On May 12, the City of King City held an open house to provide an update on the Kingston Terrace Master Plan and the projected timeline for finalizing the next steps in the process.
Ever since the Metro Council in 2018 approved King City’s request to expand its urban growth boundary west to Roy Rogers Road, interest has been growing in developing the area. One man in attendance said his 90-year-old mom owns five acres along Beef Bend Road, and she has been inundated by developers calling her to ask if she wants to sell her property.
While the UGB area encompasses 528 acres between Roy Rogers and Beef Bend roads, King City’s western boundary and the Tualatin River, only about 318 acres are developable.
For the open house, displays focusing on different aspects of the project were set up around the edges of the Council Chambers as well as in the City Hall lobby, and about 100 people crammed into the two rooms for the presentation that started with Steve Faust, community planning director for 3J Consulting, recapping the process so far.
“We will have about 3,300 dwelling units in four distinct neighborhoods with bike and pedestrian connectivity,” Faust said. “Not set are the configuration of Main Street, the future development of select parcels that include the Bankston property and Meyer Airfield, street alignments, location of drainage, gravity-sewer pipelines, an east-west crossing, and bridges or culverts to bypass the ravines.”
An overview of the project shows a Rural Character Neighborhood directly west of the current King City city limits, with the Central Neighborhood west of that area and the Beef Bend neighborhood to the north; finally, in the northwest corner of Kingston Terrace is the Main Street/Town Center area to the north and the Main Street/Town Center Employment Area to the south.
After recapping the project’s outreach efforts and design work so far, Faust explained that having a continuous east-west collector street is critical to the development of Kingston Terrace, but this is likely the most contentious issue in the entire project.
Anne Sylvester, PTE, a senior consultant for SCJ Alliance, discussed east-west traffic circulation in Kingston Terrace and development-driven investments. On a map, she showed possible east-west street alignments and identified alternatives. “The alignments are not fixed, and the final recommendation may be a hybrid of the various options,” she said.
Clean Water Services’ Water Resources Program Manager Chris Faulkner and Principal Engineer Jadene Torent Stensland talked about the options to provide CWS services, including pipeline bridge systems and pump stations to move stormwater and/or wastewater, to improve watershed health. Torent Stensland expects the strategies to be finalized by mid- to late-winter 2023.
Once the presentations were over, most of the crowd left except for a few who pressed the planners for more information. The hot topic was transportation and specifically where the major east-west collector street would go, which drew the largest group around Sylvester.
City Manager Mike Weston said after event, “The open house was designed to get input and demonstrate what we are working on but was not designed as a public hearing, and I feel like that is what the group (that is opposed to extending Fischer Road) wanted and was expecting. All public ‘testimony’ will come after we have a completed proposal. Public ‘input’ is welcome throughout the process and is collected and applied by our consultants as part of the public-engagement portion of the project.”
City officials and planners are now working on the draft Master Plan and will focus on its implementation strategy next spring; this coming winter they will work on transportation network alternatives with the goal of adopting the master plan in the fall of 2023.
For more information, visit ci.king-city.or.us and click on Kingston Terrace Master Plan.
