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Bruce Corcoran
Update: Bently Holdings Hearing, Tuesday, March 15, 2016
The Bently Holdings hearing before the Board of Supervisors is scheduled for Tuesday, March 15, 2016 at 1:30 PM in Room 330 at the Civic Center.
This will be a regular full hearing, even though the Staff Report recommends continuing the hearing to a later date.
The Staff Report is problematic for us because the Supervisors do not have to follow Staff’s recommendations, and they often don’t. On Tuesday, the Supervisors could approve or deny the Bently Holdings application, or continue the hearing.
Therefore, we are obligated to prepare for, attend, and speak at each hearing, and this would be the 7th continuance!
This redundancy is extraordinarily inconsiderate of and inconvenient for the residents of Strawberry, who volunteer their time, compared to Bently Holding’s and Marin General Hospital’s high-priced lawyers, who are paid handsomely for their time.
I plan to attend and speak at the March 15th hearing.
I’m most appreciative of others who have planned to attend Tuesday’s hearing, but I’m also very respectful of your time. Please be advised that the hearing most likely will be continued to a future date.
However, the benefit of attending and speaking at the hearing on Tuesday is that your comments will become part of the public record sooner, and the Supervisors will have more time to consider them. If you withhold your comments until later, then the Supervisors are more likely to ignore them.
Here is the crux of the matter: We are witnessing the corruption of due process because in one full year of hearings, Bently Holdings and Marin General Hospital have failed to produce a valid traffic study, but the Supervisors already have voted unanimously to continue the hearings six times, and Tuesday could be the seventh.
We need new Supervisors who will represent us based on facts, instead aligning themselves with deep-pocket Bently Holdings and Marin General Hospital based on personal subjective feelings.
Please vote for change in the elections for Supervisor in June.
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Here are my comments about the Bently Holdings application during Open Time for Public Expression at The Board of Supervisors hearing on March 8, 2016:
In preparation for next week’s hearing, I want to review the extraordinary bias your Board has shown in favor of Bently Holdings and Marin General Hospital and the utter disdain your Board has shown for the residents of Strawberry and our quality of life.
Think about this: Incredulously, in the course of the past full year, Bently Holdings and Marin General have failed to produce a valid traffic study, but you have voted unanimously 6 times to continue the hearings--based not on facts, but on your subjective personal feelings. You have no foundation to continue the hearings.
Bently Holdings wants you to amend our Master Plan and Precise Development Plan to allow medical offices that will increase traffic by 1,200 trips per day, but it hasn’t supplied any justification for amendments because at the end of last summer Bently Holdings told you that it would not spend any more money on the traffic studies you required. You accepted Bently Holdings’ refusal to pay and continued the hearings.
Marin General stepped up and spent $20,000 on a peer review of the previously discredited W-Trans Traffic Study, which was a complete waste of taxpayer money because the peer review reached to same conclusion, namely that the W-Trans study was inaccurate and inadequate. Nevertheless, you continued the hearings again.
It looked like this application would be denied because Bently Holdings and Marin General Hospital refused to fund any additional traffic studies, but in an outrageous turn of events, County DPW spent $20,000 of our tax dollars to hire Traffic Works LLC to conduct a new study to determine how many medical offices could be put in the office complex without significantly impacting traffic.
This expenditure amounts to a gift of public funds because Bently Holdings is a multi-million dollar company that can easily afford to pay for required traffic studies. You have enabled Bently Holdings to receive $40,000 of taxpayer funding for traffic studies that Bently Holdings should have paid for.
You accepted a recommendation from the Planning Commission to approve medical office use when you knew the Planning Commissioners had not even seen the original traffic and parking study or vetted it.
You have not analyzed the steep hill approach to the buildings or the parking structures for safety and suitability for serving a high volume of medical patients.
You haven’t even considered the concerns of the tenants of the building who oppose medical office use because it will be disruptive to their established businesses. They also are concerned about additional building security and the disposal of hazardous medical waste.
The volume of traffic on Belvedere Drive is so high now that it exceeds the threshold of a “livable street,” but your remedy is to approve medical offices and add even more vehicles in return for a meager amount of mitigation money. That’s an unacceptable trade off.
We need answers to these three remaining questions:
1. How can we get valid traffic studies when Belvedere Place is less than 50% occupied.
2. Are you going to consider the cumulative impacts of traffic from the redevelopment of the Seminary, or not. And if not, then why not?
3. Who is going to conduct a peer review of the new Traffic Works traffic study, because Traffic Works is no longer independent and unbiased..
We call on you, Supervisor Sears, to disclose the answers to these questions prior to the hearing next week..