Commission denies road closure request
Ben Burr Road on Moran Prairie will remain a road, Spokane County commissioners decided Tuesday.
Commissioners unanimously, if reluctantly, rejected a request to close and sell a portion of the road between 57th and 61st avenues. The closure would have allowed Black Development to build a shopping center, including a Yoke’s supermarket, on top of the road.
“Whether we like it or not, we are sworn to uphold the state law,” Commissioner Todd Mielke said.
Commissioner Mark Richard agreed that a state law prohibiting closure of “useful” roads denied commissioners the flexibility “to do the best” in this situation.
Richard and Mielke said the area, already zoned for “community commercial” use, may not be as well-developed under a different plan. Traffic safety may be compromised, they said.
Commissioner Bonnie Mager said she also had hoped Black Development could work out a “win-win” agreement with area residents – who overwhelmingly oppose vacation of Ben Burr Road.
But, Mager said, “We can’t really say how this is going to get developed. … I really don’t want to get caught up in (predictions of) dire consequences about what will happen.”
State law says county commissioners must “consider” their engineer’s report along with other testimony, and refuse to give up any useful part of the county road system. If a road isn’t useful, commissioners must still determine that vacating it would benefit the public.
County Engineer Bob Brueggeman told commissioners the disputed section of Ben Burr Road is useful because motorists use it for 450 trips a day on average, including 60 evening “peak hour” trips. With that much traffic, and only one noninjury collision in the past five years, “it does not appear that the public will be benefited by this vacation,” Brueggeman reported.
No testimony was taken Tuesday, but residents said in letters and at a public hearing several weeks ago that they value the relatively lightly traveled Ben Burr Road as an alternative to the parallel Palouse Highway. They said Ben Burr provides a back road to homes and Moran Prairie Elementary School and a place where they and their children can walk, run and ride their bicycles.
Black Development tried to address those issues by offering to build a 10-foot-wide pedestrian-bicycle trail at the western edge of their property, separated from the Palouse Highway by a runoff swale and a sidewalk. The company also offered to buy land and extend the trail across the Palouse Highway at 61st Avenue, to the water park the county parks department is building at 61st and Freya Street.
But the company still wasn’t able to win the support of residents and the Moran Prairie Elementary Parent Teacher Group.
Mielke said opponents who want to maintain the status quo “are failing to see the reality” that development will inevitably bring change, but Ben Burr can’t be vacated without their support.
“Our door is not closed to this issue,” Richard said.
Black Development spokesman Greg Sweeney said outside the meeting that he doesn’t know how Black Development will respond to the decision, but it’s likely the company will switch to a “less desirable” project that doesn’t require closure of Ben Burr Road.