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Marina Shores is the wrong project for Redwood City Marina
Shores is a project that represents a dramatic shift in the look
and character of Redwood City and the entire Peninsula. It would set a precedent for future development
all along the Bay. In the recent past, such dramatic changes in
"look and feel" have been attempted only after extensive
public participation and outreach. By
contrast, the Marina Shores project provided extremely limited opportunities
for public comment, with limited public awareness. Those
other major projects, the development of the Downtown Plan, the
downtown Cinema project, and the Courthouse Square project each
had multiple public meetings with hundreds of participants over
an extended period of time. Postcards,
flyers, notifications in City billings -- many methods were used
to notify residents of the studies underway, and the public hearings
themselves were covered on public TV to expand the audience and
citizen participation. By contrast, this project has been largely
hidden from public view.
The Marina Shores project, despite its enormity, had few
meaningful attempts at outreach. None
of the public hearings prior to formal City Council action were
carried on public television. Having
spent years developing the City's General Plan, Housing Element
and Downtown Plan, Redwood City residents had, at a minimum, a reasonable
expectation that new development proposals would be carefully screened
for consistency with these strategic plans. Instead, the City has dragged its feet on issuing formal approval
on the Downtown Plan, approved an enormous development that directly
contradicts every key feature of both that Plan and the City's overall
General Plan, and did so without any real public outreach. Proponents then have the gall to label
citizens objecting to the circumvention of City goals as Johnny-come-lately's
to the process. The
only public hearing held on this project before this year was in
July of 2003. The citizens
who later banded together to invite greater public scrutiny by forcing
this measure onto the ballot were at that meeting and at each of
the public meetings in 2004. The
four-year process the City describes has been a private process,
not a public one. The City's anemic attempts to inform residents
of the nature of this development failed so completely as to seem
purposeful. Marina
Shores is about height, density, snarled traffic, scarce water supplies,
and numerous environmental impacts. The developer-sponsored literature depicting
only street level views and coloring streets and sidewalks green
would have you believe that it is about public access to the Bayfront.
Instead, Marina Shores would mean 17 skyscrapers.
It would mean the expansion
of Woodside Rd, gridlock at Veterans and Broadway intersections
with Woodside, and gridlock on Hwy 101. It would mean taxing our already overextended water supply.
The magnitude and scale of this project on a tiny site are profound.
The limitation on access because of its
isolation makes the associated problems even more dramatic. The
27 unmitigatable significant impacts identified in the Environmental Impact Report are
considered to be of such importance that the City Council had to pass a statement of "Overriding Consideration"
before it could act on the project proposal. Overriding all concerns about the impacts
on traffic. Overriding
concerns about water supply. Overriding concerns about the impact
on Bair Island. Overriding
strategic goals and guidelines developed over many years with genuine
citizen participation. Consideration
for a developer, but not for residents. Our citizens group, being outspent 10-1 in this campaign, is working hard with limited resources to provide voters with the information needed to make an informed decision. Please DO think it through. You'll find this is the wrong project, in the wrong place, being promoted for the wrong reasons.
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