Royal Boulevard likely will bust through small park

With as many as 1,500 new residents living in the Lusk Street neighborhood later this year, plans are in the works to extend Royal Boulevard through a sliver of park space and create new intersections at Ninth Street and Capitol Boulevard.

The conceptual plans for the Royal Boulevard extension will be presented at an open house Feb. 12 from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. at the Boise Public Library, 715 S. Capitol Blvd. in the third floor meeting room.

The Royal Boulevard extension would give drivers a second source of entry from Capitol Boulevard into the Lusk neighborhood, located between Capitol/Ninth and Ann Morrison Park.

Royal Boulevard is the street closest to the Boise River and it dead-ends into Ninth Street. Drivers on Capitol Boulevard heading toward downtown currently must weave through the Lusk neighborhood from Ann Morrison Park Drive to reach Royal or cross the river and backtrack on River Street and Ninth Streets.

“A lot of students are potentially jaywalking across there,” said Hugo Fregoso, the project manager for the Ada County Highway District, which is carrying out the Royal Boulevard extension.

The project calls for a 200-foot long roadway to cut across what is referred to as the Tourist Rest Stop, a triangle of grass and trees popular with Canada geese and owned by Boise Parks & Recreation.

As presented now, the road would have three lanes, two emerging from the Lusk neighborhood and one entering the neighborhood, where the La Pointe, The Vista East, The Vista West and River Edge student housing and multi-family apartments are under construction.

This stretch of Royal would also have bike lanes and sidewalks in both directions, Fregoso said.

ACHD has collaborated with the city of Boise and Boise Parks & Recreation on bringing the design process to about 75 percent completion.

The new Royal intersection would be at a point to which left-turn traffic into Boise State University and Boise Avenue routinely backs up during rush hour. That is being taken into account in the design process. Construction is expected to start in 2016, Fregoso said.

“As far as engineering and how the signals interact with University and River, everything ties together to improve the flow of traffic,” Fregoso said.

The Royal Boulevard Extension stems from the Lusk Street Area Master Plan, which was prepared by Boise City Planning and Development Services in December 2013. The plan is aimed at transforming Royal Boulevard and Ann Morrison Park Drive into “ceremonial” and “formalized” entrances to Ann Morrison Park as well as 47 city-, university- and privately owned properties on the 46 acres that comprise the Lusk neighborhood.

Boise Parks & Recreation had to follow the letter of the federal Land & Water Conservation Fund to enable the road project through park-owned “greenscape” that has historically been referred to as the Tourist Rest Stop and, for a period after 1968, as Booth Memorial Park. Administered by the National Park Service, this Kennedy Administration program distributed funding from offshore oil lease rights across the country to build many parks, including many Boise parks in the 1960s and 1970s.

About .6 acre of the 2+-acre triangular green space falls under Land & Water Conservation Fund regulations because those funds were used to landscape the property, build a small parking lot on Ninth Street and create the segment of the Boise River Greenbelt that runs through there, said Tom Governale, Parks & Recreation’s superintendent of parks.

“Once that money is used for a park, that park has to be used in perpetuity,” Governale said.

However, Parks & Recreation may employ the Fund’s Section 6(f) to swap a portion of the Rest Stop for another piece of land to allow another use.

“You can’t just take any piece of land,” Governale said. “You have to take a piece of land you didn’t own previously.”

Parks & Recreation will reassign the Rest Stop’s Land & Water Conservation Fund designation of .6 acre to its newly acquired 3-acre Franklin Orchard property, where Franklin Elementary School stood from 1905 to 2008, he said.

The Tourist Rest Stop is not among the official designated city parks. It falls under the other landscapes and rights-of-way that Boise Parks & Recreation oversees. Governale loosely defines it as a “greenspace.”