'll just hit on some highlights.
It talks about effective use of transportation facilities, alternate methods of
moving people, deter traffic congestion, promote environmental quality through less use
of fossil fuels, less impervious service, ride sharing and requiring safe, direct,
non-motorized access from public right of ways. I don't see that the
circulation and parking is effective or gives alternate methods. The plan doesn't
deter traffic congestion. It simply moves it to the interior of the
site adjacent to residential neighbors. It doesn't promote less fossil fuel, it doesn't highlight
ride sharing, or it doesn't prioritize biking. There is nothing in the design that enhances
any of the non-motorized access to the site that I've seen. There may be plans,
but I don't see it in this. In the handout or
the brochures that were mailed out on page 29 of 67, staff talks
about being concerned about the parent drop off and the fire marshal commented
on the concern of pickup and drop offs in that narrow. I concur
with these concerns. All the undesirable things are being pushed to
the southern end of the property, which directly impacts the quality of life for
me at Issaquah Crown. Parking that can't be monitored, Parent drop-offs, backups, and
idling traffic, and ugly portable buildings. That's what we get to see as a
neighbor. And I don't really see, there is a requirement in here that you
provide the site analysis from all of the surrounding, but I don't see that
the parking areas and the portables are part of what was portrayed in the
building depictions that we've seen. So I would love
to look out through the trees of our site and see a beautiful
building with classrooms, maybe some vegetable gardens for children and kids playing. I
really don't want to look out and see parking and portable buildings up
against our fence. So the parking in the southwest corner, there's a 30-foot
setback here that it talks about the setbacks for buildings. The parking
impedes on that and I don't see that there's a sufficient setback
or buffer along the southern edge to keep stormwater runoff noise fumes
any of the heat island effects, glares from the lighting from coming into our property.
I think that's a big concern in the southwest corner there. Not only that, but
that parking lot isn't probably gonna be used during the weekends as well because it's
right next to the ball field. So not only do we get it all during
the week when the school's in session, we'll get it all weekend as well.
I'm concerned about the parking, building, and lighting. I'd like to see minimizing
the harmful effects of light pollution. And what can be done is only
use lighting where it's needed, equip it with motion detectors or daylight sensors,
only light the areas that need to be lit, be no brighter than
necessary and minimize the blue light emissions. And most importantly, fully shield the lighting. I've
got a picture here at night which you can see the white spots from the
existing lighting and basically our bedroom faces north out into the field and a fully
drawn shade is required to block the lighting from coming in. So it would be
nice if we could improve on that.
I'll also leave a handout as submission too so that you have this. I
already mentioned the analysis of the required views so it would be nice to
see the entire site and exactly what it's going to look like including the
portables and the parking areas. The landscaping really isn't defined, it's vague. They talk about
a removal of a couple of trees around the perimeter for grading. I'd like to
see that be more identified on plans and open for public review. There's a reduction
in the play field and there's a statement in there, they're gonna be going from
grass to sand. So I have concerns of dust being a problem over the long
term. And out of everything, that is being pushed up,
I'm concerned about the construction period. So construction basically from what
I've been reading goes from April of 2016 through August of
2017. That's 17 months and then in addition to that,
there are future portables as needed, which will be even more construction bringing those
in. So the questions I have are what mitigations will be given for noise
and dust during construction? Can we ask for no weakened power tools or heavy
equipment being worked? Will our water pressure be impacted during construction or after occupancy?
And then will construction truck drive routes be reviewed for public comment because
it is a very congested area. How are you going to get in
and out with the construction equipment? It says there's minimal grading but if
I do the calculations of 11,600 cubic yards, A truck and trailer, not just
a truck, but a truck and trailer, which is going to be hard to
maneuver in here, carries 20 cubic yards. That's 580 loads. Let's say we can
do 10 loads a day. That's 58 days of trucking, 11,600 cubic yards, which
is minimal grading. My closing remarks are expansion of non-conforming
situation and encroaching in the wetland buffer. Clark Elementary School does not comply
with the required height limit and maximum impervious area. This is from your
report. All of this would be insignificant to me if the buildings in
the site were thoughtful, beautiful, and provide a truly inspiring facility to many
generations of Issaquah students. The project needs to be sympathetic to all neighbors
and not just the front door right-aways. I'm gonna leave you with another
Dr. Seuss saying, "Think left and think right, "and think low and think
high. Oh, the things you can think of
if only you try. Thank you. Thank you. Mr.
Tonka, Jeff Tonka. Good evening. I'm Jeff Tonka. I
live at 580 Front Street South here in Issaquah.
I've been a resident of Old Town Issaquah for
about 25 years at this address, and it's at
the same condominiums that the previous speaker mentioned.
A lot of my comments are somewhat repetitious of the previous speaker. She did a
very eloquent job in hitting on a lot of the points. A lot of the
things that I'm going to hit on is just going to be bullet points, not
necessarily on construction or layout of the property, but really impacts from somebody that has
lived next door for a long period of time. And during that time, I do
want to state that our two largest neighbors, one is Squaw School District, who I'm
going to say we have a pretty good relationship. We've had issues from time to
time, but they've always allowed us to come in and review those issues with them.
And just recently, we talked about this within the past couple of months. and also
the city of Iskua. Our property comes up right against the Rainier Trail, which we
recently had some big issues with that we were able to work with various city
departments on to abate those issues. So I'm hoping that with this type of meeting
that we can bring out some of the issues and maybe have them addressed in
some of the action items prior to final design and construction. Again, our property is
immediately south of this site. It's several hundred feet long and our property ranges from
being above grade of this field and I'm going to use the word field because
that's what it is. It's presently a pretty much a flat piece of land. to
being at grade to below grade. And in one of the reports it said, hey,
the multifamily structures next door are two stories high. We're actually three stories high. And
therefore, it's going to make a difference in view looking over to this property depending
on where you are relative to our side of the lot. We are very concerned
about the impact to our entire property, particularly with what's being proposed here.
