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1 <br />Mogensen, Andrew <br />From:Aaron Bukofzer <> <br />Sent:Monday, December 17, 2018 4:33 PM <br />To:_Council; <br /> <br />Cc:Kay, Jeff; Liao, Thomas; Mogensen, Andrew <br />Subject:December 20th Planning Commission Meeting <br />To the San Leandro City Council and Planning Commission: <br /> <br />I am writing to express my objections to the current development plans for 1388 Bancroft. In short, what is <br />being proposed is too dense for the neighborhood, is taller than it needs to be for the density it is supposed to <br />have under current ordinance, has insufficient parking, and fails to create a meaningful number of affordable <br />housing units. I believe city staff has failed to obtain the best proposal possible for this city and this <br />neighborhood, and they should be directed to go back, obtain genuine input from the surrounding community, <br />insist on improvements to the plans, and return in 2019 with a proposal that has neighborhood support. <br /> <br />My initial objection to this is procedural. The timing of this process has been unacceptable. Mr. Silva only <br />presented his plans to the community at a poorly-publicized meeting at the library on December 6th. No mailer <br />was sent to nearby property owners about this meeting. No information was posted on Nextdoor. The library <br />itself had no record of the meeting the morning prior to the event; it took a neighbor of mine, who had found out <br />about the meeting from city staff just one day prior, pointing it out to the library before this was corrected. This <br />wasn’t a genuine attempt at community outreach; this was a check-the-box, barely-publicized meeting held just <br />two weeks before the Planning Commission is going to hear the proposal. Given the short time between the <br />community meeting and the hearing, Mr. Silva obviously had no intention of making any material changes to <br />his proposal based on feedback he got from neighbors; there simply wouldn’t have been any time! City staff <br />should never have scheduled a hearing until Mr. Silva undertook genuine community outreach where he was <br />required to take input and make adjustments accordingly. Additionally, scheduling the Planning Commission <br />hearing with short notice (the hearing was not listed on San Leandro Meeting Central until two weeks <br />beforehand), merely five days before the Christmas holiday when many people have pre-arranged holiday plans <br />or are out of town, looks very much like an attempt to minimize community involvement in the process. <br /> <br />As noted above, I have several substantive objections to the project. Mr. Silva is looking to build a <br />development that is significantly inconsistent with existing city ordinances. If something of this sort is to be <br />approved, city staff should have been fighting for the best possible deal for the neighborhood. Instead, to me it <br />looks like staff has merely been looking to obtain the minimum amount of concessions from Mr. Silva <br />necessary to get four votes on the City Council. Here are some examples: <br /> <br />1. The staff findings indicate that the height of the building does not exceed the maximum height <br />allowable in the P District. While from a very technical perspective this may be true, it is only so because <br />in the 2016 zoning code revisions, city staff failed to accurately capture the intended maximum allowable <br />height in the P District. Staff presented it to the City Council as having a 30-foot maximum height, but <br />instead through a bad cross-reference created a 50-foot maximum height for multifamily residential <br />purposes. We have spent the better part of a year waiting for this error to be corrected at the direction of <br />the City Council, something that could have been done quickly back in January, before this proposal was <br />submitted. But now city staff is attempting to use their own mistake as a justification for allowing a