Not hardly.

John and I spoke in front of the city council tonight in a vain attempt to get the council members to consider the EIR for Marina Playa a little longer than the minutes they spent last week. Among the issues we brought up:

The table both planning department director Kevin Riley and Hexagon’s traffic engineer Gary Black use to obviate a Traffic Impact Analysis (TIA) for the intersection of Lawrence Expressway and El Camino Real is based on data from the year 2000 and does not represent the traffic on or near the Marina Playa site today. Worse, both Kevin Riley and Gary Black stated in their presentation that the agencies requesting a TIA for this project were satisfied with their responses, or lack thereof, and had no further comment. We called or visited every agency that responded to the EIR and found quite a different story.

The contact from the County sent a letter to staff on 5 May disagreeing with the city’s report indicating that TIA was not needed and asked additionally for an operational analysis of the Lawrence off-ramp, including weaving from Granada to El Camino Real. Funnily, in a phone call from the city planner, I was told to “look at his title: Associate Engineer”, as if that would cause me to disregard his input. I am not into titles. That engineer represents the County and his requests should be treated as County requests.

The Department of Transportation (DOT) responded on 28 April stating quite clearly that the city’s response “has not addressed the Department’s request” and that the intersection operational analysis should be performed, as previously requested. The staff from the DOT who managed the project was emphatic in stating that he had not been contacted in any way by either city staff or Hexagon (Gary Black again).

Several agencies pointed to the year the data were collected — over five years ago — and stated that the age alone would suggest new studies; that’s what the studies are for, to keep the data current. The data used to decide that a Traffic Impact Analysis was not necessary was also pulled from national averages. Anyone who lives in Silicon Valley knows that we are hardly average at anything, let alone the national average.

The California Highway Patrol’s (CHP) accident data was not from the year 2000; it was based on current data, which means that the intersection is the eighth most accident prone in the area today, even with the old Kaiser buildings empty. That means that any additional traffic from a new development will increase the accident rate. CHP also noted that all access to the project was on or near the problematic intersection and therefore the traffic had to be studied. This is where the planning staff came in with their faulty mathematics and ignored the safety concerns and the increased CHP resources required to manage the intersection.

Dominic Caserta’s vote on an issue that would be an ethics violation for any other citizen of the city was brought up again. Mr. Caserta received money not only from BRE and Taylor Morrison, the developers of the Marina Playa project, but also from people directly linked with Fairfield Residential. That is not the problem. The problem is that he voted to approve projects backed by people from whom he took the money, including Marina Playa. We’ll see how the Fairfield Residential project goes when he is still around to vote on it.

Council Member Jamie McLeod did feel there was enough new information to warrant a reconsideration, but without someone to second her motion, the action died on the floor. The mayor of our fine city Patricia Mahan ended our bid for reconsideration with a fantastic line: “Well, despite your best efforts, the action fails.”

Ouch. That sounds a little like me. And it hurts. Not because the action failed; we somewhat expected that. It hurts that she thinks this is our best effort.

Not hardly.