(Renderings by Mahlum Architects)
By Tracy Record
West Seattle Blog editor
Double the students, double the staff, no on-site parking.
That component of the Alki Elementary School rebuild is at the heart of an appeal fight that was argued Tuesday before a city hearing examiner.
The appellants, city and district reps, and other witnesses all completed their testimony in one day, though up to three were set aside for the hearing. As we reported Monday, one appeal was withdrawn after a settlement with Seattle Public Schools, and Tuesday it was revealed that took the new school’s height off the list of issues being challenged. The project’s architect said they had managed to lower the height of a rooftop equipment “penthouse” by three feet.
After Tuesday’s seven-hour hearing, assistant hearing examiner Kathleen Drummond said she would issue a written ruling within 20 days. Before we get into what was presented to her Tuesday, here’s the backstory:
The $67 million plan to rebuild Alki Elementary dates back to the district’s BEX V levy, approved by voters in 2019; the design for a taller school with double the space and no offstreet parking was unveiled at an online meeting in June of last year. Then last fall, the district announced it was seeking nine zoning exceptions (“departures”) for the project and solicited public comment; that process was extended into November. Meantime, the district’s contention that the project didn’t need full environmental review was challenged; in March, that challenge was rejected. Then in May, the city Department of Construction and Inspections announced it would grant the departures, and that’s what led to the appeals that resulted in Tuesday’s hearing.
In this appeal process, the burden of proof is on the appellant – they have to prove the city’s decision was wrong, rather than the city having to prove its decision was right. Otherwise, the proceedings are similar to a trial, with each side given the opportunity to present their case, to call witnesses, to question the other side’s witnesses, and to give a closing statement. Though the four remaining appeals were aired in one hearing, each of the appellants got to present her case and call witnesses. The appellants are Alki residents Shauna Causey, Kathleen Oss, Jackie Szikszoy, and Maryanne Wood (who is a current candidate for Seattle School Board, running on a platform of concern about “megaschools” including the expanded Alki Elementary). Representing SPS was Katie Kendall, a lawyer from McCullough Hill; there for SDCI was project planner Holly Godard.
Primary witness for the appellants was Gary Norris, a traffic engineer who works in the private sector now and offered a long list of credits in the public sector, including the cities of Seattle, Bellevue, and Renton. He picked apart the traffic study done for the district by Heffron Transportation, saying it fails to address the “most significant issue,” the traffic flow in the school area, which would affect parking too. By all accounts, pickup/dropoff times – with about 270 students, half of the rebuilt school’s projected capacity – are chaotic; Norris contended the traffic study did not properly calculate the stress on nearby intersections, including 59th/Stevens, where the pedestrian account would “dramatically” increase too. The city’s decision requires the district to come up with a Transportation Management Plan but that hasn’t been drafted yet and likely won’t be until the rebuilt school is close to opening, which Norris suggested “eliminates a lot of potential (solutions).” He also took issue with Heffron having studied parking in the area in December 2021 – low season for the nearby beach, which otherwise generates a lot of parking demand (not to mention that it was during the pandemic and the West Seattle Bridge closure) – and with “inadequate ADA parking” (one space is to be created across 59th from the school).
Appellant Oss was the second to testify. She declared that safety planning is lacking, even beyond the traffic-circulation issues – what if there were a crisis on campus that required responders to access the school quickly? She too voiced concern with the plan for only one ADA space – “so only one person in 600 will be able to use it?” – and observed that other new, sizable schools, such as Genesee Hill Elementary, were built with parking lots. She contended that there’s no safe place in the midst of the potential traffic jam for a parent and child to park blocks away and walk safely to the school. She said she has spent eight months “agonizing” about the situation and that educators in her family insisted that she stay in the fight. She wants to see an “independent review” and redesign of the project.
Appellant Szikszoy said the community’s voice hadn’t been heard much in the process, and that the school’s impact on the neighborhood needed to be considered, calling the expanded Alki Elementary “a school that looks like an airport.” She noted that she was no stranger to the city’s public processes, as a longtime community-group leader and participant in other groups, including serving on the city’s Board of Park Commissioners. She pointed to city code as saying that “flexibility in zoning” can be possible if “the impacts on the surrounding community are negligible or can be mitigated.” In addition to criticism for the traffic and parking study, she also expressed concern about another of the departures, granted to allow a lit message-board sign at the school. She said she’d been active in advocating for “Dark Sky” and was worried the sign would contribute to light pollution. She also questioned the need for expanding the school’s capacity, given that district projections showed enrollment would likely continue declining for another decade.
Yet other departures were part of what appellant Wood spoke of next. If the district is hoping to reduce car trips, then why plan for less than the required number of bicycle parking spaces, and fewer weather-protected spaces? she asked. The loading dock entrance on 59th concerned her too. And to the major issue of no on-site parking, she contended that’s unfair to educators, who at least should have that “amenity” available.
Appellant Causey, describing herself as a tech exec turned preschool teacher, stressed that she and neighbors support the concept of a rebuilt school and want it to continue being part of their Alki neighborhood, but are “appalled” by the current plan. She also took the district to task for a lack of involving the community in the plan, which she said they were sure would be “fixed” when they first heard about it – “but it wasn’t.” While “this exact school” might work in another neighborhood, Alki’s unique situation deserved extra consideration, Causey said, with one of the city’s most popular destinations barely a block away. She (and other appellants) also pointed out that Alki had a “parking overlay” requiring residential development to allot one and a half spaces per unit, and that meant that even a remodeling project required her family to spend a sizable amount of money to add an on-site parking space, so it’s difficult to understand why a project like this could just sail through without any. For the overall parking situation, she did a survey on foot in March that, contrary to what the Heffron study showed, turned up two open spots in 10 blocks. She mentioned the unofficial petition/survey she’d set up online and said it had brought in hundreds of responses from people who want the project to include some parking. She called two area residents as witnesses, and both said the parking and traffic situation in the area already is “chaotic.”
Next was Rebecca Hutchinson from Mahlum, the architecture firm on the project. She said that zoning departures aren’t unusual on school projects because they’re often in areas where the underlying zoning is a mismatch. She offered some background on the project and site, including an explanation of how there’s some overlap with Seattle Parks property next door (the school shares a gym with Alki Community Center, and that won’t be torn down) to the east and north, and said that would help with the ADA parking concerns, because an ADA space east of the community center could be used for the school as well,. She contended that they had done outreach “to collect and center community voice.” She referred repeatedly to the project’s “evolution” bringing down the height of the mechanical penthouse and enabling them to drop the need for a departure regarding the size of the curb cut for the loading dock. Regarding the decision to design the project without on-site project, Hutchinson said including parking would have reduced the amount of space available for educational purposes, space she said was needed so that the school could offer the type of spaces that are part of modern school buildings.
Continuing to explain the departures, she said they believed they’d ultimately have more bicycle spaces than required because of the partnership with Parks. And she said the illuminated sign would not contribute to light pollution because it’ll have a canopy keeping the light – lettering on a dark background – from shining into the sky. The messages needed to be able to change, she said, for reasons such as presenting a message in multiple languages.
The appellants had questions for Hutchinson. How many “neighbors” were on the School Design Advisory Team? One, she replied. What kind of outreach was done (one appellant got a postcard two days before a meeting/presentation)? Hutchinson said her firm wasn’t accountable for that, but did make posters and place flyers in mailboxes. Did she ever think about the impact the project could have on the neighborhood? “I believe in the project,” she said, adding that she also believed in the neighbors’ lived experiences. Was there ever any consideration of putting the mechanical equipment in the basement instead of a penthouse? The building doesn’t currently have a basement, and the project budget doesn’t have money to dig one, Hutchinson said.
After a lunch break, the district brought in its next witness, Tod McBryan from Heffron Transportation, to talk about the traffic/parking study. His firm, he said, has worked with SPS on 60 project sites. Their role is usually to support the early environmental-review process. Kendall questioned him on some of the issues the appellants had raised. Regarding their concern that the parking study was done in winter, and while the West Seattle Bridge was still closed, he said his firm used historical Google images, from May 2017 and 2019, to supplement their in-person studies with imagery of warmer, pre-pandemic, pre-bridge-closure times. (The school’s enrollment was significantly higher at those times, too, he said, up to 380 students, and a bit later, he said the school had 420 students in 2015.) Overall, McBryan acknowledged, parking usage on the surrounding streets would increase with a new, higher-capacity school, but not so much that the city would require mitigation measures (RPZs, etc.). Asked about Causey’s parking study, he suggested that Heffron’s methodology was more accurate.
Why isn’t the required Traffic Management Plan expected to be done any time soon? McBryan said that they prefer to wait until new schools are close to opening, because they want to work with the principal who will be accountable for managing the plan, and principals tend to move around. Some transportation plans are simple, some are complex, he added. He mentioned some components likely to go into this one – telling parents to use 59th as a one-way street at pickup and dropoff times, telling staff to park a certain distance away, telling parents of older kids to park a few blocks away so the nearby spaces can be used by parents of younger kids. How will events be addressed in the transportation-management plan? It might be recommended that events be broken into two sessions or nights, or separated by grades, or even held offsite. In response to other questions, McBryan said the district did not expect a higher volume of school buses, because the enrollment area wasn’t expected to change, and the buses they run now have room for more riders. He also mentioned Fairmount Park Elementary as a similarly constrained site, next to a park (although one appellant countered later that FPES has a parking lot)
Wood asked McBryan if the study would be revisited to consider a higher need for ADA parking than currently projected. The study is “complete,” he replied, but certainly if, after the new school opens, a higher need was found, “accommodations can be made.” The appellants’ transportation expert Norris then asked McBryan some questions. He restated his concern that the transportation-management plan wasn’t going to be drawn up for quite some time, and asked how residents on 59th would be made aware of the plan to operate it as a one-way northbound street during pickup/dropoff times. They’d be notified, McBryan replied, but they certainly couldn’t be required to use it that way. There was also some back-and-forth about estimated numbers again – such as a projection that nearby intersections won’t see a degradation in their “levels of service.”
Questioning over, it was time for closing statements. Norris reiterated that he felt that the traffic/parking study failed to fully address project issues and included data errors, suggesting McBryan “just wants you to believe everything will be OK.” Oss said she had worked in medicine and this situation was like “building a hospital and then figuring out how you’re going to get the ambulances there.” Wood said the needs of the school’s future “most vulnerable” students – special needs and preschoolers – are “not being met” by the current plan. Szikszoy said that with the traffic on Alki already “terrible,” wanting to double the size of this school is “ludicrous.” Causey said her survey/petition had drawn another 100 signers during the course of the day, and she read some of their pro-parking comments aloud.
City planner Godard said that those concerned about the project should refer to one of the final pages of the decision she wrote approving the departures – the page that lays out some conditions for the approvals. “This is a live document,” she said repeatedly, meant to be revisited each year, and open to city code-compliance enforcement if the conditions are being disregarded. And with that, she declared that SDCI stands by its decision and hopes the appeal will be rejected. Kendall said the same on behalf of the district, and with that, the hearing was over.
WHAT’S NEXT: Drummond promised her decision would be ready within 20 days, and said she’ll be visiting the site before ruling. Notification is generally sent to the parties to the case; the ruling also will show up in the Hearing Examiner’s case file online. Work at the school site has been awaiting permits; Alki Elementary classes are to be held at the former Schmitz Park Elementary for the next two years while construction is under way at its permanent site.
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