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

5 to 3 vote at City Council approves 4-hour parking in district
This evening, after an at times dizzying and confusing discussion, the City Council voted by 5 ayes to 3 noes to approve the Public Works Committee proposal to adopt 4-hour parking throughout the majority of the Jack London District, but without any mixed-use permit scheme. After the vote community members in the public audience expressed their dismay audibly with boos before leaving.

Prior to tonight's meeting the four person Public Works Committee had been unable to find majority support for the mixed use permit plan proposed by the community based ad-hoc on-street parking improvement committee. Eventually the Nadel and Quan moved that the committee approve four-hour time limited parking in the district but without the permit plan. The hope was this would at least get the issues in front of the city council and give a chance for other council members to add support to the community's desire for a mixed-use permit scheme.

In the debate at city council our local district representative Nancy Nadel lead out with justifications why she believed the city should consider a mixed-use parking permit plan in the district. Nadel cut down "transit first" arguments with the fact that bus services to the area had been reduced in recent times from three to one, and that many of our workers come from areas not served by transit. This added to previous public comments that the reason residents were parking on the streets was because they were sometimes or always taking public transit to work, hence preventing daily resident parking would actually have the reverse effect of encouraging residents to drive to work!

Nadel also addressed the parking meter revenue comparison arguments used by Brooks by arguing that there are many areas in Oakland where parking meters had been introduced and are unused all day. This is because they are in areas where no one can meter parking or even if they can is able to leave work several times a day to feed them. Without a strong base of hourly parkers frequenting the district there is no justification at all for introducing hourly charged parking, or pricing based on a comparison with hourly parking. "Its comparing apples to oranges", said Nadel.

Jean Quan seconded Nadel's motion to support the original Ad-hoc committee's mixed-use permit plan. She emphasized that the plan sunsets after three years and addresses the needs of a neighborhood in transition while protecting the city from copy-cat resolutions for other areas where the same conditions simply don't apply. Quan also whacked at transit-first arguments by citing how Oaklanders are finding its easier to take a bus to San Francisco than to their own downtown. Clearly transit first doesn't just mean anti-car, it also requires active investment in making transit a better alternative.

Unfortunately the four members of City council who are not on the public works committee were unable reach a consensus.

While councilmember Larry Reid made no comments at all, Danny Wan quizzed city planning commissioner Claudia Cappio. Being concerned that four hour permits would leave workers with no place to park he asked Cappio if there was sufficient off-street parking. Cappio could only answer that there "was availability" and that neighborhood lots were "not at saturation". With 1700 or more workers in the area and probably several hundred residential cars on the street this was a vital question.

Unfortunately Wan did not pursue Cappio to find out how many spaces were available and at what price which was lucky for Cappio because this information is not known. However it is know that the Jack London Square redevelopment project if banking on taking all the excess capacity from the Washington St. garage, our neighborhood's lot with most excess capacity, currently estimated at 350 spaces. That project will also require a seven level 1000+ space garage on the site of the current Amtrak lot which will be completely utilized by planned developments.

Wan was also very concerned that approving a permit scheme in our neighborhood would set a precedent and "open up Pandora's box". Eventually he concluded he had no problem with residential only permits but believed that business employees must purchase spaces in off-street lots. Wan also said that if parking meters were the proposed alternative then he "could see the problem". "I don't see parking meters proposed anywhere here as an alternative", he said. In doing so he ask Cappio if that was the case and was told no parking meters were being proposed. While it is true that in front of the council was no such proposal, such a statement was in direct contradiction to the original proposal by the city to local residents of parking meters everywhere that prompted the formation of the Jack London District ad-hoc parking committee.

Councilmember Brunner asked a lot of questions about the specifics of the proposed permit plan. She then pointed out how Rockridge already has a permit scheme that allows businesses to have parking permits. Although only one permit per business is allow she believed this meant there is a problem (business parking) to be solved everywhere in Oakland. Brunner said she believed any permit scheme must not be subsidized and hence must be revenue neutral or positive. Although Rockridge already has business permits she believed that the mixed-use permit plan proposal is precedent setting regardless of any 3 year time limit because so many neighborhoods are wanting just such a thing concluding, "Once we do it it'll be here forever and everywhere".

