Camas closer to getting new roundabout

CAMAS — There has been a lot of interest in Camas surrounding plans to build a roundabout at the intersection of Northeast Lake Road and Northeast Everett Road, so much so that at Monday’s city council workshop, the room practically emptied once the council finished discussing the issue.

“It’s not often a road project clears out the room,” Mayor Shannon Turk said to the remaining crowd, mostly made up of city staffers Monday night.

At the workshop, council narrowed in on a plan for the intersection, and now city staff will start working to design the project. The original plan looked at the benefits of putting a signal at the intersection compared with a roundabout, and then narrowed to two roundabout options. Council opted for a roundabout plan that calls for more interior landscaping, single-lane pedestrian crossings and the preservation of a historic chestnut tree.

“It was sure easy for the council to get behind that preferred option, because there was so much public support for it,” City Administrator Pete Capell said. “It’s a lot of work and expense to get (the public) as engaged as they are, but when you do it on something as important as this, it’s really beneficial.”

The intersection is a busy one in Camas, connecting north shore, south shore and downtown. Public Works Director Steve Wall was making his third presentation on the project at Monday’s workshop. The city hosted two open houses and conducted two online surveys to get feedback. Wall said it was more outreach than the city typically does on this sort of project.

The online surveys received about 1,400 responses, while the first open house drew a crowd of roughly 120 people and the second one had a turnout of 90 to 100, Wall said. In the second survey, 70 percent of those who responded preferred the option ultimately selected by the council. That was on par with the responses the city has received in the earlier public outreach, according to Wall.

Historic chestnut tree

The city also received a letter from Andy Stahl, executive director of the Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics, saying his agency preferred the first option because it would save the chestnut tree. He wrote in his letter that chestnut trees once dominated forests but were nearly destroyed at the turn of the 20th century.

“Today, efforts continue to develop blight-resistant strains of American chestnuts, in hope of one day allowing this signature tree to recolonize its former range,” he wrote. “One strategy being pursued is to cross-breed existing American chestnuts in an effort to develop a strain that can fend off the blight. Only a few hundred mature chestnut trees remain, meaning that each individual tree that survives — including the one in Camas — is a potential source of important genetic breeding material.”