Two chances for public review of Sonoma’s West Napa St. hotel project

That 62-room hotel project planned for West Napa Street is moving into the next stage with two meetings in the next two weeks.|

WHERE ARE THE MEETINGS?

SVCAC: The Sonoma Valley Citizens Advisory Commission meets at 6:30 p.m. on Wednesday, Oct. 26, at the Community Meeting Room, 177 First St. West.

Planning Commission: The City of Sonoma Planning Commission will meet in special session Thursday, Nov. 3, probably at 6 p.m. at the Community Meeting Room.

Online: Documents related to the West Napa Street Hotel project can be found on the city website at www.sonomacity.org/government/resources/reports.aspx

That hotel planned for West Napa Street, just half-a-block from the Sonoma Plaza? It’s moving into the next stage of the process for its approval with two meetings in the next two weeks – an Oct. 26 hearing before the Sonoma Valley Citizens Advisory Commission, and a Nov. 3 special meeting of the City of Sonoma Planning Commission.

The autumn hearings come upon the release of the Final Environmental Impact Report for the project, prepared by Placeworks, out of Berkeley, and a series of subcontractors for the City of Sonoma. The 148-page report (plus 482 pages of appendices), dated October 2016, evaluates public comment on the preliminary Environmental Impact Report that came out in January. The public comment period on that draft report ran until March 10; this final EIR provides researched responses to those comments.

The proposed hotel, originally called Chateau Sonoma & Spa in its first, more ambitious iteration, is being built by Kenwood Investments. Darius Anderson, the founder and principal owner of Kenwood Investments, is a partner in Sonoma Media Investments, the company that owns the Index-Tribune.

“What we were looking forward to in the EIR process is an objective view of this (project), so people could look at facts and make decisions on facts, instead of just hearsay,” said Bill Hooper, president of Kenwood Investments. He described the final EIR as “a fair and staightforward review of the project impacts.”

“The best part about this EIR is that it’s done by a consultant and a set of sub-consultants that have no skin in the game, that have no stake in the outcome,” Hooper said. “They could care less if this hotel is approved or disapproved.”

The “Hotel Project Sonoma,” as the EIR identifies it, would be built at 117, 135 and 153 W. Napa St. as a three-story 62-room hotel. The project includes an 80-seat restaurant, an 8-room spa, and 115 parking spaces, most of which would be underground.

The primary entrance would be off West Napa Street between the Lynch Building (where Umpqua National Bank is) and the proposed restaurant at 153 W. Napa St., where Sonoma Brands is currently located. The primary three-story hotel building would be where most of the present-day parking lot is. The underground parking lot access ramp would be behind the Lynch Building, and would exit onto First Street West, next to a small staff and valet parking lot.

Hooper likened the current scale of the project to MacArthur Place Inn & Spa, which has a 64-room hotel plus 124-seat restaurant and 7 room spa, with 84 parking places. Overall they are of comparable size, though the MacArthur Place restaurant is larger, and the Sonoma Hotel parking lot has more spaces.

Hooper requested a comparative study of the two properties “to better understand a local business of similar size and use” for the purpose of evaluating traffic and pedestrian impact.

Though the current proposal has three more rooms than the 59 originally proposed, noted Hooper, it has been scaled down to omit a planned event center, retail space and a second restaurant, giving the project less impact on the downtown area’s traffic. “We got a lot of push-back on that, so we dropped it,” said Hooper.

Most of the other flags raised by public comment in February and March failed to rise to a level of concern in the final EIR: Larry Barnett, a former City Councilmember, mayor and advocate of the 2014 hotel limitation Measure B, expressed concern about the possible presence of TCE, trichloroethylene, as a result of the decades that the Index-Tribune and other newspapers were published on the site. The EIR released last week reiterates the findings of the study’s original soil analysis and “do not change the conclusions of the Initial Study,” as there was no evidence of TCE contamination.

“It’s disappointing; TCE was widely and commonly used, and testing for it simply makes sense to me,” said Barnett. “I can only hope no safety issues arise for workers or others if indeed TCE is present.”

Similarly, concerns about air pollution, traffic congestion and other environmental factors are largely judged to have “less than significant” impact and, in some cases, would be addressed already by having a parking lot at the hotel. “By bringing these guests to a location where they can walk to the Plaza rather than having to drive to it, the project can reasonably be expected to have a beneficial impact on the demand for parking at the Plaza,” ran one response in the EIR.

Frequently, public comments receive responses similar to this one: “This comment does not question the adequacy of the analysis included in the EIR, and therefore no response is required.”

“No reasonable person believes developer-paid-for studies that show that a 62-room hotel will have little impact on traffic and congestion in one of the worst dysfunctional intersections in town,” wrote Fred Allebach in a comment submitted in advance of the Wednesday SVCAC meeting. “This is a significant potential impact.”

However, like the draft EIR, the final EIR does recognize that the hotel project “has the potential to generate significant environmental impacts in a number of areas,” and proposes a number of mitigations.

Among them, curb striping and extensions or “bump-outs” are requested for the intersection of West Napa Street and First Street West; bicycle storage should be included in the project, to facilitate guest use of bicycle travel for non-motorized travel; and a series of mitigation measures to upgrade the capacity of local sanitation facilities, in recognition of potential stormwater peak flows.

Allebach reiterated his skepticism that the hotel development was necessary or right for Sonoma. “It’s clear 62 rooms are not necessary to make a hotel project work,” Allebach said. He cited the 8-room Ledson Hotel and the 7-unit Marino cottages in development on West Napa, across the street from the Hotel Sonoma Project.

Allebach asked if the project was immune from the residential component of in-city development, which was recently applied to the Safeway expansion proposal at Fifth Street West.

Sonoma City Planner David Goodison, who has prepared staff reports for both meetings, said the city “has hired a consultant to help it develop an affordable housing linkage fee that could be applied to new commercial development. While this work is not complete, any such fee would be applied to the issuance of building permits.”

Even if the Planning Commission and the City Council sign off on the hotel project this fall, it could take another year for building permits to be issued. “The City Council will have plenty of time to get the fee in place, if that is what it chooses to do, so that it would be applicable to the hotel development,” said Goodison.

The EIR submitted this month will receive a thorough going-over from citizens and groups in the coming two meetings, the SVCAC on this Wednesday, Oct. 26, and a week later the City’s Planning Commission, on Thursday, Nov. 3.

Staff reports and the complete final EIR with comments are available on the city website at www.sonomacity.org/government/resources/reports.aspx.

Contact Christian at christian.kallen@sonomanews.com.

WHERE ARE THE MEETINGS?

SVCAC: The Sonoma Valley Citizens Advisory Commission meets at 6:30 p.m. on Wednesday, Oct. 26, at the Community Meeting Room, 177 First St. West.

Planning Commission: The City of Sonoma Planning Commission will meet in special session Thursday, Nov. 3, probably at 6 p.m. at the Community Meeting Room.

Online: Documents related to the West Napa Street Hotel project can be found on the city website at www.sonomacity.org/government/resources/reports.aspx

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