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Bruce Corcoran
Countdown to Tuesday's Bently Holdings Hearing to Add More Traffic to Highway 101
The Bently Holdings application to convert general office space to higher traffic-generating medical offices will be heard at the Board of Supervisors meeting on Tuesday, April 12th, at 2:00 PM at the Civic Center in Room 330.
If we are going to have any chance of blocking this project, then we must have a strong presence at the hearing on Tuesday, so please try to attend and speak.
Everyone along the Highway 101 corridor will be impacted by this project.
This case epitomizes the corruption of the review process that the current Supervisors have allowed to fester under their reign.
It is a campaign issue in all three of the elections for Supervisor in June.
Note that County Public Works and Marin General Hospital have now spent $47,000 of taxpayer funds on traffic studies that the applicant, Bently Holdings, should have paid for, but has refused to.
Our current Supervisor, Kate Sears, has shown no leadership on the Bently Holdings application. The other Supervisors are supposed to defer to her judgment because the project is in her District, but instead of denying the project, she has voted to continue the hearings 7 times.
If she were truly representing us, she should have voted not to continue the hearings each time. Even if the votes to continue were 4 - 1 against her, she would have sent a strong message to her fellow Supervisors that they were voting against her and her constituents' more informed judgment.
Her inaction on the Bently Holdings application follows on the heals of her lack of leadership on the Strawberry Priority Development Area (PDA). She and Supervisor Arnold stonewalled us for 15 consecutive hearings before they finally put the PDA on the Board's agenda. We succeeded in removing the PDA at the very next hearing.
We need a Supervisor who will lead rather than follow.
That's why I strongly support Susan Kirsch for Supervisor for our District 3 in the June election.
I appeal to you to please consider Susan Kirsch's candidacy for Supervisor because it is very difficult to unseat an incumbent, but if we don't vote for change, then we will suffer the same lack of leadership we have experienced for the past 6 years.
Thank you.
Regards,
Bruce
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Here are my comments at the Board of Supervisors meeting on April 5th during Open Time for Public Expression:
In anticipation of the Bently Holdings hearing next Tuesday (April 12th), I am here once again to protest the review process you have conducted.
Despite the pleas of residents throughout Marin County to deny the application because of its impact on traffic congestion, you have allowed hearings to continue for more than one year without a valid traffic study and any factual foundation.
The Planning Commissioners you appointed failed to do their jobs when they recommended approval of this project to your Board without ever seeing and vetting the original traffic and parking study. And, you failed us because you accepted their recommendation as legitimate.
County Staff members failed to do their jobs when they told you at the first hearing that all of their concerns about traffic and parking had been addressed to their satisfaction by the original W-Trans study, but three months later, after Caltrans and the City of Mill Valley had opined that the W-trans study was inaccurate and inadequate, DPW changed its mind and agreed that it was deficient.
County Staff did not perform its own research. Instead, Staff relied on a biased traffic and parking study conducted by an outside consultant who was paid by Bently Holdings.
Last summer, Bently Holdings dropped out of the review process when it defied your requests for additional traffic studies that your Board had required, but in an extraordinary showing of favoritism you have allowed the applicant to get away with it.
Multi-million dollar Bently Holdings wants you to amend our Master Plan to allow traffic-producing medical offices for its own financial gain, but it refuses to pay for the necessary traffic studies. You don’t show that kind of favoritism to other applicants, especially for more than one year.
Now DPW has spent $27,000 of tax-payer funds on a new traffic study that Bently Holdings should have paid for. That expenditure amounts to a gift of public funds, which is prohibited by the Constitution of the State of California.
Given our experience, why should we believe anything DPW says? That’s why we are holding you to your requirement for a peer review of the latest study.
DPW didn’t put the contract for the new traffic study out for public bid. DPW merely awarded the contract to Traffic Works LLC. And embedded in the Scope of Services contract is a statement by the principal of Traffic Works himself that he was predisposed to the notion that changes in signal timing would make the project feasible, and he delivered on his promise, because that’s exactly what his unvetted final report claims.
We’re tired of traffic reports by outside consultants who have vested interests.
Each one of you has indicated your intent to approve medical offices, but by doing so you will deliberately be approving additional traffic along a stretch of Highway 101 and in certain approaches in Strawberry that you know are currently operating at Level of Service F (LOS F) during peak hours, when this additional traffic could be avoided because it is currently prohibited, and when you know that there is plenty of Class A space available for medical offices in other locations along Highway 101 that do not have traffic congestion issues.
Your vote to approve will be a breech of your responsibilities for traffic management in our County.
Your vote to approve will mean that you have ignored the cumulative impacts of traffic from the re-development of the Seminary.
Your vote to approve will mean that you have ignored the fact that current traffic counts do not reflect already approved traffic from a fully occupied Bently Holdings office complex because the applicant has purposely kept 50% of the office space vacant to make traffic counts look better.
Any Supervisor who does not recognize our legitimate concerns does not deserve our votes.
Bruce Corcoran
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