Camas Station moves forward

An independent hearings examiner has cleared the way for Camas Station, a gas station-car wash-retail complex, to be developed at the corner of Northwest Brady Road and Northwest 16th Avenue in Camas’ Prune Hill neighborhood.

Hearings Examiner Joe Turner issued his decision on Aug. 25, more than four weeks after dozens of Camas residents and Prune Hill Elementary School parents turned out to a public hearings examiner meeting to oppose the project, citing concerns about increased traffic on a busy road that connects residential neighborhoods to a park and elementary school, as well as the gas station’s potential release of harmful, airborne chemicals like benzene.

“It is regular to see drivers … speed through there,” Amy Linder, the president of the Prune Hill Elementary School parent-teacher association (PTA) told Turner during a July 26 hearings examiner hearing on the Camas Station’s required conditional-use permit. “And now we’re talking about adding 300 to 400 trips every morning? This is a recipe for disaster.”

Turner, a third-party examiner contracted by the city to oversee land-use issues such as conditional-use permits for development proposals such as the Camas Station that are not allowed outright in a certain zone, but are permitted conditionally they meet certain city code requirements, found the proposal to subdivide the 2.16-acre parcel at the corner of Brady Road and 16th Avenue into three commercial lots and construct a 7,350-square-foot convenience store-car wash and 12-pump gas station, as well as a 3,900-square foot drive-through coffee shop-retail building, a 2,800-square-foot retail building, parking lot and six electric-vehicle charging stations, “does or can comply” with the city’s standards for a conditional-use permit.

“All of the proposed uses are allowed in the (community-commercial) zone either as conditional or outright permitted uses,” Turner stated in his decision, adding that the proposed development site “has been zoned for commercial uses since at least 2006.”

Turner also found the city and developer had given adequate notice to the public regarding the proposed Camas Station development.

“The neighborhood was well represented at the hearing and in the written record,” Turner wrote in his Aug. 25 decision, noting that he had also held the record open for an additional week following the July 26 hearing “to allow the public the opportunity to submit additional testimony and evidence.”

Regarding the opponents’ concerns about environmental impacts of the development, Turner said he had no jurisdiction to reconsider the city’s determination that the proposal complied with the State Environmental Policy Act (SEPA) requirements.

“The purpose of SEPA analysis is to ensure consideration of environmental issues that are not addressed by (Camas’ municipal code),” Turner stated in his decision. “In this case, the (City) addresses the majority of potential environmental impacts of this development, including traffic … (and) issued a mitigated determination of non-significance for (the) development, which was not appealed and is now final.”

Examiner: ‘No evidence roads in the area are inherently unsafe’

One of the opponents’ main concerns about the proposed Camas Station development was that the complex and its related increase in traffic would make the area unsafe for pedestrians and bicyclists — especially children heading to and from the nearby Prune Hill Elementary School.

Alison Livett, who said she regularly drives on Brady Road, wrote to city of Camas staff to share her “strong opposition to the Camas Station development.”

“Situating a gas station so close to an elementary school is totally unacceptable and a danger to the health and safety of our children,” Livett stated in her email to the city. “The increased traffic in that location will also pose a danger to the many families on their way to school. … I find it hard to believe that the City would consider such a large development in the middle of a residential area.”

Dan Linder, the father of two Prune Hill Elementary students, wrote to the city to oppose the project and said the Brady-16th intersection “is already a disaster on weekday mornings.”

“We routinely see people speeding — in a marked school zone, no less — turning right on red with pedestrians present, blasting through yellow or red lights,” Dan Linder stated in his public comment opposing the project. “Adding a 12-pump gas station with coffee vendor and car wash will be a disaster for this intersection. Prune Hill was meant to be a walkable school, where the bulk of students would make their commute by foot. Attracting more vehicles into this area is just irresponsible to our children.”

Prior to the July 26 public hearing before Turner, the applicant, Howard Bode of the Las Vegas-based CK Designs, submitted a traffic impact study conducted by the Portland-based engineering firm Lancaster Mobley, which concluded the proposed Camas Station site had “no significant trends or crash patterns at any of the study intersections,” and predicted the project would add a little more than 1,100 new trips through the nearby intersections, including 111 new morning peak-hour trips and 107 new evening peak-hour trips. The traffic analysts also concluded the project would not “trigger the need for any new traffic signals” and said there should be no left turns permitted into the site from Northeast Brady Road.