The impact is varied, both direct and indirect, again to our quality of
life and potentially to our property values. The impact is visual. It's going to
be sound, lighting, and I don't have a good word for this next one, but
I'm going to call it movement distraction. Maybe that goes into the visual category, but
it seems like there's going to be a lot of movement on this property that
presently does not exist. Construction, again, it looks like it's potentially could kick off as
early as next month and go through to August 2017. Construction, at least what they're
projecting here, is likely going to be fairly loud. It's going to be dust concerns
and just the duration. And I'm going to digress to a recent project that transpired
over the past year that had a direct impact on our property, and that was
the build out of the ISD Transit Center. With that project, there was a lot
of excavation, a lot more excavation that is being projected here. First off, it started
off with a lot of chainsawing, removal of a lot of trees. We probably listened
to chainsaws for about two and a half, almost maybe going on three weeks. And
then after that, there was many, many, many weeks of excavation. And I think that
was then followed by a lot of backfill of heavy rockery and whatnot. Again, I
don't have a background in construction. All I can tell you is what it sounds
like. It was very loud starting from 7:00 in the morning and went through to
about 4:00 in the afternoon. A lot of equipment, heavy equipment, both scooping, dumping, trucks
backing up, very disruptive. The interesting thing is that once all that was done, there
was impacts that weren't realized. unintended consequences, if you will, to our property, things that
I don't think the city realized, the school district realized, and we sure as heck
didn't. As a result of this build-out, we now get a lot more noise transmission
coming from the ISCWA district ISD Transit Center in the form of vehicle noise. Primarily
it's the buses backing up, they're beeping audible noises, again, which we're in discussions with
ISD on right now. We can hear the buses firing up, which we never heard
before. And I think that had a lot to do with removal of a huge
hillside and again, a lot of vegetation, a lot of trees. The
remodel of this school is much larger than anticipated. It's going from one school to
two schools. I think we've kind of heard the plans on that. Again, we're a
little surprised at the redefinition of the plan. It sounds like it's going up
to three stories, but with the attic substructures, it looks like it's going
to be more visible representing four stories. Again, something that we're really not
used to seeing going directly north from our property. We're concerned about where
the track is, and primarily that acts as a buffer right now, not
only visibly, but with sound and light abatement. Again, I understand that that
is prime building and there is going to be some facilities put there, but again,
it's a big change for our property, something I don't think that was really anticipated
or accounted for. Again, our immediate property is approximately 50 homes. There's also the folks
that live on the west side of the property that are going to be impacted
here as well, the individual homeowners. The parking areas, which is drawing a lot of
interest here, The concerns are visual, again, both cars, potential glare, so on and so
forth. Noise for me is gonna be paramount. Not only of the vehicle noises, but
also car doors. I don't think that's really been talked about a lot as far
as this drop off as well in parking. Slamming doors are loud. Exhaust, the lighting
from the cars. Again, this is a flat area. When cars pull in and you
have headlights, again, this time of year particularly early school drop-off are going to be
going across the property shining through probably onto three of our four buildings there's also
going to be brake lights there's going to be potential idling issues maybe not idling
when they're stopped waiting for pickup but during the drop-off when it's an active offload
speaking of offload. I know that the goal of doing this is many fold but
one of them from the report said was to alleviate traffic congestion at the intersection
of Front Street and Clark. I guess my frustration there lies in the fact that
you're trying to alleviate the problem there by putting it literally in my backyard. And
I don't know if that's the best way to do it. And I don't know
if it's really going to alleviate the problem. Yes, it will allow for a lot
of stacking, but I heard here earlier tonight elementary schools have a lot more drop
off. And what does a lot more mean? Are we talking about 200 parents a
day dropping their kids off in the morning and then the same 200 parents coming
back in the evening. That's a lot of movement through here. And again, I'm most
concerned about my area down here on the south part of the property. I don't
know if there's anybody here that lives west of the property that's concerned about that
corridor right next to probably some brick and metal structures that's just going to be
pushing that sound out in that direction. I think there needs to be some abatement
issues. with that i'm also concerned about lighting lighting from the property and i know
that there is new lighting technology we heard some from the previous speaker and also
in talking to the folks at isd they they said that they can come up
with some clever ideas but still there's going to be more lighting that's closer to
our property line than does not exist today i'm also concerned about sound both direct
sound and indirect sound direct sound it could be classroom bells. It could be facility
air conditioners and heating noise from some of these substructures or portables that are going
to be closer to the property line. It could just be a lot more people
on this property. I heard estimates here tonight of upwards of 800 students and 200
staff with potential for future expansion. That's a lot of people on this property that
don't exist right now. I don't know what the current population is, but I know
it's not that high. I'm also concerned about some of the other visual aspects
of the building. It sounds like it's going to be nice architecture. I'm not here
to say that it's not. I'm concerned about the utilities. Where's the trash and the
recycling and the electrical transformers going to go? It seems like that stuff always makes
it to the back of the building. Maybe that's included in part of the design
phase where that's going to be somewhat hidden. I hope so.
There doesn't seem to be much of a plan for screening. And I know the
word screening is very generic. For me, screening needs to be more than just plant
material. We need screening that's going to provide visual screening. Again, for a lot of
the visual, the lighting, I'm going to call it the movement, the distraction, if you
will, that's always going to be catching you in the side of the eye to
make you look up. Noise screening, exhaust screening, and...
My big concern here is just not of the plan, but going back to the
example I gave on the build out of the transit center, it's the unintended consequences,
the things that we haven't even realized yet that are going to impact our immediate
neighborhood. We're also concerned about potential safety and trespass as well. We currently get a
lot of trespass issues directly related to school activities, both students and adults jumping the
fence, coming directly south off the field into our property, and also coming through the
wetlands buffer from the Rainier Trail when school lets out coming into our property as
well. We're very concerned that we're just going to see an uptick in that movement
as well. That concludes my comments for this evening.
Thanks. Mr. Tanaka. Mr. William Robertson. I just recently moved
here. Would you repeat your, say your name and your
address please and speak into the microphone. William Robertson, 580
Front Street South, Building B. I recently moved here and
the reason I moved here was for quiet and peace.
And if you'd appreciate my-- I'm retired law enforcement. And
who's going to patrol this? Yes, sir. Could you stay
at the mic, please? In the evenings, who's going to
patrol or monitor that cul-de-sac, if you will, down at
the end, just to the north of our property, where
youths will be drinking, doing narcotics, sex, what have
you, in that southern cul-de-sac, which is the parent drop-off
area? Who's gonna be patrolling that? Is that gonna be
something that law enforcement's gonna have to stay down there
in the evening and monitor? Are we developing something that
we really don't want to develop or start? That's
one thing I wanted to mention. The other thing is my
wife is a very light sleeper and the lights coming down,
I don't know, you think 200 vehicles, 300 vehicles in the
morning while we're trying to sleep. It's sort of like a
cul-de-sac that was relatively dead And now that cul-de-sac, you have
200 cars coming down your cul-de-sac every morning. It seems like a
good idea if there's nobody lived to the south there. But I
guess my main concern is a safety issue in the evening, late
hours. Who's going to patrol that? What kind of crime is going
to happen down there? What's going to be going on in there?
Just sort of a place for crime to fester.
I concur with the previous speakers. They
had some very strong points. But the
people that live to the south, that's
all I have. Thank you, sir. Edgar,
I'm sorry, I can't -- Rochelson. My
name is Edgar Rochelson. I live at
580 Front Street South, which is part
of the Issaquah Crown Condominium complex. I'm
here to talk mainly about boundary considerations along the
south side. In reading through the proposal, you mentioned
landscaping only around parking areas, and we're talking about
a lot more. We're not just talking about a
parking lot. We're not talking about a play field.
We're talking about over 200 linear feet of property.
A few years ago, standing in this very place, I talked
to, or talked in front of the city council when they
were proposing using the play field as a soccer field for
a soccer league. And at that time, I started off my
remarks by saying that as I stand here now, my bedroom
is closer to the property line than I am standing to you.
And not only I can say that, 17 of my neighbors can
say the same thing. So the main concern for a lot of
us as we live very close to the property boundary is what
you are going to use as a buffer all the way around
to preserve as much as possible our quality of life. Excuse me,
I just had to refer to my notes there. Now, as I
walk along Front Street to the bus each morning and back in the evening, in
the stretch between Clark Street and reaching the entrance to our condominium complex, there are
two properties that have very tall and very thick hedges, and they in effect block
off the noise and the sight of Front Street, which as we all know is
very heavily traveled. And I would like staff, the commission, whoever else
would be involved in this, to look into the feasibility of planting hedges
at least 10 to 12 feet high, if not higher, as long as
it's feasible, in order to protect us from the noise, the light, the
sound, the construction dirt, and anything else that would affect our quality of
life. This will not only be a school day project
or a school day use of the facilities. I'm sure the athletic facilities
are going to be used at night too. There will probably be additional
events going on in the various buildings on the school campus, which means
more cars, more pedestrian traffic, more noise, more light, and more disturbing of
our quiet enjoyment of the facilities. I don't expect a decision from you all
tonight. This is something, pardon the pun, I would like to plant the seed for.
To look into what would be the best barrier, if you will, to absorb all
the sounds and all the noise and all the dust and still be aesthetically pleasing
and preserve our quality of life. And also for the
construction too. I don't know how feasible it would be to plant these trees before
all the work starts, but with work starting at 7 a.m. or sometimes earlier if
everybody marshals there first, it's going to wake up a lot of people. And if
there's overtime involved in Saturdays, it's going to wake up a lot more people because
most of us don't go to work on the weekends. So that is basically what
I wanted to address you all on and ask that it all be strongly
considered. A wall is not aesthetic. Certainly the wire mesh fence that we have
now is not aesthetic or effective. As Mr. Tanker said, there are people who
can easily climb over it. So I would ask again that
you seriously consider a strong, in effect, continuous hedge going along the entire
south end of the property to separate the school facility from the Issaquah
Crown condominium. Thank you. Thank you, sir. The next person on the list
that has signed up is Mr. Greg Craven. My name is Greg Craven.
I live at 580 Front Street, the Issaquah Crown condominiums. My concerns
are obviously what everyone else has been talking about, the noise in the site with
the lights and everything. I can go over them all again, but they've all been
touched on. The dirt with the new field. I did go to that school when
I was younger and quite a bit younger, and we loved that field out there.
It was a great field, but it was nowhere near as nice as it is
now. But one of the concerns I have is if there is a fire, where
is your access for the students to go to? We all went out the back
door and stood out in that field. I don't see much room for people to
go get away from the buildings. I also do not see a way that anyone
can access or leave from the back if there is a fire or any catastrophe
or panic if you have vehicles trying to come in or out on either side,
fire trucks, aid units, something's going on, people need to leave,
they're trapped in the back. So those are my concerns.
