The team of planners, architects and real estate experts helping to guide future development of the Central Issaquah Plan shared their progress with the Issaquah City Council Tuesday night.
Planners have identified the Central Issaquah sub-area as 915 acres that stretch on both sides of Interstate 90, west to the point where Newport Way parallels Interstate 90 and east to just beyond Front Street. It has 6.3 million square feet of floor area and contains 89 percent of Issaquah’s total commercial land area and nine of Issaquah’s top 10 employers. It doesn’t, however, contain much housing — only 738 of Issaquah’s total 12,168 dwelling units.
“I think you’ll see in the next 10 to 15 years most of our housing growth in the Central Issaquah Area,” Planning Director Mark Hinthorne said.
The planning work is meant to be a 20- to 30-year plan that will determine what types of residential, commercial and mixed-use projects are built here in the coming decades. So far, the team has helped lead several public meetings and an idea-gathering tour of Mercer Island and Old Bellevue, and helped winnow down potential concepts from an initial list of 11 to two. At some point community members and the council will decide between the two options.
The meeting was the council’s first opportunity to discuss what ideas they liked and didn’t care for from the tour, which took place in July.
“I would say I found what we saw in Mercer Island more useful than Old Bellevue, but only (to a) slight degree,” Councilman John Rittenhouse said, noting that he liked the way the buildings on Mercer Island came up close to the street and weren’t separated by parking lots.
Councilman Fred Butler said he felt both tour stops were lacking in terms of successful gathering places. “We’re blessed in Issaquah, I believe, because we have the potential for some fantastic gathering places,” Butler said, noting Tibbetts Creek and Darst Park.
Councilmember Eileen Barber said she felt Mercer Island was “hard and tunnel-like” and that there was a lack of green and open space.
“It wasn’t friendly and inviting to me at all,” Barber said. “I kept thinking, where would the children play?”
The council also touched on the idea that the city will make some type of investment, perhaps in the form of funding a parking structure or stormwater program, Council President Maureen McCarry said. She said she’d like those discussions to at least begin in time to be considered in the coming budget cycle.
The planning team also shared information on traffic modeling, which showed that some city intersections could be failing by the year 2030 even without any additional large development projects.
Darby Watson of LMN Architects showed the council some very preliminary ideas of what the smaller planning districts within the sub-area might look like and contain. Current design guidelines, codes and standards will be reviewed and altered, and new ones created in order to guide what specific developments in each district would look like.
Some council members said they would like to ensure that the character of certain areas such as Gilman Village aren’t drastically altered in the process.
Doug Larson of the real estate consulting and investing firm Heartland gave council members an overview of market conditions and the potential of the Central Issaquah sub-area, covering current and potential rental and purchase rates for residential and commercial spaces, the retail market and strategies for attracting the types of businesses council members hope would be interested in coming to Issaquah.
To see the presentation, visit http://www.ci.issaquah.wa.us/page.asp?navid=1597.
