Phinney Ridge Cleaners

After decades as the home of Phinney Ridge Cleaners, the site has accumulated an amount of PERC that was found to be above cleanup levels in 9 of the 11 borings. That means the developers of the 6010 project will have to do something about the soil before construction starts on their proposed mixed-use development.  The study offers two possible methods for cleanup: either the soil can be dug out and removed entirely, or the PERC can be removed by chemical treatment.

This study doesn’t call for any immediate cleanup action, but Geotech did recommend further testing to find out the exact depth, area and volume of the PERC in the soil. For the moment, the situation doesn’t appear to be serious. No spills or releases of PERC at 6010 have ever been reported to the Washington Department of Ecology.

Fortunately for both the developers and local residents, the study also didn’t find very much groundwater on the site. Water is the main way PERC can spread, and cleaning up the site will be easier and safer without it. The chemical evaporates in the air and doesn’t spread quickly in soil.

The developers haven’t said how this affects the timetable for the project, or their chances for getting a master use permit, but the current businesses on the property aren’t going anywhere for a while. Roosters Breakfast Club agreed to a new three-year lease on Thursday, according to the restaurant’s owner, who said he had already started scouting out possible new locations.  He also said that the business owners on the block haven’t seen the results of the Geotech study, so although it appears the cleanup issue and the lease extension are related, we can’t confirm that yet.

All in all, the DRB meeting was less eventful than people following the situation might have expected. The group from Fred Meyer opened their presentation by trying to reassure the audience that they’re committed to the community, but the opposition they seemed to be expecting never turned up. Although there were a handful of constructive suggestions to improve the design — better bike access, more entrances to the store, space for a farmers’ market or other local event — nobody was up in arms about any particular element of the proposal.

As Fred Meyer’s Real Estate Director, Tom Gibbons, pointed out at the beginning of the meeting, the design has come a long way since the company proposed a generic big box store back in 1997. Fred Meyer is in no hurry to return to the previous two-story version of the new store. Pushing an “urban village” model appeals to the community, but it’s also motivated by profits. The project’s designers acknowledged that the foot traffic generated by an open, walkable space with retail storefronts and kiosks is going to make or break the store in Greenwood.

Now that the plans for the building include sinking it as far into the ground as Greenwood’s peat bog will allow. The bog is a still a concern for some residents. Former Greenwood Community Council president Kate Martin showed up with a map of the bog, and used it to illustrate the point that water is always going to travel in and out of the area, and Fred Meyer is building at its own risk. In response to other neighbors’ concerns about the bog and the depth of the building, the Board assured everyone that the peat had been thoroughly studied, and that the building wouldn’t be approved if it was too low to meet code.

Several people felt that new building needed more parking, especially with 200 apartment units and new retail that could attract a lot more cars to the area. The Board shut these comments down, though, because parking isn’t a design issue, except that the code requires a minimum number of spaces. The 680 proposed spaces for Fred Meyer meet code, but there’s nothing from adding more if it turns out to be necessary.

For a play-by-play of the meeting, check out phinneyridge.org’s liveblog from Monday night.

Update: A Seattle attorney criticizes - point by point – the city’s design review process and it’s result on the Fred Meyer Greenwood project, sub-optimization of result.

6010 Phinney Building

The proposed four-story mixed-use building at 6010 Phinney Ave. is one step closer to becoming a reality, after being approved by the Design Review Board in a public meeting at Ballard High School on Tuesday. About 30 neighbors showed up to comment on the latest plans for a building that’s slated to go in where Rooster’s Breakfast Club, Daily Planet, Chef Liao and the Phinney Dry Cleaners now stand. The new design addressed a lot of neighbors’ previous concerns, but nearly every speaker at the meeting had the same big problem with the new plans: the location of the driveway leading in and out of the building’s underground parking garage.

Architects from Kilburn, LLC, ran through 14 different changes that attempted to address neighbors’ concerns from the previous Design Review Board meeting back in February. These included things like reducing the size of one of the building’s stair towers, using materials that more closely match other buildings in the neighborhood, and creating a transparent canopy over the sidewalk instead of a solid brick one. Ventilation between the ground floor and the roof has also been added, which will allow restaurants to move into the building’s retail spaces. While most of the audience were pleased with the changes, the location of the driveway remains a sore spot for neighbors.

The driveway was initially going to be located on Phinney Ave., but that changed at the previous DRB meeting in February. The board recommended moving it around the corner to 61st St., where there’s generally less pedestrian traffic. After that meeting, the architects redrew the entire plan from the ground up to accommodate the new driveway. The developers claim this nearly doubled their design costs. However, neighbors were concerned that a driveway on 61st would provide less visibility for cars coming out of the underground garage and pose a danger to pedestrians. The Design Review Board said that the sight triangle at the driveway was large enough to meet code.

Moving the driveway back to Phinney would also significantly break up the retail storefronts on the busiest side of the building. During deliberations, members of the Board said that they’ve been approving driveways on side streets with less foot traffic all over the Northwest. Neighbors argued that the Roycroft Condominiums, right across the street from 6010, use a driveway on Phinney. The Board discussed this point . The developers, for their part, say they’re just “taking the City’s lead” and doing what they can to comply with code.

The Design Review Board is only one step in the process of getting the building at 6010 approved. To secure a Master Use Permit and start building, the site also has to pass an environmental review. The results of the environmental testing should be available to the public next week, but developers said that preliminary reports show some contaminants in the soil. It won’t be clear how much contamination, or whether it’s from chemicals used at the dry cleaner that’s been on the site for decades, until the final report comes out.