Thank you, sir. Alicia Hunt or Hurt? All right. Thank
you. Elaine Fisher? All right. Is there anyone else, any
other member of the public that would like to speak?
Okay. And my name is Mary Lynch. I reside at
2690 Northwest Oakcrest Drive, Issaquah, Washington. And I just want to
say I concur with what the people have said before, especially when I just
stamp, rubber stamp what Chris said about sustainable schools and looking at maybe small
alternatives for the building to be more sustainable, rain gardens, solar heat, other things.
But one of my primary reasons is to say that I think this needs to
be really reviewed by the city's walk and roll program and safe routes to school
program that you have and those guidelines because I currently see that most of these
students that go to Clark are coming from Old Town, the Highlands and Preston. And
so the walking paths really need to be clearly identified and right now we go
to the very edge of the school property. We don't continue on down the hill
by the community center, which is not a sidewalk. We don't continue down the other
side of the street, which is the maintenance building, which we constantly in the morning
with Issaquah Middle have cars pulling in and out. Parent cars come in there back
in and out. And even with the buses there, we have continual problems with parents
trying to drop off with buses. We have people who do not obey the parking
signs along that and park on the sidewalks. So you're going to have elementary kids
trying to maneuver their ways through coming up to the school through a mine field.
The same way if they do come in, there's not going to be that many
coming, I don't think, off of Front Street. They don't come from that area now,
but you're going to have more cars coming in. Parents do not shut their cars
off, believe me. We're required to school bus drivers to turn our buses off. Parents
do not. So you're gonna have a long line of vehicles down here with cars
running. If any of you'll go over and see what the problem is at Clark
or Issaquah Valley and the lineup of cars that we have with people, It's bad
and they are not looking at anybody else's kids. All they're caring about is their
kid getting out of the car and they all want to drop off at the
front unless they're really late and then they'll let their kid get out any place
along that area. So this area down here is going to be really bad. We
also, I don't see any identification on where the small buses are going to go.
This school currently has I think five to six small buses which also are kindergarten,
preschool and also handicapped. Where are they going to enter? Are they going to have
to fight with the parents to go into this way which we do at some
of our schools and which they do right now at Clark and they have tremendous
trouble in the afternoon getting into Clark, the buses do, all the buses do. So
I'd like to see what that's happening there. And work proactively in getting the parents
to use the buses. And that's where we talked on Monday night with city council
to say that there needs to be more cooperation between the city or the school
and the city. And that's a big one I see that we can work. And
maybe getting the PTAs involved. The other problem we have over there on Bush and
that first or whatever goes up to there is food bank parking. They are parking
all over the place anytime the food bank is open and it creates a nightmare
for getting through as well as then the people at the community center. I do
have problems with the pinch point down here because where, as someone else said, where
the garbage truck is going to go, where the delivery truck is going to go.
If we have normally with the fire, if there's an emergency, there's at least two
and sometimes three fire trucks that come and at least one aid car that comes
any time an incident happens. So how are they going to get in and out
of there in a timely fashion? And are they going to get stuck in there
with parent traffic if it happens right around the bell time? Which in the last
couple of months we've had at least two incidences where the emergency has happened right
at the bell time and the buses are held up but if they're expected to
go in this way with the parents, who's going to keep the parents back from
there? I guess that's the most of mine. I just say I think we really
need to make this and look at making this a safe way for kids to
get to school and to walk to school. Thank you. Thank you. If there's anyone
else that would like to speak, please make sure that I know that you have.
Sir, if you want to, this gentleman here in the front, go ahead. Why don't
you stand up? And when you come up, sir, would you make sure that you
have signed in the list? Okay. Thank you.
Hi, and thank you all for the job that you do. My name is Steve
Pereira. I live at 170 Northeast Dogwood Street. I've definitely heard the concerns of the
people that live adjacent to the property. I don't live adjacent to the property. There
was a recent meeting on and showing the film Urbanization, which definitely seems to be
happening here in Issaquah. Part of what I guess I don't see is kind of
this idea of I know Front Street and Sunset are really pretty packed already. We're
going to add a whole bunch of new traffic to the site. Is there a
way of making a more coherent plan than just this particular school site but with
how the traffic and how people are going to continue to get in and out
of the site as part of the overall plan? It seems we're just having separate
pieces going in but not an overall look going into that. And that needs to
be part of the consideration for the school, not just the school by itself or
a middle school and a high school. how that impacts the overall Old Town, how
that impacts Izaquahoga as a whole, where we're going. So I just think there needs
to be more consideration of that before approval of this particular combined middle school and
high school site that isn't currently designed for that. So please, let's take some more
time for part of that consideration as well as considering the impact to the immediate
adjacent neighbors. Thank you. Thank you, sir.
Good evening. My name is Tom Griffin, 580 Front Street South in
Issaquah. I'm also part of the Issaquah Crown and just wanted to
voice my concern about the temporary pods. There wasn't much discussion or
details provided in either presentation about the temporary units on the southern
end. And currently right now they're showing up as being temporary pods, one stories
and so forth. But as we all know, as time goes by, I'm sure that
the campus and the need for growth for the increase of students will also increase
as well. And based upon what I can see from the drawings and the structures
and so forth, if there is going to be an increase, and the population
size of the school, the natural progression of the growth would come from those
pods and taking those temporary structures out and putting larger structures in that existing
site. So that is my concern. And there hasn't been any discussion as to
what the long-term plans are for this site and specifically addressing and
dealing with those pods that are currently on the plans.
So just wanted to bring that up. Thank you. If
there are no more members of the public that wish
to speak, at this point we will close the public
participation and open it to commissioners' questions. What we'll do, what
we normally do in this case is allow each of the commissioners-- we're not allowing
it-- but each of the commissioners will seek clarification of specific points, either in the
applicant's plan, the staff report, or the comments that were made here by staff and
applicant. And once we go through the clarifications and so on, we'll come back. And
then each commissioner will express their opinion, make recommendations, observations, and things like that.
So with that, we'll start with Commissioner Higgs. Do you have any questions, clarifications,
or anything like that? I have my first question would be
about the fire access, the emergency vehicle access. How is that being
addressed and how is ISD working with the Eastside Fire Department to
make the accommodations and corrections for the access for the fire department
and emergency vehicles? So I'm going to start off by saying that
we have only done some very, very preliminary review of this, which is reflected in
the staff report. So we will be following up with the school district as far
as with the with coordination for the review of the fire access. However, I think
Mr Crawford will be able to answer how they have thought through the operations and
how they would deal with potential emergencies on site. Thank you. So
at pick up and drop off times, we do have staff and EA
staff that assist and help control traffic. So any areas that are concerns,
we have staff to help monitor and move traffic. There is a fire
loop that loops all the way around the building. So there is alternative
access for fire emergency vehicles all the way around the perimeter of the
building. Excuse me. There would be traffic coming in. This is the section of
drop-off area where you do have some stationary cars. And once cars are leaving there,
they're going to be moving until you get up to another point where there might
be a little bit of a decision point into these areas here. But I think
in large part, traffic through here is going to be moving. The service yard is
here. That's where trash and dumpsters and things are. Those activities are scheduled for outside
of the the drop off or pick up times, all of those service
providers and our own district staff know that those are not times that
they want to be coming onto a school site. That's something that's already
a scheduling issue that's addressed. Can I do a follow up question? As
I understand it from the packet and from the presentations, those traffic
lanes, the car lanes, are basically one way, right? - Two way. -
There's two way traffic here. There's an entrance lane and there's an exit
lane. - Okay. - And those are standard traffic lane widths. - Okay,
so, but the cars come down and go down the parent drop off
and go down to turn around there. - Cars come in, loop around,
We always want them to drop off on the right side so the kids
are getting dropped off on the curb side. So the drop off area is
along this sidewalk area here. And that's the discharge point at the north end
and then exiting back out. So basically you have a typical two lane roadway
that passes from this section to this point. With a sense of a drop
off lane? So I'm sorry if you're going to comment you have to come up
to that. Please do if you want to. Yeah, there's two lanes of traffic. There's
an inbound lane here. There's a free outbound lane as well as the 10 foot
drop off lane. So that's a 30 foot wide section of the pavement. CHRIS JERRAM:
Commissioner Hicks had a question about the timing of the parent drop off or pickup
and an emergency. And I believe there was an observation made by a member of
the public that there have been some recent-- times when both of
those have occurred when there's been an emergency. So if there is an
emergency of some nature in the corner down there, those areas right in
there, how would emergency vehicles access that area? Assuming that the pickup and
drop off lane is CHRIS RODGERS: If you had an emergency event and
there was inbound traffic here, staff would get traffic out of here to free
up the lane. There's also the option of coming in from the east side.
