Urban designers are evaluating options for the layout of the 34-acre Broadway Corridor site, including park spaces and the block configuration.

ZGF Architects has come up with three possible master plans for the site. Each one is designed to accommodate the 3.8 million square feet of development that is expected in the Northwest Portland district.

The three concepts are known as “Play,” “Discovery” and “Nature.” They were presented to the Portland Design Commission in an informational briefing Thursday. Designers are tentatively set to return in mid-December for a design advice request.

Each option would continue the Green Loop and set aside space for buildings. A park is likely to be built in front of the Pacific Northwest College of Art, at 511 N.W. Broadway, and extend the Park Blocks northward.

One option would have a podium with a skate park stepping up to the Broadway Bridge. The master plans offer different configurations of parcels that would translate to large floor plates or smaller office plates.

Julie Livingston, chairwoman of the Design Commission, told the designers on Thursday to integrate the Broadway Corridor into its surroundings.

“How is what is being proposed not an inward-facing campus?” she asked.

The Broadway Corridor site was created by the U.S. Postal Service’s move to the Portland International Airport area. Union Station and vacant parcels are also part of the plan.

Continuum Partners of Denver was selected in April by Prosper Portland as master developer of the 14-acre Postal Service property – the largest single portion of the larger Broadway Corridor.

A request for proposals closed Friday for pre-development project management services at the USPS site.

A Pearl District resident, Glenn Traeger, on Thursday urged the planners to account for the area’s traffic woes.

“We are at a stage where we need a transportation study,” he said.

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Portland officials are considering a sweeping, $46 million, 20-year renovation of Washington Park that would limit motor vehicle access while making improvements across the park.

Home to the Oregon Zoo, the Portland Japanese Garden and the International Rose Test Garden, Washington Park ranks as one of Portland’s largest and most-visited parks. It has not seen a significant park-wide overhaul since the early 1980s, although both the zoo and the Japanese Garden have received major upgrades since then.

Portland Parks & Recreation last week released a 106-page draft master plan that contemplates major changes for Washington Park.

Projects include:

• Revitalizing the Stearns Canyon gateway along Burnside Street by removing vegetation, relocating the Stearns Memorial Fountain and building a more attractive stop for buses and an autonomous shuttle.
• Creating a “garden plaza” near the MAX stop. A new linear garden would link the existing plaza, the Oregon Zoo and the World Forestry Center.

“You could walk directly to the zoo without crossing a lane of traffic,” said Emily Roth, senior project manager for Portland Parks & Recreation.

• Closing Rose Garden Way to vehicles and bicycles. Tennis courts would be moved, clearing space for new gardens, including a water garden and a glass-house conservatory that would hold an indoor garden. Parking at the entrance to the garden would be replaced with seasonal food carts and an outdoor promenade. The existing archery range would be retained.
• Renovating the unused train depot building into a café. Some trees would be thinned or pruned to open up views of Mount St. Helens, Mount Hood and downtown Portland.

Parks & Recreation officials said the changes would happen gradually in a two-decade period. The upgrades would be financed by Washington Park’s parking operations, which bring in about $3 million annually.

Parks & Recreation is accepting public comments on the draft master plan through Nov. 30. Staffers are expected to then finalize the master plan in early January. A presentation to the City Council would follow in February, and then a final decision would be made by Parks & Recreation Director Mike Abbaté.

Perhaps most controversially, the draft master plan resists calls for more parking. Washington Park has 1,400 parking spaces.

“Even as our population grows, we are not going to make more parking in the park,” Roth said.

Both Oregon Zoo and Japanese Garden officials requested additional parking, Roth acknowledged. Japanese Garden officials also asked for administrative offices, which Roth said cannot be built inside the park.

Parks & Recreation staffers are examining the feasibility of building a parking garage in the Sylvan area in a public-private partnership. Any parking garage would be built outside the park’s boundaries, Roth said.

“We have found we would not be spending public money on building a parking garage, because it is very expensive to build and very expensive to run,” she said.

Zoo officials are looking at other options to improve parking, including reconfiguring the existing lots to improve capacity and traffic flow.

“We think this is an important step and should be done as soon as feasible,” Oregon Zoo Director Don Moore stated in an email.

