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HomeMy WebLinkAbout1-30-2017 ARC Correspondence - Item 1 (R. Schmidt) Meeting: ty:±/ 1,;D • W From: Richard Schmidt < Sent: Sunday, January 29, 2017 8:39 PM To: Advisory Bodies Subject: ARC Agenda 1.30.17 Attachments: ARC Palomar Jan 17.doc Dear ARC commissioners, Please see attached written testimony Thank you. Richard Schmidt Item: RECEIVED CITY OF SAN LUIS OBISPO JAN 3 0 2011 COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT January 29, 2017 Re: Palomar project Dear Architectural Review Commission, You are being asked to "approve" the dreadful 71 Palomar project. In order to approve it you must also sign off on the CEQA studies that have been done. In order to do that you must have read every word of the ridiculously -long content - challenged IS -MND document, also every word of the public comments, and every word of staff's "responses" to those comments. And then you must certify that in your judgment, the purpose of CEQA has been fulfilled; to wit, that all potentially significant environmental impacts have been laid on the table and that the project has found ways to "mitigate" those impacts, so that the proLct_does minimal environmental harm. Of course, that's not possible, for neither have the environmental impacts been laid on the table honestly and completely, nor has the project made the least effort to minimize them. I would urge you to consider the following: as ethical individuals you cannot possibly certify what CEQA requires „-you to certify. To certify the CEQA portion of your agenda means that • you condone the sort of slipshod environmental study done for this project; • you approve of the city's willful refusal to do proper environmental studies; to wit, after agreeing the first IS -MND was faulty, the city willfully set out to make "modifications" of a sort that did not resolve practically any of the problems of the first study, even when those problems were clearly delineated by public comment at the time of previous hearings; • you think it's OK that the city turns a deaf ear to residents who strove to work with the city to make the modified IS -MND a good one (FYI, I have a long email string with Mr. Codron first urging him to redo the IS -MND, then requesting that there be some sort of opportunity for public scope -of -work participation for what we thought would be a "new" IS -MND -- explicitly making the point that allowing critics to help shape the scope was the best way to move this project along without delay for still further studies or lawsuits, his refusal, further correspondence with Mr. Codron asking how the public could contribute to the revised IS -MND and his refusal to so much as respond to those entreaties, etc. I understand other citizens have their own email threads along similar lines. It's an ugly picture of how this city operates, shunning the input of persons more expert on specific issues than staff or their hired consultants.); • you feel it's OK to stick it to one of your fellow advisory bodies, the Tree. Committee, whose participation in this review has been unreasonably, unfairly, and ridiculously circumscribed. (If my memory serves me correctly, at your last meeting on this project, you noted the mistreatment of the Tree Committee and explicitly requested their involvement, so it would be unseemly for you to ignore their plea that the tree portion of the IS -MND is incompetent and that their committee's review needs to continue.) I therefore urge you, as ethical individuals, not to approve this project nor its CEQA documents, and to direct that the IS -MND and tree report be fixed, and the Tree Committee have full opportunity to do what it considers their proper work, prior to any return to you for any further action. Thank you. Richard Schmidt, Architect PS. It would be thoroughly tiresome to try to reply here to all the dismissive, manipulative and rude staff retorts to public comments on the "revised" IS -MND, but will attempt to interject a bit of humor by commenting on just one of the retorts to my . many considered comments — the one where I included a graphic the purpose of which was to question the IS-MND's unfootnoted assertion that private vehicle traffic is the economic sector contributing the most to GHG emissions, when clearly it is not. The graphic showed, of course, that buildings are the largest contributor — my point being that the IS -MND by mis-identifying the largest GHG source let itself ignore the elephant trumpeting atop of the mountain, the energy consumption of the buildings themselves. But not to be bothered with my point, the staff reply was to deal with the obvious omission of facts I cited by dismissing the chart as being one I got from "a webpage," implying of course insignificance and unreliability and who knows what else associated with that wildly inaccurate collection of stuff on the internet, and thereby the irrelevance of my pointing out missing facts. The problem is what webpage this chart came from. It came from Architecture 2030, the organization that has pretty much defined energy -cutting goals and practices for the profession, and whose work and 2030 energy reduction goals have been endorsed and adopted by the AIA, the architecture community's primary professional organization. Now, maybe staff has never heard of Architecture 2030 or the AIA, or maybe they just think those are suspect organizations who know less than staff and hired consultants about the impacts of buildings on the environment. I should hope the Architectural Review Commission might feel differently about these matters. In any event, the deliberate and willful refusal to include such analysis in the revised IS - MND even after the omission from the first IS -MND was pointed out, states much.