Loading...
HomeMy WebLinkAboutCity Council Meeting - Council Workshop - Minutes - 06/15/1999 COUNCIL WORKSHOP MINUTES June 15, 1999 COMMITTEE MEMBERS PRESENT: Chair Leona Orr, Sandy Amodt, Torn Brotherton, Tim Clark, Connie Epperly, Judy Woods, Rico Yingling STAFF PRESENT: Charlie Lindsey, Mike Hattrup, Sue Viseth, Jim Harris, John Hodgson, Anh Hoang, Don Wickstrom, Marty Mulholland, Brent McFall, Roger Lubovich, Chris Hills, Bob Holt, Becky Fowler, Jackie Bicknell PUBLIC PRESENT: Song Shin, David Thomas, Tom Beckwith, James Merritt Space Utllization Plan: Consultant Report Parks Director John Hodgson—Thank you very much. Last summer of 1998 we came to you with a plan that would house city employees once we get to a city population of 130,000 people. At the end of that meeting, and as we went into the budget process, council authorized funding to allow our consultants to go through the program of the facility space plan and the predesign process which allows us to really start figuring out some budget numbers for moving into the next schematic level and actual implementation of some of the recommendations. One of the things that happened when they first came back in January was they realized that within six months we had achieved our five year staff growth plan, and I think there's a number of reasons it happened. We grew faster through that last annexation and it surprised some of us and we really got a chance to see what our real needs are and some of the things that are happening with some of the other studies, the permit process and what not,but it was real clear that we need to go back and rethink this a little bit and really see if we can achieve what we originally had planned to do in the space that was provided to us. Our consultants met, emphasizing city hall, Centennial Center, the campus here, police station, to determine what we were going to do about a police station and the new East Hill shop area. Those are the four major components that this group is working with. They're here today to give you an update on where they're at and what we hope to do is lay this out, and get your thoughts and comments on it(there are a couple pretty big changes to it), and also start to think about what the priorities are that we need to do to accomplish the work. Then we can start putting it into the UP budget for the year 2000. So with that I want to introduce Jim Merritt from the Merritt Pardini Architectural firm. He'll introduce the rest of his team. Jim Merritt— Good evening council members. It's a pleasure to be back here to talk to you about how we have progressed since the last time, sometime last year, when we gave you a kind of kickoff into how you grow, to the it's a very accelerated growth that Kent is experiencing. I would like to introduce our key members here, Dave Thomas, Tom Beckwith and Song Shin. As John mentioned, we've looked at assessing. We came back to getting into what we call a concept level to test exactly how all of these spaces work together and then there were a couple of good things I think that happened. Obviously John mentioned the growth. All of a sudden in six months to a five year plan I think was Council Workshop,6/15/99 2 • more of an internal shock probably than they may have expected. But it told us if you get a little look at the realistic growth in the future, not to over do it—be very prudent in how we look at space needs. So it's not as dramatic as you may have expected in the growth but in a few areas, the pressure definitely was there sooner than anyone anticipated. The other thing involved in looking at the assessment for the predesign or the concept planning is some of the departments assessed things with a little more in-depth thought. So now they could see if we're going to serve these new areas and the growth that is now coming, these are the kinds of needs we better look at. So that became much more apparent in the turnaround. That meant a couple of things. When we finished (and I'll show you the concept of the specific plan) some areas which you thought were anticipated for future growth, we looked at as taking care of growth in this first few years, so the amount of space that may be available for lease in the Centennial Building is going to be looked at a little bit differently. The element side we want to touch on first because we could get involved and not touch on some of the other elements that we want to share with you particularly. And as John mentioned, what we do with Russell Road and East Hill for maintenance and what we call the corporate yard—taking care of the infrastructure is a significant component. We'll talk about that first. We'll come back and look at specific campus with the administrative needs and all the other components that will be on what we call the Civic Campus. You'll come up with a better word and call it something much more • appropriate for the city and then part of that is to give you a briefing then on the police station because it's kind of looked at in a couple of different spots on the campus. Now we think we have something that really will be kind of a complement to the campus as well as giving it its own flexible space needs that can grow over time also. So to start off with and particularly what happens on the East Hill, I'd like Tom to give us the briefing on the Corporate Yard. Tom Beckwith—I've put up here a kind of diagrammatic solution for best use of the site. (Mr. Beckwith discussed the site plan by providing a map of the area.) It can handle