So in essence, you have a two-lane road here, just as you have in
any number of locations around the city. CHRIS RODGERS: But the access on the
far side on the opposite side from the parent pick-up. That
is normally open? It's staff parking? There's parking on the sides. The center is
a 20-foot dedicated fire lane that loops all the way back around. So would
that not be the primary access in the plan for that? I think the
emergency providers would see that as their first. first point of access, their
primary point. I do believe that the congestion in this whole area will be
far less than what we currently see here, which consistently backs up traffic down
to the light. And so if there was an inbound emergency vehicle trying to
get in here, any time in the near future or recent past when it
was pick-up/drop-off time, they'd have a heck of time coming up the road. COMMISSIONER
MAY: Commissioner Sellem? I'm concerned about the Southwest parking. And if I
understand what was written, the plan exceeds the required number of parking spots. Is
that correct? CHRIS RODGERS: It does exceed the number of parking spots. I believe
the number that's required is 216, and we provide for 242. We
typically, the number that we provide is what we would typically
find at our other elementary schools and similar facilities. So
there is a difference between 216 and 242. There are events at
school facilities that bring in larger crowds for kindergarten roundup days and
Christmas programs and things like that. There was another additional 81 spaces
that can be used for those high volume events that's on the
paved play field areas. So the number that was said that said
we were providing 100 or something more than what we are required to is
is only when you're using the play field areas for large scale events. And
just for clarification, the land use code doesn't have a maximum limit for parking,
only a minimum. Well, it seems like the the maximum may be
a critical thing to think about because the reality is if you've got an impervious
violation or an inability to meet your impervious surface requirement and you've got a community
at the south of the property that is saying we're really worried about the impacts
of this, if you've exceeded the number of parking spots that you have, that would
not seem unreasonable. I think maybe you could eliminate a good portion of some of
that parking on the south, move the buff, extend the buffer and create some of
that buffering that the people are asking for. It just seems like that. I guess
my other concern was really being concerned about the-- excess of impervious space
especially when you have a pretty significant drop off on the west side you're going
to increase water flow over that and i don't know what's going to happen to
stabilize that i guess i didn't read it into anything that was going to be
happening to stabilize that drop off there but if you're getting excess water over that
that just is kind of a recipe for disaster and i had concerns over the
the emergency access to, but you did a good job. I understand what the plan
is now, so thank you. This driveway on the west side currently is paved, and
there's catch basin system there, so there is no runoff from that paved area over
the bank. and that would continue and be enhanced in this new development so that
there is no infiltration of surface water at the top of the bank or runoff
that goes down over the bank. The other thing I would point out is that
the stormwater management plan for this initially included rain gardens and other low impact development
features. The whole play field area is an infiltration basin. this site
will is designed to infiltrate 100 of the storm water uh this is
what middle school infiltrates the new school will infiltrate 100 of the storm
water and it's why i feel infiltrates 100 of its storm water thanks
thank you mr bryant so um i had similar thoughts or comments um
maybe a question for staff so amy the Is there a
perimeter landscaping minimum width requirement for this project? There's actually
several. The way the landscape standards are set up, depending
on different types of uses and transition, there is transition
landscaping that's required. And for parking, in this case,
There's some limits to the way the land use
code provides for buffering. Unfortunately, where you have properties
adjacent to other residential, the buffering is a little different than if it was
abutting a public right-of-way. But I can come back, I can return next time
with a more detailed analysis of that. Yeah, I guess I'm just looking at
the site and the amount of development and impervious, kind of back to the
theme of we're kind of really stretching the impervious and maximizing the development on
the site, which I understand the districts need to provide capacity for a growing number
of students. But it just seems like we've got an awful lot of hard surface
here and maybe there is some opportunity to improve landscaping because I it's a
better quality of experience for the kids that are on the campus, incorporate more low
impact development techniques. Thinking back at Issaquah High School and when we reviewed that, some
really great stuff was done on that site. And maybe there's some opportunities, maybe not
quite as bold as was possible there. And then the idea of how do we
provide some screening, taking advantage of both kind of physical screens created by fencing and
other sorts of fears and softened with some sort of landscaping, I think, in combination
with kind of what's the code telling us to do here. I think it just
seems like we're really kind of pushing the boundaries a bit with the amount of
development that's being pushed onto the site. I do appreciate the infiltration that's happening on
the play field. I think that's a good thing. So as far as a
question I just I want to try to I'm not going to I guess we're
just going to go around and take questions and so just a couple that came
out from the people who spoke and I really appreciate the comments. Just a simple
one regarding where you're going to deal with waste management sorts of stuff on
this property because now we have, you know, obviously trucks that need to come in
and service that area as well. And I couldn't really pick it up on the
site. So is that, can you point to that? Yeah, okay. I thought that's it.
Service yard is here and that's where trash and recycling occurs. Right. So the trucks
will come in and pick up. It's a screened in area with gates. Right. And
then they'll pick up and they'll go back down around the loop to come back
out. They'll come in, loop around, pick up, back up and exit typically. What time
of day? Those are midday pickups. Again, they schedule around. They know when the
start and stop times are, and they know not to be there for their
own good. Just does the district work with the Issaquah Police Department in this
case to look at site development from a safety standpoint, kind of responding to some
of the concerns we've heard from? Yeah, we'll we talked with the fire department, we
talked with our first responders and our SROs to to help ascertain. I mean safety
and security is one of the primary considerations for the district. Maybe you can just
speak to a little bit to how you're providing security and trying to prevent people
from accessing the back part of that property which is I think what the concern
was. We gate, currently there's a gate at this location and there's a gate
at this location. So you have the ability to prevent any access to the rear
side of the building. This is currently the area of the grass play field and
track. So this is play area currently. The configuration changes, some of this becomes hard
surface area and this becomes sand surface play field. So there are recreational
opportunities that occur back here. And if there are activities
going on after school and weekends, there's the intended ability
to use some of the parking to provide access for
that. It's a community recreation facility. So that southwest corner
parking lot, will that be open for people to go
there on Saturday nights? Generally. These are not lighted fields, so
beyond the hours of use that are either scheduled by the district or the city
for the use of fields. I'm not worried about the fields. I'm thinking about what
the one gentleman said about-- No, after dark, they get gated off. OK. Just to
follow that up, when you say gated off, are they gates designed to prevent vehicles
from going in there, or would they also be-- deterrent for pedestrians
to go in there and congregate? Currently we have vehicle gates in
these locations that don't necessarily prevent pedestrian travel. There are, it's certainly
possible that you can, there's actually currently a fence gate at this
point, so that would prevent, you know, it's a six foot fence.
You could put a six foot fence in on the other side
to prevent people from walking in if if that was desired. One
more quick one. Sure. Just off the list here that the speakers. Just
the question about the smaller bus access and drop off and how that
works. Yeah. Smaller bus drop off is planned to be on the cul-de-sac
loop. Thank you. Commissioner Allen. Thank you Mr. Chairman. Sir,
can you speak a little bit towards the fact about the long-term planning for Clark?
I know Clark is located next to the new middle school right now, and then
they're moving in here. And then eventually, what is going to happen to Clark Elementary
School? The existing Clark Elementary will be demolished when occupancy is-- moved into this
new facility. The area that's currently occupied by Clark and the Tiger Mountain Portables
will become the football, soccer, lacrosse field and track that serves the middle school
and the community as well as the softball field and finish up some of
the additional parking and exiting of the bus loop. So this will be the
permanent Clark Elementary School building? This will be the permanent new Clark.
How about for building 200? What's there right now? And what is the future
planning of that? This is a two-story building. It was built in the mid
'90s, so it's relatively recent. It's relatively new and in good condition. It was
built well. It's well insulated and fairly efficient. It's a two-story building with
a roof. The likelihood of expanding upwards on that is really slim because of
the type of construction of the building. And we're proposing enclosure of the hard
surface courtyard area to provide a commons to facilitate the use of this for
the Gibson Eck. For what? It's called Gibson Eck. It's named after the first
two graduates from Iskwa High and two ladies, Gibson and Eck. And it
is a evolution of the Tiger Mountain Community High School. And-- OK,
yeah. So that's where it will be used then, huh? OK. The
turning radius-- I know we have a small site, and we're trying
to squeeze everything in there. But the turning radius for buses-- and
then you have the small van that's coming in.