The master plan is based on recommendations from a high-level committee that included neighbors, architecture and development professionals, and Multnomah County and Metro representatives. The so-called “Champion Committee” members have agreed to advocate for the master plan for its duration, said Elizabeth Kennedy-Wong, community engagement manager for Parks & Recreation.

Place Studio served as the master plan’s lead design consultant and engaged several subcontractors.

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With light rail scheduled to arrive from Portland in 2015, the city of Milwaukie has already discussed possibilities such as a minor league baseball stadium and an outdoor shopping center.

But Milwaukie officials first want to make sure space will be available to accommodate smaller projects: community-oriented ones centered on a public plaza.

City Council last week approved the , a three-year effort by city staffers and community members to repurpose a six-acre swath of land that will eventually house Milwaukie’s downtown light-rail station. City staffers were asked to spend the next six to 12 months relaxing zoning codes and updating city plans so that properties can be transformed into a mix of live-work and public spaces.

“Frankly, we’re trying to stay ahead of the light-rail project,” said Kenny Asher, community development and public works director for Milwaukie. “(The light rail) is going to attract development – there’s no question about that. We are trying to get in there first and get the community what they want first.”

The six-acre area included in the South Downtown Plan is south of Washington Street, between 21st Avenue and McLoughlin Boulevard. There are four redevelopment sites in the area – two owned publicly and two owned privately that have existing buildings.

The plan – which included insight from 40 community members, city officials and private planners – calls for a public plaza to house the local farmers market and other events, a pedestrian-oriented street closed to traffic occasionally, live-work space, and affordable commercial space. The city has been working with Dark Horse Comics – the third largest comics publisher in the U.S. – to relocate to the area.

“If this plan is turned into development,” said Mark Gamba, a local photographer who worked on the project, “it won’t be developer-orientated; it will be human-orientated. This plan isn’t about making money for a developer; it’s about creating a place that community members want to live, work and hang out.”

Nothing is official yet, but Asher said the idea is to help cover the cost of relocating some existing businesses and setting up zoning codes and development standards that help implement ideas in the plan.

“We don’t have urban renewal or a (local improvements district), so this is going to have to come mostly from the private sector,” Asher said. “But we hope to encourage the development by working with developers and hopefully offering lots of public improvements to the area.”

Gamba said he fully supports the project and hopes it can help distinguish Milwaukie as a great metropolitan area. But he added that until private developers present ideas that fit in the plan, it’s tough to tell whether anything will be built.

“It would be completely different than your standard development,” he said. “But someone needs to step up to the plate.”

Asher said that in addition to working with the folks at Dark Horse Comics, the city is working with TriMet officials to move forward with the light-rail station, which will have a retail/commercial element. The goal, he said, is to issue a request for qualifications in the next year and then start assembling a development team.

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When the 16-acre Con-way site in Northwest Portland is finally developed, there may not be any canals and gondolas, as envisioned previously. But the property owner and city employees are nevertheless excited about the potential for what could be Portland’s next new neighborhood.

A project team working on redevelopment of the site – a swath of land that mostly consists of surface parking – met with city officials on Thursday to seek guidance as it develops a new master plan. The team believes the pared-down version is feasible, and that development could move ahead by the beginning of next year.

“The canals and skyscrapers can’t be done, especially without any urban renewal money,” said J. Craig Boretz, vice president of Con-way and the driving force behind redevelopment of its underutilized Portland property. “Not only is our new plan sensitive to current real estate market conditions, it’s coming at a time when we have tremendous interest from developers for the properties.”

About five years ago, Con-way and Portland-based GBD Architects developed a master plan shaped by the city’s then-hot condominium market and Con-way employees’ use of only a small amount of the land. When the recession hit, however, Boretz and GBD scaled back and crafted a plan for high-density, for-rent housing surrounded by green space – a strategy the team says is more compatible with current market conditions.

Because Con-way is in the trucking business and not the real estate business, the company plans to bring on board developers interested in project types that fit within the master plan.

“The plan will structure and frame the type of development (Con-way) would like to see on its property, but (it) won’t actually serve as the developer,” said Phil Beyl, president at GBD. “Because of this, we won’t have the level of certainty and detail that is seen in a lot of these master plans.”

The site has drawn a lot of interest from developers; however, only one grocery store project has been announced officially.

