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HomeMy WebLinkAbout00 - Insider's GuideReceived After Agenda Printed Insiders Guide Brown, Leilani From: Kiff, Dave Sent: Saturday, July 19, 2014 1:58 PM Subject: Insider's Guide - NB City Council Meeting of July 22, 2014 A good cloudy Saturday afternoon to you. This version of the Insider's Guide has information about the upcoming Council meeting set for Tuesday, July 22nd, 2014 as well as some community items of interest. The City Council meeting is held on the 2nd and 4th Tuesdays of most months, typically with study session starting at 4:00 and the regular session at 7:00 p.m. The Council meets at 100 Civic Center Drive, but you can also watch on TV (Channels 3/31) or on your computer. There is no study session planned for this meeting on July 22nd Before I go further, I wanted to recognize that a lot has happened in our town since I last wrote an Insider's Guide. The on -duty death of our lifeguard, Ben Carlson, has affected our entire City organization as well as so many in the community and indeed across the region and nation. Thank you to all who expressed condolences, thoughts, and prayers to Ben, his family, his lifeguarding colleagues, and the rest of his co- workers here at the city. Your continued thoughts and prayers are still needed. These past 2 weeks have been very hard and the weeks and months ahead will be, too. Even folks here who didn't know Ben well know his colleagues in lifeguarding well, and that pain is shared citywide. Thank you again. WHAT'S ON THE AGENDA? It's not a very interesting one except for the Land Use Element Amendment, but I will mention a few of them in addition to that. • A parking lot lease agreement with Harbor Day School. Harbor Day (in Corona del Mar up the hill near San Joaquin Hills Road) had asked to help improve their parking and drop -off, and we discussed using a portion of the Big Canyon Reservoir land to help facilitate that. This agenda has the proposed lease agreement with them to do so. We had the value of the use appraised and are charging that appraised rate for the use ($11,440 /year). • Riverside Avenue Post Office Zoning Amendment. This is not officially back yet except to continue it again to August 12th. If you're in Newport Shores or Mariner's Mile and have been following this issue, please reserve that date for another possible action. • The Council will discuss selling the property that the City owns at 1499 Monrovia (the old Road and Track Building) for $5.8M to Kobe, Inc. The City purchased this property in November 2012 for $43M. If sold, the suggestion is to place the money into our reserves for new and renovated facilities, like the West Newport Community Center. • Staff has prepared a summary of the steps associated with identifying the Goldenrod Footbridge in CdM as an historic structure, and the Council will tell us if they'd like us to follow those steps. And now, the Land Use Amendment to the General Plan. This is a two -item action, if the Council consents to it. I am going to give you my best general and high -level summary of the issue, as well as to describe what the Council did at the last meeting on July 8, 2014. Let me start with the latter. o What Was Changed At the July 81h Meeting. The Council followed Mayor pro Tern Selich's lead to amend the proposed amendment. In other words, to change what the Planning Commission had approved in previous weeks. Mr. Selich's proposed changes did this: • They scaled back the scope of the amendment a bit. His changes removed a number of locations from the amendment, including removing proposed entitlement in the Airport Area and removing entitlement for a proposed hotel that would have replaced the car wash at Newport Center across from Muldoon's Irish Pub; and • Accepted a number of text changes recommended by Stop Polluting Our Newport (SPON). Mr. Selich and Mr. Petros both also discussed traffic and transportation as it relates to the proposed amendment. Mr. Selich proposed that the amendment's proposed new entitlement in Newport Center could not be constructed until such time as a "Corona del Mar Bypass Plan" could be implemented that would "divert vehicular traffic and limit traffic congestion in the Corona del Mar area." As proposed, the new Land Use Element Policy (L.7.13.11) reads, "The bypass plan shall be approved by the City Council and implemented prior to the issuance of the first certificate of occupancy for any project that uses any or all of the (new) 500,000 SF of office, 50,00 SF of regional commercial, and /or 500 dwelling units..." Mr. Petros suggested a new policy (LU 7.13.9) that would "include a comprehensive Newport Center Transportation Demand Management Program that pursues the goal of a measureable reduction in vehicle trips..: including a comprehensive pedestrian walkway and bike path plan..." He also asked for a policy (L.7.13.12) that would direct the City, OCTA, and Newport Center stakeholders to improve "last mile" transit associated with the OCTA transit center in Newport Center to encourage transit use from there to Fashion Island. All of the above is now within the documents that you can see now and that the Council will see for Tuesday (we got it up on our website late Wednesday, six days before the meeting). o What the Amendment Looks Like as Proposed Now. As