The most noticeable thing at the start of last night’s Chelan City Council meeting was the unusually large group of attendees. Some of them were from the Aquatics group who came to the meeting to thank the City Council and Port Commission for their help in getting the location study funded for the Community and Aquatic Center.
However, the big issue that caused most of the attendees to be there is an issue with the Legacy Ridge development that is just west of Crystal View Estates. Apparently a condition of final plat approval for that development is that the intersection at Crystal View Estates be brought up to Department of Transportation standards. According to the discussion last night, that involves both a left turn lane and a right turn lane. The right of way in that area is not wide enough for all of those lanes and is constrained by private property on both sides and Lake Chelan to the south.
City staff sent out a letter, that I think they would have worded differently in hindsight, to impacted property owners in Crystal View Estates a week before last night’s council meeting. Many owners did not receive the letter until two days before the meeting. Since the letter, which I don’t have a copy of, sounds like it included a discussion about the developer acquiring the needed right of way and condemnation by the city potentially being part of that process. Those words got the attention of the property owners, several of which drove over from places including the west side and Portland to attend the meeting.
The council hadn’t heard about this either until just prior to the meeting. The discussion centered around the developer needing to work this out with property owners and that the wording of the letter, and short timing of the letter before the meeting, was not an acceptable approach for the city to have taken. The council sounded to me like they did not want to get involved with the issue at all at this point and that the developer had the responsibility to work it out. City staff was encouraged to communicate with property owners with at least more notice in the future.
I doubt this is the end of the issue, since it doesn’t sound like an easy problem for the developer to solve. The discussions to potentially solve it are underway with the property owners involved now but that discussion clearly has gotten off to a bit of an awkward start. Please add your comments below!