With the exception of one lot zoned for industrial use, the site is zoned “EX” – a flexible category that allows a wide range of uses. But the master plan calls for density that would require a 3-to-1 floor-area-ratio. On the Con-way site, that ratio is allowed only on residential property. So the project team would need to obtain city approval to use the ratio in its master plan.

The project team also would need city approval to be able to transfer density from property to property within the site – the density for a park or green space, for example, could be transferred to another parcel. Presently, plans call for most of the transfer density to be applied to properties (which would be developed as office space) on the site’s farthest northern end in order to create a buffer between the site and Interstate 405, said Dan Seeman, a principal planner at Kittelson & Associates, which is involved with the project.

The team already has identified a few properties to be used as public space: a square near the intersection of Northwest 21st Avenue and Pettygrove Street, a mid-block park between Northwest Savier and Raleigh streets near 21st Avenue, and pedestrian-oriented streets around the public spaces.

The team will let developers decide what to build on most of the properties, but it does want the portion of Northwest 21st Avenue that runs through the site to become a “main street” dedicated to retail development.

City staffers and the area’s neighborhood association, the Northwest District Association, say they back preliminary plans, but both also note that a lot of work remains.

“It’s hard from a development review perspective, considering the low level of detail,” said Bob Haley, a senior planner with the Portland Bureau of Transportation. “It’s challenging, and outside our typical projects, but we’re excited to work on it.”

The project team is seeking city approval for the master plan by the end of the year in order to meet the needs of its first potential tenant, a grocer looking to occupy a former industrial building within the master plan area.

Tim Heron, a city planner with the Portland Bureau of Development Services, offered a suggestion to accelerate the process.

“My big message, especially considering the time frame, is to replicate as much of the current code as possible,” he said. “But with that said, the master plan can work without (Con-way) being the developer, and I’m tickled to be a part of it.”

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The city of Beaverton is looking for a developer to help build a mixed-use facility on a city-owned lot.

Earlier this month the city acquired a 0.84-acre site located at the corner of Southwest Lombard Avenue and First Street. The city viewed the site as a key element to its downtown redevelopment strategy.

City officials want to use this site for a multi-story, mixed-use development, which would include workforce and mixed-income housing over retail space. They also want to incorporate sustainable building practices into the project and will used reclaimed materials from the demolition of the current structure on the lot in the construction of the new building.

The city paid $1.07 million for the site using general fund dollars that have been stored away for key property acquisitions. The development of the site will likely require a developer to purchase it.

The RFQ can be found on the .

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In addition to starting work on the Oregon Research Institute building, University of Oregon staffers will begin preparations to update the Riverfront Research Park master plan all together.

The near 30 year old master plan for the Riverfront Research Park will expire in October of 2012 with plenty of space left to develop in the park. University officials, wanting to get ample public involvement, have already started the process of updating it.

The update is needed considering most of the arguments against placing the ORI building on the waterfront were centered on the idea that the master plan was outdated and needed to be revised, taking into account contemporary market conditions, environmental concerns and other factors.

“Beyond the project, the university will launch a master planning process to help address future facilities needs for UO‘s expanding role in catalyzing innovation and its ties to economic development,” said Rich Linton, vice president for research and graduate studies at the university.

Excited about the process, the Associated Students of University of Oregon has approved $56,000 to bring speakers to Eugene who can offer examples of innovative riverfront design and add to the discussion for a new master plan.

Connecting Eugene member Allen Hancock, one of the major opponents of the original ORI site, said he is looking forward to the discussions and hopes the group will be considered a stakeholder.

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For citizen activist Dan Phegley, it’s pretty simple: If the taxpayers are going to pay for something, they should not only know what they’re paying for and how much it’s going to cost, but should also be able to have a say in it.

That’s why , a citizens group, has filed an initiative with the city of Damascus that, if approved, would require voter approval for any city planning document required by the state or Metro. The group believes the city is passing $3 billion in debt to citizens through creation of the state-mandated Damascus Comprehensive Plan without getting their input.

“This initiative is just an extension of what’s been going on out here,” Phegley said. “After everything that has gone on already, we don’t trust the (City Council) to make this decision, so we want the voters to get the final say.”

Damascus City Council has been assembling a comprehensive plan – an all-inclusive visioning document – since 2009. The document identified approximately $3 billion worth of projects to help manage growth sustainably into the future. The council earlier this year was ready to ship the plan to the state Department of Land Conservation and Development for final approval, but then Ask Damascus added a referendum to the May ballot that asked voters whether they agreed with the plan.

