At their March 18 King City Council meeting, councilors signed Fehr and Peers Engineering onto the revision of the city’s Transportation System Plan (TSP).
Droves of unincorporated Washington County residents attended the Wednesday night meeting, alerting the firm to what they would like to see included in a TSP relook and praising the legwork new engineers had already put into their proposal.
Fehr and Peers submitted their proposal to the city on Feb. 19, which included summaries of future traffic evaluations and a timeline of other potential analyses leading up to their final report, which they roughly planned to submit back to the city in March 2027.
Fehr and Peers’ proposal was the only one submitted to the city’s request for proposal and estimated a cost not to exceed $95,000 for analysis and proposed amendments to the TSP.
The firm highlighted that they had most recently worked on TSP amendments for the City of Tigard and Tualatin, and had also done design work for Washington County.
Multiple residents from unincorporated Washington County and the site of the Kingston Terrace Development emphasized the importance of the project and questioned the firm on its plans for specific roads, neighborhoods and natural areas like the Bankston Family Reserve.
“I think all, if not most, of the alternatives have already been studied,” resident Janet Black said about the proposal. “I think the community has repeatedly and clearly said we want, number one, to remove the road through the Bankston Conservation Easement.”
While Fehr and Peers did not provide specific answers at the meeting, they repeatedly said that they would work with community members in the future to incorporate their input.
Their proposal reads, “We want to engage with them (citizens) along the way to ensure our findings answer their questions and communicate clear tradeoffs.”
Councilors and King City staff also asked Fehr and Peers personnel questions about their proposed approach, highlighting concerns over budgetary limitations, relook legality, governmental overreach, coordination and project timeline.
“The concern that I have is that if this does exceed that cost, there’s a process where you have to come back in front of council, and we’re a small city with a small budget,” King City Manager Vince Ferraris said to Fehr and Peers at the meeting.
Councilor Sandra Cunningham also expressed concerns with the scope of the TSP project by and large, saying, “I think we’ve let this project get too big again.”
Fehr and Peers Project Manager Briana Callhoun told Ferraris and the city council that consultants would “work really closely with” City Planner Max Carter to maintain the scope and expense of the project.
They also told the council that their proposal was not etched in stone and would be a malleable plan that could be modified if it were in the interest of residents and the city.
Calhoun and other consultants emphasized that the reexamination would not be a reinvention of the original TSP and that engineers would base their relook on the initial plan.
This sentiment was supported by Fehr and Peers’ proposal, which said the relook would “start from work done in the TSP and Kingston Terrace Master Plan so as not to repeat analyses already completed.”
King City Council voted 6-0 to enter into an agreement with Fehr and Peers, who, based on their proposal, planned to reconnect with either the city council or the King City Planning Commission sometime in the next three months.
