City unanimously approves Jack London Square redevelopment project
Last night the City Council unanimously approved the three resolutions relating to the Jack London Square upheld the developer's appeal relating to fast food ordinances, partially upheld Gary Knecht's appeal and most importantly approved the 15 year developer agreement with Jack London Square Partners. A second reading of the resolutions will occur on July 6th however that is now just a formality.

Early in the two hours of discussion it was clear that the councilmembers had already made up their mind and were mostly going through the motions of hearing public comment. This was most unfortunate as the public had turned out in record numbers for this meeting to express their opinions. While a half-dozen or so business people spoke giving unconditional support for the project, most had clearly been called into action by the developer as many had business relations with them or the Port of Oakland. However the great majority, approximately another twenty or so, took time to explain that while they support development the existing plans still left them with several concerns.

It is important to realize that the local community has never outright rejected the notion that development at Jack London Square is a good thing. In fact by dedication literally hundred, if not thousands of hours to analyze and comment on the EIR and plans they have at all time actively support it. As several people stated, "whenever the community got involved the project got better".


Indeed thanks to unanimous comments from the community the council managed to get the developer to effectively exclude the Site G garage final design from the approvals. The scope of the design review for that sites design can fully encompass all issues that normal design review addresses, rather than being limited to strictly finish, materials and other details, or the design guidelines. Additionally the developer will no longer get unconditional latitude to deploy fast food restaurants in the development. There is a cap of 40% for "national chains" with the remaining 60% being local and regional entities.

As a bonus the developer also decided to withdraw final design plan variant for 66 Franklin Site (where Spaghetti Factory and El Toritto now stand) that would have required demolishing the structure. This appears to indicate they either will not develop this site or will go ahead with renovation of the building intact with an intent to restore it to its original warehouse style facade.

Finally all buildings will go through a further public design review process even if the designs are substantially unchanged from the current final design plans that were submitted to and approved by the design review committee. However the extent to which the designs can be critiqued and challenged in the future is strictly limited to minor architectural issues for designs that have not changed substantially, and to conformance with the established design guidelines for the project for those that have changed (except Site G as previously noted above).

While the city council did ultimately unanimously approve the project a few dissenting comments were heard. Our local representative raised concerns about the validity of parking mitigations that are based on excess parking supply figures determined in 2002. She briefly alluded to the fact that the council had only recently expressed it intent to drive daily parking in the greater Jack London District off streets and into off-street parking. Unfortunately she failed to drive the point home to the rest of the council and later claimed she already knew the developer had refused to concede to re-calculating parking supply and demand figure at the time building permits are granted.

This came as a great disappointment to many community members who had lobbied the city council to listen to their wisdom on this issue. As the parking supply in the district has changed dramatically even in the last two years, and is about to change dramatically again with introduction of 4-hour parking on the streets, it made no sense at all to allow development to assume spare off-street parking spaces based on numbers counted back in 2002 only months after the events of September 11th 2001 - clearly a time of very low commercial activity. With such changes occurring in only 2 years and a looking forward to a 15 year development entitlement period, many community members believe we'll endure a parking space shortage created by the project. This shortfall will be borne by our local streets, and cause a dire shortage of day parking for local businesses that will further fuel the exodus of non-retail businesses from the district.

Also clearly unhappy with the funding for public art required by the development agreement, councilmember Desley Brooks made a motion to add an amendment requiring a minimum of 1% of the project's value to by spent on public art. Normally developers would be required to spend 1.5% of the value on public art, however on Port of Oakland land the figure is only 0.5% with a cap of $150,000. Thus the developer is able to limit their expenditure on public art to one tenth of the figure that individual entitlements would require. Hal Ellis, in good faith has always maintained that they will spend "more than $150,000" but has always maintained that he could not say how much more. He would not even say "substantially more than". He claimed that setting a higher figure was not acceptable because it could force them to spend more than was necessary to bring an acceptable amount of public art to the development.

At that point Desley Brooks mentioned that she was not merely talking about expenditure on "pop art as is the current vogue" leaving it unsaid that she was referring to spending money on inappropriate sculptures throughout the project as has already occurred in Jack London Square. Clearly the $3 million spent on public art a 1% commitment would have brought could have opened up opportunities for incorporating many artistic improvements that would definitely assist in hallmarking the project as "world class" as the developer has always said it will be. Unfortunately Hal Ellis was unmoved by Brooks' appeal and no other councilmember was moved to support her motion.

After some concluding an mostly congratulatory remarks from the remaining councilmembers votes were taking and each part of resolution 14.4 was unanimously passed 8 ayes to 0.

The rest, as they say, is history.

The regular attendees of the city meetings on this project would particularly like to thank the many additional community members who took time to turn up and speak at this meeting. We sincerely hope you can find time again to join us again as all the final design plans for this project come up for design review in the coming months and years! In particular we hope there will soon be a design "charette" with the architects VBN. This will be to gather further community input on what the exterior of the Site G garage (on the current Amtrak parking lot) should look like. Unfortunately we will not have the latitude to change its height or other dimensions, but we may be able to influence other aspects of its architecture to enhance its appeal and hopefully help disguise what otherwise will be an ugly 8-storey concrete box in our back yard.

Please refer to the calendar at the Jack London District website for further announcements.
Posted 6/16/2004