March_2022 - 30

Sound Transit
LIGHT-RAIL VEHICLE trucks await installation in
the Sound Transit Operations and Maintenance
Facility East.
Bicycle Coalition to community equestrians, there
were at least 50 different people and organizations
that all lined up against the project.
Sound Transit Environmental Planning Director
Kent Hale agrees with Wall's perspective, adding
that " moving mountains is not an inaccurate way
to characterize what we faced. "
" With NIMBY projects there are rarely easy answers.
The monumental challenge with Bellevue was
its transit-oriented development (TOD) vision for the
BelRed Corridor, " said Hale. " They wanted the lightrail
station as part of that but weren't too keen on
losing prime development land and replacing it with
a maintenance facility next to their development site.
And that makes perfect sense. Development around
a light-rail station helps make both successful. But
the approximately 25-acre site is pretty constrained.
" The south end is closest to the light-rail station.
The north end is hemmed in mostly by a wetland.
And the west side is a former BNSF rail corridor,
now a regional rail utility corridor and bike trail.
Huitt-Zollars essentially pushed the maintenance
facility element as far north as possible to create as
much developable space on the south end for TOD
without affecting the wetland. But we also had to
deal with perceptions about what a rail maintenance
facility would look and sound like. Only through a
concerted effort to educate and align everyone could
we get this done, " Hale noted.
With opposition fierce and united, the project
team went to work. Known for proactively engaging
stakeholders, Sound Transit partnered with
Huitt-Zollars and held a series of comprehensive
workshops that included experts from the Urban
Land Institute. The workshops covered virtually
every stakeholder want and concern, from
multi-million-dollar development to regional bike
30 | Mass Transit | MassTransitmag.com | MARCH 2022
A CONSTRUCTION
worker welds
beams in the
construction of
Sound Transit's
Operation and
Maintenance
Facility East.
path integrity to open-space advocacy. Then, they
walked the site with relevant stakeholders to give
them a visceral sense of the discussion. While the
charrettes educated and aligned stakeholders, there
was still another critical element.
" We started out by doing a lot of listening, really
understanding what the stakeholders' concerns
were, " said Huitt-Zollars Vice President and Director
of Planning Christof Spieler. " We catalogued those
concerns. And we also really understood the vision
the city had, so that we could identify ways to approach
a solution. We gained a lot of goodwill from
the stakeholders early on because of that. We didn't
try to ram through a solution, but we listened to
what they wanted, feared and needed. We came in
with open minds, as did Sound Transit, much to
their great credit. And we took the stakeholders'
concerns very seriously. "
It worked. Using the charrettes and workshops
to examine the site and each stakeholder's require
http://www.MassTransitmag.com
March_2022

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