a result, if approved by the voters, the major changes in this amendment would (generally) involve: More office (500,000 SF), retail (50,000 SF), and residential units (500 units) in Newport Center, but Removal of not - yet -built entitlement in the Newport Coast (a reduction of 1,011 hotel rooms and 356 dwelling units) and • Removal of not - yet -built entitlement in various neighborhood shopping centers (a reduction of about 58,000 SF) across town. The net change in Average Daily Trips (ADTs) from these changes would be a reduction of 2,922 ADT from the buildable entitlement in the 2006 General Plan. The second Agenda item that relates to the Land Use Element on Tuesday's meeting would place the proposed amendment on the November 2014 ballot for voter consideration. If you have any questions about the Land Use Element Amendment, please check out the staff report and /or contact Community Development Director Kim Brandt at 949 - 644 -3226. To see these items and the rest of the City Council's agenda, click here: http: / /newportbeachca.gov /mod u les /ShowDocument.aspx ?docu mentid =4414 NOTES AND NOTES • Water Conservation is in the news. We are working on a compliance plan with the recent directive by the State Water Resources Control Board for additional water conservation measures and possible penalties. Please know that our water sources here in Newport are a little different than most. For us, about 70% of our potable water comes from the groundwater basin under Huntington Beach and Fountain Valley, which is in part recharged by reclaimed water. The other 30% comes from Metropolitan Water District (imported) sources. We have a conservation structure in place where the Council can enact tiered levels of mandates. Many of these may already comply with the Board's directive, but we don't know yet. Please stay tuned, but it's always wise to conserve water. Fortips, contact us at: http:// www .newportbeachca.gov /index.aspx ?page =229 The Lido House Hotel Project. I've gotten a few e -mails in recent weeks from residents expressing concern about documentation, strategy, and the pace of the approvals for the Lido House Hotel, which is planned for the old city hall site at 3300 Newport Boulevard. Let me acknowledge those concerns here. If the concerns are based in a supposition that the City is somehow backing away from or does not support the Lido House Hotel project 100 %, please know that nothing could be further from the truth. And I apologize that you have sensed that from us. The City Council was unanimous in its support of the Lido House Hotel —that hasn't waived. As staff, we're here to implement their direction. We want the project and we want the hotel to succeed. We also want the approval process to succeed without years and layers of litigation or challenge. So on Thursday night, the Planning Commission continued consideration of the hotel (and its environmental document) for a few weeks until August 7`h. They did so because we all were concerned that some of the documents associated with the approvals may not have been conveniently available at their typical time, and that we also had some late comments in about the approval process from attorneys. This project stirs a lot of good passion and desire to get it approved and under construction and occupied. It truly will be a jewel for the Peninsula area and Lido Isle, and as noted we're all excited about what it can bring following the City Council's unanimous vote to approve it. We're very pleased, too, to have developer /partner as great as RD Olson for the project. As excited as we all are, we still need to be extremely careful about the approval process. California environmental law has been used over and over for costly derailments and delays of projects, and we don't want that to happen here. I want to thank each of you for your patience and understanding as we go forward. Please remember that us folks at City Hall are human beings who are trying pretty darn hard to do everything correctly, but we have technological troubles and make mistakes just like you do. Because we're a public agency, you get to see every one of our mistakes. But they are still mistakes made by real people. I would respectfully ask that you think about that before you push the send button on the rough e -mail. If there is anything these 2 last weeks have shown me, it's that our hold on life is too tenuous. I would never want my last words to someone else (someone I don't even know) to be mean or disrespectful. For those of you interested in this project specifically, we hope to have the project and its EIR all teed -up for the Planning Commission on August 7`h, then the full City Council shortly thereafter. Both items will be public hearings. Your early comments are always welcomed as well as comments at the hearings. The earlier we get them, the better we can address them with you. As always, thanks for reading the Insider's Guide. Please pass it along to others in the neighborhood, especially if you represent a homeowners' or community association. Feel free to share your thoughts about this with me, or to ask me any question about city operations. And for those of you who passed along your thoughts on July 4" —the good and the bad — I really appreciated the comments. Thanks again, Dave Kiff City Manager 949 - 644 -3001