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Health & Fitness

Rezoning Portola Auto Center Part 3 - The Tie Breaker

Tonight the Planning Commission will re-convene at 7 pm to consider the application by Brookfield Homes to build 151 new condos in 11 buildings on 8.9 acres adjacent to Auto Center Drive in Foothill Ranch.

BACKGROUND

For more details about the proposal, click below for past stories.

Is Lake Forest For Sale?

City Wants More Traffic

Is Brookfield a Good Neighbor?

The Planning Commission Meets

CURRENT STATUS

At the last meeting, nearly a dozen Lake Forest residents opposed the project because…

·  Re-zoning the area is not needed since we are already overdeveloped with 4,000+ new homes scheduled to be built, half of them close to the Portola Auto Center.

·  Brookfield and the other developers need to wait until the City has done its job revising the outdated parking standards.

·  Tandem parking will not work.

·  The project has some aesthetic problems.

·  There are no adequate provisions for children, and the area is dangerous for children due to extremely high traffic.  

The last meeting revealed some fundamental philosophical differences between the Commissioners, and the vote ended in a 2-2 tie. Despite some obvious flaws, Commissioner Brower wanted to give the project an OK, saying “If we ask our developers to come in with a perfect plan, we’ll never get anything done.” But Commissioner Verplancke cautioned that “Experience shows giving developers the benefit of the doubt can come back to haunt you. There’s always enough time to do something right, and never enough time to fix something wrong.” The best comment of the night came from Acting Chairperson Jerry Zechmeister who said – “We work for the people of Lake Forest, not the developers”

SOME NEW INSIGHTS

Tonight, Chairperson Tim Hughes will rejoin his colleagues, so the tie breaking vote will be in the house.

Meanwhile, between the last meeting and tonight’s meeting, I had a chance to go through the proposals more thoroughly. Contrary to the Brookfield’s spokesperson who claimed that the new development would not increase traffic, his own findings show that both am and pm peak traffic in the target area will increase, in some cases, more than doubling. What is even more troubling, no one, including the city staff, has any idea what this additional traffic will do to the rest of the city, nor do they have any idea what the other 4,000+ new homes already approved will do. By itself, the additional Brookfield traffic should have a relatively low impact, since there are only 151 new homes and some 300+ new trips per day generated. But one has to realize that the 4,000 new homes are going to generate 32,000 new vehicle trips and the Brookfield traffic will be added to this.

I'm reminded of the Monty Python film "The Meaning of Life" where an extremely fat man is having dinner and after having stuffed himself with every imaginable food, his host tempts him with one small thin dinner mint. The fat man protests, but his host insists, so greed takes the better part of his judgment and he swallows the thin mint. We hear sounds of grumbling and then the fat man explodes. The thin mint was the "straw that broke the camel's back", even though the thin mint by itself was hardly dangerous.

So it is with Brookfield - the thin mint on our City's menu. Their traffic studies show that the 32,000 new vehicle trips on the road will not impair the traffic circulation around the sites of the new developments, largely because there isn’t much traffic there right now, and the roads are fairly large. But no one is able to tell us, with any degree of confidence, what will happen when these 32,000 new vehicle trips hit those other parts of the City that are already congested. This is a major omission in all the studies of all the new developments, and it promises to bring traffic to a complete halt in some parts of the city.

After all, if you assume that some 20,000 new vehicle trips are going to be required to service the new developments (post office trucks, gardeners, repairmen, school buses, etc.), where do you think these trips are going to originate from, and how are they going to get from where they are to the new developments? In most cases, they are going to go through the rest of Lake Forest in order to get to these new developments, and it is in these parts of Lake Forest that we are already experiencing traffic problems.

It's too bad for Brookfield that they come at a time when our plate is already more than full. Had the thin mint come earlier, it would not have burst the fat man's stomach. The City should not have approved all those 4,000 new homes without knowing what the impact would be on the entire city, but they did this and we will literally have to live with the consequences. But please, let's digest the enormous meal before we add the thin mint. Look what happened to the fat man.

BOTTOM LINE

Until more research is done, no new developments should be approved.

YOU CAN HELP

Whether or not you live in Foothill Ranch or Portola Hills, this new traffic is going to impact your life. If you can't make the meeting tonight, you can still help. One concerned resident has started a petition to demonstrate community opposition to the Brookfield  proposal. You can sign up by clicking here

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