Two chances for public review of Sonoma’s West Napa St. hotel project
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.”
UPDATED: Please read and follow our commenting policy: