CC Minutes - 06/29/05 WS - Laserfiche WebLink

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Ms. Taylor said that she attended the neighborhood meetings and felt the last one was productive. She questioned whether everyone in the neighborhood understood that if the council paid for the context-sensitive design process it would be included in the LID and added to the assessments. She asked how many properties were involved and what the per person cost of the $240,000 process would be. Mr. Schoening said he could provide that information and pointed out that the normal cost of a capital project included engineering and design costs, which could vary depending on how extensive the process was. Ms. Taylor asked if there were exceptions to ADA requirements for sidewalks if the terrain was very steep. Mr. Schoening replied that if a car was able to climb a grade, a motorized wheelchair also could and there was no basis for an exception in that neighborhood. Ms. Taylor asked staff to look into the matter. Ms. Taylor asked how it would be determined which side of a street would have a sidewalk if there was to be only one sidewalk along the street. Mr. Schoening replied that would be part of the design discussion and one of the goals was to limit the number of times pedestrians would have to cross the street when walking from one point to another. Ms. Taylor hoped that stop signs could be added to the list of traffic calming strategies. Mr. Schoening said that traffic calming tools were included in the Arterial/Collector Street Plan and stop signs were a regulatory device to assign right-of-way rather than a traffic calming tool. Ms. Bettman commented that the City's position was that stop signs that were not warranted could open it to legal liability, which is why they were not used as a traffic calming device. Ms. Bettman stated that she had attended the neighborhood meeting and her impression was that the neighborhood's main concern over ten- foot lanes was, according to staff, off the table for discussion before the process began. She asked if the ten- foot standard could be flexible when there were extenuating circumstances, such as preserving heritage trees or a front yard, and the travel lane be narrower at that point. She pointed out that the ten-foot minimum lane width was the standard in the Arterial/Collector Street Plan for a collector street and the basis of the neighborhood's objection was that it did not want the street to be a collector. She said the City should be willing to make an exception to the ten-foot lane width where it was appropriate and reasonable and pointed out that there were many streets throughout the City that were very narrow and included parking on both sides. She thought it was unlikely that two fire trucks would be passing each other simultaneously going in opposite directions on a street, thus requiring a 20-foot width. Mr. Poling noted Mr. Schoening's remarks about ADA requirements for sidewalk surfaces and commented that during recent discussions of alley improvements the issue of a new technique with a pervious surface was raised. He asked if that type of surface would qualify under ADA requirements for a hard surface. Mr. Schoening said he thought it would, but one of the issues with pervious pavement was that underlying soils needed to be pervious. He said the soils in the Crest Drive neighborhood were clay soils and not very pervious. Mr. Kelly said he was pleased the last neighborhood meeting went well and the idea of designing a process made sense. He hoped that the process would be designed so that both the process and paying for the process would be broken into several phases with check-in points for the council and neighbors at the end of each. He indicated he was not opposed to eventual classification of the streets and what emerged from the design process would help with that discussion. MINUTES--Eugene City Council June 29, 2005 Page 9 Work Session