OSU-Cascades master plan goes to Bend City Council

OSU-Cascades put its master plan for future expansion in front of Bend city councilors Wednesday evening, with a public hearing on the plans scheduled in two weeks.

The university hopes to expand this current campus and make it into a small community over a four-phase project.

The school plans to do this by creating different districts across the campus that can be used by students and faculty to create a better living environment, including a recreation district and “innovation district.”

Kelly Sparks, the associate vice president of finance and strategic planning, said she hopes that by creating the districts, they can create a place where students want to live and learn.

“One of the ways the we keep students on campus are all of things that happen in between classes,” Sparks said. “So recreation, multi-cultural activities, arts and enrichment that happen on campus, student advising and then experiential learning.”

The campus would be made up of four districts, the innovations district, the core campus district, the recreation district and the residential district.

The university says it hopes to have the campus completed by the year 2034.

Councilors in their work session got a look at the master plan and will later decide to either deny or approve the plan along with conditions made for approval.

There are other aspects to the university’s master plan could impact traffic flow in the city.

The university said it recognizes they will have to stay ahead of the growth in numbers when it comes to traffic around the campus.

That is why they plan to put in three new roundabouts to help accommodate that.

The proposed roundabouts are to be located at Columbia Street and Colorado Avenue, Columbia Street and Simpson Avenue, and at Century and Taylor drives. More sidewalks also are planned, including along the entire north boundary and pedestrian refuge and left-turn lanes.

Sparks said the measures are designed and intended to help keep traffic flowing on the west side of town.

“So we have studied to meet the city code, but we also made it — because we think as a university developing, it’d be important that we are a community partner, and that we are putting the right improvements in place to keep everybody safe and moving on the west side of Bend,” Sparks said.

The university will fund the new roundabouts.

A big problem on any campus is making sure that there is enough parking to go around.

That is something that OSU-Cascades is looking at with their master plan.

According to Bend city code, a certain number of parking spaces are required to be available on a college campus, based on their population.

That number is 1,766 parking spaces for OSU-Cascades at full building, to be phased in as they grow. That includes a 20 percent reduction of spaces allowed by city code for carpool/car-share spaces and bike facilities

Sparks said OSU-Cascades, which has faced great scrutiny over parking spaces, is not going to just stop at the bare minimum, parking-wise.

“We certainly hope that number is right, because the objective is to put less concrete down and to have fewer trips coming to and from the campus. The object is to not build more then that,” Sparks said. “However, we have accounted for 29 percent more parking to be able to be built on campus, if that number is wrong.”

City Senior Code Planner Karen Swenson told councilors there would be space for nearly 2,300 parking spaces on site at full buildout, if traffic monitoring shows the demand is higher through required monitoring. That includes 75 spaces along the north side of Chandler Avenue, but not the current off-site parking location.

Along with plenty more parking spots, the university said they are hoping to add better walking and biking access to the campus, to give people that option of transportation as well.

Councilors asked a few questions ahead of their public hearing on the master plan and rezoning that will take place on Wednesday, May 16 at 7 p.m. at City Hall.