Developers would build two new roundabouts and pay most of the cost to finish rebuilding 14th Street under a contract being considered by the Bend City Council.

Councilors are expected to vote later this year on a development agreement with four landowners who collectively own about 400 acres of undeveloped land west of NorthWest Crossing. If the City Council approves the agreement, the owners would have to pay a combined $1.4 million for traffic improvements and build two new roundabouts where Skyliners and Shevlin Park roads intersect Skyline Ranch Road.

They’d also improve three sewer lift stations, build a new 24-inch water pipeline and connect Skyline Ranch Road to Regency Street. That’s all in addition to building local roads, sewer connections and water lines in the future developments.

The agreement gives both the city and developers certainty about what the developers have to do, but it prevents the city from negotiating future infrastructure improvements with developers, Assistant City Attorney Ian Leitheiser told the City Council.

Developers are required to mitigate the effects new homes and businesses have on city infrastructure through fees and/or physical improvements, and they often negotiate those mitigations with the city.

“They will know ahead of time what we are going to ask them to do, mainly involving transportation but to a lesser extent sewer and water infrastructure,” Leitheiser said. “What it means for the city is we will get a binding commitment from the developers of what they’re going to do.”

The four property owners — NWX2, Coats Property, Rio Lobo Investments and Anderson Ranch Holding Company — all hold large sections of land within Bend’s urban growth boundary, which determines where the city can grow. Coats Property and Rio Lobo also own adjacent land in Deschutes County where they plan for transect development, or gradual increases in density as they approach city limits.

The land hasn’t been developed yet because it was only added to Bend’s urban growth boundary in late 2016. Bend Community Development Director Russ Grayson said his department’s been in simultaneous talks with several owners.

“We were saying instead of having four different traffic studies and four different utility analyses all looking at the same intersections, can we work together as a group, combine that into one package of mitigations and figure out who’s going to build what instead of having four different conversations all relating to the same infrastructure,” he said.

Bend’s comprehensive plan, the overarching document that determines what can be built in the city, allows for 1,167 total homes on 383 acres of land, 29 acres of employment land and space for a new elementary school in the area. The county transect land could have up to 187 homes.

“It made the analysis of this very defined,” Grayson said. “We didn’t have a lot of ambiguity. We knew exactly what was going to be developed here.”

That means the city was able to look at the combined impacts of all future development in the area, something that doesn’t happen with redevelopment within city limits. For instance, there are at least two proposed apartment complexes near Oregon State University-Cascades, which also plans to expand its campus. The university and the apartment developers have only had to consider existing development, not the other proposed projects, when preparing traffic studies.

New development west of Bend would have a significant impact on eight intersections, the city found. Developers will build new single-lane roundabouts on two, and the others are all single-lane roundabouts on the west side which the city doesn’t plan to expand.

Instead, developers are expected to write the city checks for a combined $1.4 million for the impact on the remaining intersections.

Part of that sum will be used to pay for what City Manager Eric King described as the “missing middle” section of 14th Street, the blocks between Albany and Galveston avenues that the city didn’t have the money to rebuild as it reconstructed areas to the south and north this summer. The City Council on Wednesday voted to finish that section of road this summer using developer money.

“As soon as the agreement is signed and effective, the developers are going to write the check to us within 30 days,” Grayson said.

—  Reporter: 541-633-2160; jshumway@bendbulletin.com