The Hayhurst neighborhood association presented preliminary plans for development of the Alpenrose Dairy site last week at their March 11 open house about the property. The group obtained the draft plans through a public records request, and shared them at the neighborhood meeting and with BikePortland.
The 51-acre Alpenrose campus holds special importance to cyclists because of its Velodrome, which closed permanently in 2021 after 60 years of operation. But it was also home to an operating dairy, Little League playing fields, and a faux frontier town. So overlapping communities have strong feelings about the future development of this property, including the neighbors who live closest to it in southwest Portland.
I have been keeping an eye on the plans because new development is the main avenue through which southwest Portland is supposed to get bike lanes and sidewalks. But because most of the southwest lacks a formal stormwater conveyance system, the city often only requires developers to fulfill frontage improvements in a rudimentary way. What I have been waiting to see is if development of the Alpenrose property would bring a safe place for pedestrians and cyclists to travel along SW Shattuck Road, the two-lane collector which fronts the site to the east.
According to these preliminary plans, the answer is yes, and that is a very pleasant surprise for me. In the cross section below, you can see a design for a multi-use path separated from the roadway by a “stormwater facility,” and also a curb.
Keep in mind that this has not been approved. The permitting log on PortlandMaps shows that the Portland Bureau of Transportation (PBOT) and the Bureau of Environmental Services (BES) each approved a “Concept Review” with corrections on March 12th. [UPDATE: 3/22/24 9:20 — the permitting log actually says “Approved w/corr,” I assumed the “corr” meant “corrections” but it could also mean “correspondence” or anything else that fits.] Hopefully the MUP isn’t something which will be corrected away. And, to be honest, I am confused about the process. The preliminary plans are quite finished, and are much more detailed than I would expect to see given that there doesn’t seem to have been a Public Works Alternative Review (PWAR) meeting. My limited experience is that a developer doesn’t go forward with the expense of a detailed plan without knowing what the city expects to see.
I put in a public records request to BDS last week for any recent PWAR forms and was told that PWAR was a PBOT matter, and that PBOT hasn’t “yet received the Public Works Alternative Review for this location.” My understanding from Marita Ingalsbe, president of the Hayhurst Neighborhood Association, was that the developer intended to file plans in mid-April.
A mid-April filing doesn’t leave any time for the back-and-forth a PWAR often entails.
So I don’t know exactly what is going on, except that stuff is going on and, knock on wood, things seem good with the Shattuck frontage. I am not going to follow-up with a flurry of further public records requests (for example, for the “corrections” to the concept plan, or trying to time when PWAR forms will arrive at PBOT). But things are happening and perhaps we will have firmer information in the near term. Stay tuned and please contact me if you have any information to share.