Spokane official felt Kendall Yards duress

Spokane’s outgoing director of public works and utilities apparently felt his professional integrity was being threatened by a rush to gain approval of a large new Kendall Yards commercial and residential development on the north bank of the Spokane River.

Director Roger Flint last year had been given the job of overseeing the city’s regulatory processing of the project, but asked in a pair of memos to Mayor Dennis Hession to be taken off the job rather than be expected to become an “advocate” for the project. Copies of the memos were obtained by The Spokesman-Review.

Back in April, Hession agreed to reassign the job to Economic Development Director John Pilcher in a shuffling of duties. Flint subsequently turned in his resignation to take a new job as Spokane manager and vice president for CH2M Hill, an international engineering firm with more than $4 million in public works contracts with the city.

Flint said in a recent interview that he was unwilling to grant traffic changes sought by developer Marshall Chesrown without sufficient documentation to ensure that they would not cause vehicle congestion and air pollution. Flint said he has a professional obligation to the broader public, even though he favors the economic development promised by the Chesrown project.

“We have greater responsibility as public servants and public administrators,” Flint said in the interview.

He said he was not leaving because of pressure to approve Kendall Yards’ requests but because CH2M Hill offered him a new opportunity in his career.

His insistence that traffic flow not be hampered by the project brought private complaints and phone calls from business leaders, he said, and the controversy led to a meeting involving Hession, the developer and a regional Chamber of Commerce representative earlier this year.

“I’ve been called by everybody,” he said of a behind-the-scenes lobbying effort to get Chesrown his approvals.

Hession said Wednesday he has urged Flint and others working on the project at City Hall to never compromise their professional judgment, and would never ask for that. He said that if there is a rush to get the development approved it may stem from the fact that the property under a previous owner had sat vacant for more than a decade despite a lot of previous project planning. Now, Chesrown has an aggressive schedule to start work.

Hession said he decided to appoint Pilcher to head a City Hall task force on Kendall Yards because the relationship between the developer and Flint had become strained. Also, there is no discussion of any changes of codes or laws to accommodate Chesrown, he said.

Possibly the most contentious issue is a proposal by Chesrown to put a new traffic light at the north end of the Monroe Street Bridge at Bridge Avenue. The eastern entrance to Kendall Yards would be at the newly designed intersection proposed by the developer.

A representative of the developer said on Wednesday that the light would be installed as a protection to pedestrians seeking to cross Monroe on their way to and from downtown. North-south through traffic would only be required to stop when pedestrians activate the light, said project manager Tom Reese.

But Chesrown’s proposal threatens to scuttle a previously funded plan to relocate Bridge Avenue about a half-block to the north, a project shepherded by Flint to create an improved commuter connection between Monroe and Lincoln streets north of the river.

That City Hall plan, which has been deemed in compliance with air quality standards, has been granted nearly $900,000 in federal funding through the Spokane Regional Transportation Council.

Chesrown’s traffic engineering consultant has submitted insufficient data to show that Chesrown’s proposed intersection would meet air quality standards while at the same time attracting an estimated 370 vehicles making left-hand turns into Kendall Yards during the peak hour of afternoon traffic after the first phase of construction.

“The city is being blamed, and I personally am being blamed, for them not getting their stoplight,” Flint said in the interview.

His memo to Hession, dated Feb. 16, detailed his concerns.

“I continue to be singled out as an obstacle to this project’s success,” he wrote to the mayor. “The city team I have assembled has been trying to advise Kendall Yards on the paths that will make this project happen as quickly as possible.”

“The city has a regulatory role to ensure city/state/federal requirements are being followed in order to safeguard the good of the overall public interest,” Flint continued, and then singled out the developer for not working with the city.

“The constant changes and lack of information being submitted by the developer makes this very difficult for them to accomplish.”

Flint said that he believed the developer was seeking a “project advocate or ombudsman” at City Hall. One possible solution to the controversy, he told the mayor, was “political involvement” to change the government standards.

He said that with the legal obligations he faces as director of public works and utilities, “I believe this type of role would put me in a compromising position that I do not feel comfortable with.”

In a separate memorandum to city officials last month, an independent traffic consultant said that Kendall Yards had submitted insufficient information to show that its traffic proposals would be safe, and said that preliminary traffic data indicated that back-ups could be caused by motorists seeking to turn left at the north end of the bridge to gain access to the development.

Reese, project manager for Kendall Yards, said, “We haven’t been blaming anybody for anything.”

He said final traffic data is being assembled and will be submitted to the city in the near future. He said the developer’s proposal for a pedestrian light and reconfigured intersection at Bridge and Monroe would create a safer pedestrian connection between downtown and the proposed 400 residential units and 450,000 square feet of commercial and office space to be built in the first phase of the project.

“It is entirely about pedestrian-oriented development,” Reese said. “At the end of the day, we are going to get it resolved,” he said about the traffic issues.

“The merits of the project stand on their own.”