At its May 27 meeting, the city’s Design Commission voted unanimously not to let the planned five-story mixed-use Hines project go forward without another review. Because its preliminary design review was denied, Hines will have to start the application process over.

Hines can still file a complete building permit and become vested under the current development code without design approval, but approval is needed before a building permit can be issued, said Development Services Group Director Scott Greenberg.

The Design Commissioners said that they gave Hines input on their initial design at study sessions in November 2013 and December 2014. Yet many of those suggested elements were not included in the preliminary design presented on Thursday. The commissioners said that the public plaza and facade facing S.E. 29th Street was attractive, but that the other three sides were out of scale with the rest of the neighborhood.

Commissioner Tami Szerlip said that the north facade “feels like the side of the Queen Mary.”

Several citizens who testified during the meeting shared the same concerns – that a five-story building is too tall for the heart of Town Center. They also said that it presents traffic problems that haven’t been fully evaluated.

Since the latest study session in December, Islanders have been following the project through a series of dramas.

The City Council discussed imposing a moratorium on downtown development in January in an attempt to appease citizens opposed to tall buildings and increased density, but exempted Hines due to the legal risk associated with singling out one project.

At the same time, the city had begun talking with Hines about adding 200 commuter parking stalls. Later, representatives from Hines later appeared before the City Council with promises of including an upscale grocery store in the ground floor retail area. The concept excited many residents, though architectural renderings presented to the Design Commission didn’t show sufficient space for that use.

Throughout these discussions, the city was conducting a Town Center visioning process with a goal of rewriting its development code.

The Design Commission was asked to evaluate the project as presented and under the current code, without considering the outcomes of the Town Center code revision or commuter parking negotiations. Still, the seven-member commission rejected the project, meaning that Hines will have to come before city staff and the commission again for pre-design, pre-application and preliminary design review before it can proceed with the building permit process.

Commissioner Lara Sanderson said that in a prior review, the Design Commission suggested moving the leasing office, adding more three-bedroom units, activating retail along 78th Avenue S.E. and 77th Avenue S.E. and opening up the courtyard for public use. Those suggestions were not taken into account in the design presented on Wednesday.

“Honestly, I don’t even feel a nod toward our feedback,” she said.

Hines pledged to involve the public throughout the design process, holding an open house at the Community and Event Center to propose ideas and coming up with ideas that fit in the architectural context of Mercer Island, which is “mid-century modern” and “Pacific Northwest regionalism,” according to representatives from Runberg Architecture Group.

Hines also said they would include a public plaza along S.E. 29th Street that would be 200 percent larger than those of other recent Island developments, and planned a mid-block connector between its building and McDonald’s, which isn’t required by the current code.

“There were real concerns about the scale of the building,” said Colin Brandt, vice-chair of the Commission. “We all liked the plaza. That was a big step forward from where they were before. Now they just have to work on the mass.”

Sanderson said that she would feel great about the project if all of the facades looked like the south-facing one on S.E. 29th, with interesting building articulations and setbacks from the street, but that “the other sides don’t feel human-scale,” especially the north-facing one.

The architects said that all sides will look the same, but that the south facade looks nicer in drawings because it is a professional rendering, and that the north wall will be an “internal property line” when the McDonald’s property is eventually re-developed.

John McCullough, a lawyer from Hines, wrote to the city on May 28 to respond to a letter from City Manager Noel Treat and “set the record straight” regarding the exemption of Hines from the moratorium.

McCullough said that Hines couldn’t get an upscale grocer to commit to the project because of the potential to redevelop the Albertson’s site. He also wrote that having an upscale grocer was never part of the initial decision to exempt Hines, and that the city is now using “moratorium threats to extract free and unreasonable concessions.”

Instead of a grocer like Whole Foods, “Hines is now targeting a mix of high-quality smaller scale retailers and hopefully a boutique, small grocer,” McCullough wrote.

Hines will deliver the parking stalls, if the city pays for them, he wrote. Funding could come from an agreement with South Transit, which is still being negotiated by the city. Hines remains exempt from the moratorium, which the City Council will decide to renew, modify or allow to expire at its June 15 meeting.