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HomeMy WebLinkAboutExhibit268 I.\\VYIRS Ii Davis Wright Tremaine LLP ANCHORAGE BEllEVUE LOS ANGELES NEW YORK PORTLAND SAN FRANCISCO " ,\I III SHANGHAl WASHINGTON. D.C. MARCO DE SA H SIL.V A Direct (206) 757-8024 marcodc sacsil va@dwt.com SUITE 2200 1201 THIRD AVENUE SI'.\I n.!', WA 98101-3045 TEL (206) I> 22 -.\ I ~ 0 FAX (201)) 757-77110 www.dwl.com January 30, 2008 VIA ELECTRONIC MAIL Phil Olbrechts, Jefferson County Appellate Hearing Examiner c/o AI Scalf, Director Jefferson County Department of Community Development 621 Sheridan Street Port Townsend, Washington 98368 Re: Port Ludlow Associates LLC; Resort Completion Project; Ludlow Bay Village and Admiralty III; File Nos. ZON03-00044, SOO05-00030, and SDP05-00019 Final Decision on Appeal dated January 7,2008 PLA's Motion for Reconsideration Dear Mr. Olbrechts: I am writing in response to your January 30 message to the parties. Heron Road The Project will cause traffic to increase slightly along two segments of Heron Road: the segment that leads to Gull Drive and the inn, marina, and restaurant, and the segment that leads to the inn and the existing town homes. The increase on the segment that leads to the inn and existing town homes will be due solely to the addition of a few new dwelling units along Heron Road and not to other existing or proposed uses within the Project site. All Project traffic impacts, including traffic increases on Heron Road, were evaluated by Jefferson County in the Final Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement for the Port Ludlow Resort Plan Revision (May 2005) (Log Item 6.235) and in the January 17,2006, testimony of transportation engineer Gerilyn Reinart. Ms. Reinart found that "the proposed action will not result in significant unavoidable adverse impacts that cannot be mitigated." Final SEIS Section 3.6 at 3-106 (Log Item 6.235). Ms. Reinhart also testified at the public hearing on January 17,2006, rebutting claims that Heron Road was unsafe. She testified, "[T]hat roadway is essentially a local access roadway, very low DWT 2240353vl 0065364-000002 Seattle LOG ITEM # ).~ Page--L-ofj(L Phil Olbrechts January 30, 2008 Page 2 volume," and the entire record discloses only one known accident possibly connected to Heron Road since 1993, a minor fender bender in the inn parking lot. The entirety of Ms. Reinart's testimony is transcribed on the six pages that follow this letter. In his decision, Mr. Berteig imposed mitigation measures to ensure safety on Heron Road, notwithstanding that he did not find that Heron Road was or would be unsafe. Based on his decision, PLA is required to complete the following improvements: 1. Incorporate design elements to improve traffic safety on Heron Road by slowing down cars (Decision at 32, Condition 3.b) (Log Item 5.216); 2. Directional signage to the existing and proposed on-site destinations shall be installed and/or enhanced along the internal roadways (Decision at 40, Condition 25.a) (Log Item 5.216); 3. On-site speed limit signs shall be installed, limiting speeds to 15 m.p.h. (Decision at 41, Condition 25.b) (Log Item 5.216); and 4. Heron Drive shall be signed for local accesslresident use only (Decision at 41, Condition 25.c) (Log Item 5.216). PLA initially had proposed bollards in order to eliminate inn traffic on the segment of Heron Road that bypasses the existing town homes. The bollards could have been removed by the fire department in the event that they needed to have access to the imi from Heron Road. However, both Jefferson County Fire District No.3 and some town home residents objected to the bollards because they believed the bollards would obstruct emergency vehicle access to the inn and emergency evacuation from the town homes. Residents also stated that they and their guests often use the inn parking lot and felt that it would be inconvenient for them if the parking areas were separated. The following explanation of these concerns was provided by Randy Verrue on behalf of PLA at the November 30, 2006, public hearing before Mr. Berteig: Parking was also a consideration in the vicinity of the inn. Previously we had bollards at this location and as well as this location to separate the residential component from the commercial component. After further discussions with the residents, they liked the open level of circulation in this area The fire department also weighed in on that issue and said that he preferred to have an open level of circulation to allow fire trucks to access this freely from this direction or freely from this direction. Parking as it relates to the residential town home units in this area was also a concern so we