Alki Elementary Variance Hearing Held

 Great reporting on this day-long event on Tuesday by the West Seattle Blog. The hearing examiners said she would give a written judgment within 20 days. It's my experience that Seattle Schools generally wins the day on this kind of thing but I found the arguments compelling.

The background is that Seattle Schools is rebuilding Alki Elementary to be a much larger school - going from X to X. Like the other elementary schools they are greatly enlarging - like Viewlands, Rogers and Montlake - the district has never clearly explained why this is necessary if they are losing enrollment. 

(As my spidey sense tells me, it's because they want to close near by small schools and move those small populations into these larger buildings. I have looked at the map for Alki and I'm not sure I get why it is happening there.)

But Alki is really a special situation as the entire school will have zero parking with a single ADA spot available across the street. What seems odd is that the closed Schmitz Park Elementary site is close by and does have a parking area. Why didn't it become the pick for a rebuild?

When you read the West Seattle Blog comments on this story, there are a lot of disdainful comments about too much worry over not being able to park your car and parents should make the students who can't have bus access, walk or bike. I absolutely can see the point of getting that thinking started early. But other factors to consider:

• Like many areas in Seattle, apparently this is a hilly area. That does build in some issues plus the rain factor.
  
• The school is just a block away from a very popular beach area which means competition for parking spaces. 
• If you have a large school, you likely have a fair amount of staff. I have rarely seen any teacher enter a building without an armful of something. It's a lot to park blocks away and then carry teaching materials for blocks. And volunteers? And other disabled people/students?

From the West Seattle Blog (all bold mine):

In this appeal process, the burden of proof is on the appellant – they have to prove the city’s decision was wrong, rather than the city having to prove its decision was right. Otherwise, the proceedings are similar to a trial, with each side given the opportunity to present their case, to call witnesses, to question the other side’s witnesses, and to give a closing statement. Though the four remaining appeals were aired in one hearing, each of the appellants got to present her case and call witnesses. (One of the appellants is Maryanne Wood, candidate for school board for District 6.)

The appellants, city and district reps, and other witnesses all completed their testimony in one day, though up to three were set aside for the hearing. As we reported Monday, one appeal was withdrawn after a settlement with Seattle Public Schools, and Tuesday it was revealed that took the new school’s height off the list of issues being challenged. The project’s architect said they had managed to lower the height of a rooftop equipment “penthouse” by three feet.

From the reporting, it sounds like the appellants did their homework:

• Primary witness for the appellants was Gary Norris, a traffic engineer who works in the private sector now and offered a long list of credits in the public sector, including the cities of Seattle, Bellevue, and Renton. He picked apart the traffic study done for the district by Heffron Transportation, saying it fails to address the “most significant issue,” the traffic flow in the school area, which would affect parking too. By all accounts, pickup/dropoff times – with about 270 students, half of the rebuilt school’s projected capacity – are chaotic; Norris contended the traffic study did not properly calculate the stress on nearby intersections, including 59th/Stevens, where the pedestrian account would “dramatically” increase too. 
• He also took issue with Heffron having studied parking in the area in December 2021 – low season for the nearby beach, which otherwise generates a lot of parking demand (not to mention that it was during the pandemic and the West Seattle Bridge closure) – and with “inadequate ADA parking” (one space is to be created across 59th from the school).

•  Kathleen Oss, an appellant,  "declared that safety planning is lacking, even beyond the traffic-circulation issues – what if there were a crisis on campus that required responders to access the school quickly?" She wants to see an “independent review” and redesign of the project.
• Another appellant, Jackie Szikszoy, " said the community’s voice hadn’t been heard much in the process, and that the school’s impact on the neighborhood needed to be considered, calling the expanded Alki Elementary “a school that looks like an airport.” She noted that she was no stranger to the city’s public processes, as a longtime community-group leader and participant in other groups, including serving on the city’s Board of Park Commissioners. She pointed to city code as saying that “flexibility in zoning” can be possible if “the impacts on the surrounding community are negligible or can be mitigated.”
• Candidate Maryanne Wood made another important point - If the district is hoping to reduce car trips, then why plan for less than the required number of bicycle parking spaces, and fewer weather-protected spaces? 
• Appellant Shauna Causey said "she (and other appellants) also pointed out that Alki had a “parking overlay” requiring residential development to allot one and a half spaces per unit, and that meant that even a remodeling project required her family to spend a sizable amount of money to add an on-site parking space, so it’s difficult to understand why a project like this could just sail through without any. "
• The district's architecture firm rep said "that there some overlap with Seattle Parks Property next door (the school shares a gym with Alki Community Center, and that won’t be torn down) to the east and north, and said that would help with the ADA parking concerns, because an ADA space east of the community center could be used for the school as well."
• As for community voice, the district says they did outreach "to collect and center community voice." The appellants had questions for Hutchinson. How many “neighbors” were on the School Design Advisory Team? One, she replied. What kind of outreach was done (one appellant got a postcard two days before a meeting/presentation)? Hutchinson said her firm wasn’t accountable for that, but did make posters and place flyers in mailboxes. "One neighbor? And isn't illegal to put any non-mail item in mailboxes? They tell you this all the time when you are out doorbelling for candidates. 
• Overall, McBryan acknowledged, parking usage on the surrounding streets would increase with a new, higher-capacity school, but not so much that the city would require mitigation measures (RPZs, etc.). 
• Why isn’t the required Traffic Management Plan expected to be done any time soon? McBryan said that they prefer to wait until new schools are close to opening, because they want to work with the principal who will be accountable for managing the plan, and principals tend to move around. Some transportation plans are simple, some are complex, he added. He mentioned some components likely to go into this one – telling parents to use 59th as a one-way street at pickup and dropoff times, telling staff to park a certain distance away, telling parents of older kids to park a few blocks away so the nearby spaces can be used by parents of younger kids. The appellants’ transportation expert Norris then asked McBryan some questions. He restated his concern that the transportation-management plan wasn’t going to be drawn up for quite some time, and asked how residents on 59th would be made aware of the plan to operate it as a one-way northbound street during pickup/dropoff times. They’d be notified, McBryan replied, but they certainly couldn’t be required to use it that way.
• How will events be addressed in the transportation-management plan? It might be recommended that events be broken into two sessions or nights, or separated by grades, or even held offsite. Off-site? The district has the funding to allow one school to have events off-site? Even if it was a district building, there are facilities costs. 
• In response to other questions, McBryan said the district did not expect a higher volume of school buses, because the enrollment area wasn’t expected to change, and the buses they run now have room for more riders.