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Sunday, September 22, 2013

Op-Ed: Redwood City wrong to let developers flout rules

By Richard White. Published in the San Francisco Chronicle.

We have trouble, right here in Redwood City. This is not "Music Man" wayward-youth trouble. It is City Council, City Planning Commission and City Planning Department trouble. Our trouble could potentially affect the whole Bay Area.

The trouble comes in various sizes, but it all involves a refusal of Redwood City to play by its own rules and implement its own codes and General Plan. What the city is doing - and citizens, courts and state commissions are attempting to stop - is ripping up the environmental and social fabric of an important part of the Bay Area piece by piece.

We can start small. There are sites within Redwood City that don't meet building requirements because of slope, proximity to waterways, environmental conditions and lot sizes. Citizens regard them as environmental amenities and necessary wildlife corridors; the city seems to view them as wasted space.

These lands cannot be developed under normal procedures, so the Planning Department reverts to a special "planned development" process. It is a kind of get-out-of-jail-free card.

Judge Marie Weiner has tentatively found that the City Council violated its own municipal code on the Finger Avenue project on Cordilleras Creek. Will the City Council learn from this? Probably not.

The council will meet Monday to give final approval to a development on steep hillsides on Laurel Way. The Laurel Way Joint Venture has proposed to build 16 large homes on small steeply sloped lots. The council is ready to waive rules that have prevented the development of these lots for years.

There seems to be a pattern here, and it is not confined to small developments. The council approved a new development for Pete's Harbor, but it turned out that the state, not the city, has jurisdiction over the outer harbor included in the development. You would think this was the kind of thing planning commissions and departments would notice. The State Lands Commission slapped that one down. The litigation and the expense of hiring consultants are piling up.

Redwood City planners and politicians seem oblivious to the consequences. The largest of the developments - Cargill's Saltworks - will have consequences far beyond Redwood City. The original Saltworks plan involved as many as 12,000 homes, offices, shops and schools but was derailed in a controversy that featured conflict-of-interest charges against a city councilperson. Faced with local opposition, this plan was pulled, but it is coming back.

The state decided long ago to stop filling San Francisco Bay. The Saltworks are tidelands, once very biologically productive. With climate change, rising ocean levels, and the increase in lethal storms, building on the tidelands is expensive and reckless, not only in the medium term but also in the long run. In the short run, there is money to be made.

Cargill wants to make money, but it is not Redwood City's job to help them. Cargill will try to grandfather the Saltworks development to avoid the ban on filling in more of the bay. The Redwood City Council seems eager to help them.

It is hard to imagine a more environmentally dangerous and costly development on the bay than the Saltworks, but it is of a kind with the smaller developments in Redwood City. To focus only on Saltworks and not the smaller developments on Laurel Way, Pete's Harbor and Cordilleras Creek is to miss the core problem: Redwood City does have rules and policies for dealing with this kind of development; it has a perfectly respectable ordinances and new General Plan.

Yet Redwood City ignores them to chase developers' dollars. We have trouble, right here in Redwood City.

Richard White is a professor of history at Stanford University. He lives in Redwood City.

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