Public Records Request Reveals Lie at Center of Noise Ordinance

Noise Ordinance Investigation Reveals

People's Interest Not Represented at City Hall

Public Records Request Proves Developers Are Preferred,

Residents Interest in Peace & Quiet Rank Second Place

A Public Records Request (PRR) for internal documents at City Hall, filed by the Tattler as part of an investigation into a breakdown of Emeryville's noise ordinance, has revealed a lie at the center of the ordinance perpetrated by the City Hall staff.  Previous publically made assurances of deference to the citizens and their expectations of peace and quiet by the City staff have given way to a public records revealed truth that it's really the developers who the City works for.  The trove of documents, turned over last week following an initial request filed in mid October, is revelatory more for what it didn't contain than for its mundane contents (mostly concerning getting meeting dates coordinated).  After the staff made blanket assertions of their turning away developers seeking noise ordinance waivers administratively en masse, no such evidence was found among the  documents that would bolster those assertions.  The documents turned over to satisfy the PRR means the charge, brought by the Tattler, that the staff at City Hall recommends noise waivers be granted to developers in a global way at the expense of the residents, remains uncontested.

Anybody that’s lived here for a while can see how Emeryville is changing.  Our population has doubled over the last 20 years and the business sector keeps growing as well. Emeryville is slated to grow even more moving forward; now we’re entering a new era of skyscraper construction.  All this growth means there’s always lots of construction going on.  Seventeen years ago we decided we need peace and quiet on weekends and evenings against the constant din.  And so like other cities, the people of Emeryville enacted a noise ordinance.

Unfortunately, that hasn’t been the end of it.  The ordinance has not served as a correction.

Developers, always looking to increase their profits, hate our noise ordinance.  Not known as a group fond of regulatory constraint, they’re free to hate it of course but that doesn’t mean we have to grant them the waivers they keep requesting.  We should only grant noise ordinance waivers for special circumstances when any public benefits clearly outweigh losing our peace and quiet.  And there’s the rub: Emeryville has fallen into a bad habit of routinely granting developers waivers for no good reason.  Sometimes for no stated reason at all.  For 17 years the developers have been getting their way at City Hall at the expense of the residents with their interest in quiet weekends and evenings.

The Tattler has followed this issue closely over the years.  We’ve documented how the City Hall staff, specifically Charlie Bryant, longtime head of the Planning Department, keeps recommending the City Council grant every waiver brought before them.  The Council, who has the final say, generally has used the staff waiver recommendations as political cover to say ‘yes’ to each developer seeking relief.

Before the release of the damning noise ordinance documents last week, anyone paying attention could see how developers have been getting preferential treatment at City Hall.  If residents desires for peace and quiet were genuinely and impartially being listened to, one would expect the staff to recommend noise ordinance constraints be waived maybe half the time; 50% in developers interest and 50% in residents interests.  But that’s not what's been happening.  The staff has gone with the developers, recommending the residents give up their peace and quiet virtually 100% of the time (with only one exception over the last 17 years).
Responding to mounting criticism from residents, the staff some months ago, made claim to an unseen world behind the doors at City Hall where they say residents interests ARE being looked after.  Planning Director Bryant says watching the Council meetings, it only SEEMS like the residents are being ignored.  He told the Tattler that the residents are only seeing the waiver requests that the staff thinks are legitimate and worthy.  A great number of developer requests are denied “administratively”, meaning the staff interdicts and refuses to even forward many to the City Council for their consideration.  Many, if not most waiver requests never even see the light of day says Mr Bryant.

The Tattler, ever vigilant, saw in Mr Bryant’s claims of behind the scenes noise ordinance waiver denials, a facile attempt to put to rest resident claims of the staff's anti-democratic behavior once and for all.  And so we made a Public Records Request for all documents including electronic recordings and interdepartmental memos concerning any administratively denied waivers, just to verify.  After waiting almost three months, the documents provided by City Hall reveal nothing to substantiate the claims made by Mr Bryant.
We now know the claim of a staff diligently working on our behalf with the noise ordinance behind the scenes at City Hall is a ruse.  The Planning Department is merely forwarding each waiver request from each developer, no matter how absurd the stated reasons, over to the City Council, after giving their recommendation to waive the constraints of the ordinance.

At virtually 100% of recommendations falling in the developer’s favor, we can now say with certainty the loud weekends we’re experiencing in Emeryville are not part of any compromise.  The noise ordinance doesn’t function.  It’s just for show.  The fix is in.  Emeryville’s pro-developer reputation is not your imagination.  And it's going to get worse.  Quiet weekends are not anything the residents can expect as we enter Emeryville's next phase of frenzied skyscraper construction.

Center of 'Community' Life: Citizens See Neighborhood Impacts, City Sees Nothing

Why Won't the City Look After Our Interests?

General Plan Deep Sixed

Where Was Charlie Bryant?