Is that, I mean, somebody, this is a regular, probably looked at it and
said it's adequate. It seems pretty tight. This is a regular city standard cul-de-sac
that was developed, I don't know, maybe eight, ten years ago and currently is
and has been used for a number of years for the bus drop off. Currently
buses come in on First Avenue heading south, they come back around the bus loop,
and then they stack along the west side of the community center. And as a
middle school, they share the buses with the high schools. So there's currently between 22
and 24 buses that serve the middle school. And when Clark moves in here, Clark
has six buses. Maybe in the future, because this has a little bit bigger capacity,
it might grow to eight. But you're looking at six to eight buses compared to
22 to 24. So the bus traffic and impacts there will be significantly reduced. So
you're saying that the buses, they're coming from the north end, coming down south here
this way? Correct. And it's not sharing with the parents' traffic coming in here? On
Front Street then? There's an occasional parent that tries to come back up the
wrong way, but for the most part, no. And the parent pick-up drop-off is
off of Front and Newport. Newport, which aligns with Clark, and comes in, comes
to the front, drops off, and exits right back around here. The bone pool
is right in this area. And so you never have this crossing of the
buses versus the parents' traffic then? No. There's a physical barrier here of about a
10-foot grade separation and retaining wall in this location. It does taper up. The elevation
of this part of the bus loop is basically the same elevation as this, but
this is a raised table sidewalk crosswalk across here. And the buses go straight north
onto-- And then the buses exit-- To the east of the sitting pool. --back to
the north. and have the option of continuing out towards Sunset
or turning right or turning left, depending on the route destination.
Okay, good. Another question. Is there any reason why we're not
exiting utilizing the southeast corner of the lot for traffic? Well,
there's a wetland in this extreme corner here, and this is
the... The Rainier Trail. The Rainier Trail runs right through here. And then there's an
extended wetland along the east side of the trail, the old railroad bed in this
area here. And where's the limit of the wetland? Does it cover all the way
through here? The extent of the wetland that covers into the school property is this
corner right down here. And it extends further out to the south and west. And
I think that's probably about the configuration of that area there because the concrete trail
comes right through here. And then there's another long, skinny piece of wetland that's on
the east side of the trail. So there's a number of issues of crossing here.
A number of years ago when we built this reconfigured the front bus loop here,
we looked at trying to bring an exit drive down here and connect through here.
And that got all tangled up in the fact that we were crossing the creek
and we couldn't do that. And so that basically got squashed. There's a pedestrian crossing
across that creek currently, but not for roadway access. And how long ago was that?
That eight to 10 year time frame. Because it seems to me, you know, we're
all, you know, we have a very small site and here we are trying to
put in two driveways, one of which, you know, the neighbors, you know, I sure
don't want to be living somewhere on the west side, but you got two driveways
that you're trying to squeeze in there and somehow If you could just minimize that
and have an exit towards the east side of the property, seems like
that's something worthwhile to look into. CHRIS RODGERS: Yeah, one of the primary
concerns we have is the separation of the parent pickup drop-off traffic and
school buses. When they conflict, it becomes really problematic. OK. And
the portables are coming from existing Clark property, is that
correct? All the portable classrooms? Portables will come from the
existing Tiger Mountain campus when it comes apart or comes
down in June of '17. And the reason why we're
still using portables, seems to me portables are portables. Is
it because of financial budget that we cannot build those classrooms and we're
still using portables? Well, we use portables to try and manage and bridge
growth. The district currently has 200 portable classrooms in the proposed bond with
a new high school, middle school, two new elementary schools and additions that
will add about 200 classrooms to the inventory. If we never saw
another student, we can get rid of all the portables and put everybody
in schools. But to build that number of additional schools is probably impossible,
both financially and just physically, because there isn't land area available to do
it. So we use portables. In the past, portables were probably more temporary
than they have been in more recent years, but growth is 500
to 600 kids a year. And when they come, you have to have a seat
for them. And portables come in quicker and at a lot less cost than a
permanent building. CHRIS JERRAM: Yeah, that's all that I have, Mr. Chairman. Thank you. CHRIS
JERRAM: I don't have a lot to add because it's been gone over pretty well.
I really appreciate what the public had to say. I like this idea of possible
win-win. of doing some additional landscaping that could be a great amenity to
the users of the property and potentially build that buffer up to help
the folks that are living close by for their quality of life. So
I think that's something that should be explored. Really good idea that was
brought up by another commissioner. - Thank you. Commissioner Morgan. - The current
building height that we have, is it 32 feet? The
Gibson Act here is 32 feet. I think the east side of the existing gym
building is more like 42 feet from the east side. It's lower on the west
side. Okay. I guess what I'm trying to understand, and, Amy, this may be a
question for you, is the building height nonconformity or is that going to be a
variance request because the nonconformity We're going up to looks like 47 feet for
building height, which exceeds allowed 30. They didn't see something saying we're already at
47. And can you make a nonconforming situation worse or do we have to
go through a variance to get it? So basically the the the code currently
allows them or allows any development to expand and increase the nonconformity in
the community facilities zone. So if you were a foot over, if you
were at 31 feet, you could go to 80 feet or 90 feet,
whatever you wanted to? Yeah, basically the code is silent on how high
you can go. It seems like a strange... situation you can
make nonconforming even worse instead of just maintaining it. For the
community facilities, though. So building heights is one of those conundrums
because we go to three stories to reduce footprint area, which
reduces site impacts and compacts the building. The third story of
this building basically occupies this area and I imagine adding that
much more floor space somewhere else on this site. Yeah, I'm not trying to say
I think the building's too tall in relation to surroundings or anything like that. It's
just more of a code question and how it actually works in terms of how
it gets approved. On First Avenue South, is there not a sidewalk now between the
school and Southeast Bush Street? There's a sidewalk all along the east side here.
It goes the sidewalk all the way adjacent to the community
center to Bush Street? Correct. Okay, great. I'm going to offer,
can I get out for, because I have one of my
existing photos shows you, so here is what First Avenue looks
like. There's no official sidewalk on the left side and on the
right side pretty much it's flush to the to the roadway. You could he
is yeah that was that when I was looking at your package Amy your
pedestrian connection concerns there but we they can walk on the east side of
the street along the community center on a sidewalk. So
I think this is-- There's a sidewalk that runs the whole way. Yeah, and
I think this is where Ms. Lynch was talking about how cars will park
there and block what is intended as the pedestrian access. They can park on
the sidewalk? Well, because it's not raced, so people just kind of take over
whatever space there is. I'm sorry, so it's not a raised
sidewalk? Yeah, it's delineated more by this, more like this, you know, like
a lighter shade of pavement. Sounds like street to me. Light street. We
have a lot of places in the city that kind of has that
flush to the... Right. Okay. So is one possibility to put in
at least a curb? Extruded curb, yeah. Prevent that so that we do have
student walkability to Bush? And to clearly delineate where people can walk versus where
cars are parking. Exactly. OK. And then
the overflow parking is just, as you said, I think just at
certain events you can open those gates and bring cars in. At
certain events you can park cars on the hard surface play area
just to help absorb people for those events. OK, great. And Amy,
maybe you could bring this up. I guess I have some questions
about the west side of Clark. Well, both
the elevation and then actually where the students
that get dropped off will go into the
building and come out of the building. OK,
students that get picked up-- And if you
could blow that up a bit, it'd be
really helpful. Or if you have a bigger--
Oh, that happened. Hmm, nope. OK, let me
find here. There. So access points to
the building are on the south end here and at the midpoint and
also at this point on both sides of the building and south endpoint.
So pick up/drop off is intended to be here. Typical program and operations of the
elementary school, kids get dropped off, they go into the hard surface play area, they
tend to congregate in the covered play areas if it's a rainy day, and then
at the time a few minutes before the school bell, they open the doors and
then the kids go into the building.
Great. And then, Amy, can you do me a favor?