all of Public Works, all of Traffic and all of Parks on the East Hill, plus about a 25-30% extra contingency after that. This is an industrial operation essentially with a lot of equipment. A buffer around it will screen it and make the buildings look good. If you'd like to see an example—we did the facility for Puyallup. It's on South Hill. Their corporate yard is like this and it's very close to the residential. We want to show you now where we are on the city campus. We do have a model that we'll be looking at. You saw a piece of this model last year when we looked at it. What we started with here is back in 1998 with an existing space plan. In other words, how are you using the space right now. The change from now and 1999 is there is less lease space. You'll see that we're now starting to move in and actually use some space as a floater space up on the third floor and starting to look at moving things towards a future plan and how to accommodate long term needs for the city. So this can show you how you've moved from one year to the next and implementation, starting to grow into the space that you started to plan for 7-8 years ago. Council Workshop, 6/15/99 3 . Now you recall last year we had a plan that papered the room with options. The zeroing down on that came to what was called the 4.1. That had a number of departments laid out as illustrated here with the notion that the 40 floor of the Centennial Building would be still available for lease under the scenario. We looked at a council chambers and an entry here. We have some police space here and we looked at the police being over on this edge of the campus. You may recall it really was this site over on this side of the Centennial Building was what we were looking at for the police station once we did that implementation. Now a couple of things took place. Growth and expansion started to see this lease space probably wasn't going to be just lease space but we were going to start using it a little sooner than we had expected. A lot sooner than may be the case. The other issue was how to accommodate the police department. We started really zeroing in on that. It was sort of the framework back then that there would be a police station. Not a separated precinct on the East Hill. There may be a storefront presence, a lot like you've got on the west side of town, but still it would be a police station so most everything would come out of the central headquarters. So then what we looked at really was an option that started to bring the police station into the concept of what we call the civic street. So when you come to the campus you don't have to worry about going around the corner to another function but really once you're in • the heart of the services you can find your way very easily. What we want to do is simplify the movement through all the different facilities. How you cluster offices and how the public and your constituents can come and get things in a simply way without having to move all over the building. What we want to do in that concept is to bring all the service needs down to the same level. It's very simple to find and that's the basic concept. So what we end up with is bringing those things that really need to have permits or talking to the public on a regular basis that they come down to the main level. So what we have then is to bring all of these functions down to main level with all of the permitting, staff training, cafe, council chamber—all on this one level. The other component was, as we looked at the space needs,particularly the police department, we were feeling that this was becoming a little too tight. The other thing that we had was an existing building which is now a piece of the police station that we needed to take a relook at. So the notion was that because we want the police station down here as part of the civic campus, let's keep it here. Let's expand the existing police station and take care of our needs. So it's not gonna move. In this plan, the police station uses what it has and builds off of that. I think that's good prudent value also for the city. There will be some remodeling, obviously, and expansion from what is 18,000 to about 60 some thousand square feet, so it's quite a bit larger for your needs but it can be accommodated with a couple of things there. So now the idea becomes, if the police station stays where it is and we want to bring everything down to one level and bring the community into the building, is to tie those all together. And so what we're saying in this diagram here is that . if you arrive off of 4t°, if you arrive off of Gowe, that you arrive and come into the building and this is a clear path. This is a civic street, an internal civic street. It's not Council Workshop, 6/15/99 4 really a mall. Is it an atrium? It is a kind of space where if it would be planted up, it would probably be tempered and not heated, like a real occupiable space but in those cold winter days if you come in and arrive here, once you're in, you're in. You're coming along that path and so what you've got then is an arrival for pedestrians and a pedestrian plaza. In this piece of the city campus that reaches out to downtown you've got another arrival off the plaza that comes off of 4`h as you arrive into town. We've got a plaza and an auto drop off that would eliminate the parking on this side but it brings in just a little drop off here so you have a way in and then what we really start looking at is bringing the auto drop off right where