PC 101508 - Laserfiche WebLink

Ms. Stern indicated that following the consolidation of the Draft General Plan and Land Use Map and after the completion of the traffic modeling, staff and the City's consultants wrote the EIR, which was issued on September 22, 2008, with the public comment period extending through November 21, 2008. She noted that staff will be preparing the Response to Comments document, based on comments received, which is projected to be completed bymid-January 2009. She indicated that the final document will come before the Planning Commission around February 2009, at which time the Commission will make a decision whether or not to recommend to the City Council both the certification of the Final EIR and approval of the Draft General Plan. She added that the City Council will then take action in March 2009 whether or not to certify the Final EIR and to adopt the General Plan. Ms. Stern stated that the project was the maps, text, goals, policies, and programs of the Draft General Plan (the preferred development scenario), the development assumptions within that encompassed the 29,000 residential units and 35 million square feet of office and industrial uses. She noted that this number includes approximately 3.5 to 4 million square feet of commercial uses for the East Pleasanton area as placeholders for preparing the traffic analyses. She added that staff recognizes and has informed the property owners that the actual development potential will be determined by a specific plan process. She noted that there is a no-project alternative, which would be the existing 1996 General Plan with the land use and circulation network within that General Plan. Ms. Stern noted that a General Plan is not a focused EIR; it has a number of environmental topics and touches on all of the topics that are of interest as an environmental impact, from land use and agriculture to population and employment, utilities, geology, air quality, biological resources, etc. She stated that staff deals with them on a program level, looking at it at a higher level of analysis rather than at a project level. She added that subsequent development may require additional environmental review. Ms. Stern stated that with respect to the proposed General Plan, there were several discussions about the Circulation Element when the model for the land use buildout was run and that there were two significant impacts shown in the Draft EIR: the first was the potential impacts at gateway intersections, which are the first intersections coming in from the freeway or from Stanley Boulevard. She noted that the 1996 General Plan adopted a LOS D for all City intersections other than those exempted in the Downtown, based on the rationale that the Downtown was to maintain its pedestrian-friendly character and that the objective in the Downtown was to maintain that rather than facilitate the flow of traffic. She indicated that there were several intersections where it was necessary to make improvements in order to achieve the LOS D and that tolerating a higher level of congestion at those intersections could act to meter traffic to some extent in the downstream to enable downstream traffic to move more smoothly. She noted that there was consensus to allow a LOS exception to go below LOS D; therefore, improvements at those intersections are not PLANNING COMMISSION MINUTES, October 15, 2008 Page 5 of 15