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….

School District and City Withhold Public Documents from Tattler & the Public

Public Better Off Being Ignorant Says City Attorney & School District

Opinion
Emeryville's City Attorney has ruled that documents in the possession of the City and the School District outlining meetings of public officials that took place behind closed doors will not be made public according to a letter recently received by the Tattler.  The City Attorney, Michael Biddle, ruled that the release of the documents would harm the public now and that the public would be further harmed later because government officials would not be able to engage in "robust" behind closed door discussions necessary for good public policy formulation.

One of the documents, a major traffic study regarding the new Emeryville Center for Community Life (ECCL), was requested by the Tattler in April from both the School District and the City.  Both refused to provide the document in response to a California Public Records Act request and as a result Emeryville residents can now only guess what public officials know about the traffic impact that will be caused by the ECCL that officials are unwilling to share with the public.

City Attorney and interim City Manager
Michael Biddle (on left) with recently retired
City Manager Pat O'Keeffe 

The Emeryville Center for Community Life, still years from being completed, has recently disappointed residents that hoped it would live up to the environmental promises made by both School District and City officials.  First, this February we saw the School District request special permission to be exempted from the City’s LEED environmental standards for Emeryville public buildings. In a 3-2 vote, the City Council allowed this environmental promise to be broken.

More recently, in April, we saw the School District back before the City Council requesting that it be exempted from another environmentally-friendly requirement that it found bothersome, the General Plan’s requirement that there be a bicycle and pedestrian path along the western property border of the proposed ECCL site. While this 3-2 vote of the City Council preserved the path in the City’s General Plan, none of the most recent ECCL designs show any intention by the District of actually building the required path.

With the School District’s record clear, the Tattler has decided to watch carefully the District’s compliance with the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) as it proceeds with the ECCL design and construction.  On April 11th the Tattler wrote ECCL project director, Roy Miller, requesting all Environmental Impact Reports related to the planned ECCL, all CEQA notices, and to be placed on a list of “interested parties” to receive all future CEQA notices.  Mr. Miller replied that such documents were not currently available and would be available at the District office once “they have been prepared for public release”,  presumably after having been scrubbed clean.

However, we were surprised a few days later with the release of the monthly Progress Reports, dated March 1 and April 1, prepared by the City’s Building & Planning Director, Charlie Bryant, which each describe the School District providing the City with a copy of a traffic study for the ECCL project, and the City’s Building and Planning department responding to the District with comments.  The Progress Reports reveal no details of the traffic study.

If the earlier request for CEQA-related documents was not clear enough, the Tattler again wrote to the School District’s Roy Miller to request a copy of this ECCL traffic study.  For good measure, the City also received a request for the same ECCL traffic study document.

After several days, lawyers for both the City and the School District flatly refused the Tattler’s request for Public Documents.  City Attorney Biddle responded on behalf of the City that the traffic study was a “draft” not subject to the Public Records Act.  Mr. Biddle’s letter claims that “the public interest in withholding those records clearly outweighs the public interest in disclosure,” citing a California Supreme Court decision called Citizens for a Better Environment v. Department of Food and Agriculture. 

Phony Case Law
Readers might find it as amusing as we did to read the court opinion cited by Mr. Biddle (in the link above), because what the Court actually decides in that case is that the documents at issue have to be disclosed to the extent the document contains factual material and that only the expressions of opinion have to be redacted.  So, clearly this top secret ECCL traffic study is either entirely a work of opinion, and therefore not subject to disclosure, or a work containing factual material that the City and School District are improperly withholding from the public.  This leaves one to wonder what value a traffic study would have to a CEQA process if it were made up entirely of opinion and contained no facts on which to base those opinions.   Leave it to our School District to break exciting new ground in purely fictional traffic studies!  Bravo!  The Tattler expected nothing less.

Mr. Biddle also argued that the documents requested were “deliberative materials necessary for robust agency discussion” and therefore subject to an exception to the Public Records Act intended to foster “robust policy discussions.” This is what the Tattler has always found to be true of both our City and School District. They never shy away from a “robust” policy debate… just so long as the public isn’t included.  If we're allowed to listen in, presumably the talk becomes wimpy and feeble.

This City and this School District, fearful as they are of transparency should come clean with regard to this withholding of documents.  We ask again, are these environmental documents for the Center of Community Life factual in nature?  If so, the City Attorney's own citation requires their release to the public, by his own reckoning he must make them available.  And in that case, Mr Biddle and the School District is wrong, for they are harming the public more by withholding these documents than by releasing them to the rightful owners, the public.