Aw, gee, I hate going negative again, but I really think the Dublin City Council let a golden opportunity slip through their wide open fingers at the 1/6/2009 council meeting when they extended the Wallis Ranch development agreement for an additional 10 years in exchange for a $1M Benefit Payment. The development as planned is a terrible idea for the Wallis Ranch property and for all of Dublin.
Wallis Ranch may be the most egregious example so far of Dublin’s haphazard and illogical density concentrations away from the city core and transit centers. The project violates almost every principle of smart urban design. The medium and medium-high density housing planned for Wallis Ranch exemplifies the worst aspects of sprawl, being located far from jobs, transit, shopping, the civic center and public schools. That may be fine for low-density estate homes and ranchettes, but not for medium-high density multi-family housing. With apologies to Gilbert & Sullivan, it is the very model of the modern major general plan mistake. In fact, every time the future Wallis Ranch residents want to do just about anything, they will have to get in their cars and drive. The concomitant traffic, pollution, energy consumption, expense, safety risk and wasted time will be multiplied by the density factor.
Future observers will shake their heads in utter disbelief when they ponder the abysmal effect on the environment, and on the quality of life for everyone, as a result of ill-conceived developments like Wallis Ranch, while at the same time they agonize over the astronomical cost of undoing the damage wrought by the planning commissions and city councils of the past. This is something our great grandchildren are going to have to live with. When are we going to learn!
Because of decisions about Wallis Ranch made by previous planning commissions and city councils, this was very likely the current council’s single chance to minimize the damage before it was too late. They should have denied the agreement and instructed the developer to come back to the table with a low-density housing plan that makes sense for a project so far away from everything that’s anything. I’m very disappointed that Mayor Sbranti has so quickly forgotten the strategy he suggested at the 11/6/2008 council meeting, namely to move towards density reductions when re-negotiating development agreements. (See video clip below.) Now, because the council chose to accept $1M of hush money instead of reducing the density of the Wallis Ranch project, a golden opportunity to remedy a grievous wrong was lost.
I’ve been told that Dublin is locked into similar development agreements on almost all of the remaining developable residential tracts in the city. If true, this means that the only way to curtail unsuitable projects like Wallis Ranch in the future is to hope that developers are forced to come back to the city to re-negotiate their agreements because of slowdowns in the housing industry. (Eureka — I’ve finally discovered a benefit of the current recession!) This will enable the city to put a stop to the practice of allowing higher density developments where they most definitely don’t belong, and perhaps Dublin can gain some desperately-needed housing options for families with children, especially on the east side of town. I’m talking about detached single family homes with yards that kids can actually play in, on safe streets, preferably with cul-de-sacs. Families need more homes that they can grow into, instead of having to move to neighboring communities as their kids get older. Unfortunately, if the council continues to swoon over Benefit Payments instead of correcting poor planning decisions, this will never happen in Dublin. What a lasting shame!
If I had known about the Wallis Ranch re-negotiation ahead of time, and if I hadn’t left the council meeting before this item came up for discussion, I would have spoken on these very points. Still, I doubt that I would have changed any minds on the council, since all they seemed to care about was the size of the Benefit Payment. But this is a moot point anyhow, since I was still too disgusted by Kevin Hart’s Shameful Public Belittling to hang around after the speech I had just given during the Public Commentary portion of the meeting.
