The Maple Valley Planning Commission proposed several suggestions to the council members regarding construction in the Town Center of Maple Valley during the Oct. 8 council meeting.

According to the Maple Valley Council agenda packet, “City council enacted interim zoning regulations in the fall of 2017 and renewed the interim regulations in May 2018 to temporarily suspend acceptance of mixed use project applications in Commercial Zones so that the Planning Commission could review the current zoning code and provide a recommendation to council regarding mixed uses in the city.”

The reason for the pause, according to Laura Philpot, Maple Valley city manager, is because the way the zoning code for that area is previously written said a good portion of that land (in the Town Center) could be redeveloped as apartments, condominiums or residential.

She said the Planning Commission was concerned about the impact this kind of zoning would have with transportation and traffic in the city knowing that state Route 169 does not have any funds for widening or adding capacity.

The suggestions were given to the city council by the Planning Commission to review.

Philpot said the first suggestion the Planning Commission gave was that in the Town Center, all multifamily and mixed use development would have to be vertically built. This means all of the first floor of that potential building would have to be used for commercial business and all of the residential would have to be above that.

“The difference between horizontal mixed use and vertical mixed use is horizontal is very similar to what has occurred across from HopJacks in that area,” Philpot said. “The way the zoning code was written at the time, it said you could do horizontal (building). You can have residential on one side and then another separate building for your commercial. It (the zoning code) was saying as long as you met the percentage requirement of commercial you could build a certain amount of residential.”

In regard to parking in that area for the proposed vertical building, the planning commission recommended 50 percent of the parking requirement for that development would need to be in a parking garage above or below the structure, Philpot said.

Greg Wood, planning commission chair, said the reasoning for this type of parking is to “protect the space and make sure it’s used wisely.”

“We noted that there were some local communities nearby, mainly Auburn that had some construction downtown that included underground structured parking and so we thought that was a reasonable suggestion for the council as they’re looking in those two areas,” he continued.

Philpot said in a town center, it is important to have a good mix of residential and community business space.

“If it was all just residential then there wouldn’t be enough services to support the residents who live here and the new residents that would move in. What I mean by services, I just mean retail. And that puts a lot of strain on the residential properties because all of the public services like road maintenance and police services would be paid for by the residential properties and not have any commercial properties,” Laura explained.

Although the planning commission recommended vertical use for future projects, they said horizontal mixed use may be allowed in a community business zone if the parcels are not touching SR 169, 516 or Witte Road, the agenda packet said.

Philpot said if horizontal mixed use is used, a minimum of 20 percent of the footprint of all structures must be commercial or business and 25 percent of parking would be required to be structure parking.

Wood said another recommendation to the council was that if that space was made into a residential building, there would be no three bedroom apartment complexes.

“That was simply was a response when we had the two proposals for the two current apartment complexes that are being constructed, we were led to believe that a small number of units would be three bedroom, and in turns out that many more were three bedroom,” Wood explained. “We just wanted to kind of have a check and balance on protecting infrastructure, impact on infrastructure. We recommended to the council that they take a look at that in terms of school district, emergency services, road, adjacent parking, etc, that there’s not an overly significant impact from that perspective.”

Philpot said they are looking into this recommendation from a legal perspective because she is not sure that’s something that could legally be allowed.

The next steps in deciding what will happen with this space is dependent on what the council decides to do after long deliberation and more research, Philpot said.