Belmont's Firehouse Square delayed again

“The city is certainly interested in moving the project across the finish line, but we have to check all our boxes before all parties can develop a final comfort level around the results,” said Community Development Director Carlos de Melo. “Hopefully everything will finish in a timely fashion.”

That delay is in addition to many others that have occurred since the project was initially proposed in 2014. This project site, located at 1300 El Camino Real in the heart of the city’s downtown, has been vacant for nearly 20 years and many residents and officials alike are eager to see it developed.

The latest delay is to allow for additional soil testing on the project site, which was once home to a fire station. Experts will specifically be looking for a chemical known as PFOS that is present in firefighting foams.

Interim City Manager Afshin Oskoui described the tests as “due diligence” and doesn’t expect the chemical to be found.

“Because a firehouse was located there part of the due diligence is to check for all possible contaminants that might be present, but it’s nothing of concern and we don’t believe there’s anything there,” Oskoui said.

Oskoui said the test results will likely be available by mid-July. Additional remediation work may be required if the PFOS chemical is found.

The development proposal is the result of a partnership between nonprofit developer MidPen Housing and for-profit developer Sares Regis.

MidPen will construct and manage the affordable units, which will be reserved for those earning between 30% and 80% of area median income or $38,800 to $82,200 a year, while Sares Regis will construct the townhomes.

The architecture will remain the same since the last round of community meetings in 2014 — the MidPen building will be in the Spanish style, the townhomes in the craftsman style and the firehouse facade will be preserved.

The apartment building will be four stories tall with 4,000 square feet of ground-level retail and the townhomes will be two stories. There will be open space between the two buildings, some of it publicly accessible, and a subterranean garage for the apartments can accommodate 47 cars while each of the townhomes will have a two-car garage.

The reduced parking for the MidPen development is possible because of the state density bonus law, which allows affordable housing near transit to include just a half of a parking space per unit. But the MidPen development will include somewhat more parking than that — 0.7 spaces per unit.

The reduced parking has been a concern among some residents as well as a proposal to do reverse-in angled parking in the parking lot along Fifth Avenue so that cars will have to back into parking spaces. Such a configuration will reduce the number of parking spaces in the lot from 52 to 36, depriving the neighborhood of 16 spaces.

Various site improvements for the project include the undergrounding of overhead power lines on Fifth Avenue from O’Neill Avenue to Broadway and down to Civic Lane, new street lighting and sidewalk upgrades.

zachary@smdailyjournal.com

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