City Council Workshop on JLS redevelopment raises too many questions to answer
Oakland residents made a strong showing for the City Council workshop tonight which was devoted entirely to the Jack London Square Redevelopment project. The developer led out with an update on the project by Hal Ellis and a presentation from lead architect Steve Worthington. As borne out by later comments, the council was clearly struggling to comprehend the mass of information being presented and even had to ask the developer to slow down.

The developer began with his usual claim to have attended over twenty public meetings, a hundred other meetings and numerous one on one meetings communicating the project to the community. However this was the first time that the public had ever seen the three dimensional architectural model (see right - click image for a larger view) displayed at the meeting. The model was clearly the most valuable communication tool seen in the six months since the plans were formally released to the public as part of the Draft Environmental Impact Report.

Around twenty public commenters spoke for up to three minutes each, touching on a wide range of outstanding issues. Many asked the City Council to reject the proposed design of Site G (the massive seven storey 74' parking garage destined for the Amtrak parking lot) and require something more compatible with the beautiful train station next door, while others pointed out the ominous presence of alternatives ("variants") in the proposal that would allow the developer to build large amounts of office space rather than retail, restaurant, and entertainment spaces. Other speakers asked Council to pay attention to issues regarding open space use, the design review process, and many unresolved environmental impact problems including traffic and off-street parking.

Several public speakers, notably all from the Oakland Chamber of Commerce spoke in favor of the project. Two were unable to give any input other than that the chamber full endorsed the project. It was surprising that in a $300M project they could not find a single area that could use some improvement from the point of view of future Oakland merchants who might occupy it. One spoke at some length about how those in opposition had sometime contradicted themselves and that clearly the project could not be redesigned around personal preferences instead of been driven by good design from the developer. Ironically the councilors later showed it wasn't just the public who were able to express contradictory opinions.^*

To round out the public comments Sanjiv Handa of East Bay News, laid to waste all the complaints by the developer about the number of meetings it had attended. He pointed out that in the 6,000 person city of Emeryville, Kaiser had held over 120 public meetings for their hospital project that was half the dollar value of the JLS redevelopment project. He raised a laugh throughout City Hall when he extrapolated that by comparison Hal should have held over a thousand public meetings by now to keep up with Kaiser.

As the City councilors weighed in with the comments two things became clear. Firstly some had done their homework on the project and some were still drowning under the volume of paper work it generated, and secondly that this was clearly not going to be a slam dunk rubber stamping exercise for the developer.

Our local District 3 representative Nancy Nadel produce a very impressive list of questions, comments and concerns for the developer and City staff to answer. Nadel demonstrated she'd read a good deal of the paperwork in detail, and had clearly been following a good deal of the input from the local community. Raising red-flags about parking, the design for sites F2 and G, environmental impacts and standards, and lack of transit enhancements she set the standard.

The rest of the council followed and in general added to and strengthened the concerns raised by Nadel and the community at large. Repeated themes in their comments included:

• Dissatisfaction with the design of the garage on Site G
  
• Desire to see variants not visualized
  
• Must not have a mostly office space alternative developed
  
• Have more discussion of transit and parking issues
  
• Require widening of the Bay Trail around the hotel at Site F3
  
• Why no residential mixed use?
  
• Need more design consideration at all times to ensure quality
  
• Thanks (often at length) to the community for their continued and hard work
  
• Require the developer to build something of quality within six years if approvals are granted
  
• Concerns about consequences of a fast food major variance
  
• Lack of linkages to downtown and neighboring communities (Chinatown)
  
• Issues with the size and complexity of the project that made it difficult to comprehend and understand
  

The Jack London District website now has a detailed list of the comments made by the city councilors.

In fact the council raised so many questions that both Planning Director Claudia Cappio and the developer elected to provide their responses in writing to the council rather than at the meeting. However Hal Ellis could not stop himself commenting on the notion that they might develop an "office park" on the site (as alluded to by several commentators, and a recent Oakland Tribune article). He stated that he was ready to entertain mitigations to ensure that didn't happen.

Jack London News would like to extend a big thank you to all those who have been involved in help shape this project to serve our community instead of just a balance sheet bottom line somewhere. As ever we encourage all our readers to get involved and even if you don't speak to please come along to any meetings that you can, or at least watch them on KTOP, our local government access cable station!

^*Danny Wan wondered why the developers own calculations showed they were building excess parking capacity, and De La Fuente chimed in with the belief that there would never been enough parking no matter how much was provided.
Posted 3/31/2004