The Collins View Neighborhood Association is gearing up to do battle with its “800 pound gorilla” – Lewis and Clark College – as the latter gears up to update its Master Plan.
Already the largest “college” in Oregon with 3,400 students, Lewis and Clark is seeking some expansion of its enrollment and major expansion of its facilities in the plan, which at press time was scheduled to be reviewed by a City of Portland hearings officer on August 19. Neighbors fear the effect this will have on them in the form of traffic volume, parking congestion and noise.
For one thing, the college wants to expand use of Huston Field and Griswold Stadium. In her recommendations, City planner Sheila Frugoli has recommended against a college request to allow the installation of lights and a sound system at Huston which, neighbors say, the college assured them would be just an athletic “practice field” when it was created.
The college is currently limited to seven football games, or large events, calculated to attract upwards of 1,000 people, a year at Griswold. Frugoli has recommended that Riverdale High School football games not be included in this inventory.
However, siding with Collins View, she has stipulated that at least three of the seven events must be “Lewis and Clark sponsored or sporting events that include Lewis and Clark athletes,” rather than affairs for which unaffiliated promoters rent the stadium.
Frugoli also refused to relax noise monitoring requirements or extend the hours during which stadium lights can be used, and actually called for noise monitoring requirements to kick in an hour earlier than they do now.
However, Frugoli has recommended extending the campus boundary to cover several properties on Southwest Boones Ferry Road and one on Southwest Maplecrest Drive, all of which will be used for law and graduate student housing and parking.
The plan calls for 168 to 200 such housing units. Overall the plan calls for 800,000 square feet of additions to the college’s existing 1.2 million square feet of facilities, including expansion of the arts building and theater, and new science buildings and campus center.
The Hearings Officer’s decision could be appealed by either the college or its neighbors to the Portland City Council. As a neighborhood association, Collins View could bring such an appeal for free.
Lewis and Clark College attorney Dave Ellis has tried to assure neighbors that the expansions called for won’t necessarily occur any time soon, or even at all; the plan simply preserves the possibility.
“For capital construction, we’d first have to raise the money, and donors are fickle about what they want to contribute money for,” he said at a neighborhood meeting last month.” In any event, LC vice-president Carl Vance said, there will be further review of these projects when they come.
Neighbors are not reassured, especially with regard to the graduate housing. One Maplecrest Drive resident said, “This looks like a pretty final plan to me. As much as it’s qualified – ‘It’s just an idea,’ ‘We’re still looking for money under rocks’ – this would be tacit approval.”
Vance conceded, “I think you’re right that this is not just a hypothetical design. It’s been evolving. It’s not the final design, but it’s close to it.”
Collins View land use chair Dave Johnston said it is also “close to” what the neighborhood proposed as a design. He argued that Lewis and Clark already owned the land and it already carried the appropriate IR (Institutional residential) zoning, and there would be little basis for opposing the boundary extension.
The City can’t legally refuse to let the land be developed, he said, and if the college didn’t build there a private developer could, with fewer restrictions.
Others disagree. Collins View treasurer Prakash Joshi said that originally neighbors were told that the development “would be professor housing; there might be some for grad students, but it would look like our homes. Over a period of time it has changed, and the timeline is now two years or less. All of us will be living on the Lewis and Clark campus. They shouldn’t approve this without details. Two hundred units is unreasonable.”
Maplecrest Drive residents, several of whom attended the meeting for the first time, expressed particular concern about the traffic impact of such a development. They point out the street has no shoulders, let alone sidewalks, and increased traffic increases an existing danger. They also say a proposed reconstruction of the Boones Ferry Road and Maplecrest Drive intersection would result in dangerously limited sight distances on high-speed streets.
Maplecrest Drive resident DeAnne Troutman complained that she had received no word of the proposed plans until a week before the August community meetings from either the college or the neighborhood association. She called for asking the hearings officer for a delay in expanding the boundary. “They have acres of land within the boundary that is bare,” she said. “There’s no reason to expand it.”
Collins View officers said that they didn’t have the resources to notify all affected people of all meetings. Dixie Johnston said, “We’ve been fighting this battle for 15 years. We’ve knocked on every door, begged you, did everything but hog-tie you, to get you to get involved.”
To Troutman she said, “I feel your pain, I really do.” Dave Johnston and others say that the City noise regulations governing College events applies only to amplified sounds, not to crowd noises or the sounds of people coming and going. One neighbor spoke of a cheerleading contest at Griswold where there were “twelve hours for twelve days of screaming girls.”
City hearings officer Gregory Frank heard more than three hours of testimony at the hearing on August 19. He announced that he would hold the record open to receive additional public testimony on “one of the most complex applications I’ve ever seen” until September 16.
for sub-menu