reoriented the parking area to allow parking that really favors DWf 2240353v 1 0065364-000002 Seattle # Page LOG ITEM f)b1 A of Phi10lbrechts January 30, 2008 Page 3 the town home owners on both sides and added some parallel parking here as well as parking units that face the town homes. In reaction to these comments, PLA proposed to eliminate the bollards in its letter to Al Scalf and Barbara Nightingale dated September 13,2006 (Log Item 5.121). Mr. Berteig discussed the bollards at pages 8, 31, and 32 of his decision, noting the Fire District's concerns and ultimately requiring as follows: "Eliminate proposed bollards to increase the circulation area unless Jefferson County Fire District No.3 requires otherwise." (Decision at 32, Condition 3.b) (Log Item 5.216). PLA will do whatever Jefferson County and the Fire District require: install bollards or not. PLA takes no position whether bollards should be required or not. The fact that in Section 14 of your decision you assumed that bollards still were required is insignificant for two reasons: (1) there is no credible or substantial evidence in the administrative record that there either are or win be any safety issues on Heron Road, in spite of all the chest-thumping you are hearing from Mr. Hale and Mr. Powers~ and (2) you have the authority to reinstate the bollards now, in a reconsidered or modified decision, if you deem them appropriate and do not mind that your decision may offend the Fire District and other town home residents. Berteig Recusal PLA does not object to your consideration of the new evidence but finds that it does not show bias. In fact, the new evidence is so lacking in merit that Mr. Powers should be condemned for pretending that it proves anything other than that Mr. Berteig was deposed last month. The new evidence, like the evidence already in the record, shows that Mr. Berteig was irritated, frustrated, and worn down by his work on Port Ludlow projects, that he resented that Jefferson County procedures allowed an Appellate Hearing Examiner to review his decisions, and that he advocated for the elimination of the administrative appellate procedure in which we are now involved. That is all. There is no evidence either in the record or in the new evidence offered by Mr. Powers that Mr. Berteig was biased - no evidence that he pre-judged this case or any other, or that he favored PLA over the Appellants, or that he would benefit personally from any of his decisions. If you carefully read all of the deposition passages quoted and cited by Mr. Powers and the e- mail message dated August 21, 2006, from County Administrator John Fischbach to Mr. Berteig, then you will be forgiven for asking, "Where the heck in all of this does it show that Berteig was biased toward any party or resented the appellants?" The answer is, nowhere. Mr. Berteig's DWT 2240353vl 0065364-000002 Seattle # Page LOG ITEM ?~~ 3 of Phil Olbrechts January 30, 2008 Page 4 reference to ''the Port Ludlow folks" does not mean "Les Powers" any more than it means "PLA." Nothing in the new evidence supports any claim of bias. Conclusion I do not agree with the assertion that you do not have authority to reconsider your decision as to any matter not described in Section 13.1 of Appendix C to the Land Use Application Procedures Ordinance, Ordinance No. 04-0828-98. You have a common law authority to reconsider your decision on proper grounds, such as those grounds described at Civil Rule 59(a), as long as you maintain jurisdiction over the appeals. Those grounds include "that substantial justice has not been done." You also have authority, on your own initiative and without regard to PLA' s motion, to correct your decision. In any event, PLA' s motion for reconsideration raises sufficient issues about materials facts (such as the locations of shore lands, the nature of the "final action" by Jefferson County relating to the shoreline permit, and the ability of the Board of County Commissioners to establish development standards in the development agreement) to give you authority to grant PLA's motion even under Section 13.1. I again respectfully request that you grant PLA's motion for reconsideration by the issuance of a modified decision and deny the Hale and Powers motions for reconsideration. Thank you very much for your consideration. Sincerely yours, Aa~s :ri, T~:L~ IYarYo ~Silva cc: David Johnson (Via Electronic Mail) Lewis Hale (Via Electronic Mail) Gregg Jordshaugen (Via Electronic Mail) Elizabeth Van Zonneveld (Via Electronic Mail) Vaughn Bradshaw (Via Electronic Mail) Leslie A. Powers (Via Electronic Mail) Diana Smeland (Via Electronic Mail) Randy Verrue (Via Electronic Mail) Troy Crosby (Via Electronic