We met with key people in the City Planning and Engineering/Building to address our concerns about the Aktiv Development. We were informed that the application was sent back to Chinook, as it was incomplete (missing a lighting plan). So the City has not formerly reviewed the application as of this date. We were still able to discuss some of our larger concerns about traffic and environmental impact.

As for the environmental, from preliminary review, they did not see any issues with the plan or its proximity to the Poulsbo Creek. There will be stormwater retention under the upper lot of the development, it of course will still be emptying out into the stream, however it will be “managed”. In their words, currently it is not, so it “should be better” when it comes to flooding issues in the neighborhood. We do still have concerns about contaminants, construction run-off, etc. But we’ll need to re-address this later once the City has formerly reviewed the application.

As for traffic, the current survey by the City says that Harrison currently sees 200-300 car trips per day. The traffic impact study for the development estimated it nearly doubling that by adding around 200 more car trips a day, for a total of 500-600 car trips a day. This is a huge impact, BUT the City’s own study says that Harrison’s current max capacity is 3,000 car trips a day. We did argue that the street is barely two lanes with no parking (as noted in the Aktiv traffic study). According to Building/Engineering the street width is adequate and meets regulation for a two-lane street. We did bring up that 9th, where the parking garage is slated to exit, is an alley and is generally blocked by delivery vehicles to the businesses on the street. This information was new to the City, so this is good that they are now aware of the difficulties of adding that kind of traffic to an alley way.