Opinion
What are our expectations of our City Hall?
If nothing else, we expect them to fight for our interests.  Specifically, when we put $21 million of our money down for a project, we expect that City Hall will make sure our money goes to support our interests, not the School District's interests.
So why when the School District took our $21 million and proposed how our part, the City's part of the Center of "Community" Life (ECCL) would be built, City Hall had nothing to say?  They were given a forum to speak up at the Mitigated Negative Declaration Special School Board meeting on Monday.  They were expected to make sure the citizen's interests would be forwarded, but the City said nothing.

It's not as if there were no improvements to be made for the residents with the contentious project.  In fact an ad hoc group of unpaid independent citizens did just that.  They saw what the School District was proposing to do with our money and they made 18 pages of recommendations to better improve the project for residents while the City sat on its hands.

Charlie Bryant, 'I See Nothing'

City of Emeryville's Planning Director
Charlie Bryant
MIA: I see nothing... nothing!

The City of Emeryville actually did raise one concern.  In a letter to the School District,  Charlie Bryant, the head of the Planning Department, representing the citizens, asked the District to clarify that while the School District was telling neighbors that they would have approximately one athletic event per week at the Center of 'Community' Life and would turn off the outdoor lights by 9pm, the City, in its letter wanted to make clear that it might have City-sponsored events there and plans to keep the lights on until 10pm.  Since our $21 million is paying for the field and the lights after all.

That’s it as far as any resident's concerns are concerned from Charlie Bryant and the City as they as they hand over our $21 million to the School District.

Residents, by themselves, raised all 18 pages of concerns. In particular they explained the numerous inconsistencies that the Center of 'Community' Life  proposal has with the City’s General Plan. The residents were right to speak out for nearly every side of this project as it turns out, is inconsistent with Emeryville's General Plan or specific plans such as the Bike/Ped plan. 

General Plan Ignored By City
The General Plan calls for an east-west greenway on 53^rd street with various pedestrian and bicycle-friendly features, the General Plan would require a "connected city" that breaks up super blocks and that would have a bicycle-pedestrian path on the western edge of the property, and the General Plan calls for 47^th Street to be a key 'Green Street'.

The ECCL plans are inconsistent with all of these and don’t even show the bike/ped path in 'Phase 2' of the project. 

In addition to Charlie Bryant, we have an entire Building and Planning staff here at City Hall that ought to be experts on our City’s General Plan and that ought to be speaking up for residents in an effort to see that the General Plan is followed.  Instead, this job was left to residents alone, while the City of Emeryville acted as the School District’s accomplice in furthering the fiction that the ECCL project could not possibly be improved by more thoughtful comments.

Who's minding the store here?  Mr Bryant and company are paid after all to look out after our interests.

So where residents themselves see 18 pages of improvements they expect to get for their $21 million, Charlie Bryant and City Hall, who represent us, sees nothing.

                                       

Panera Bakery Building Determined To Be "Memorable"

Planning Director Pushes Back:  Fast Food Restaurant Is "Memorable"

 Says Emeryville Spent $2 Million To Attract 
Fast Food Development

Emeryville spent more than $2 million on a General Plan to help lure fast food development and it's been highly successful according to Planning Director Charlie Bryant in a report released last week.  The Planning Director points to the success of the recently opened Panera Bakery building as a reason to celebrate Emeryville's uncanny ability to attract fast food restaurants.   Emeryville he says, knows how to create a memorable city and being part of Panera Corporation's family of 1500 fast food strip mall restaurants spread across the US and Canada is proof that the money recently spent on writing the General Plan was money well spent.

Mr Bryant made the glowing findings about the Panera Bakery Building in his June 'Monthly Progress Report' to the City Manager and released to the public on July 1st.  In the report, the Planning Director claims the existence of a mural depicting Emeryville history on the "back side of the building" qualifies the restaurant project as "memorable", a requirement elucidated by Emeryville's new General Plan.

Mr Bryant submitted the report to rebuff a May 29th Tattler article questioning the appropriateness of the Panera building and the mandates of Emeryville's General Plan.  He went on to insist the restaurant has "a main entrance" on 40th Street, thereby making the restaurant "pedestrian-oriented".  The restaurant has two entrances, the main entrance, a large double door on the parking lot side and the other door, effectively the back door, opens to 40th Street.  Mr Bryant says the back entrance provides access for the Park Avenue neighborhood, fulfilling the General Plan mandate that development be neighborhood enhancing.

As Emeryville's top planner, Mr Bryant was instrumental in guiding the General Plan vetting process with the citizens two years ago.  The Plan cost $2 million for consultants and the city spent probably another $2 million in compensated staff time according to a junior planner at City Hall.  Mr Bryant conducted many General Plan public meetings to engage the citizens and actively sought their ideas on how the town should be developed.  The citizens made it clear, according to Mr Bryant that more fast food development like the Panera Building is needed in Emeryville.  The Planning Director posits the Panera Building represents an unqualified success that the General Plan helped realize.

Emeryville's Mayor, Jennifer West, it should be noted, has publicly refuted Planning Director Bryant's assertion that the new Panera Bakery building is memorable.