The 900 Kiely Project, a.k.a. Fairfield Residential’s Gallery at Central Park, proposes the construction of over 800 housing units on the old Kaiser-Permanente Hospital site at the corner of Kiely Blvd and Kaiser Road.  This would put an additional 2% of the City of Santa Clara at your doorstep with no additional schools, traffic mitigation fees, retail stores or other public services.  The Final Environmental Impact Report (FEIR) for this project will be discussed at:

Santa Clara Planning Commission
7:00 p.m. on Wednesday, 22 April 2009
located at City Council Chambers:
1500 Warburton Avenue
Santa Clara, California  95050

The Final Environmental Impact Report (FEIR) for the 900 Kiely property is available here:

http://santaclaraca.gov/city_gov/gallery-FEIR.html

The 900 Kiely Project:

  • doubles the number of daily car trips, mostly along Kiely, to over 10,000
  • doubles the number of people in the area (2,000), within one-fifth of the space
  • assumes the benefits of  being a transit district, without actually having the transit infrastructure — the largest street along this project is Kiely Blvd, and it is only two lanes in each direction, with only two bus routes
  • does not add any retail space or public services — the additional 2000 people will share the existing schools, library, grocery stores, post office and roads
  • eliminates much street parking for city-wide Central Park events
  • ignores the current mixed zoning for parks and institutional use in favor of 100% high-density housing
  • does not add any public open space — any green areas are owned by and solely for Fairfield Residential and come about due to mandatory set-backs

After a verbal agreement that the city would give the residents 20 days to review the Final EIR, we were told almost at the last minute that the EIR would be available exactly 10 calendar days (the minimum legal requirement) — including weekend days, and during Easter to boot — before the Planning Commission meeting on 22 April.  The noticing for the project was done a mere three days before the release of the EIR.

To put that in perspective, they gave us 10 days to go over more than 1300 pages of paperwork.  The planning commissioners had better be equally prepared; they had better be convincing that they know what they are approving.