UPFRONT
Reprinted from the Pacific Sun, July 28 to August 3, 2006 Issue
The Loch Lomond monster
San Rafael General Plan put to test over proposal for large marina development
BY BILL MEAGHER AND PETER SEIDMAN
Who should decide the future of a neighborhood? Local residents or the entire community?
That's one of the toughest questions cities and towns face as they near "buildout," the planning term that indicates there are no more large, empty lots suitable for development. The proposed Loch Lomond Marina project in San Rafael is bringing the theoretical question into practical perspective.
San Rafael Marin LLC submitted an application to the city of San Rafael to build 66 market-rate homes and 18 affordable-housing units on the site of the current Loch Lomond Marina, located on Point San Pedro Road. Two subdivisions, San Pedro Cove and Bayside Acres, are located adjacent to the marina. The Loch Lomond subdivision is across Point San Pedro Road from the site. Motorists traveling north on Highway 101 can spot the marina as they drive down into central San Rafael. In addition to the homes and housing units, the developer's plan also called for 21,785 square feet of new retail and office space. The plan retained the 517 berths in the marina but reduced the number of both dry-dock storage spaces and parking spaces.
The plan to fill in 900 square feet of wetlands disquieted neighbors, although the developer stated the lost wetlands would be more than compensated for by expanding wetlands elsewhere on the site by as much as 9,000 square feet. Critics said the project might result in pollution running into the bay and an unacceptable increase in traffic. Brickbats were aimed at the developer's initial plan to replace the full-service Loch Lomond Market, a longtime fixture, with a smaller store.
And that's just a taste of the objections neighbors raised when the city released the project's draft Environmental Impact Report in the spring. The level of knowledge and recent experience among many area residents stemmed from the city's planning process that led to the San Rafael General Plan 2020. Going from general to specific often is a hard maneuver, and that's been the experience when it comes to the Loch Lomond project. "This is not your typical public process," says Bob Brown, San Rafael's director of community development. "Many of these issues came up in our update of our General Plan, and that was a process that took four and a half years." The city approved the General Plan in 2004, the same year San Rafael Marin LLC submitted its application for the Loch Lomond project.
The question of developing the Loch Lomond Marina "was a significant focus of the General Plan update," says Brown, "and a lot of these neighbors were involved in those discussions. We had probably two years of high-level policy discussions as part of the General Plan, and now we're into the review of the actual development proposal."
David Tattersall is a co-chairman of the Loch Lomond Marina Committee, which is allied with the Point San Pedro Road Coalition. Tattersall says the city gave neighbors the opportunity to provide input into the General Plan, and he lauds city councilmembers who discussed issues and walked the Loch Lomond property with residents. But he also says neighbors "feel what seems to be a lack of sensitivity of planning administrators to community feedback, especially the local community that gets most impacted by development." And, he says, input from residents seems to have been ignored in preparing the General Plan and now in the development proposal for Loch Lomond.
After the city unveiled the draft EIR, the Loch Lomond neighborhood rallied and submitted numerous objections, to which the city is responding, says Brown. The city is holding a series of focus meetings with the Planning Commission to deal with the major objections. The size of the market was the subject of a meeting this week. In September, traffic will be the topic. After the last focus meetings, when the city ostensibly will have responded to objections concerning the EIR, the Planning Commission will begin hearings on the merits of the project. The controversy to date has been, in essence, just an extended first round in a lengthy process.
It's a process that begins with the state mandating that cities and towns, including San Rafael, must provide adequate housing for its residents as part of a General Plan. "We have to plan for housing units," says Brown. "We did an evaluation of 85 housing sites, and the Loch Lomond Marina was the number one site selected. People outside the neighborhood see this as an opportunity site. People inside the neighborhood feel that the neighborhood should really dictate what occurs there. It's a conundrum as to what occurs there: a community vision or a neighborhood vision."
Tattersall says that before the most recent General Plan update, Loch Lomond was designated as a marina use. That changed drastically with the adoption o the General Plan 2020, when a marina use became just part of the allowed development on the property. "City staff wanted to completely overload the site with development potential, which is a complete change from what was there originally," Tattersall says. Area residents, he adds, just want to see "a little more balance in the whole process."
