City planners are going to go back to the negotiating table with interests in the shopping center where the Grocery Outlet and Roundtable Pizza are located to see if there’s anyway to modify plans for a proposed roundabout at the intersection of Ladd Lane.
That is the plan following discontent from the shopping center business owners with a city proposal broached in August to use grant funds to realign that intersection with a roundabout.
Hollister council members have been reviewing whether to allocate $1.5 million for a “Safe Routes to Schools” grant after blow-back came over a planned roundabout at Ladd Lane and Tres Pinos Road. With the “safe routes” funding, the council OK’d the grant application in June for the California Transportation Cycle 4 Active Transportation Program. The city submitted the grant July 31 that includes a match of $1.5 million.
City planning official Mary Paxton made the latest presentation on the matter at Monday’s council meeting. She noted how merchants in that shopping area north of the Chevron station were concerned about losing parking spaces and cut-through traffic potential to McCray Street.
She said questions arose as an alternative whether the roundabout could be shifted more into the neighboring Kmart parking lot, but a consulting engineer took a further look at it and determined “it’s more complex than they realized” and there would be no way to avoid taking right of way land from the shopping center property near Chevron.
Paxton said there was also review of whether a $200,000 to $400,000 U-turn modification would be feasible as an alternative to a roundabout, but she said it was likely the grant would be jeopardized under those circumstances.
In the end, Paxton said the next step would be attempting to meet with the property owners to the north of Chevron to see if there’s any way that consulting engineers could reexamine how the parking lot is laid out, to find out if there’s a way to prevent a loss of parking spaces there and the cut-through traffic issue.
