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County Holds Firm on Senior Housing Project Road Requirement · KMUD News

• 0:00
  Speaker A: Despite concerns about effects on its housing prices, the Humboldt Commons project in Mckinleyville was denied a waiver of a county road widening requirement. During a March 19 hearing, the Humboldt County Planning Commission weighed a staff recommendation to deny the waiver against the cost of the requirement. The waiver was requested by the Humboldt Commons resident driven senior community project. The project is being advanced by the Life Plan Humboldt nonprofit organization. It'll build 109 affordable senior housing units on a 15 acre parcel along Hiller Road between Mckinleyville and Central avenues. Hiller Road now consists of two vehicle travel lanes and shoulders bordered by grassy areas. To accommodate the addition of its project life plan, Humboldt is required to add a sidewalk and landscape buffer and a paved 13 foot wide travel lane that will temporarily be used as a bicycle lane. Emma Haskett of Life Plan Humboldt said widening and paving the Hiller Road segment will add cost to an already expensive list of off site improvements.
• 1:17
  Speaker B: So this is all going to cost a lot of money. Our budget currently allocates 5, 575,000 to Hiller Road improvements, which just includes curb, gutter and sidewalk, $550,000 to the Nursery Way extension and $175,000 to the Midtown trail. The county is asking us to pay an additional $200,000 to widen Hiller Road, which brings our total county required subdivision improvements to $1.5 million. So again, we're just asking you to grant an exception to the additional requirement to widen Hiller Road.
• 1:52
  Speaker A: The ultimate design for Hiller Road as approved in the Mckinleyville town center plan is for the section to have two auto travel lanes with medians and landscape strips, a bicycle lane and sidewalks. Life Plan Humboldt's alternative proposal to the widening is for a maintained vegetated buffer. Planning director John Ford said doing that would be problematic.
• 2:17
  Speaker C: This is a very difficult situation and you know, everybody is supportive of lifeplan Humboldt. Absolutely. I think part of this thing that is normal is the first lane of traffic curb veterans sidewalk are normal improvements for development. You've developed enough property, you know that. And so when it comes to orderly development, what do you want that area to look like? One of the things that's being presented, and I would ask you to think about this, is to put grass in there and maybe some other plantings and that would look nice, encourage people to be there. That's the public right of way. That's putting them in the public right of way. Where cars are, as has been testified, going by too fast. That's not something the county wants to
• 3:15
  Speaker A: take liability for Commissioner Peggy o' Neill vouched for having the county seek outside funding for the widening and other improvements. She also evoked a long standing stance that McKinleyville absorbs housing and other responsibilities without proportional funding.
• 3:33
  Speaker D: You know, as a McKinleyville resident, I'd like to see more attention given to McKinleyville when it comes to improving the roads. That's where you want to put everybody. You want to put the homeless people there, you want to put low income people there. You want, you know, it to be your increased housing. But I don't see a lot of money coming back to McKinleyville for the amount of taxes that we pay. And I mean, we don't have an accounting of it. We've, we asked. I know Madrone was looking into how much taxes we pay versus what we get back. But a project like this that benefits low income residents should be a priority of the counties. If you want low income people to live in McKinleyville, then help us out.
• 4:16
  Speaker A: The commission agreed to maintain the requirement with some conditions to increase the possibility of outside funding. The widened and paved area will be a buffered interim bicycle lane that will be striped by the county. The commission also agreed to give Life Plan Humboldt five years to do the improvements with ultimate design of the roadway to be Approved by the McKinleyville Municipal Advisory Committee and the county's board of supervisors. The vote in support of that was unanimous and was part of a package of approvals including a parcel subdivision and a special permit for wetland consolidation and restoration in Eureka. For KMUD news, this is Daniel Mintz.