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Publisher’s note: Welcome to Perlman’s Potpourri for June — a roundup of news items from the Gateway and Parkrose neighborhoods of mid-Multnomah County from veteran Beat Reporter Lee Perlman.

Coming up, a Gateway developer argues with the city over where to put a parking lot.

Parkrose scions rent Portland Police a contact office on Sandy Boulevard in Parkrose.

Remember Senn’s Dairy in Parkrose? Neighborhood leaders are looking for photos of the Senn family as the planning for the formal dedication of Senn’s Dairy Park at the end of this summer proceeds.

The Hazelwood Hydro-Park community garden was dedicated last month at an official celebration.

Heard of planning with Mr. Manning? Well Tom Armstrong, also a senior planner at the City of Portland Planning Bureau, hopes to hear from you about how to improve Mid-county’s light rail stations.

Plus, more planning news follows as Portland State University urban planning students release the results of their study of 82nd Avenue; until the mid-80s the city’s eastern boundary; and we all know what gets built, or planned for, or not at the edge of towns. Small car lots, automotive related services, pawn shops, no-tell motels, junk and wrecking yards and whatever other type of enterprises city fathers do not want to see downtown is what usually ends up at the city’s edge.

And finally, Perlman reports on the luminaries and political people who populated the bon voyage party for longtime Wilkes Community Group Chair Ross Monn. He is throwing in the towel and moving to Spokane — Spokane?

But first, to the battle over parking lot placement ...

LEE PERLMAN
The MID-COUNTY MEMO

Developer, neighborhood battle city on design
In a rare alignment of interests, a neighborhood association is allied with a developer on a building design, to which city planners are opposed.

There is unanimous support for the basic intent of the nonprofit Specialized Housing, Inc., to build a four-story, 61-unit housing project for the disabled at Northeast 120th Avenue between East Burnside and Northeast Davis streets, behind a Ron Tonkin auto dealership. The issue is the design.

Specialized Housing and architect Scott Crosby originally proposed to situate the $14-million building project along Davis, with entrances along this street and a surface parking lot on the south end. The applicants submitted this plan, but said they preferred a Scheme B. This would move the building south, to the center of the lot, leaving two small parking lots at both ends of the building, and an entrance off 120th Avenue on Couch Street, set back 73 feet from the sidewalk.

Planner Noelle Elliott said she would approve Scheme A but deny permission for Scheme B. The applicants appealed to the Portland Design Commission.

Elliott argued that Scheme B would work against the zoning code objectives of having “active uses” and “eyes” on the street, passing up the chance to “strengthen the residential character” of Davis by encouraging its use and having an entrance so far from the street.

To this Crosby retorted, “What residential character?”

Across the street is the rear of the Safeway and a retirement home, which present a solid concrete wall 300 feet long. The street “is what it is,” attorney Tim Ramis said, and being forced to use it would make the new project’s vulnerable residents feel uncomfortable and unsafe. A gate on the 120th entrance that would be locked at night — to which Elliott also objected — would make residents feel safer, he said. Finally, Ramis said, shifting the building southward would bring it closer to the 122nd Avenue MAX station, which some of the residents would use.

The single or double parking lots would contain 48 spaces. When commission member Andrew Jansky asked why that particular number, he was told it was what was left over after allowing for the building footprint. It is needed not for the building residents, few of whom would own cars, but for family and caregivers, the developers said.

Linda Robinson of the Hazelwood Neighborhood Association testified in favor of Scheme B. Scheme A “would meet the letter of the code, but not the intent of the design guidelines,” she said. “It would compel the residents to walk through a canyon. Davis is not a pedestrian-oriented street and not likely to become one in the next 15 years. If you have to shift the building, it would be better to shift it to the south end. Shifting to the north makes no sense at all.”

In fact the shifting bothered the commission. Jansky asked the developers, “Did you try to make changes to your plan instead of just pushing it around the site?”