The study noted that the intersection at Brady Road and 16th Avenue was the site of a fatality on July 30, 2017, when a motorcyclist “disregarded a stop sign and collided with a passenger vehicle,” but said that crash occurred when the intersection was still controlled by stop signs instead of the traffic signal installed in 2018. Since then, all intersections included in the traffic impact study had “crash rates well below 1.0,” the traffic analysts stated, adding that “recent signalization at this intersection is expected to reduce collisions.”

Many Camas residents who frequently drive, bike and walk through the area, however, disagreed with the results of the traffic impact study.

Linder, the Prune Hill PTA president, noted in a written public comment that she believed the applicant’s traffic impact study “flawed in four ways.”

“It fails to appreciate the unique time and space constraints of a public school drop-off period. It fails to address an intersection critical to the traffic flow around Prune Hill Elementary School. It fails to convey the dangerous sight lines on Brady Road, and it was conducted on a day not representative of an average Camas school day,” Linder stated in a letter sent to the city’s lead planner, Lauren Hollenbeck, and interim Community Development Director Robert Maul on July 29.

In his decision, Turner said he realized “increased traffic will be perceptible to area residents,” but noted the proposed Camas Station site “is located at the intersection of two arterial streets and a collector street — streets that are designed and intended to carry higher traffic volumes.”

“Vehicle traffic volumes, congestion and safety of pedestrians was a significant concern for many witnesses,” Turner noted in his decision. “This development, like any other commercial development on this site, will increase the volume of traffic on roads in the area. The uses proposed on the site are projected to generate 5,429 average daily trips. However, the majority of those trips are ‘pass-by’ trips – vehicles that are already on the road that stop by the site on their way to other destinations. The proposed uses will only generate 1,131 ‘new’ average daily trips.”

Turner called the opponents’ traffic-safety concerns “unsupported and subjective” and said they were “not sufficient to counter the expert analysis of the engineers for the applicant and the City, which is based on actual traffic counts and nationally accepted engineering standards and analyses.”

And while Turner found that “additional traffic generated by this development may pose an increased risk for drivers, cyclists and pedestrians in the area” and “may well warrant a heightened degree of attentiveness to traffic when driving, cycling or walking in the neighborhood,” the hearings examiner stated in his decision that these types of risks “are consistent with the location of the site in the urban area where City plans call for the sort of development being proposed.”

“Opponents cited numerous ‘near misses’ as distracted drivers failed to stop for pedestrians and/or ignored traffic control devices,” Turner added. “That is unfortunate and frightening for the persons involved, but it is not evidence that the roads in the area are inherently unsafe.”

Turner said the responsibility for ensuring safety of pedestrians, bicyclists and drivers in the area should not be on the Camas Station developer but, rather, on the city of Camas.

“If necessary, the City can address issues of speeding and other traffic violations by providing increased enforcement of traffic laws on streets in the area,” Turner stated in his decision. “Area residents can petition the City to provide increased enforcement on area streets. However, speeding and other traffic violations noted in the record are an existing problem, which the applicant cannot be required to remedy.”

Turner also found that traffic congestion due to school drop-off and pick-up times “does not alter the results of the applicant’s analysis (as) that congestion is localized and short term — roughly 20 minutes.”

Additionally, the hearings examiner noted that the city of Camas had recently improved the Brady Road-16th Avenue intersection “installing a traffic signal and widening Northwest Brady Road” and said the Camas Station applicant would be required to “further improve this intersection, widening the pavement, providing an eastbound left turn lane at Northwest Brady Road and constructing sidewalks and other improvements along the site’s frontage on Northwest 16th Avenue.”

Opponents ‘extremely disappointed’ in decision

Prune Hill parent Aunna Elm, who spoke in opposition to the proposed Camas development during the July public hearing before Turner, said she was “extremely disappointed” in the hearings examiner’s decision.

“Whether it was safety, pollution concerns, etcetera, he seemed, to me, to be dismissive of residents’ concerns,” Elm said. “His approach disregards testimony from parents regarding near-misses and traffic dangers at that intersection, which has visibility issues with a hill that crests in the middle of the intersection … sure, (the City) put in a traffic signal at a four-way stop, but that doesn’t address concerns parents expressed about visibility and distracted drivers” at the intersection’s current traffic levels, much less after the Camas Station adds more vehicle coming to and from the gas station, car wash, charging stations, EV drive-through coffee shop and retailers.

Elm also said she thinks the city’s notification system, which alerts neighbors within 350 feet of the development site and posts notice in this newspaper’s “Public Notices” section, doesn’t go far enough.

“In a nutshell,” she said, “I’m extremely disappointed.”

Camas resident Mike Kelly, who also opposed the Camas Station project, said the hearings examiner’s decision is hard to understand “from a layman’s point of view.”