The comprehensive plan was shot down by 65 percent of the voters.

“If you take a town of 10,000 and put them in debt $3 billion, that’s economic suicide,” Phegley said. “And on top of that, the council didn’t tell us how much they wanted to put us in debt throughout the entire process.”

Diana Helm, president of the council, said it has since revisited the document, but she isn’t sure much will change.

“I’m not sure we will make any changes,” Helm said. “The changes they want fly in the face of our core values. But we are listening and re-examining the document.”

The comprehensive plan calls for dense, urban zoning surrounded by natural, open spaces. This includes 200-foot setbacks along any streams to protect the city’s water source.

The problem, according to Damascus Mayor Steve Spinnett, is that residents like the area’s rurality. When Damascus was incorporated in 2004, citizens agreed simply to avoid annexation into nearby cities, which would have made the area subject to those cities’ planning requirements.

“Planners have a tendency to do things the same way, like cluster development with wide-open green space,” Spinnett said. “But that’s not what the people want here. I don’t work for the city; I work for the people and the council needs to remember that they do too.

“I’m in complete support of what Ask Damascus is doing because the ballot box is the ultimate public involvement.”

The initiative was submitted to the city and is before the city attorney, who will draft the ballot measure language and then open a public notice period. Ask Damascus would then be able to start gathering the 400 verified signatures required for the initiative to go before voters.

If the initiative were approved, it would amend the Damascus City Charter and add a section titled Additional Powers Retained by Citizens.

The new section would read, “After March 1, 2011, the council shall not submit any ordinance or plan which affects property rights to Metro, the (Land Conservation and Development Commission), the DLCD or their successors until it is ratified by a majority vote of the city’s qualified electors voting in an election where at least 50 percent of the registered voters cast a ballot, or the election is a general election in an even-numbered year.”

The initiative also would require that the council include on the ballot an estimation of how much the plan would cost taxpayers after implementation, as well as a description of what it would do.

Both Phegley and Spinnett believe that the initiative will spur dialogue and potentially lead to compromises so a plan can be approved and sent to the state. But Helm warns that a change to city code could spin the entire process out of control.

“I just don’t think they understand that we are required to turn something in to the state, and just because they voted no on it, or vote no on it again, doesn’t mean that requirement, or the issue, will go away,” she said.

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After spending $525,000 over 20 months to develop a 20-year plan – the – for achieving community vision, city officials are taking another big step.

Beaverton City Council last week authorized the purchase of three parcels – to become one city block – at the southwest corner of First Street and Lombard Avenue. City officials hope the property, which is being earmarked for redevelopment into workforce housing, can help spur private development.

“This purchase is the first in what I hope to be several strategic property acquisitions to help facilitate redevelopment and to begin bringing the recently adopted Civic Plan to life for (Beaverton),” Mayor Denny Doyle said. “Property acquisition is a key priority.”

The city will pay $1.07 million for the parcels in a deal expected to close June 10. Doyle, who took office in 2009, said the city has set aside small amounts of general fund money so that it can jump on opportunities like this one.

The Civic Plan, an update of Beaverton’s 1981 planning effort, outlines the vision that citizens and government officials have for the city. One of the key goals is to make the central city, which includes Old Town, into a business and residential district.

Community Development Director Don Mazziotti envisions the lot, which houses three part-time businesses that will relocate, being transformed into a four-story building with housing for workers making approximately $66,900 – the city’s median annual income. The upper three floors would consist of 70-80 two- or three-bedroom units, while the bottom floor would be neighborhood retail, he said.

“We’re guessing that this site is ideal for housing, and that’s my personal intuition, but we will listen to any developer with a good idea and capital,” Mazziotti said.

Gary Winkler, a principal with multifamily brokerage firm Winkler & DuPont Real Estate Services, said city governments typically don’t buy land to serve as a pass-through to a private developer.

“It’s an aggressive move by Beaverton, but I think Beaverton needs to be aggressive right now,” Winkler said. “I can’t think of any projects that have moved forward out there recently.

“They need to create structure around downtown in Beaverton, and this lets them control what happens with a site they see as a catalyst.”

Paul Roder, chairman of the Central Beaverton Neighborhood Association, said that purchases such as this one are exactly what his organization believes will spur redevelopment downtown and initiate the Civic Plan.