the parking is and so we collect the drop off for parking on the side where the cars are going to be instead of clustering them on the wrong side of the building. We'll do something that both is gracious for the arrival from this side so you can come into parking and also have it so it's recognizable. So there would be a routing that would come around 2nd and just off of Willis down here so you come in and this would be the arrival for the auto and the formal plaza would be on this side that ties to the parking. So in diagram this then becomes all of the really most I would say 95 or 98% of the interaction of the public with the staff could take place here. The vertical notion is when you come up through the building on the 2nd, 3`d, and 4`h floor that you have the departments up above and the elevators really become employee elevators. Actually . there'll be times the public will go up with the staff and it's not off limits in that respect, but it's not something that they have to worry about. It all comes down to simplifying that lower level. In the same way it also takes place in the existing city hall in this building. You have very little of moving up through the building. That circulation would come down and most of your activities and meetings will come down to the first floor. So what we end up with is called the civic street that ties this together at the ground level so you come through the building and tie this together so the police department would hook on at the southwest corner. The main spaces in the main level, including this room, would be training room,wellness, a coffee shop which then could really borrow and share the civic street so it would be like a cafe and it would actually be the break area for that matter. It would be the interaction space for coffee or lunch. All would take place here. Meeting rooms then would take what is now the finance area across the way here around the lobby. Then the council chambers become the link so that when you are in the city street, this area caf6,we can actually open this so you would actually feel like it was a shared space. You would be able then to have overflow activities that include this area into the need of the council chambers. Besides being able to divide, you can also use it in a larger expanded way. Then in the Centennial Center portion, we would have a series of permitting counters and the permits here would be all departments with inner access to their support staff being through the elevators. Other support spaces on the opposite side, we have finance and customer service. So this really is an activity service area all in that one level. As you then move up through the building on the Centennial side, Public Works, Planning on the third floor, some Finance, Fire Prevention, Employee Services all Council Workshop, 6/15/99 5 • move up into this side. You can see by the area needs that we really don't have the 4`h floor available as we had originally projected, so this would take care of those needs out to 130,000 population. The notion over here in the existing building—Information Services, Law Department up on the second floor which means that off up here we would have a circulation link that would tie on the second floor also. Now this will be very beneficial because in this diagram which takes you from the existing to the new you'll notice that we have all of this circulation on the first floor, city administration also ties on the second. So it means now that whole second level can feel tied together. So if you're on the second level you don't have to go down to go up. There will be a circulation path through that center area also that would come through the area and then City Administration and the Mayor would have the space over the top of the council chambers so you could have access there so you could have an executive session conference room and could be up in this area at that time. Parks is best on the 4th floor and that brings in Employee Services closer to Finance which we were feeling was a more appropriate link. So that's the layout of the spaces. But the big idea or what kind of knits this together is a simple way to tie things on that main level. So when you come in here or were dropped off at this plaza and walked in you'd have a feeling for the whole space. Or if you came off 41h, you wouldn't feel you're in the back door. You can have the feeling of opening services off of this internal space. The civic street would be covered, enclosed, a lot of glass. Just very simple spaces. See this would be some large plantings in there. It would feel kind of inside/outside kind of space. You'd have signage or different departments would have signage that would be hanging, banners and things, lots of light and that, and then activities that would happen in the council chambers which is right off of this space. So in this section, you go right in here we come right down and here's the dais and the council chambers. And you can be coming by and a meeting could be going on or if you could expand it this could relate and be apart of that activity. And this kind of space just around the corner is where the coffee area the little caf6 would be. It would be out in this area and then above it, you can see this little corridor. The corridor that walks around the council chambers, you can see it on the second level, that tube that goes around there is right here, and that would allow you to walk between the second floors and kind of overlook the civic street. So that