Can you pull up your elevation views, the view from
the west? I think you have it, right? I think
they have more of a, let me see if maybe
this is, which side? The view from the west? There
we go. So if I had this right, so the
So that's the southern half of Clark. And then to the left of
that would be Building 100? This is the existing commons building here. Right.
OK. This is the walled service yard and loading dock and drop off.
So there's access into the building there on the north end. And then
there's south end access into the building. So there's, in essence, the--
accessibility on both ends. - And again, you said in the middle there, there's where
we can't really see the door, it's sort of-- - This is a stairway that
links the floors, the entrance points are here on the north side. - Right there,
okay, yeah. - It goes all the way through and then on the south end,
the stairwell. - So trying to figure out with this angle, you can't see that
one door, so. - Right. - Okay, thank you. - Most of the questions that
I had have already been asked, so I won't go over them again, but there
was, the amount of parking, how much of an
opportunity is there from ISD's perspective to reduce the
parking in order to increase the pervious surface? -
That's certainly something that we'll look at. - Okay,
is 12% kind of a? over the limit.
I mean, we're pretty flexible historically, but for
that topic, that's a pretty good jump.
There was a statement made that the city codes don't allow pervious pavement. Did
I understand that correctly? No, they do allow it. They don't count as pervious
surface. For zoning and development standards purposes, pervious pavers are not. Right. You can
do it, but you just don't get credit for it. Right. Is there a
particular rationale for that? Our zoning standard is meant to mitigate not only
the stormwater. So most of the previous pavement is meant to meet
the stormwater requirements. But in terms of the quality of the environment,
including heat island, it doesn't really do much for that. So that's
why, you know, the development standards were meant to mitigate and allow for
more of the areas for planting and more for the quality of the environment,
not just stormwater. - Okay, I think that that is it in terms of
questions that I had that have already been, so I'm not gonna go over
them in the interest of. - I had just one more question I wanted
to. Ms. Craven asked a question, and if you didn't know, I
thought your quotes were appropriate for today since today is Dr. Seuss's birthday, right? Yeah.
That's pretty good. Nicely done. We're serving green eggs after the meeting, if there's any
way. Is that we have a high school that will be growing onto this
property as well and the question was about what are we doing to really encourage
non-motorized vehicle transportation to the school. We know the little guys aren't going to be
driving cars but the high schoolers may so what's the school district's program to try
to get kids out of their cars and into public transit or on a bike
or on their feet. CHRIS RODGERS: And if I can interrupt here to add to
Commissioner Brennan's concerns, I would also say that the number, as you've heard me say
before, and we've expressed this before when it came to the high school, the number
of parents, whether it's dropping off at the high school or dropping off at the
elementary school, the percentage of parents that drive their children to school and pick them
up seems to me to be quite surprising considering the environmental ethos of this area.
So I would very much like to know the answer to that question because it
seems that there's a tremendous opportunity there. Well, we transport
about half of the kids in the district to and from school on
the yellow buses. So it's a good start. It'd be nice if more
rode the bus. It's a trend that parent pickup drop-off has increased over
the years. Probably somewhat safety security related, also somewhat related to the fact
that kids are doing more extracurricular activities. They go into
all sorts of different events and service providers for either sports
and recreation or other educational issues. So we try. The Gibson-Eck
is planned to max out at about 250, and that's going
to take a few years to get there. So a fourth
of that class would be seniors and a few juniors. So,
not a large number. The other interesting piece about the GIPS and EC is
that the program is designed to strongly interact with local community businesses for internships
and that students would be at school Monday, Wednesdays and Fridays and they would
be at their internships on Tuesdays and Thursdays. So it's going to significantly
change the traffic impacts and traffic patterns during the week. But the numbers of
parking spaces that we've planned for accounts for the fact that we anticipate that
Gibson-Eck will grow to about 250 kids and that the fourth of those would
be seniors. Probably a good percentage, not much different than what the percentage of
seniors is at current high schools, would probably be drivers. We all
share a goal of getting people out of cars and using alternative
forms of transportation. One of the interesting things that came out of
the district and community and city meeting the other night was that
there are transportation plans and planning in the works. There's some hopefully
new things that will be happening. But in large part, we deal
with a suburban transportation system currently. There is no public transit. The
yellow buses provide the majority of public transportation in the region currently.
The Issaquah core area development is a 10, 20, 30-year plan, and our need
is immediate. We're going to face challenges to provide school facilities for the kids
that are here now and that come next year and the year after that
and the year after that. I think that there are opportunities in the future
As the city develops and there becomes a greater core area population, that
some of the areas that we currently use for vehicular transportation could be
converted to additional open space, green space, play fields, park space. as we
look at additional planning down the road. But reality is we really
have to provide for the circumstances that exist today and do what
we can to try and minimize We have one contingent, the parent contingent
is sort of of the mind frame that their kid has a given right to
a parking space at school and we should have a thousand parking spaces at Issaquah
High instead of 400 but we don't. So we do impose some limits and they
have to deal with it and not every kid can get a parking pass.
Corollary to that is if you don't provide some reasonable number of parking spaces on
site, then they migrate out into the community and that creates other issues and concerns.
So difficult issue. I guess that whole issue is an interesting one, but it seems
like especially in this case when you're exceeding the number of spaces that you need,
you're almost facilitating the use of a car as opposed to limiting the number of
spaces and making it somewhat competitive to get a parking space. I know the kids
would move off. I did when I was a kid and had my car. And
you get a few tickets and you try to explain that to your dad, and
pretty soon you start taking the bus. I guess that's old school. The price
of the parking space continues to go up too. So that's another disincentive.
But it seems like most of the kids are able to manage. Are
there any more questions, requests for clarifications, or anything? All right.
I'm sorry, the public comment period has been closed. But if you do have something
that you'd like to bring up, I would invite you to communicate with the staff
specifically, because we'll see that for the next-- in our packet to prepare for the
next meeting. So don't think I'm trying to prevent you from communicating. Just if you
do it directly with Amy, it would be great. So we'll now
go to the part of the last part of the community conference where the
commissioners make their observations and or recommendations regarding the application. And we'll start with
Commissioner Higgs. I have two recommendations and one
is that ISD work with the walk and roll and
safe streets to try and work around these issues about
transportation and also increase the the area for bikes and
make some bike access available where it's visible so that parents
can see it and maybe think about biking with their kids
to school. And the other observation and recommendation that I have
is surrounding public comment. around what I'm hearing most from the
public is that they would like a preservation of their quality of life.
That's what I'm hearing loud and clear. And so in order to be
good neighbors, I think that ISD should really work to mitigate some of
these issues of the excavation, the screening. So my recommendation would be to
have a fence and also build a hedge around the southern
and southeast part of the property based on public comment from
Mr. Edgar Edger Roshelson. I think that that is a very good
solution. I see that around my own kids' elementary school, which works quite
well with the adjacent properties. And so we would probably want to look
into appropriate hedges, not just putting up any old hedge, but something that
would grow rapidly and that the root systems won't lift up because it
will be close to the parking lot. So that's not lifting
up and causing a problem for the parking lot. So possibly
laurels, that's a quick growing, very attractive hedge that has, from
what I know, a pretty solid root system and is inexpensive
to maintain. So I think the combination of you're shaking your head. It's not
inexpensive to maintain, but go ahead. Well, the reason why I said it's inexpensive
to maintain is because we won't be dealing with falling limbs. which could
be a little dangerous around there. And so that's why I'm suggesting laurels. They
grow quickly and hedge trimmers can take care of them and they don't have
the drop off. of the limbs that could be dangerous to homes
and windows as well. And also don't have the deep root systems
that can uplift the pavement. So those are my two recommendations.
Thank you. Mr. Schiller? Mine centered around the excess parking and the
variance going to be necessary for the impervious issue and the impact
in that southwest parking lot to the community of the south. So
just trying to think about how to move to create additional buffer
moving the south most part of the facility north. trying to create that.
