Council Decides… Nothing (stay tuned)
Another overflow crowd, with some confusion remaining about the venue. Matt Ivers brought his Architecture Masters project (drawings and a model) for display in the lobby (not for testimony). Matt’s project explored making a mixed use “more Moscow” demonstration of what could be done on the site.
Linda Pall recused herself because of opinions she had expressed to one of the land owners that locating a Wal-Mart on the site would be a ‘bad idea.’ She expressed a concern to avoid any appearance of conflict of interest. She remained at the dias to listen.
Joel Plakson droned on with what appeared to be the same powerpoint. Among his report, 3500 trip ends peak hour on Saturday and 34,000 trip ends for the whole of a Saturday. The present use has 4.5K trips per day on Highway 8. Is that a typo, or could there really be 10x as many cars? Hwy 8 west sees 15,ooo cars/day now.
Staff recommended rezoning at least a significant part to Motor Business with conditions to provide buffers to the Latah Trail. The applicant continue to follow this theme, suggesting that some smaller portion might be OK, a PUD overly would be OK, anything to get past this hurdle would be OK.
NoSuperWalMart had provided the council a “blue binder” with traffic and retail studies. These caught the attention of the applicant and they spent energy refuting aspects of those studies.
Further, the applicant crafted many elements of their presentation to make gestures toward Smart Growth, Mixed Use and ‘the new urbanism.’ This was a challenging aspect of their presentation because it was not the topic of the discussion.
This whole process underlines that Moscow needs a different approach for conducting its planning procedures. The trust us model doesn’t seem to be operative; maybe with a good cap on the size of big box retail.
The meeting ran to 11:30, the public testimony portion was completed, ending with Paul Kimmel’s general comments about the Chamber’s recent survey.