Bend council OKs Westside campus – with misgivings

At the close of a nearly 5-hour appeal hearing Monday afternoon, the Bend City Council unanimously affirmed a hearings officer’s approval of controversial plans for OSU-Cascades’ new Westside campus – but not before they tacked on some new conditions and expressed strong disappointment at the university’s method of winning approval.

The 6-0 decision (with Scott Ramsay absent) likely will send the opposing Truth in Site Coalition, which prefers a location at Juniper Ridge on the north edge of town, to the state Land Use Board of Appeals, once councilors adopt the written findings at their Oct. 15 meeting.

But while all those legal arguments and deliberation did not convince any councilor they had the means to derail the project, several did say they felt confined by the state land-use process they must follow. They said they wished OSU had not just applied for site-plan approval for its 10-acre site along Chandler Avenue but a master plan that includes the 46-acre former pumice mine it has an option to buy to the west, for later expansion.

But their concerns went beyond the master plan, which they will make a condition for just such an expansion. They also strengthened the hearings officers’ conditions regarding adding to the much-debated 320 parking spaces, if as critics fear that number leads to parking problems for the surrounding neighborhoods.

And while they are willing to let OSU-Cascades try to match its goal of 30 percent of students and staff walk, bike, take transit or otherwise avoid a single person in a car, the current situation of little student housing in place within easy walking distance meant their issues go beyond the campus itself – and involve the narrow land use process it chose to employ, called a site plan approval and design review.

“The university has chosen to move this forward through a very skinny wicket,” said Councilor Sally Russell. “A lot of expectations in the community have not been able to be addressed, and processes for wider community inclusion have not happened.”

“This is a very difficult decision, as someone who was hoping to be more engaged with the community on a change” of such magnitude, Russell said, though she added that under the city code and rules, “I don’t see any other direction to go.”

“I feel, as a community leader, very disappointed with how we got to here,” she added, adding that “(I) don’t appreciate being put in this position. I hope the university as an organization hears what we’re telling them today – that moving forward is a much broader process. It needs to be successful for this community, and it all hinges around the master planned development many of us hoped and expected would take place.”

Councilor Mark Capell had suggested requiring a master plan when the university expands elsewhere in the community, not just adjacent to where it is, but that drew concern from colleagues, including Victor Chudowsky, as being unworkable and setting a troubling precedent for other projects in the area, so it eventually was withdrawn.

Truth in Site co-founder Scott Morgan claimed the hemmed-in “shoehorned” site won’t result in the “multiplier effect” of economic growth in nearby areas that a “university park district” at a site like Juniper Ridge makes possible. But hours later, Capell said those “aspirational” goals are all good and well – but city councilors have to decide on the record whether the project meets city code requirements.

“The city’s at a crossroads right now,” Morgan said, adding that the decisions made now “will affect our grandchildren’s grandchildren. Why shoehorn it into a site that doesn’t make sense. … Let’s not squander the opportunity. Let’s do all the planning now.” (Morgan also noted that his son started classes Monday at COCC, where 85 cars were counted as illegally parked due to the parking crunch.)

Opponents’ attorney Jeff Kleinman pointed to the “mere site plan and design review,” and asked, “How did that get cooked up? Why has the city appeared to jump through hoops and do cartwheels to avoid imposing the requirement of master planning?”

But the school’s attorney, Steve Janik, said, “Why would we plan for 56 acres when we don’t know there’ll be demand for it?”

School representative Kelly Sparks said, “We of course want to do a long-range planning effort,” aand are “looking at what might be a special planned district.”

Kleinman had some lines to deliver during the afternoon, saying the school monitoring is own parking supply and demand is like “the fox guarding the henhouse – or maybe in this case, the Beavers guarding the woodpile.”

While Janik attacked Kleinman’s ‘tortured twisting of those code sections” to change the outcome, Chudowsky agreed that it would be “really jumping the gun to require” master planning for 46 acres, and they have to decide on what is before them.

Capell said much of what Morgan and the community hope to see is “just irrelevant” in the terms of what they were deciding.

In fact, he said. “The council has no say on where this (campus) is placed. All we have a say on is what they’ve asked to do – does it fit within our code? It’s not, do we like the site or dislike the site … do we want it somewhere else.”

The council went along with some of what staff recommended in moving from a hearings officer’s decision to formal findings, but rejected a proposal that OSU-Cascades be required to schedule classes so they don’t begin or end within 15 minutes of the start or end of the nearby Bend-La Pine schools. The first problem with that arose when it was noted that private schools like Seven Peaks are also nearby.

Instead, they returned to the hearings officer condition that directs OSU-Cascades to coordinate its schedules to alleviate the impact on area roads.