So I guess one other concern was in that loop on the west side of
the property where the people are supposed to drive through, drop off kids, and drive
out, there's a parallel parking or perpendicular parking all along there. And I think that's
going to create a real serious traffic problem when people are parking as well as
pulling out and trying to get going. So I think you might want to look
at that. That's it. Similar concerns, so I'll just kind
of validate a couple here. One is just the south boundary and sensitivity to
the neighbors and finding a way in a combination of fencing, robust screening landscaping
and potentially reconfiguring particularly that parking area a bit to create a little bit
more of a buffer there. I think is something that the district and the
design team should look at. I think that will be something we'll be paying close
attention to when this comes back, if this comes back, unless it hands down a
different process. Again, really looking hard at LID opportunities, understanding some have been incorporated here,
but those that we can add to the property on site, even allowing the kids
to see them as they're on the property too. I think they're an educational thing
as well if they're done right. I think what we did, or what the district
did at the high school, I think was a good example of integrating a number
of different LID principles on the site and into the actually into the building even
did a green roof so I thought that was a great kind of leadership example
of the district kind of putting its green foot forward and maybe there's more that
could be done on this property as this opportunity presents itself so I'd like to
see that challenged a bit The perimeter landscaping, it seems thin to me around this
project, around the property, particularly on the south and on the west properties. And I
know over on the west side, it's fairly limited. We have a steep slope there.
So we've got some already a bit of a buffer that occurs to those properties
that slopes away. but on the property itself there's a fairly limited amount of landscaping
that's been provided and if there's any opportunity to enhance that i think that would
be good again it's part of the concern about um blair etc that could be
coming from the vehicles now that are planned to travel down through that portion of
the site so that would kind of both and then from a screening standpoint help
on that front. And I'm still a little puzzled by the process side and how
this moves forward and what the threshold triggers are for the height question and then
the impervious question and what triggers heading to a variance and to the hearing examiner
versus sticking with the commission. But I guess that'll be a staff call depending on
how the design advances from here. So those would be my comments. Thank you,
sir. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I'd like to thank the
the staff and the neighbors for coming down. It's really nice to see so many
neighbors that comes down who are concerned about the neighborhood. And being the front street
and the center city of Issaquah, there's a lot of things that's happening in that
area. So it's really nice to see you folks come over and express your concern.
And rightly so, those are concerns that you have voiced. Those are concerns that I
would have if I was leading that area. So thank you for spending your evening
coming down here. I guess looking at the site, there seems to be a
lot of concern on the west side of the property. And it seems like
there needs to be more work that needs to be done to kind of
push the facilities, the buildings, onto the west side to
continue the concerns the neighbor would have, the comfort and then the livelihood of the
folks in the city of Issaquah. And trying to get to that point, I guess
my recommendation is that to push those buildings to the west side and then allow
the east side of the building, east side of the lot to have the circulation,
whatever you might have. I know it gets to a point where How much do
you want to spend? We have the buildings that's existing. Do we want to tear
it all down and then start new? It goes back to the issue of cost.
So you don't want to keep tearing down every building when you come across issues
like that. But this is something that I think all the kids around in the
neighborhood, all the young families coming to Issaquah, they look at what schools are my
kids going to go to? And they see something like this, I guess it's okay,
but then there's so much that can be done here. I like the idea of
separating the parents, vehicles coming in, and then the buses. There's always the possibility of
accident, kids running into the wrong lane, you know, get hit, and nobody wants that
to happen. So in this case, I think the design was able to
do that. But I think that you can still improve that. I
guess I would ask the designer or the architect to look at
maybe pushing the driveway all the way to the west side and
the bus lane onto the west side and then the parent's vehicle
coming in and then exiting onto the north side of
the property. And then just so you don't have, right, just so you
don't have this too really, really long driveway when you have such a
tight site. And then you have all those portables that's taking up all
this valuable real estate when you can put them into a building, combine
them, I understand the fiscal, the financial issue here, and that's what we're all talking
about. But seems to me, you know, if we continue on this route of putting
the parents drop off on the west side of the building, eventually that's what's going
to be a permanent thing. And for the neighbors living in that area, it is
not an ideal situation. It is a very long driveway. and have to drop your
kid off, you have to drive all the way to the south end of the
property to turn around and to drop your kid off. A lot of parents would
just sit there in the corner, the northwest corner of the building and wait for
the kid to be dropped off and they turn around and then take off. So
what you created there is that you're going to create a lot of traffic standing
in that corner waiting for little Johnny to get off the the car so that
the parents don't have to sit and wait and drive all the way
to the south end of the property to drop off the kid. Same
thing with pickup. Parents would come in and sit in that corner waiting
for little John to come out. I understand and I know the point
that there are traffic monitors. They work well, but then a lot of
times, It does not work. And when you have emergency vehicles coming in and
you have all those string of cars sitting there waiting to come in or go
out, you just create a problem there. So I think the site needs to be
re-looked at. I hate to say this, being an architect myself, but there's a lot
of effort that went into it. And I would hate to have you re-look at
this. But I think in this case, you really need to look at this And
for the fact that Clark, you know, it's a great school. My kids
went to Clark. Great school, great school district. That's why we're here. But
there's a lot of things that needs to be done on here that
gives a better impression of the city of Issaquah. Again, I want to
repeat the fact that on the west side of the building, there's a
bottleneck there. It's nice you say there's a traffic
monitor. That's true. But the physical fact is that there
is a bottleneck there. The point was made by one
of the parents or retirees on the southwest corner. You
have a little area there where the kids can congregate
on Friday night or Saturday night. I shared a concern,
and I don't know I guess you can
push the parking lot there, push it closer to the
building to eliminate that problem. But there is a problem
there. Even with the fence, with the gate that's all
locked, you still have that problem. Utility vehicles, I know
that there's a service Again, the service vehicle that's coming in,
they would have to back into that service yard. And when they're all
done with it, they have to come all the way out again, going
all the way to the south end of the parking of the property,
turn around and go back out. It just seems like there's a lot
of wasted asphalt or concrete pavement there. So again, I would look at,
exiting the vehicle, creating an exit onto the east side
of the-- from the east side of the property. I
know there's some issues there. I don't know what solution
I can offer you, but it seems to me exiting
to the east side from the east side of the
property seems to be something that needs to be looked
at. Again, I'll just leave all the design work for the architect and don't
want to mess around with the architect. So that's all that I have, Mr. Chairman.
CHRIS JERRAM: Thank you. CHRIS JERRAM: Just three things. Buffer on the south side, I
think that really needs to be looked at. An idea might be to go over
and look at IVE on the south end of Issaquah Valley Elementary. CHRIS JERRAM: --is
some buffer and area where there's-- ELIZABETH BUTLER: That's where my kids go to school.
CHRIS JERRAM: --some hedges, and then there's a condo complex just adjacent, very similar. This,
I think another thing that needs to be looked at is footpaths and sidewalks. We
talked a little bit about that, the incomplete sidewalk in the bus turnaround area. And
then since we've all been beating to death the west side drop off, area, and
that is a very tight space. I've worked a lot of seven days fundraisers, parking
cars behind IMS in my day, because both my kids went to IMS. And I
know it might look good on paper, but that is a tight spot back there.
And that's something that needs to really be looked at, because I think it's going
to get to be a bottleneck, as Ray said. That's it for me. RAY SUAREZ:
Thank you, sir. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Let's see. First of all, thank you to
the public for coming in, providing your comments and all your thoughts and detailed thoughts.
We appreciate those very much. And thank you to the Issaquah School District for the
hard work they're doing, all for the benefit of the kids in Issaquah, which is
the most important part of all of this. I do want to say one thing
I do appreciate the architecture a lot of the modulation that we're seeing in the
buildings that are being planned and and some of the changes in in coloration between
the first floor and the second floor and so forth I think Amy pointed out
some nice design features in the buildings themselves and appreciate that and it'll be good
to see color boards at the SDP let's see so a few things I think
the Number one, a better delineation or an actual sidewalk for
students on Southeast First Avenue to get the bush. I think it may
be one thing for middle schoolers to make a walk along a street
that's just a painted sidewalk. But I think for grade schoolers to make
it safe for them to walk, we really need to have a decent
sidewalk to make it walkable. the south parking
lot. And I know this has already been covered, but
a couple of things I would recommend specifically would be
that the play field-- right now the play field, the
south border of the play field-- and Amy, could you
pull this up? Is that OK? Is that all right,
Mr. Chair? Sure. If you can pull up-- is it
possible to pull up A1.1, the site plan? Will this
one work?
It's the same thing with just the
circulation. Yeah, maybe yours worked better. And
then if you can zoom in on
the southwest corner, the parking lot and
the play field. So let me try
something here to zoom in. Oops, sorry.