Commission member Gwen Millius agreed, “I’m uneasy when two imperfect schemes are presented as the only options. I want residents to feel empowered to own more than the parking lot.”

Commission Chair Lloyd Lindley saw the parking lot in Scheme A as a potential future development site, whereas the two lots in B would be “economic remnants within a transit-oriented area. The guidelines are pretty clear, and they pretty clearly speak to Scheme A.” Regarding Davis, he said, “Bad decisions were made here in the past, but there’s no reason to compound that.”

Crosby and Ramis asked for a delay to come up with a new scheme. The case was set over to July 3.

New police contact office opens in Parkrose
There is a much smaller and more welcome addition to Parkrose, with the opening last month of a police contact station at 11036 N.E. Sandy Blvd. The Rossi family is leasing the space to the Portland Police Bureau for a dollar a year. Sgt. John Anderson and Officer Greg Baldwin renovated the space in their spare time, with materials donated by Parkrose Hardware and others. The police will use the office periodically to do paperwork and other chores as needed, and Elders in Action has a key and will make use of the space at other times. “It’s a great community partnership all around,” Anderson told the Memo.

Senn’s Dairy Park work due
There will be more work at Senn’s Dairy Park, including installation of play equipment, Parkrose Neighborhood Association Chair Mary Walker says. Parkrose will hold its National Night Out celebration (Aug. 5 this year) at the Russellville Grange at Northeast 121st Avenue and Prescott Street. There will be a dedication of the completed park at the end of the summer. Toward this end, Walker is appealing to community members for pictures of the old Senn’s Dairy, or of the Senn family, to be reproduced on a plaque that would be set in the park.

Hazelwood Hydro-Park garden dedicated
Commissioner Randy Leonard and about 50 residents dedicated the city’s newest community garden last month, in the Hazelwood Hydro-Park at Northeast 117th Avenue and Holladay Street. During planning two years ago, some nearby residents argued that since the most immediate neighbors all had yards, a community garden wasn’t needed. In fact, city officials say, all of the garden’s 30 plots are taken, there is a waiting list, and nearly all the gardeners live within four blocks of the park.

Planning project — MAX light rail station area
Different planning efforts moved forward last month. A group of planners under Tom Armstrong continued doing station-area plans for the land within a one-half mile radius of TriMet MAX light rail stations east of 60th Avenue.

“What can we do to enhance ridership?” Armstrong asked at an open house at Madison High School. “What’s going in around the stations, and how can we make it a nicer place where people want to be?”

Over the summer, he said, staff will be working to boil down citizens’ input thus far into a to-do list of three to five major items per station. The top issues to emerge so far from input, including citizen-staff walking tours of the areas around each station, have been safety of passengers on trains and platforms, pedestrian and bike safety in the surrounding areas given the inadequacy or nonexistence of sidewalks and bike lanes, and infill development.

Addressing this last, Armstrong said, “This is a very complex issue, but we want to at least dig into it.” Another planner, Debbie Bischoff, said that zone changes might be a possibility in some cases.

Attendance at the session was poor, with perhaps 15 people present. In a small group discussing the Parkrose-Sumner Station, Parkrose Neighborhood Association Chair Mary Walker complained about the nonconforming uses in the area and the lack of quality infill. She also said that the I-205 offramp at this location has a very dangerous merger into local traffic.

Transportation planner Stuart Gwinn suggested a boulevard treatment of Northeast Sandy Boulevard. He also said, “There’s a need to market this area. It’s a really great little area that’s sort of hidden away.”

For more information about the project or to fill out a survey, contact Project Manager Tom Armstrong at 503-823-3527, or e-mail him at: tom.armstrong@ci.portland.or.us.

The Eastside MAX Station Communities Project’s purpose is to take a comprehensive look at seven station community areas within one-half mile of MAX light rail stations in Northeast Portland (six of the seven station areas are in Mid-county). The basic question being studied is: How can these communities become better places?
Submitted by City of Portland, Bureau of Planning


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