“Maybe this isn’t a keystone of the area and the Civic Plan, but it can serve as an example of what’s to come. It’s an exciting opportunity for that area.”

Mazziotti added that the purchase will bring construction to Beaverton after several years of relatively few projects.

“Growth has been slow over the past few years and we want to make things happen,” he said. “We believe this can serve as a catalyst site.”

The city will combine the three sites into one and issue a request for qualifications. Once city officials have a list of qualified bidders, they will conduct a detailed request for proposals process and select a developer. Mazziotti expects a developer to be selected by September.

City officials don’t expect much public money to go into the project. The site is in the city’s proposed new urban renewal area, but both Doyle and Mazziotti doubt this project will receive any urban renewal money. They both expect work to start on the Old Town project before bonds would be issued for the proposed URA, which won’t go before voters until November.

“We want to get this going quickly,” Doyle said. “We think this is a good time to get something out of the ground that could bring about more development.”

More information about the Civic Plan is available at .

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Voters in Damascus Tuesday night voted against the city’s proposed comprehensive plan in resounding fashion.

Voters struck down Measure 3-375 with 65 percent of citizens voting against it. The measure was a referendum that asked voters whether they supported the city council’s decision to pass the comprehensive plan, which came in December.

The state-mandated comprehensive plan laid out $3 billion in future projects for the city of 10,000 people. When it was approved, a small group of citizens, calling themselves Ask Damascus, started collecting signatures for the referendum. The group wanted to give citizens a chance to vote on the plan, which the group felt was hurriedly put together.

The vote on the referendum doesn’t necessarily mean the city will have to start anew the process of developing a comprehensive plan. The council could choose to use as much of the comprehensive plan as it sees fit, but whatever the council decides to do, its decision will have to be made in a public meeting with public testimony.

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Salem City Council next month will vote whether to approve its annual capital improvements plan, which prioritizes $205.7 million in construction projects that the city would like to see start during the next five years.

But this year the city is using a more thorough asset-based evaluation tactic that it has adopted from Down Under. And Salem officials say they believe the strategy is improving planning and efficiency while possibly saving money and reducing contractor stress.

Salem city officials since 2008 have led a charge to base more of their decisions on data rather than intuition. They started by focusing on the capital improvements plan, which involves major projects paid for with public money.

“There wasn’t a particular instance or project that sparked this,” said Sean O’Day, the Salem deputy city manager who was involved in early discussions of the work. “We just knew that there was a way to make better decisions and make better use of public dollars.”

The city wanted more factors to determine which projects are most important, as well as how each one could impact the others.

As O’Day pointed out, the city for years had prioritized projects based on the availability of money and projects’ timelines, but little else. Now he said the city hopes to be able to avoid needing to tear up a recently constructed street to install new pipes or wires for another project.

The new strategy takes into account about 12 more factors, both qualitative and quantitative. These include the risk of failure to complete a project, the consequences of a project failure, the relation of a project to a city council goal and whether the project helps meet local, state or federal requirements.

Once these factors are ranked, they are added to a matrix with data about a project’s timeframe, its condition and the likelihood of available money. These factors are then used to determine a project’s priority, which helps the city better determine where money should go.

“Basically we have changed the whole prioritizing concept from a project-based system to an asset management-based system,” said Barry Buchanan, a senior utilities planning engineer who has contributed to the effort for the past two years. “This provides a much more detailed evaluation of each project and how it fits in with what the city wants to do.”

O’Day added that the new process helps create transparency with the public and certainty with city planners and contractors working on projects.

Although the concept may be new in the Pacific Northwest, it has been used for years in Australia and New Zealand.

Buchanan said Salem officials have worked out of the International Infrastructure Management Manual, a document developed by the Institute of Public Works Engineering Australia. Buchanan has ties to the region and has worked closely with engineers to develop asset management strategies for the Pacific Northwest. He also has worked closely with the city of Seattle’s public utility department, which he said has the region’s most advanced asset management program.

The Portland Water Bureau is in the process of developing a similar system for prioritizing its projects. The bureau and the city of Salem plan to share their work with other cities in Oregon and around the country.

“The work isn’t done because we are still developing the data and formula for the current condition of each asset,” Buchanan said. “But I am personally behind national and local movements to push asset management forward, and I believe we are on the right track.”

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