Mail) Miriam Villiard (Via Electronic Mail) DWT 2240353vl 0065364-000002 Seattle # Page LOG ITEM ~6~ ~ of , Phil Olbrechts January 30, 2008 Page 5 TRANSCRIPT OF TESTIMONY OF TRAFFIC ENGINEER GERAL YN REINART, P.E. BEFORE JEFFERSON COUNTY HEARING EXAMINER IRV BERTEIG PLA RESORT COMPLETION PROJECT PUBLIC HEARING JANUARY 17, 2006 Marco: Examiner: Reinart: Examiner: Reinart: DWT 2240353vl 0065364-000002 Seattle We're gonna switch the order a little bit here, so I'm, sorry to throw you off but this is, this is Geralyn Reinart. She's a traffic and transportation engineer and she's going to talk about off site transportation impacts. Swear to tell the truth, the whole truth in the testimony you're about to give? I do. Okay, now state your name please. For the record my name is Geralyn Reinart. My address is 1319 Dexter Avenue North, Suite 103 in Seattle, 98109. Uh, brief summary of my credentials. I have a Bachelors Degree in Civil Engineering from Iowa State University, a Masters in Civil Engineering from the University of Washington. I've been a member of the Institute of Transportation Engineers for over 25 years. I've been a licensed engineer in the State of Washington for over 20 years. For the first seven years of my career I was employed in the public sector by the Cities of Kenewick and the City of Bellevue as their Traffic Engineer and Traffic Operation Engineer respectively. Those duties primarily involved day to day traffic operations, monitoring of traffic signals, pavement marking signing, responding to citizen complaints and setting up neighborhood traffic control program. For the past 20 years I've been a consultant, uh 16 and a half of those years employed at David 1. Hamlin and Associates and the last three and a half years I've been self employed. Primarily involved in, excuse me, the preparation of traffic impact analyses. I also provide on-call traffic engineering, services to the City's of Dupont and Sultan. Urn, my involvement in this project is as the primary author of the transportation element for the EIS documents. I've also been involved in various projects in Port Ludlow over many years including the 1993 programmatic BIS and the yearly traffic monitoring programs. What I'd like to do today is provide a brief LOG ITEM # ?b~ Page 5 of Phil Olbrechts January 30, 2008 Page 6 DWT 2240353vl 0065364-000002 Seattle overview of the work completed for the resort project and the findings. Detailed discussions of the elements of the analysis prepared for the project and the alternatives along with the assumptions and the findings and conclusions can be found in the published environmental documents which have already been submitted into the record. The traffic analysis reviewed the existing conditions in the area. The arterial roadway configurations, speed limits, traffic volumes, intersection control, accident history, transient facilities and the level of service at six critical off-site intersections that would be impacted by the project. These intersections included two locations along SR 104 uh those being the intersections of Paradise Bay Road and Oak Bay - re I'm sorry Beaver Valley Road. Along with the intersections of Beaver Valley Road, Oak Bay Road, Oak Bay Road at Paradise Bay Road, Teal? Lake Road at Paradise Bay Road, and Oak Bay Road at Walker Way which is also Marina View Drive and the main access into the Resort. For the most part these intersections are, er these intersection are arterial intersections and therefore more critical with respect to level of service and traffic operations. All of these intersections are controlled by stop signs on the minor streets with the exception of the Oak Bay Road, Paradise Bay Road which is controlled by stop signs in all directions. Furthermore, five of these intersections are locations that are monitored yearly as part of the Port Ludlow monitoring prograTIl. In general the traffic volumes at the intersections in the immediate, in the immediate Port Ludlow area are relatively light but with much higher volumes present along the SR 104 corridor. As part of past monitoring we've also found that the weekend peak hour volumes at these intersections are higher than the traditional commuter peak hours during the week. And that's most likely the result of the summer tourist related activities that are um in this area. The analyses of the level of service for the existing conditions for both the weekday and the weekend conditions resulted in or showed that all of these intersections in the Port Ludlow community are operating at level of service B or better with much lower levels of service present at the Highway 104 conditions, especially on the weekend. And these findings were