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Corte Madera Inn Best Western
Round 14, Corte Madera Inn Rebuild ---Bell Rings 7:30 pm 4/11/17
The fighters are weary and punch drunk. But the show will go on. The California Environmental Quality Act requires it. And the Corte Madera Planning Commission, like score card judges at a heavyweight fight, will have to perform what has become ---in the case of a highly controversial development project---an increasingly tough job.
In one corner, we have Reneson Hotels Corporation which seeks to demolish the community-serving 110-room Best Western Corte Madera Inn with its subscription Swim Club, restaurant and wildlife pond---then to replace those amenities with a 174-room dual-branded Marriott Springhill Suites and Residence Inn catering to out-of-town visitors.
In the other corner, we have a host of environmentalists and small town advocates whose determined opposition to yet another big Corte Madera development project has not wavered during the last three years and what is now 588 pages of public record testimony.
Engaged citizens may recall that the Planning Commission voted April 26, 2016 to certify this project as CEQA compliant.
But that was before an independent biologist, Peter Baye, hired by community advocacy group Community Venture Partners, discovered in the wildlife pond a mat of rare submerged aquatic grass which the city's / applicant’s hired biologist had somehow missed. The applicant’s site-study deficiency required that the Environmental Impact Report be recirculated for more public and scientific expert commentary.
Then another potential roadblock to the project appeared.
That happened February 3, 2017 when the applicant’s proposal to fill the wetlands pond, submitted to the Regional Water Quality Control Board, was rejected by RWQCB’s scientists---who found that the degraded, un-maintained pond still had significant habitat value under the federal Clean Water And Wetlands Protection Act of 1972, and that the applicant had failed to demonstrate sufficiently that a smaller pond-saving project was not financially feasible, and that less environmentally impactful alternatives did not exist.
http://www.waterboards.ca.gov/sanfrancis...
So, now on to punch drunk and wobbly Round 14.
Will Planning Commission vote to uphold the value of the pond and its environmental protections, essentially requiring a new project plan with a reduced hotel footprint on site?
The outcome is anyone’s guess.
But in one of the perks of local participatory democracy, ringside side seats will be free to all comers on at 7:30 Town Hall.
Notice of Public Hearing can be found at
http://www.ci.corte-madera.ca.us/Archive...