would be open like an open walkway and then the Administration and Mayor's offices are right here. So you could just come out of the office, go right that way directly through here and go over to the Centennial Offices on the second floor or come back this way and go to where the Law offices would be. I want to show you on the model here briefly just how this works. You may recall one element I did not highlight which we talked about last time was the infill. To make this operationally work on the second, third and fourth floors of city hall was to do basically a transparent infill. This would not impact the existing space of the building but would take this in and basically be as transparent as possible to just slot right in so the feeling of Council Workshop,6/15/99 6 the building and the "L"would be maintained so if you were sitting here you'd still see the brick inside. All that is remaining. You'll also notice that this would be as transparent as we could get it. Lower in scale also so that you can see the element of the council chambers here. The parking which is here can be expanded in the future. You could do more expansion there. Administrative needs could be expanded this way in the future. So you've got your expansion opportunity for City Administration and then the police station has opportunity to grow. One of the options may be that some of these secured parking spaces could also go there under this. So you have a little flexibility to kind of zero in on. And then the police station off the core space here could then grow to the south. Note one thing that we are recommending for Titus Street, we would close that one block. It does not go through other than one block further. So it's not a primary street and yet it starts to create the feeling of the campus in a very dramatic way. If you were at a counter in the permit center, the street would be wide enough where you could have little sitting spaces where you could fill out the forms, and from here you'd be able to see the edge of the cafd so its right there. Or down at the end, with the banner down here, you could see the police entry at this end or you could get a feel of the activity around the council chambers. The community activities could take place there or little community events could use this space with an outside plaza that would kind of peel off the side. So once you arrive into the civic street you feel you're at city hall no matter what. You're not in the other building. You're all together. I think that's a positive element. These last two sketches kind of show how it would touch the city and an aerial photo and this one here shows you the existing campus. So what you've got here of course is there's the old city hall, the original, then here's the Centennial Building. There's your parking garage. There's the police station. It's very compact right there. As you start to grow, we want to maximize your assets and minimize the destruction and maximize your opportunities to function properly. So as this grows, this is what it would grow into. So you can see the spine of the civic street coming through. At this end, it starts to relate to the town. You have some use here and then a drop off into loading for like the Print Shop would be at this end. The parking still is there. As you come through City Hall, the plaza would still be there as a major arrival at this end of the civic street. There you see the link of the council chambers with a nice landscaped area with a little drop off there, and then the police department stretches along 41h. Secured parking then could be at this end for the police. There's a continuity here, a compactness. It starts to relate to 4th and Gowe very well and starts to relate as a full campus to other things of scale that are further down on 4th and there's one other interesting thing this does. The arrival off of Willis becomes very important. Now all of a sudden instead of it being a couple of blocks down the street, your arrival at the city campus is right here and this arrival now becomes pretty important. This will be the auto traffic drop off that you come in and drop off here and then into the parking or if you're in the parking, you'd come and pickup and then leave. So there's a nice circulation pattern that brings you into the civic street from the other side. Short term parking here would be a little bit more than what you have between the Council Workshop, 6/15/99 7 . buildings right now. This allows an opportunity to make something that works very logically for automobiles but they're not slamming the street edge and ruining the urban fabric. They still have a drop off zone there and with a little bit of signage and a bit of a learning curve,we'll will be able to get people used to this back drop off zone. Then it will simplify itself. Dave Thomas—The beginning of this year we met with the Police Department staff, Chief Crawford's officers, and spent a lot of time with Bob Holt and Dave Santos to develop a program for the new police facility, goals, objectives and some of the things that Jim has already mentioned. Resultant of those meetings and some of the directions that we have received from the police department is to keep everything centralized. In the past, there were discussions about having a major facility up on the East Hill. We can still do some spot facilities. We can have some precinct stations, storefronts throughout the city, as the city grows, but the real goal was to develop a plan that brought everybody