Opposition Group Requests Parkplace Draft Environmental Impact Study Be Redone
Kirkland Citizens for Responsible Development (KCRD), a group that opposes the Kirkland Parkplace mixed-use redevelopment map, has sent a formal request to the City of Kirkland Planning Commission asking that the Draft Environmental Impact Study (DEIS) be redone before any recommendations or actions are taken on the project. The KCRD submitted an EIS Comments Letter as well as a letter from their engineer supporting their claims.
In a press release dated May 19, the group stated, ”Citing flawed traffic and parking analyses, as well as a failure to meet the legal requirements of the State Environmental Protection Act (SEPA), Kirkland CRD asked that the Planning Commission mandate a new traffic study and parking analysis and the release of a revised version of the DEIS for public comment…”
“KCRD further requested that the DEIS be amended to address changes to the city’s transportation and financing plans that would be triggered by the project. Specifically, the group is looking for the city to account for where the funding will come from for the more than $13 million in traffic mitigation projects and the additional 13.5 firefighters and police positions identified in the DEIS.”
“The traffic study is flawed and it seriously understates the amount of peak hour traffic, and according to the experts, it was done incorrectly,” states Ken Davidson, founder of KCRD and owner of The Emerald Building, an adjacent office building. “The DEIS uses the unrealistic assumption that 78 percent of workers will arrive in SOV (single occupancy vehicles), when the U.S. Census data and the City’s own survey of office buildings demonstrates 86 – 87 percent will arrive in SOV. When you correct the numbers, more intersections will fail—potentially with no possible solution, or solutions that will be far more costly than estimated,” he adds.
According to KCRD, the City paid $250,000 of public funds for the EIS process so they could maintain control of the analysis.
KCRD did not suggest who they thought should pay for a new Draft Environmental Impact Study.
What are your views? How should the parking spaces requirement be calculated in a mixed-use development like Parkplace? The calculations for parking requirements claimed by KCRD and Touchstone are very different. What parking requirements did the Google development have?
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I like the idea of he City controlling the EIS. When the developer commisions an analysis, the consulkting foirm doing the work is under thegun to come up with the “right answer” for the developer.
I heard that Google actually asked for their developer to build MORE parking thatn the code called for They use less office space per employee than the parking standard assumes, so they expect to have more demand. Note that they are further from downtown, where the land is less pricey, and they surely made this parking amount a condition of their leaseof the buildings. Park Place will be in the poostion of having to get office tenants to buy off on the parking system and space that they are providing.
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Great for cities to control EIS, but usually, they still make the developer pay for it! Not good for you to foot the bill. And in this case, taxpayers should be a mite irritated they did not get what they paid for as the DEIS is flowed such that lawsuits (read more budget money) are inevitable if they don’t go back to the drawing board. City seems to have a hard time not chasing their tail these days…especially if the last meeting was an example!
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At its meeting last night the Kirkland Planning Commission voted to consider building heights of up to 11 stories, rather than the 8 stories originally requested, at the Parkplace site. Because of so much demand from the public for shorter buildings on the perimeter of the site, the idea was put forward of having some buildings at the center of the site higher than 8 stories so that other buildings could be shorter, with the same total square feet of office and retail as proposed. The public will have a chance to comment on these ideas at public hearings in June.
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