Hearing Examiner Approves Riverside Village Project
Developer Buster Heitman has been given approval to move ahead with his plan to develop 52-acre Riverside Village on the east side of Nine Mile Road.
The project includes 102 homes, apartments and a 52-bed alzheimer’s disease care center.
Spokane Hearing Examiner Greg Smith approved the project with conditions that include road improvements and signals.
Traffic was the biggest concern mentioned by neighbors during a community meeting in December. Heitman will pay for a turn lane to his project and for the traffic signal at State Route 291 and the new section of Rifle Club Road.
However, the left turn lane into the existing Rifle Club Road on the west side will be the responsibility of the state Department of Transportation, and the city.
Heitman has agreed to install the traffic signal after 75 lots are built.
In addition to the homes and care center, the project includes five sixplexes and a 12-unit apartment building. More than 20 of the 52 acres will be common area and open space. Most of that includes the steep slopes on the eastern portion of the site.
A slightly different version of the project, which didn’t include the alzheimer’s center, was approved in 1996.
The project falls within the planning area of the Indian Trail Specific Plan. The neighborhood plan prohibits entrance gates for planned unit developments.
However, in this case, since none of the entries face other Indian Trail subdivisions or streets, the hearing examiner is allowing a gated entry.
An emergency access road from the highway will be gated to prevent it from being used for nonemergencies.
Construction of the alzheimer’s center is expected to begin early this spring.
Other conditions of the approval include establishing a homeowners association for maintaining the streets, common areas and storm water. The developer is also required to submit final landscape plans for the development.
In other planning matters
A decision is expected soon on an application by James O. Hagen to rezone property from multifamily residential to residential office. Hagen wants to add 18 off-street parking spaces at his chiropractic office at West Francis Avenue and Jefferson.
The hearing examiner is also considering an application by Goodale and Barbieri to allow two 75-square-foot signs on the east and west wall of the former IBM building at 201 W. North River Drive. The building is within the Central Falls shoreline, where 35 feet is the maximum height limit for a sign.
The two proposed signs would be about 82 feet above the building’s finished grade.
, DataTimes