together. The facility that we have here is roughly in square footage right around 65,000 square feet. Now you see in the site plan a kind of the footprint of the building,the first floor of the building takes up about 45,000 square feet. We talked about the school site across the street. We've looked at the property to the south or the block to the south. We made a determination to go ahead and propose that as an approach over the next few years to develop the full police headquarters that direction to the south. As we got into it and looked at it a little bit more, we did a number of diagrams where the police facility grew off of the existing old library and it actually fell in place very well. The model footprint that we have on the first floor,plus the residual left over on the south side of the property, gave us some opportunities for some more parking and some opportunities for a police facility here that has services that come off of 3`d and has the opportunities for a pretty nice presence along 4th Avenue as you approach city hall. There is a sensitivity to this building and we're keeping that in mind as we go through this and that's why you're not seeing massive structures and types of buildings that are going to overtake the campus. The intent with the architecture is to make it fit in like it's been here for a long time. As we get into the development of the police building and the compatibility with the architecture of the existing city hall,we're looking at a step facility that has a second and possibly a third floor level with the administrative levels on the upper floors. A little hole right in the middle of the building is just an attempt to show that there will be light wells and things like that coming through there. The building is pretty deep— 150 feet from 4`h to 3`d, which is a pretty good size for a building's depth. So we're introducing some natural light into the facility in some of these sections. This is a section in elevation that Jim was talking about which actually is looking at the plaza and some of the glazing that could potentially come in here with the police building here. And again, it's stepping back from 4th Avenue, so as you're driving down 4th, it's not a massive three story wall. Plus, it highlights city hall as you're going north on 4th. One of the components that came up here a month or so ago is also the emergency generation system that's you're looking at putting on campus. That's a piece that we've Council Workshop, 6/15/99 8 been asked to participate in. We're not the consultants doing it but we're also working with Charlie and John on the interaction to that. That's a huge component to this campus and how all that comes together is going to be a fairly important aspect of it. We don't have that really here yet. I know the consultants are identifying locations for it, the size, how all that interplays with the police, with the city hall, with the two buildings that are here. And all of that is going to be relatively important and I know that's going to happen over the next year, 6-8 months. Director of Operations Brent McFall—I think that if even tonight or in fairly short order you could begin to look at this and say, No that's not what I had in mind or Gee I really like this, that would be nice to hear. Do you think we're on the right tract? But if you're not comfortable with even making those kinds of statements tonight, then over the course of the next couple of weeks or so it would be an appropriate discussion item either at a workshop or perhaps at the Operations Committee. So that we can in fairly short order get moving on this. We either need to know that we can move onto the next step or that we've got to step back and start over. Council President Leona Orr—I like a lot of the things I've heard tonight but I'd like some time to think about what it means in the overall scheme of things. Brent McFall—One thing I might point out because we've actually had that discussion at the staff level about are we turning our back on downtown, and I think that something that probably doesn't show maybe quite as dramatically as could—this space in here where you're building new council chambers lends itself to just a wonderful opportunity for a very nice entrance, very nicely landscaped or urban plaza type design to put a front door on. It's sort of a side entrance to the spine that I think can retain that downtown orientation. And I think what this does too is it ultimately really anchors the sort of the south edge of downtown. You've got an RJC anchor at the north end. Councilmember Connie Epperly— It kind of links all that behind the Centennial and to the east of where city hall would come down. Councilmember Rico Yingling—I think the whole idea of the civic street is really cool. I mean that is just fantastic idea. I think I can visualize it doing everything you want and especially I like the idea that we are emphasizing a little bit the council chambers and we're saying this is a citizen's place. I really like that, and I think that could work really well with a lot more community use and almost become a community council. I think that the whole idea there is really cool. The idea that you can look down this pathway and almost like a mall you can see the coffee shop and you can see the permit center and you can see the council chambers. That really works for me, so I'm real with this. I know there will be some refinement and everything else but I'm bought into that. The meeting adjourned.