At a meeting of the city council’s land use committee yesterday, council president Richard Conlin got “kind of annoyed,” as he put it later, when staffers informed council members that upzoning a small parcel of land near the Roosevelt light rail station could delay the project by as much as a year. As a solution, committee chair Sally Clark suggested putting off the specific upzone indefinitely while the rest of the zoning changes around the rail station move forward. The committee did not take a vote.
The suddenly problematic upzone, part of a compromise proposed by neighborhood residents, comes after months of debate over zoning near the light-rail station. Mayor Mike McGinn proposed increasing heights around the station as high as 85 feet, an idea some neighborhood residents opposed on the grounds that the neighborhood had already negotiated a deal with the city that would allow buildings at the station up to 65 feet. The compromise plan would allow heights up to 85 feet in some areas, while limiting them to 40 feet in others.
Yesterday’s discussion centered on a parcel of land between NE 66th St. and NE 68th St. at the northwest corner of the station (the light-blue square in the upper-left corner in the image below). Neighborhood residents argue that taller buildings make sense on that corner, which is surrounded by tall residential buildings, I-5, and a large church.
The change, from low-rise zoning to midrise, would increase the total capacity for housing on that corner from 183 units to 399 units. In exchange for agreeing to taller buildings on the northwest corner of the station, neighborhood residents have also proposed preserving a 40-foot height limit between NE 65th St. and NE 66th St. and between 12th Ave. NE and 15th Ave. NE (the orange rectangle below) instead of going up to 65 feet, as McGinn proposed.
Conlin said he was “disappointed” that the city’s Department of Planning and Development, which is responsible for reviewing zoning changes like this one under the State Environmental Policy Act (SEPA), hadn’t already started the review. SEPA review takes about a month, but if anyone files a challenge under SEPA, that can add as much as another year to the process. The holidays could delay that timeline by another month.
“Are you’re telling me that [if the city had initiated the review when they first started discussing the compromise proposal] we would be in a position to say yes or no at this point?” Conlin asked. Committee chair Sally Clark responded that that may be the case, “but we are where we are.”
“I’m kind of annoyed, because I asked DPD to analyze the neighborhood’s proposal so we could proceed, and they didn’t do that,” Conlin said after the meeting. “I feel like I probably dropped the ball because I didn’t push” DPD to start the review. “I told them I wanted this to happen, and I sort of assumed that they would do it.”
Clark says she’d prefer to “hold aside” discussion about the parcel until it can go through environmental review, allowing most of the rezone to move forward. That would delay the upzone on the northwest corner until the council discusses what to do with a separate piece of land southwest of the rail station, which could be as much as a couple of years from now. That way, “we won’t delay the whole package—we’ll just delay the decision in that square,” Clark says.
The council will find out today how long a review will take, and will decide at a subsequent committee meeting whether to go forward with the compromise zoning proposal or postpone it until later.
