CCMIN092496 - Laserfiche WebLink

Mr. van Gelder felt an amendment was appropriate. If this report is not approve. d, then staff must use last year's report, which is not as current as the one before Council. Rather than wait longer, he preferred to prepare an amendment. Now that the General Plan has been adopted, further studies can be performed to include impacts with and without the West Las Positas interchange. It is more difficult getting the freeway information requested. Staff can prepare a report setting forth the options for proceeding with a study including costs and Council can select the level of study it feels is appropriate. Mr. Tarver asked how long it would take to prepare the amendment? Mr. van Gelder felt the buildout model is almost completed and the CMA has recently revised its freeway levels of service report. He believed one draft would be necessary to make certain the report included the information Council wanted to see on the freeways. He felt that within the next thirty days the new Tri-Valley model to 2010 will be available. That may be the best model to review regional freeway impacts rather than the Pleasanton model and baseline report. Ms. Michelotti asked how that affects future baseline reports. Mr. van Gelder felt the biggest difficult was trying to guess freeway impacts in the future. If there is any freeway stoppage, city arterials will receive some impact from cut through trafflc. Staff can project worst case scenarios, but he did not suggest trying to build the city based on that information. Ms. Dennis understood why people do not accept the baseline counts as reality. The information is mostly based on what happens within the city. The more one tries to measure impacts outside the city, the less certainty there is about what will actually happen. She felt the report will probably be more a range of possibilities, than a concrete prediction. There are regional impacts which have not been foreseen. She agrees the models have to be melded to include local and regional impacts. One step to be taken now is to establish a baseline for the stop intersection at West Las Positas and Muirwood, although she acknowledged that this does not need to be done for every four-way stop in the city. Ms. Michelotti asked if that was going to be done when the West Las Positas study began? Mr. Tarvet indicated there was a conscious decision years ago when baseline reports were started to leave out the study of freeways or cut through traffic. Staff was to mitigate impacts of development on city streets and that has been done remarkably well. This is the first major project that has come to the attention of the residents in terms of freeway impacts. Council wants a study done regarding West Las Positas which includes a citizens group. That is the perfect opportunity to re-examine the baseline and how freeway and cross-town traffic is evaluated. He was concerned about trying to do that this year. The discussion about 09/24/96 -6-