Brown says he understands the implications of the changes brought about by the General Plan update. "This is the difficulty with infill development." In principal, controlling development makes sense, preventing growth from being pushed into farmlands and open space." From a theoretical standpoint, infill makes all the sense in the world. But here you have some people who have been living in their homes for 50 years, and change is extraordinarily hard." Especially when a proposed development like this adds the kind of multi-use environment that increases office and retail space in an area that has been primarily residential." This is clearly not a development that will look like the lower-density, single-family development that surrounded it 40 years ago," says Brown.
Jonathan Frieman, co-president of the Point San Pedro Road Coalition, says many residents are particularly concerned about the traffic implications. He says traffic already is congested on Point San Pedro Road in front of San Rafael High School and the Montecito Plaza Shopping Center. And, he notes, there are only two main routes in and out of the Loch Lomond area, on North San Pedro and Point San Pedro roads. Adding more traffic to the route that passes by Montecito may prove dangerous in the event of a disaster, especially near Montecito, Frieman says. (Not to mention the day-to-day-hazards of traversing the Whole Foods parking lot and its environs.)
The draft EIR states that the project would cause relatively few traffic problems. Tattersall says that's ridiculous. The only way it can be true, he adds, is that the city must have increased the acceptable level of traffic at intersections affected by the development.
Increasing the acceptable level of traffic at intersections is not unheard of in planning circles. It's a real-world way to cope with the pressures of development. The real issue, though, is the time it takes to drive to and from destinations. Brown says that based on the objections to the draft EIR's traffic estimates, the city "went back, and the traffic engineering division made dozens of runs at different times, and they even had a video camera in the car and a clock." With what Brown calls "definitive data and averages," the city can present a reasoned argument about traffic times in response to objections about traffic impacts.
Traffic, danger to wetlands, pollution from infill, the size (or even the existence) of a market that has been a fixture in the neighborhood, are all legitimate concerns. "We had some input into the plan," says Tattersall, "but the final document that came out diluted enormous amounts of our input and also provided lots of ways for the city to do what it wanted and ignore the input." Neighbors developed a lengthy response to the draft EIR that focused in part on what they say are its lack of adherence to the city's General Plan principles.
Whatever the neighbors' objections to the General Plan, it's already written and now serves as a framework for the process taking place with the Loch Lomond Marina development. As with other projects in the city, Brown says, the first job of his planning department is to uphold the tenets of the General Plan. That strict adherence has caused much consternation among those who will be affected by the project, as well as neighbors of high-profile development proposals elsewhere in the area. The Planning Commission, and then the City Council, decisions wili determine whether the city's General Plan is affirmed, at least when it comes to the Loch Lomond Marina. "I don't know if their decisions will be ultimately consistent with the policies in the General Plan, or whether they will see the development proposal and then think that the policy decisions on paper and then in particular" reveal discrepancies, says Brown. It's possible that the outcome of the Loch Lomond debate may actually point out inadequacies in the General Plan rather than in the project.
Keith Bloom, project manager for Dorman Partners LLC, the Sausalito based firm that's developing the property for San Rafael Marin LLC, stresses that he and his firm have made extensive efforts to collect input from residents through many public hearings and private meetings. "In all our projects, we attempt to reach out to the community and understand the big issues and what people would like to see and not like to see. We attempt to respond as best we can to community feedback."
Bloom says he hopes the project can move through the city's planning process by the end of the year, "but that's up to the city."
Paul Jensen, project planner for the city, says the Loch Lomond development proposal has been the subject of more public meetings than just about any other proposal he's seen during his 25 years with the city. But as San Rafael and other cities in Marin near buildout, it's not unrealistic to imagine that increasingly extended and contentious hearings will mark projects that seek to meet state requirements through infill. And then it will be up to the planning commissions and the city councils to determine how closely to follow their general plans, and whether deviating from them could bring legal liability.
"It's an issue of character here," says Brown. "We are an urbanizing area. Some people view this as a suburban area that needs to be retained as such. When you preserve 80 percent of this county as open space, you are left with essentially intensifying the remaining 20 percent."
Loch Lomond neighbors say they understand the implications of maintaining an urban corridor along the north-south axis of the county. Development on the property is something that many residents "are resigned to having," says Frieman. "It's just a question of how much and in what way."
Contact the writers at meagher seidman@yahoo.com