Upgrades begin on Garden Way.

Byline: DEVELOPMENT REPORT By Joe Harwood The Register-Guard

Work to upgrade Garden Way begins in earnest this week, a project that will pave the way for commercial, housing and office development north of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.

Eugene Water & Electric Board crews have been working along Garden Way since February to put utilities underground in anticipation of the improvements and future development.

On Monday, Wildish Sand & Gravel Co. workers were at the site, preparing to launch the $3.7 million project that city officials hope is substantially complete by September, in time for the crush of traffic from the first University of Oregon home football game.

The project, funded by state road funds, local systems development charges and assessments on property owners, includes building a new street with landscaped medians from MLK Boulevard north to Sisters View Avenue, adding a traffic signal and street lights, and installing a roundabout at Commons Drive and Garden Way.

Perhaps the most dramatic changes for the thousands of area residents who use Garden Way for daily north or south travel between MLK Boulevard and Harlow Road will be the removal of potholes and the softening of the curves at the south end of Garden Way.

The city has given Wildish approval from mid-June to early September to close part of Garden Way to through traffic, said Steve Gallup, a civil engineer with the city.

Garden Way is a popular route for Kinsrow Road area apartment dwellers, residents south of MLK Boulevard and those living in west Springfield.

Completion of the long-anticipated project is expected to open the door for development.

City planners, consultants, property owners and developers have worked for several years to come up with a "nodal" design for a commercial hub surrounded by housing.

The Eugene City Council in 2002 approved amendments to the Eugene-Springfield Metropolitan General Plan to accommodate the nodal development. The so-called Chase Node would allow a grocery store of up to 50,000 square feet. Other retail shops - none of which could offer drive-through service - would surround the grocery store to create a pedestrian-friendly public square.

Colorado-based Simpson Housing LP owns a vacant 20-acre parcel bordered by the Chase Village apartment complex on the west, MLK Boulevard to the south and Garden Way to the east. The southern 10 acres of the Simpson property is where most of the commercial development would take place.

The rest of Simpson's parcel is zoned for apartments. Simpson acquired the land in 1998 as part of its $40 million purchase of the 537-unit Chase Village complex.

Tualatin-based Gramor Development, which wants to build the grocery store and retail strip, remains interested in buying Simpson's commercial-zoned land, said Kurt Yeiter, a Eugene city planner.

However, when the City Council adopted new land use rules for the node, it imposed two conditions aimed at creating high-density development that Gramor disliked.

The first requires buildings along Garden Way have at least two stories.

Gramor officials have said that finding tenants to occupy the second floors for the lease rates they want to charge will be difficult, Yeiter said. In order to build the additional floors and not lose money, Gramor believes it would have to cut the quality of building materials and the amenities.

"They like to build high-quality. They don't like cheap strip malls," Yeiter said. "They'd rather walk (away) than build cheap."

Gramor officials did not return calls to The Register-Guard on Monday.

The second condition requires any business facing Garden Way or Marche Chase to have distinct entrance doors facing the street in addition to the entrances accessed from the public square and interior parking area. Developers envision small retailers such as video rental, clothing and coffee shops along those strips, Yeiter said. Such businesses would be likely to employ one or two workers per shift, and having two entrances to a store could create security problems, developers said.

Yeiter said Gramor officials have told him they would buy the land and begin construction if those terms were eliminated. But Yeiter said that can only be done by the City Council. So far, no developer has asked the council do that.

Land east of Garden Way and north of the commercial area on the west side fronting Garden Way is designated for apartments and offices.