consistent with prior monitoring reports. The traffic analysis then reviewed and analyzed the impacts associated with the proposed project. The analysis included an estimate of the new traffic that would be generated by the project. The distribution of the traffic through the critical intersections LOG rretfJt # ~~ Page h of Phil Olbrechts January 30, 2008 Page 7 Examiner: Reinart: DWT 2240353vl 0065364-000002 Seattle mentioned. An analysis of future levels of service at the critical intersections. These analyses were for the weekend conditions since as I stated earlier those have shown to be the higher volumes in the area. The proposed project could potentially expect to generate just under 890 daily trips on the weekend of which 100 of those would occur during the peak. hour. The levels of service at the intersections mentioned were reviewed again for the future post development condition. The existing traffic volumes were increased by yearly growth rates of roughly 3-6% annually depending on the location. These percentages or growth rates were used county projects that were based on both housing and population forecasts and historical traffic count. And those values are presented in their transportation element. Additionally on top of these yearly growth factors, I also increased the volumes for an additionally 350 units within the Port Ludlow community that may be developed over the next several years. As a result of this combination of both historical background traffic growth plus these additional units it produced a very conservative analysis since the county forecasts would have already included these population and housing forecasts in their future projections shown on the transportation element. The results of the levels of service for the future conditions indicate that the critical inter. arterial intersections within the Port Ludlow community would continue to operate at acceptable levels of service upon completion of the project. That being level of service C or better um with higher, increasingly higher amounts of delay present at the side street stop control movements of the intersections entering Highway 104. Closer to the project itself um the need for left turn storage along Oak. Bay Road was also reviewed at the Marina View Drive, Walker Way intersection. Based on the Wash dot or WSDOT guidelines turn storage would not be needed to accommodate the projected future left turns at that location. There's the left turn on Walker or is that turn on? The left turn on Oak Bay Road to serve traffic turning left into the project, yes. With respect to the private roadways within the resort no level of service concerns are apparent since the volumes on these roadways would be considerably lower than the volumes present along the county arterials and as noted a few minutes ago, there were no level of service conditions, er concerns or LOG ITEM ?-b'3 ~ of # Page Phil Olbrechts January 30, 2008 Page 8 Examiner: Reinart: Examiner: Bob: Reinart: DWT 2240353vl 0065364-000002 Seattle deficiencies noted for those locations. Furthermore it's been mentioned several times that there will be some internal circulation revisions uh removing some of the traffic from Heron Drive that associated with the inn and the restaurant that would decrease some of the traffic, the existing traffic through that area right now although there would be some additional traffic associated with the, the proposed additional tome home units that would be constructed. Did you participate in the uh design changes that Mark Dorsey described earlier? No he was primarily involved in those issues. However, just a quick number for your reference in the general area of where the existing restaurant is right now, which is this general vicinity. The existing town home units plus these additional units up to about that point would result in a, a daily volume of just of under 250 trips a day which is typically considered a low volume roadway. Based on the trip generation and volume projections for the project and analysis of the key county arterial intersections impacted by the proposed project no significant off site adverse impacts attributed to the project were identified. And based on that um, I will conclude at this time unless you have some specific questions you'd like to ask. I think I've got it covered. Bob? Yes, thank you urn, let's got back to the town homes and the Heron Road. Would you examine that - the record indicates a lot of concerns in part of the community about the town home parking access through the garages, circulation back from the inn through the town home areas. So if you could elaborate more about your analysis of that area. Any accident history? Urn, first