Ignacio De La Fuente concurred with Brunner that a mixed-use permit scheme would be precedent setting, but went on to raise many issues supporting such a precedent. In his district he had teachers struggling to feed meters for parking near their schools and such a scheme would clearly benefit them and many other workers. While thanking the community for their hard work in formulating such a solution he noted "we have to be careful" and cited problems of businesses with lots of money buying all the permits and stopping residents from getting any. He also cited his personal experience that at 7:30am when he has meetings at the local Cuckoo's Nest restaurant there always seems to be lots of parking. This error which was thankfully corrected by Nadel - by 8 or 9am all parking is gone leaving retailers and visitors with nowhere to park.

Councilmembers Desley Brooks and Henry Chang trotted out their same old objections expressed in the public works committee. Chang reiterated that a mixed-use plan was clearly against the transit-first policy and that the city could not subsidize parking. In the same breath he contradicted himself by saying he had no problem at all with a residential permit scheme in the area indicating he believes "transit-first" only applies to businesses, something it clearly does not. Brooks choose not to hear Nadel's earlier arguments and again cited her comparison of the ad-hoc committee's permits costs with meter revenues.

In a second round of comments Jean Quan emphasized the revenue aspects of the communities proposal and how up to $60,000 in profit could be made from it which included hiring 1.5 extra city staff for administration and enforcement. She also noted that staff's analysis and no ones comments failed to take into consideration loss of revenue caused by established businesses with hundreds of employees leaving the district. Del la Fuente suggested the Public Works Committee 4-hour proposal should be accepted with a provision that City Staff go and work on solving the issues of a mixed-use permit scheme for the various districts of Oakland.

Jane Brunner took the opportunity to call Planning Commissioner Cappio on an earlier statement. She asked why the permit scheme is limited to three years to allow time for additional off-street parking if there was already sufficient off-street parking. Unfortunately ah-hoc chaos prevailed and no answer was forthcoming from Cappio even though Brunner has clearly hit on an important issue in staff's arguments about the permit plan. Concluding Brunner emphasized that clearly our district's problem of parking an business retention is one widely shared and that there was definitely a need to find solutions that work throughout Oakland. "Ultimately", she said, "we either want to keep these business, or we don't".

Eventually the original public works committee proposal for 4-hour parking was moved with a rider that at a later date City staff investigate mixed-use parking permit plan solutions that could be applied throughout the city. A vote of 5 to 3 for was quickly passed. Nadel, Quan and Brunner dissenting preferring that the mixed-use permit plan be solved first before introducing 4-hour parking.

What happens next?

It seems likely the next step will be for the City to follow through tonight's motion by:

a) implementing the time limited zones in the Jack London District through a City Council resolution; and

b) draft a resolution to amend the City's budget by revising revenue expectations and increasing appropriation (omitting reference to the permit parking revenues and decreasing staff time to account for the elimination of the permit parking system administration)

This will give district residents, workers and business owners additional time to lobby their councilmembers and also to turn up at City Council to speak when future resolutions are voted on. Currently there is no indication of how quickly this will happen, and what the chances are that the community can sway the opinions of another two councilmembers to back its permit plan, or reject the 4-hour parking resolution until something better is proposed.

To express your opinion to the three councilmember who might still back a Jack London District mixed-use permit scheme contact:

Danny Wan, District 2; 510-238-7002; dwan@oaklandnet.com
Ignatio De La Fuente, District 5, President; 510-238-7005; idelafuente@oaklandnet.com
Larry Reid, District 7; 510-238-7007; lreid@oaklandnet.com

Those that would like to give thanks to those councilmembers that did support some kind of mixed-used permit plan, and perhaps encourage them to continue to lobby their council collegues, contact:

Nancy Nadel, District 3; (510) 238-7003; nnadel@oaklandnet.com
Jean Quan, District 4; (510) 238-7004; jquan@oaklandnet.com
Jane Brunner, District 1; (510) 238-7001; jbrunner@oaklandnet.com
Posted 6/01/2004