The Richardson City Council met February 23, 2026. Two of the agenda items are worth covering: DART and the Apollo Middle School rezoning. The first was covered in yesterday's blog: "Council Recap: DART". Today we look at Apollo Middle School. In short, the RISD request was approved 7-0.
The enrollment at Apollo will rise from 594 today to 834 in Fall of 2028 and possibly 1,000 at full capacity. The footprint of the building will grow from 126,920 sq. ft. to 206,220 sq. ft. The height will be 42 ft., with an additional 8 ft. for mechanical screening. It will have fencing in the front yard and fencing exceeding 8 ft. by the athletics fields. The landscaping will be required to adhere to commercial standards (more on this later).
None of these specs was controversial. Some received no comments from public or council at all. The only controversial part of the request had to do with the traffic circulation plan. That was because the student dropoff and pickup location was being moved from Apollo Rd to Amherst Ave, with two driveways from the new east front of the school to Amherst Ave. Homeowners on Amherst Ave. were the only members of the public to speak during the public hearing and they were unanimously opposed.
Then it was the council's turn to speak. Let's jump ahead and repeat that they approved the rezoning request 7-0, with no changes made to the request.
Council member Dan Barrios asked, "Do you know if it was considered using driveway C [on Apollo] as the exit versus moving it onto Amherst?" The staff response: "I don't know if they considered that."
My reaction to that is, first, why didn't staff know? The impact on Amherst Ave was well known to be the most controversial part of this rezoning. The traffic management plan received the bulk of the discussion during the December 16, 2025, CPC meeting. The plan was revised according to feedback then. Didn't city staff work with RISD before and/or after this? The city council meeting where final approval is given is, in my opinion, way too late for such detail to be thrashed out. And why is a council member doing detailed traffic management planning at all? They aren't experts. Council Member Barrios wasn't the only offender here. Council Member Arefin followed him. "Thank you for being patient answering the question. Oh, sure, and I'm gonna be asking the same question again, a little bit different way."
Finally, City Manager Don Magner asked someone from RISD to come up and explain. "We hire our traffic engineers as required to develop strategies to improve the traffic management plan, and so we've worked with our traffic engineers, alongside our city staff, including their engineers, and we try to meet a few general milestones. One of those, I think, was mentioned earlier, the city really wants us to get off of the streets as best as possible. So they want us to increase the on-site queuing capability. So what our engineers attempt to do is figure out where on-site can we extend or lengthen the on-site queuing...A part of this plan attempts to, as you see in the red dotted line, extend that queuing length. What you don't see is the red dotted line is also double queuing. So we need so much room that we're double stacking cars along the red double lines just to again, achieve one of the objectives, which is to get cars off the street, if possible, and onto our site. So with that in mind, as far as exiting, I think the comment was, why can't we go left at driveway C and just take a right onto Apollo road and exit, I think was one of the comments... So the spirit of this traffic plan, what we want to communicate to our parents, is we want to double queue and go all the way around... We need that length the calculation the engineers mandated to get the number of cars off the street as normal, to minimize the on street parking. So that's why the no left, if you will, on driveway C."
Where city council members are thinking of ways to make it easy for parents to pick their own dropoff spot, the traffic engineers are designing ways to make that more difficult. Any backup at all at the Apollo Rd exit on Driveway C would interfere with the traffic flow to the intended dropoff at the school entrance. In other words, the perceived inefficiency is not a bug, it's a feature. It took a while, and whether the council members eventually trusted the experts' judgment on this or not, they did eventually approve the rezoning request, unmodified, 7-0.
One last comment by me, about something that no one brought up in the meeting, but it's a feature of this plan that should appeal to the neighborhood. Under current zoning, there are no requirements for landscaping. Under the proposed rezoning, RISD will have to meet commercial landscaping standards. This means the 1,200 ft. stretch of Amherst Ave. along the athletic fields, which currently has only three trees, will have to have landscaping all along the street. The landscape plan shows 18 trees and multiple shrubs (I think) along the street. There is also a large water retention pond surrounded by trees in the northeast corner of the property along Amherst Ave. I consider all that a win for the homeowners' view. That stretch could end up looking parklike, a good deal better than the bare grounds that are there now. But, as we all know, a beautiful park attracts visitors. ;-)
Quotes have been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.
"Seven hands all rise.
Apollo to swell with teens.
Amherst holds its breath."
—h/t ChatGPT
1 comment:
I know it is a little late for this realization, but one of the complaints was people parking in the bike lane in front of Apollo. I noticed that in front of Apollo the small area, the two lines close together, are marked out and the area between those lines and the curb are designated as the bike lane. Just one elementary school away, Yale elementary, the bike lanes are opposite. The area next to the curb is designated for parking and the space between the two little lines has the bicycle pictograph. Seems like it could have been much cheaper to restripe the street in front of Apollo than incur all of the street maintenance that will be required on Amherst and Syracuse.
I will add that several months ago we met with the city planning department and pointed out that Amherst is absolutely covered with patches and sinking areas which does not seem like it will support bus traffic. They got on Google Earth immediately and took a look to see and agreed. I believe that their study was conducted after (And as a result of) that and while they said only 13 cars drove on Amherst Ave in the study, they did not indicate it was an average. I suspect they only took a look one day, when the weather was nice and most people were not dropping off or picking up their kids.
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