Before the meeting started, Brenda Adelman alerted us to the April 3, 5pm hearing (I assume at the BPU meeting), where they'll consider the EIR for the River Discharge component of the Incremental Recycled Wastewater Program. The EIR is huge, as you'd expect.

Our guest was Wayne Goldberg, Santa Rosa’s Director of Advanced Planning. We asked Wayne what his current projects were, and he reported:

1) The General Plan Update, restricted this time to updating the Housing Element, as required by state law to be complete by June 2009; inclusion of some projects such as the Station Area Plan (SAP), Parks plan and Bicycle and Pedestrian Master Plan; and some climate change policies (but not in a separate element).

2) A study of the Mendocino Avenue corridor between College and Steele Lane, funded by the General Fund.

3) A grant application for a Santa Rosa Ave. study in the area between Sonoma Avenue and Highway 12, an area that’s within the SAP’s boundaries.

4) Changes in the Housing Allocation Plan (HAP), which was written as a companion ordinance to promote housing for all income sectors when the Growth Management Ordinance was enacted in the early 1990’s. As a result of the SAP public process there was a call to amend the HAP so that the triggering factor for on-site production of affordable units is the number of units in a project, not acreage. Also planned is removing the exemption for mixed use projects from providing affordable units or paying in-lieu fees, as they are expected to comprise a large amount of future development. CCSR was integral in writing the original HAP, but it was watered down and made ineffective over the years, so this change is good news, but something we need to monitor.

5) Roseland annexation: after many meetings with county officials, there remains a gap in predictions of the city budget deficit that such an annexation would create: the county says $1.7 million, city $2.7 million.

6) The city has applied for a planning award based partly on the SAP public process, which was robust. The Accountable Development Coalition (ADC), a member organization comprised of citizen interest (like CCSR), environmental, social justice and labor groups who gather to address important projects proposed in Sonoma County recently submitted a letter supporting Santa Rosa in its application.

We talked about the Lowes project proposal. It was mentioned that in the Mendocino Safeway project several years ago, what the city did to improve the standard Safeway model was to simply deny a rezoning for the residential portion of the parcel. The resulting project that includes some housing has been successful.

Downtown highrises came up. The city is currently looking for a new developer for the Whitehouse site, to build a substantial amount of parking. I don’t know if the RFP said that retail and housing were required. Monahan Pacific still hopes to build The Rises (where Kinko’s used to reside), and the potential Ledson project on the Barnes and Nobel parking lot site will depend on that new parking.

Anne E. Seeley