Streets, Costs and Incentives: Three Bel-Red Asks Before the Code Advances

Bellevue Chamber of Commerce  |  August 17, 2026

After more than a year of filings on the Bel-Red Land Use Code Amendment, the Chamber narrowed its ask. On August 17, 2026, a sign-on letter went to the Bellevue Planning Commission with three signatures: Joe Fain, President and CEO of the Bellevue Chamber; Jessica Clawson, chair of the Chamber's PLUSH Committee; and Charlie Bauman of the BelRed Property Owners Group. BPOG speaks for the property owners affected by the grid plus additional local builders and stakeholders with active land use investments in the corridor.

Where earlier letters worked through the code section by section, this one names three concerns the signers want resolved before the amendment advances, and it is explicit about why.

"In the spirit of ensuring the new code does not stall the development that it is intended to align with in the the Comprehensive Plan." — Bellevue Chamber, PLUSH Committee and BelRed Property Owners Group letter to the Bellevue Planning Commission, August 17, 2026

One: Scale Back the Street Grid Obligations

The street grid remains the Chamber's longest-running Bel-Red concern, and the letter treats it as a cost driver first. It asks the Commission to direct staff to revisit the grid requirements with an eye toward minimizing new street construction obligations, rather than layering them on top of public infrastructure costs that are already significant.

Two: Offset the Infrastructure the Code Already Requires

This is the ask that is new at this stage, and it turns on a feature of the subarea that most of Bellevue does not share. Bel-Red relies on streams for natural drainage rather than a centralized stormwater system, which pushes projects into large and costly detention facilities. Because the city generally will not allow that detention inside a building or garage, projects have to put it in the public right of way, which adds street closure and construction costs on top of the detention itself. Stack that with mandatory stream restoration and street obligations, and the letter calls the resulting code-required costs onerous.

The remedy the letter asks for is a mechanism that offsets those mandatory infrastructure costs against other mandatory fees, including the affordable housing fee. The ask is for an offset, not for removal of the fee.

"..so projects are not penalized twice for infrastructure the code already requires them to build." — Bellevue Chamber, PLUSH Committee and BelRed Property Owners Group letter to the Bellevue Planning Commission, August 17, 2026

Three: Make the Amenity Incentives Reachable

The amenity incentive system is meant to buy public benefits with additional development capacity. As currently structured, incentives are only unlocked once a project clears a floor-area-ratio threshold that very few projects will realistically reach, so these benefits will rarely materialize. The letter makes two requests: reexamine the threshold, and keep the incentive system distinct from the mandatory cost items above, so that code-required streets, streams and stormwater are addressed directly rather than folded into a voluntary framework that is not doing the job.

The Through-Line

The letter ends by encouraging the Commission to look at total development cost in Bel-Red, since requirements from other city departments compound what the land use code imposes on its own. That is the argument underneath all three priorities: the code can be internally reasonable in every section and still add up to something no project can carry.

The Planning Commission's review of the Bel-Red amendment continues, and these three items are on the record for it.