Lakeway City Council approved a special-use permit Feb. 16 for Belmont Village Senior Living, an assisted-living center that also opened a facility in West Lake Hills in 2014.
The company develops and operates assisted-living, memory-care and independent-living properties, Senior Vice President Stephen Brollier said.
The 130,000-square-foot project, to be located at 107 Bella Montagna Circle, Austin, will include 162 units with varied levels of care as well as a dining hall, swimming pool, fitness center and salon, Brollier said. It will be staffed 24 hours daily, provide transportation for residents and also offer a memory-care unit for residents with mild to full cognitive impairment, he said. About 52,000 square feet will be designated for resident activities, he said.
“[Belmont Village] is a low traffic impact on the community,” Brollier said. “There are minimal parking requirements, it’s a low noise impact [and] we are not going to have access from [RR] 620.”
Lakeway resident Brandy Meeks said she was concerned about ambulance siren noise and water runoff from the project onto her home that backs to the proposed center.
“You have ambulances coming all times of the day and the night,” she said referring to assisted-living facilities. “How is that going to affect us when we are trying to sleep? [The proposed Belmont Village] is right here by a neighborhood. It’s not out in the woods, in the middle of nowhere.”
The developer is required to capture all of the water runoff produced on-site as well as water that is already flowing across the property, Deputy City Manager Chessie Zimmerman said.
The project is zoned as C-1, or commercial zoning, she said. A special-use permit is required because the project involves a medical use, she said.
“Tomorrow we could issue a building permit for an office building larger than this and with the same height,” Zimmerman said. “From a land-use perspective, this is a less intense use for the property because it will generate less traffic and fewer trips per day.”
She said ambulances would use the front entrance and not the back entrance adjacent to the neighborhood.
“This is probably the ultimate nicest thing you can expect to be on that large of a piece of property,” Council Member Dwight Haley said.
Brollier said construction is projected to start in mid-September, and the community is slated to open January 2018.
“This [assisted-living] market is severely underserved,” he said. “There are communities here, but the type of resident and the community—I won’t say we are high-end, but we are on an upper end of that market.”
