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Council weighs flexible RFEI for Evans Vista site amid affordability trade-offs and air-quality scrutiny
Summary
City staff proposed an RFEI for the Evans Vista site to attract creative developer approaches while preserving strong affordability goals; councilors pressed trade-offs among deeper affordability, mixed-income goals, phasing and community amenities and heard public calls for more air-quality monitoring near the adjacent paper mill.
City staff told the Port Townsend City Council that they plan to issue a request for expressions of interest (RFEI) for the Evans Vista site to invite a broad range of developer concepts while preserving requirements tied to anticipated funding sources.
Renata Manfreda, the citys housing grants coordinator, said staff and developers favored the RFEI over a prescriptive RFP because it allows creativity and avoids locking the city into building typologies that make projects infeasible. She told council staff expect phase 1 to include roughly 75—125 units and that minimum funding requirements (SHIP, the Local Community Projects appropriation and potential LIHTC subsidies) mean some baseline affordability levels must be met. "At a minimum 40% of units must be rented to households at 60% AMI or lower" under some subsidy scenarios, Manfreda said, and staff will use bonus points to encourage deeper affordability while avoiding hard mandates that could deter proposals.
The presentation also summarized developer feedback that vertical mixed-use and 4-over-1 podium buildings substantially increase costs and could reduce the number of responsive proposals. Staff urged council to weigh trade-offs among unit count, timeline and depth of affordability: "Deeper affordability usually means a longer timeline and the need for more subsidy," a staff member said during the discussion.
Council discussion focused on priorities. Several council members said rental housing should be the early priority and favored flexibility in building type while incentivizing deeper affordability through scoring. One council member asked whether the city should give bonus points for a small share of "missing-middle" homeownership; others said on-site services and long-term maintenance plans should also be evaluated. No motion or vote was taken; staff said the RFEI would be released later this year, with evaluations by an expert committee and a council review of top-ranked responses in the fall. Manfreda said staff hope to execute a development agreement by 2027 if the process proceeds on schedule.
Air-quality concerns near the Evans Vista parcel and the adjacent paper mill were a central theme of public comment and council questions. Manfreda reviewed monitoring and agency findings, noting that Ecology, EPA and the regional ORCA monitor report ambient and fence-line data that have generally fallen in the "good" to "satisfactory" ranges. She summarized an ATSDR exposure investigation and fact sheet included in the packet, saying the public-health agency concluded "sulfur dioxide concentrations near the mill are not expected to harm people's health" and that the measured data do not indicate chronic risks at the monitoring locations staff reviewed.
Public commenter Derek Frenze disputed parts of that reading and urged more monitoring. "The ATSDR study showed acute events and measured additional sulfur-containing compounds that Ecology does not routinely monitor," Frenze said, asking the city to support follow-up monitoring and grant applications to fill regulatory gaps.
Staff responded that ATSDR had reviewed the staff summary and that the agency's fact sheet supports the packet language: ATSDR found that short-term exposures to a mix of sulfur compounds can cause occasional acute respiratory effects but that the measured concentrations from the investigation were not expected to pose chronic health risks. Staff recommended the council keep monitoring and regulatory discussions separate from the RFEI scoring, while continuing to consider the findings when drafting the solicitation and scoring criteria.
What happens next: staff will draft the RFEI language with options for mandatory elements and bonus scoring for deeper affordability, community space and long-term operations. The evaluation committee will review submittals and bring top-ranked proposals to council at a public meeting; staff said they expect to release the RFEI and hold developer previews over the coming months.
