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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Spokane Valley hopes study sparks change

Plan faces opposition from business group

Spokane Valley will pay $150,000 for an environmental study city officials hope will encourage redevelopment of a mile-long, 145-acre section of the Sprague-Appleway corridor.

Almost all of the land – bounded by Walnut and Bowdish roads, and by Main and Fourth avenues – is privately owned, but city officials hope the entire community will benefit.

“Communities are in a very competitive arena when we talk about attracting private investment, and oftentimes those areas that have parcels that are the most development ready are the ones that the investment will flow to first,” City Manager Dave Mercier said.

He likened the study to the city’s efforts to make street projects “shovel ready” so they can qualify for federal economic-stimulus money that must be spent quickly.

Critics, on the other hand, see public enrichment of private interests.

“I don’t think it should happen at the expense of all the other small-business men who aren’t as well connected with the city as these city center people seem to be,” said Susan Scott, co-owner of Lark Enterprises Inc. and secretary of Friends of Spokane Valley, a business group that opposes the Sprague-Appleway plan.

“All this is predicated on land the city doesn’t own,” Scott said.

Friends of Spokane Valley signaled in a prepared statement that it views the environmental impact statement as a new avenue the group can use to challenge the project.

“It is particularly troubling that the city has neglected to identify and include water quality (aquifer protection and sewer capacity issues) in the areas for discussion,” the group stated. “The proposed special interest-driven densities in the city center area will affect the quality of life for the entire valley.”

The group said it supports the “no-action” option state law requires the study to consider.

According to a document city officials distributed at a meeting last week, two other options call for dividing the 145-acre city center zone into four subareas: north, south, east central and west central.

Everything between Main and Sprague avenues would be in the north subarea; everything between Fourth Avenue and the present and future Appleway Boulevard would be in the south. The east central and west central areas are sandwiched between the north and south areas, divided by University Road.

One option calls for “high-intensity mixed-use” – with a 50-50 mix of retail and four-story, high-density residential development in the north, east central and west central subareas. Apartments and townhouses would constitute 90 percent of the south subarea, and the rest would be devoted to mixed office-retail development.

The second option calls for “low-intensity mixed use” – with one-story retail, office and service buildings in 60 percent of the north subarea and “high-density” residential in the rest of that area; 80 percent high-density residential and 20 percent commercial mix in the east central subarea; a mix of one-story commercial buildings in the west central subarea; and 90 percent townhouses and apartment and a 10 percent office-retail mix in the south subarea.

Under a contract authorized by the City Council last June and signed in January, the environmental impact study will be performed by Berger/Abam Engineers, based in Federal Way, Wash. The firm helped conduct last week’s public meeting to refine the scope of the study. Seven people attended.

Subject to changes based on citizen comments, Berger/Abam’s contract calls for the study to focus on transportation, land use, public services and utilities, and air quality. It is expected to be published this fall, triggering a 45-day public comment period.

Barring issues identified in the “scoping process,” the contract says other environmental impacts won’t be studied because they’re expected to be insignificant in an already developed area.

The area to be studied is the entire “city center core” zone proposed in the Sprague-Appleway Revitalization Plan, not the five- to nine-acre site of a proposed new city hall in what is now the University City Shopping Center. Nor is it the downtown-style district on the rest of U-City’s 35 acres, for which city officials hope the municipal building will be a catalyst.

In an open letter to Mercier, Spokane Valley resident Katie Krauss questions the propriety of spending city money on an environmental impact study when the city hasn’t purchased the city hall land and University City Inc. hasn’t yet named a developer for the private shopping center renovation.

“It is my understanding that it is the responsibility of city officials to make sure the funding is available before developing an environmental impact statement,” Krauss wrote. “Could it be that you have the cart before the horse?”

In his reply to Krauss, Mercier said the study “is the type of economic-development activity that a city can perform in pursuit of community betterment.”

Mercier said in an interview that the environmental review will cover the entire city center core zone to encourage more projects as the shopping center renovation “ripples wider and wider and wider.” He said he didn’t know what the study would have cost if it had been limited to University City or the proposed city hall site.

Given the uncertainty of starting any of the work in the current economy, could the environmental impact statement be out of date before anyone can use it?

“Time will tell,” Mercier said.

Some updates may be needed, but “I think that the work that we’ll do now will serve a valuable purpose for some number of years in the future,” he said.

Mercier discounted the possibility that such a broad environmental study could create liability or extra expense for the city if, for example, it turned up contamination from an abandoned gasoline station.

Past and present owners of contaminated property would be responsible for further environmental analysis as well as any cleanup, Mercier said.

John Craig may be contacted at johnc@spokesman.com.