By Khalida Sarwari
If all goes according to schedule, Campbell residents can expect to see construction on Hacienda Avenue beginning next fall.
The project to revamp the road recently went before the city council at a study session, and beginning in September city staff will meet with property owners in the area to discuss the plans.
“We want to meet with them and hear their concerns and any ideas they may have,” said city engineer Michelle Quinney. “We’re hoping to go back to council in November with a conceptual design approval. That’s when we’d start the real design of the project.”
At a study session on Aug. 7, city staff presented an updated overview of the Hacienda Avenue “Green Street” project to the city council. After years of the project being stalled due to insufficient funding, it appears the city has secured enough grant money to move forward with the project. In August 2011, Campbell was awarded a $2 million grant from Proposition 84 toward the project.
“We felt really fortunate,” Quinney said. “I think it’s such a great project and has a lot of environmental benefits and I think that’s why we received the grant.”
The rest of the funding for the estimated $4.2 million project will come from the city and the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority. The city’s street pavement management program will cover about $1.5 million and another half million will come from VTA’s community design and transportation program, Quinney said.
The project has been in the works since about 2007. The goal, Quinney said, is to ultimately transform” Hacienda Avenue from Winchester Boulevard to San Tomas Aquino Road. The plan is to “rehabilitate” the pavement in an environmentally sensible way, make the street narrower and promote alternative modes of transportation and community interaction.
“It’s really not useful the way it is,” said Quinney, “so we wanted to do something beneficial for the city, something that would be making improvements to the environment, something that would help maybe bring the community together.”
The project entails making traffic and pedestrian improvements, highlighting transit routes along the road, adding bicycle lanes and managing stormwater runoff from the streets by having it percolate into groundwater rather than going down a storm drain and directly into the bay. Another project goal is to add more sidewalks and reduce the roadway heat island effect by reducing the amount of asphalt pavement, Quinney said.
“We are promoting sustainability,” she said. “We are rehabilitating the street in a manner that’s going to be easier in the future to maintain it.”
The city is expected to be in the bid award phase next summer. There may be some utility relocation prior to construction, which is anticipated to begin in November 2013 and end around November 2014.
The community meetings with property owners will take place in September. Quinney said much of the area is occupied by single-family homes and townhome complexes and most would be impacted by the project.
Staff will also discuss the project with utility companies and notify the larger community via mail-ins.
“The first step is to talk to those directly affected by that project,” Quinney said. “Then we’ll open it up after that.”
Hacienda Avenue will become ‘green street’ when construction begins next fall
