Sherwin Williams Project: Emeryville's City Staff Prepares a Bogus Environmental Document

An EIR is Supposed to Tell Decision Makers About Negative Environmental Impacts 

What Will the Sherwin Williams Traffic be Like?

Nobody Knows

Opinion/News Analysis

EIR's Are Supposed to Measure
Will the City Council demand
measurements from the
Sherwin Williams EIR?

Emeryville’s City staff has prepared the environmental document that facilitates the last large development project for our town, the Sherwin Williams Project (SWP), and the City Council decides Tuesday night whether to certify the Environmental Impact Report as a properly prepared CEQA document.  
But hold on; there’s a huge problem.  The City Council cannot certify the EIR for Sherwin Williams because the EIR fails at it’s most elemental CEQA charge; to inform the decision makers about how the proposal will effect traffic in our town.  

In fact the EIR contains no useful information about traffic at all.  That’s because the traffic study within the EIR was written with the assumption the City Council will amend our General Plan to get rid of the Horton Street Bike Boulevard as it calculated the traffic effects the SWP would have on the neighborhood.  It's not up to the staff to decide the General Plan will be amended.  

What if the Council decided they like bike boulevards?  What if they want to keep the Horton Street Bike Boulevard as the General Plan says it should be?  As they have said many times they wished to do?  Well then less traffic would be using Horton Street and that excess traffic would move to other streets.  And that would change the ‘level of service’ on those other streets to a lower level.  In that case, the streets in the neighborhood would be more negatively impacted by the Sherwin Williams Project than the current EIR shows. 

The City Council and the people of Emeryville are in the dark about how the Sherwin Williams traffic will impact our neighborhoods.

The City Council needs to know this to make an informed choice about the SWP.  Is it too impactful to traffic in the neighborhood?  Is it acceptable? The Council needs to know this before they can decide on this project.  Says who?  Says the State of California: the central function of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) is exactly this….to properly inform the decision makers about development proposals.  

The document the staff will be pushing Tuesday night doesn’t do that.  It fails at the sole task it’s supposed to perform.  The City Council needs to throw it back.  They need to tell the staff to prepare a  new EIR with traffic numbers that show the effect on the neighborhoods with the assumption we’re going to keep the Horton Street Bike Boulevard, that's all.

More Traffic on our Bike Boulevards Means
More Ghost Bikes for Emeryville
Will the City Council make the right decision
on Tuesday night? Will they keep open the
option to have a bike boulevard for Horton Street?

The citizen activist group Residents United for a Livable Emeryville (RULE) wrote a letter to the staff about this subject.  Inexplicably, the response to RULE’s letter was the staff didn’t understand the question.  That seems like a canard.  They're paid to know about this. 
We understand it: this is an end run on what’s supposed to be a transparent process.  The staff is trying to show a Sherwin Williams Project with less effect on traffic to make it more palatable to the public, to make it an easier sell for the Council. 

We have a right to know what the effect on traffic the Sherwin Williams Project will have in our town assuming we keep our bike boulevards. We need to know how this project will effect the real world. The world that contains the Emeryville General Plan and bicycling as a safe possibility here.  If the City Council certifies this EIR as it is being offered up to them by the staff on Tuesday night, we’ll know they never had any intention on having a bike boulevard on Horton Street.  The developers for the Sherwin Williams Project don't want a bike boulevard on Horton Street.  Let’s see who’s back this City Council has.  Watch this space….

Sherwin Williams Project: 'Cars Are Good, Bikes Are Incompatable'

Sherwin Williams Primer:

'Bike Boulevards Not Acceptable'

EIR Says Glut of Cars Should Push Bikes Out
If All Goes to Plan 

There's only one way the 540 unit Sherwin Williams project gets built; and that's by accommodating its glut of cars seeking its 1000 parking spaces by getting rid of Emeryville's General Plan mandated Bike Boulevards on Horton Street (as well as 45th and 53rd streets) according to City Hall and the environmental document it directed for the project.
But it wasn't supposed to be this way. The document prepared to study the effects of the Sherwin Williams residential building development proposal that has been written that precludes the three planned bicycle boulevards was specifically supposed to accommodate the bike transit corridors in its traffic analysis.  Emeryville's Directors of Planning and Public Works made an executive decision as it turns out, to only study one traffic scenario for the project; one that disregards the three bike boulevards.  The document was supposed to assist the City Council in their decision about the Sherwin Williams proposal as if bike boulevards could coexist with the cars.

"It didn't occur to us" 

to accommodate bike boulevards

-Charlie Bryant 

Emeryville Planning Director

The State mandated document, called the Draft Environmental Impact Report (DIER), was prepared by Maurice Kaufman, City Hall's Public Works Department Director as well as Planning Department Director Charlie Bryant by deleting from the City's General Plan the bike boulevards and moving the project forward with a field leveling, full steam ahead Statement of Overriding Consideration for the City Council to sign.  Alternatively, the bike boulevard standards quantified by the Emeryville's Bike Plan (part of the General Plan), could be "loosened" by amending the Bike Plan to permit the piling of more cars onto the bike corridors Mr Kaufman told the Tattler Wednesday.  However Emeryville's allowance of 3000 vehicles on its bike boulevards is already very high by national standards, "That's probably too high" Steve Clark, the 'bike friendly community director' at the League of American Bicyclists told the Tattler last summer.  Regardless, four years ago, Emeryville's Bike Plan was recognized by the League as good enough to award the city with the designation 'bicycle friendly city'.

Emeryville's General Plan provides for no more than 3000 vehicle trips per day on the three bike boulevards and provides a remedy of traffic diverters to maintain that metric.  Mr Kaufman and Mr Bryant directed the DEIR to assume two 'half diverters' for Horton Street, one at 40th Street and one at 53rd Street that would permit southbound traffic only and northbound traffic only respectively, in order to try to bring down the number of vehicles on the street but the study reveals the remaining traffic would still exceed the 3000 vehicles per day limit as the Bike Plan spells out.  The scenario studied in the DEIR calls for no diverters for either 45th Street Bike Boulevard or the 53rd Street Bike Boulevard.

Directors Bryant (L) and Kaufman (R)
Bike boulevards are only possible
"If you loosen your standards" (Kaufman)
 because "It didn't occur to us" (Bryant)
 to accommodate bikes (as mandated 
by the General Plan).

The DEIR could have studied the traffic effects of the Sherwin Williams project with enough diverters on the bike boulevards to accommodate Emeryville's Bike Plan but Planning Director Bryant told the Tattler that idea wasn't entertained, "That didn't occur to us" he said.  For its part, LSA Associates, the firm that actually wrote the DEIR thinks the two half diverters as proposed by City Hall, while not adequate to save the bike boulevards, are the "maximum that is feasible", a representative told the Tattler.

The public is allowed to comment on the DEIR and any comments received will be reflected in the Final Environmental Impact Report (FEIR) as well as any responses deemed reasonable from LSA Associates.  Commenters should contact the City of Emeryville.