Lower Grand Employment Area Wide Planning and Integrated Roadway and Stormwater Retrofit

The City of Vancouver engaged MFA to implement an area wide planning project intended to identify and prioritize needed improvements in the Lower Grand Employment Area (LGEA). The LGEA, a valuable employment center, contains many successful businesses but had not realized its full potential. Deteriorating and substandard street conditions, poor drainage leading to localized flooding, and real or perceived environmental contamination had hindered development and resulted in the area’s underperformance in creating family-wage jobs. The City applied for and received funding through an EPA Brownfield Area-Wide Planning Grant.

The project took a comprehensive look at existing conditions in the LGEA to understand what was impeding business expansion and attraction. MFA convened two focused planning workshops with area stakeholders to identify specific areas of concern and to review opportunities for improvement. The final LGEA action plan took a basin-wide approach, evaluating stormwater management and prioritizing low-impact development solutions. It identified future road alignments, infrastructure design solutions, and included strategies for funding infrastructure improvements and remediating and redeveloping brownfields and other underutilized properties. Based on input generated from stakeholder meetings and property owner interviews, the northwest quadrant of the LGEA area, including V Street, Y Street, and East 2nd Street (the Lower Grand Industrial Area), was identified as the first focus area for improvements. To remedy the substandard road conditions, poor drainage, and flat slopes in the area, MFA proposed a full-width, pervious concrete road section for the area.  

The LGEA stakeholder engagement process also brought to light JH Kelly’s plans to expand their operations on the former federal superfund site, Frontier Hard Chrome, located in the priority Lower Grand Industrial Area. The City and JH Kelly formed a public-private partnership to leverage development of the site and construct the full width pervious pavement road section along the Y Street site frontage. MFA worked with EPA to remove the site from the National Priorities List and then completed the civil site and public infrastructure design and permitting, including the pervious concrete road, bioretention stormwater facilities, and a new sanitary sewer lift station for the City. The project resulted in the expansion of JH Kelly’s operations in the Lower Grand Industrial Area and created over 200 new professional and manufacturing jobs and new office and manufacturing space.

To complete the identified improvements along the other three blocks in the Lower Grand Industrial Area, MFA assisted the City in obtaining an Ecology Water Quality grant to design and construct this unique stormwater management and road improvement project. 

MFA prepared the final roadway design and construction documents, including a new horizontal and vertical geometric layout, curb ramps, commercial driveway drops, and pervious concrete sidewalks. As the pervious concrete roadway also provides stormwater management for the site, MFA prepared the WWHM stormwater model of the site and a design report to meet all of Ecology’s grant requirements including an engineer’s cost estimate for all improvements. This is the first full-width, pervious concrete industrial road section in the City.

Through the multiple phases of this project, MFA assisted the City in creating the conditions for a thriving employment center by developing an action plan that is grounded in market feasibility and reflective of business and property owner goals and community priorities and then implementing the identified actions to help the employment center reach its full potential.