Not the right one. OK, what happened
to you? Usually zoom at the bottom
of the screen. Lower right corner, just drag that
icon. Yeah, there's a measurement thing over there. It says 77%. What project is
this? So this is not the right slide. So I have to go back
to your-- This one, look at the circulation. Which one? This one. Yeah. But
this isn't the right one. I guess I can use this. Put that back
to the other slides you had before. Yeah. So here's what I can do.
It's not showing. OK. Let's try that
again. So I guess this one, we can't zoom
in. OK. So I guess what I'll point out
is the bottom portion of the play field, we
can see where it angles down to the left.
So the upper right portion of that, the upper right corner-- not there, but
right down there-- that about lines up with a 30-foot building setback. And I
know there's no building there, but it doesn't seem to me that it's necessary
for that play field to extend down closer to the property line there. I
would suggest the play field be pulled back to-- a minimum of 30 feet
from the property line that then allows room to put a solid hedge in there.
It was brought up by Essie and it was brought up by a homeowner that
a perfect place to plant a hedge. And then I would say on the south
end of the parking lot, there are 10 stalls right there that all cars would
be pointing straight into the condos. I would suggest that all of those stalls be
taken out And again, that parking area, the pavement moved back at least 30
feet from the edge. So you could have one continuous row of hedge all the
way along that south property border with a 30 foot width there. We lose only
10 parking stalls. And you don't have any cars then that are pointing in towards
the condos when they're parking. And there's also one other thing, and I'm not
sure exactly where it is, but there's an 18-inch cedar at that southwest corner shown
on the existing site plan. And I think it would be great to-- if we
need the pervious area and we're trying to move that, create a better border with
the condo owners, it would be great to maintain that 18-inch cedar at the same
time. So those are my recommendations for that south parking lot and
hopefully creating a better border with the condos to the south. And I would hopefully
recommend-- I hope the condo owners have maybe a homeowner association president or somebody that
can represent them dealing with the school district to work on what that hedge would
be made of. Let's see, also on the west side of the building, both the
existing building right now, which the west side of that is really just on a
driveway that nobody really uses. But now we're going to be putting really a lot
of the parents are going to be driving by the west side. And both the
existing building and then a good portion of the new building have blank walls. And
Amy, I know in your report, you brought up the issue. I think those two
walls will be really critical for the appearance of these buildings because we don't want
parents driving by just blank brick walls every day. I think it's a perfect
opportunity to put some art into the architecture and create something that's going to
be interesting in the building, fun for the students, fun for the parents, a
great canvas for the school district and the architect to work together on.
And then my last comment is, Christopher, I sure hope that we get to see
any signage in front of the development commission. Because this will be an important sign
that a lot of people are going to drive by. So if there's a chance
for us to opine on any new signage, we'd love to do so, I think.
Thank you very much. CHRIS JERRAM: Thank you, Commissioner. We're going to deviate from the
norm a little bit here. The representatives of the city staff, Amy and Christopher, I'm
going to give them the opportunity now to directly answer some of the questions that
were raised by members of the public. So go ahead, Christopher, go ahead and do
that. Actually, I wanted to address some comments made by the commission. That's fine. And
they're having to do with process. And I almost made it through this whole meeting
without having to say anything. Almost. But with regard to process, the expansion of the
nonconformity for height, there are several criteria in the code that need to be met
in order to do that. And those criteria have to do with impacts to adjacent
properties and public benefit. So like I said, there's several criteria. And in our staff
report for the site development permit, we'll have to show how each of those criteria
are being met. Great. But I also wanted to point out a possible
scenario with regard to the next steps, which are if the school district does want
to apply for a variance to increase the impervious, because again they can't use that
expansion of a nonconformity with regard to impervious. They will have to apply for a
variance right now if they want to go over that 50%. And if they did,
a likely scenario would be that the variance would be kind of be bundled with
the site development permit and it would all go to the hearing examiner for a
decision. So if they apply for a variance, it's possible you guys will not
have another chance to review and comment. And the hearing examiner would be the decision
maker on the project. How often does that happen? It's happened a couple of times
in the last 25 years. They'd be the decider on all the whole SDP then?
So what Christopher is referring to is in the code there is a section that
talks about consolidated review and basically when you have multiple types of reviews for the
same project it gets elevated to the highest level of review. So in this case
it would be a level four which is with the hearing examiner. OK. Just a
quick question. But in that case what we've done here tonight would be on the
record for the hearing examiner's consideration. Right. OK. And the
public would have -- The public has a right to attend the hearing examiner
meeting? Yeah. Part of this is that we can only have one public hearing
for a project. And so what the hearing examiner would hold would be a
public hearing which would have the same opportunity of public comment as if it
was coming here. Anything else, Christopher? Not for me, no. Thank you.
I believe that the school district-- I frequently point out to people in this that
there's a process that just because you got there first doesn't mean that whoever has
the property next to you doesn't get to comply with city code and zoning and
things to do whatever they want to do with it, as long as it is
absolutely compliant and impact fees are met and so on and so forth. But I
believe that this is one of those instances where the applicant has an obligation
to the neighbors, to the property owner, the adjacent property owners, to address the
concerns that were expressed here tonight. shall we say, undesirable for this excellent
needed project. There's no question in my mind about the need for the Issaquah School
District to accommodate growth. It's absolutely not the issue. But I believe that there is
an unusual obligation because of the proximity and because of the number of vehicles, the
construction schedule, and so on, there is an elevated responsibility on the part of the
applicant and the city staff to address the concerns that were expressed
here tonight by the adjacent property owners. I believe that those concerns are absolutely legitimate.
When it comes to security, I would suggest that in the Southwest parking lot, as
well as every other area inside the city limits, it is the responsibility of the
Issaquah Police Department to ensure that crimes that are being committed or the potential for
crimes being committed are addressed by the Issaquah Police Department. The Issaquah Police Department
can only do that if they are informed of concerns by
the neighbors. So ultimately-- The IPD says this in all their public hearings and interviews
and so on. It's really up to the people that have the concerns to get
them to the police department and say, this is going on and it's got to
be addressed. So I think it's a legitimate concern to look at that as an
opportunity for Saturday night beer drinking and God knows what else. Absolutely. But it's really
going to be up to the property owners that if and when you see that,
to make sure that there is a clear presentation made to the city,
the elected staff, and the police department to address it. The landscaping plan,
obviously, we talked about the screen down there to protect the neighbors to
the degree possible from light and sound pollution. But I also wanted
to add to Commissioner Morgan's observation that on the elevations, I
know we don't have a final landscaping plan here. But I
do also think that there's an opportunity there for the elevations
that are mostly walls now to be used creatively, both for
aesthetic purposes and also just to soften the--
the presence of what are now presented to us
here at this stage in the game is blank
walls. So I think there's some real good opportunities
there. Excuse me. Everybody addressed it. I hesitate to
make a negative observation without being able to offer
a positive, realistic suggestion. But I am really concerned
about the parent pick up and drop off approach. I
understand the physical constraints, the fiscal constraints, and the realities of
parents who are late and are going to drop their kids
off wherever they can. But Commissioner Morgan also noted the perpendicular
parking there. And if it weren't for the perpendicular parking, I'd
still have concerns. But for perpendicular parking, to be added to
that uh traffic design aside from the bumper you know the the
bumper benders people coming out at the same time it's i don't
see any alternative to increased congestion being caused by the the ability
of people to use the parking places even if they're not supposed
to so that that Eliminating the ones down there at the bottom is
a good start, but especially if you have the option of dropping parking places
in various aspects of the plan to meet the city required minimum, I would
really consider looking at that or recommend looking at that. In closing, I
believe that the package was great as always from the city staff. I appreciate the
preparation there. I also very much appreciate the ISD staff preparation for this, the planning
and the elevations that were given to us and the explanations that were given and
the time to address the concerns that have been raised by the public, which will
continue to require everybody's attention. But I also very much want, as my fellow commissioners
have done, to express my appreciation for the members of the public who've come in.
Basically, you're the reason that we're here. This is a public, and the subsequent is
a public hearing. It is a community conference. And if members of the community and
the public don't show up, then We can call it that, but it doesn't do
what it's intended to do. So on a weeknight, for you to come out and
take the time to prepare your presentations and then give them to us and sit
through this is greatly appreciated by all of us. And it will make this project
better, believe me. So with that, if there are no more comments, questions, candy-coated snacks,
we'll close this meeting tonight. So the meeting is adjourned. Thank you. Good job.
Nice job, Mr. Chair, as always. But I'll give you that always.
Yes.