of all, some of that will be covered from more of a design perspective by Steve Kelly who will be following me since they were responsible for designing the road. However, from just a general traffic operations review. It, that roadway is essentially a local access roadway, very low volume. Typically on a roadway such as that um, many agencies only require minimal stopping sight distance, intersection sight distance is no longer an issue with them just because of the lower speeds and the local a.cc~ss. In LUG ITEM # ~~ Page ~ of PhilOlbrechts January 30, 2008 Page 9 Bob: Reinart: Bob: Reinart: Bob: Reinart: Bob: OWT 2240353vl 0065364-000002 Seattle many ways this street functions as an alley or driveway access, not unlike a lot of the old alleys in the City of Seattle, areas like that. My understanding is that the stopping sight distance is more than adequate for the design parameters that were used and based on my field inspection; I would concur with that assessment. Is that within stopping distance in view of that speed limit? Correct, correct. Also because and I did contact Scott Kilmer prior to his retirement from the county regarding any kind of accident data for the resort area in general. The bottom line is the county and most agencies simply do not keep track of records for non- public roadways. Urn, I think uh, there was something mentioned earlier that there might have been a minor fender bender in the urn, in the inn parking lot at some point in time. But typically roadways like this you won't see a high incidence of accidents. Just beyond this from a comparative standpoint, the county records that were for Oak Bay Road and Paradise Bay Road also had a very low incidence of, of reported traffic accidents from the three year history that was provided by the county. And I also believe prior to my assessment the county had also done their own analysis of both Oak Bay Road and Paradise Bay Road and also found - er did not find a high accident incidents occurring along those public roadways. Okay thank you. On the internal circulation itself of the resort area around the pond and the access points out to Oak Bay Road did you analyze the need for either one, one access point or two access points for egress and ingress? Urn I'm not sure I quite understand the direction of your question. Did you do any average daily traffic or any circulation studies relative to the internal circulation? No. And the need particularly for one access point onto Oak Bay Road or two access points. Now I'll point to the areas that I'm concerned about. The Harbor Drive as it comes out to Oak Bay Road on this end which is not an access point but more specifically this, this one that comes up and approaches out on the Oak Bay LOG ITEM # '1:b "0 Page~of Phil Olbrechts January 30, 2008 Page 10 Reinart: Man? Reinart: Bob: Reinart: Bob: DWT 2240353vl 0065364-000002 Seattle Road. So two, one or two access points here and it's internal circulation as it goes and comes down in the, see the arrows come up Oak Bay Road, come into the resort, go to Admiralty, or the Beach Club, come on down you can make your way down to the Marina. Or you can make your way into the inn. You can't circulate out, you can turn around here, come back out, and out or you come into the town homes and, and for those people. Did you analyze any of that work, that circulation? No not specifically. Uh starting out with your first comment about uh I believe its Harbor Drive that is the one way road out - that connects to Oak Bay Road. Entrance only. Correct it's an entrance only. So in terms of capacity or level of service there really is not an issue there because there is no controlled movement which is where you begin to fmd any kind of capacity constraints. Certainly we did yes, analyze the intersection of Oak Bay Road and Marina View Drive for level of service. And that I believe upon post development condition with the assumptions made would operate at level of service C under the current configuration and stop sign control. Further into the site, no, no specific intersection analysis was completed. I think it's pretty apparent by inspection and qualitatively that since there were no levels of service deficiencies noted on the county arterial system where the volumes are considerably heavier that internal to the site urn that capacity will not be a concern within, within the site itself. Does that answer your question? And, and as I further stated just a relative number in this vicinity post development that would be in the range of you know, under 250 trips a day which is very, very minor volume. No that's fine thank you. Thank you. Okay thank you. LOG ITEM i#. Q-h1 Ptge---l.1Lof..JJL