Grandstand and deliver

So, on Tuesday night, there was some weirdness at the City Council with regard to the Del Monte discussions.  Mostly it came from Tony Daysog right out of the gate after the developer presentation.  He started down this convoluted road of traffic impacts and essentially said that the traffic impact analysis in the Mitigated Negative Declaration is all wrong because he thinks that the only measure of traffic impacts should be traffic that occurs from residential development.

Let put aside the fact that measuring only residential development is not how these things work.  When you measure the impacts of a project you measure it for all of the uses and not just the residential.  Because just measuring residential would be sort of silly since that wouldn’t cover the complete impact of traffic from the project.

But the nut meat of Tony Daysog’s “concerns” was that there were no “benchmarks” to which the developer could get penalized for if they were unable to mitigate increased traffic.  Tony Daysog’s trumped up indignation about the fact that there are no penalties for the developer not being able to meet some arbitrary benchmark that Tony Daysog has created in his mind falls flat when he’s faced with the clarification by Lena Tam that the Development Agreement has a process by which to determine exactly what Tony Daysog is asking.

Turns out it seems as though Tony Daysog is really more upset that the TDM was approved by the Planning Board and he feels as though it should be separately vetted by the City Council.  I’ll add the he keeps waving the document up in the air as though this makes his point more valid.   He also reminds the audience no less than three separate times that he wants to see the “brick building” revitalized, even though he’s getting hung up on micromanage-y details.

Which, I fear, will be the hallmark of this new Council based on the make up.

But really it seems like Tony Daysog’s biggest beef is with the function and the role of the Planning Board.  It sounds like he’s more upset about the process that includes the Planning Board doing the initial vetting of some of the documents. Perhaps his issues with the Planning Board should be addressed in a Council Referral or something if he wants to limit the scope and powers of the Planning Board, because — as it stands — the Planning Board is doing exactly what they are supposed to do, even if Tony Daysog doesn’t like it.

Here’s a tweet that pretty much says all that in less than 140 characters:

@TheAlamedan Daysog always wants council to have control over Planning Board issues. Maybe he is on wrong body.

— Brian McGuire (@brianrmcguire) December 3, 2014

Oh yeah, also Tony Daysog wants to penalize the individual future Del Monte residents if they don’t meet whatever benchmarks he thinks should be met by upping the amount of money they have to spent on the transportation “tax” for lack of a better term.  So even if you are an existing Alamedan, as long as you move into a new development, Tony Daysog wants to make you pay extra for that privilege and penalize you if don’t meet his expectations.   Even if you are Alamedan by right of living there 1, 2, 3, or 20 years, Tony Daysog wants to penalize you for benchmarks that may not even be a result of the development itself.

Then Tony Daysog decides to launch into a tirade about impact fees and asks why the impact fees don’t include school impact fees, etc and so forth.  So Planning Manager Andrew Thomas explains to him, very clearly, that the impact fees are fixed for the City so that if new City impact fees are created after the project has been approved that the developer would not have to pay the additional fees.  However, that doesn’t mean that if other agencies, like the School District which is separate from the City of Alameda, has their impact fees “fixed.”  Therefore other agencies are exempt.  Meaning that if these other exempt agencies have new fees, they might be able to collect against the developer.

Clear right?

Apparently not to Tony Daysog who raises his voice and gets indignant over that issue, so then the Assistant City Attorney, whose name I didn’t catch, but I’ve seen him speak before and he’s one of those Elected Official whisperers that can calm and soothe the most frothy of grandstanders even when he says exactly the same thing that another City staff person says before him.  Seriously.  He said nearly identically what Andrew Thomas said but somehow Tony Daysog understood it this time, but not seconds before.

But here’s the icing on the Tony Daysog cake. After some wrangling about the motion to approve — this requires a whole other post to explain — the short version is units capped so that developer can build penciled out Del Monte development with all the goodies intact (rehabilitation of historic monument, funding for parks, all impact fees paid for, infrastructure paid for, affordable housing built) on the pieces of land it currently owns without relying on a portion of the Beltline which they were initially banking on the City transferring to the Housing Authority to build the low and very low income housing.   Anyway, during this motion, Tony Daysog offers up a substitute motion which eliminates building on site B and C.  B and C are the sites for the affordable housing units.  When the Mayor Marie Gilmore and Vice Mayor Marilyn Ezzy-Ashcraft confirm with him that eliminating these two sites would then eliminate the low and very low affordable housing his answer is when Marie Gilmore clarifies that his motion would cut out the 31 units of low and very low affordable housing he says, and I’m not even going to paraphrase:

And I would feel very bad about that, but following on the logic of where I’m coming from in terms of traffic and transit…

I tweeted Tony Daysog to ask him to explain the connection, he wrote this post which still doesn’t adequately explain why he chose to eliminate the low income housing.  Tony Daysog seems to be under the assumption that lower number of units = lower volume of traffic, I mean, it’s the gut “belief” that a lot of people have.  But for someone that is so insistent on the City staff showing more evidence that their volumes of research show that TDM mitigations work, perhaps he should also provide evidence that his premise that a lower number of units directly translates into a lower volume of traffic is true.

The TL; dr wrap up of all this is that Tony Daysog was trying to come off as commanding and tenacious but honestly it read more like nitpicking over fairly straightforward things and also bringing forth fairly bad public policy (see affordable housing motion).  He also came off like a bit of a jerk as well, which is one thing I never thought of Tony Daysog before that Tuesday night meeting.  Sure he tweets about a lot of weird things and makes some really off-the-wall comments like the fact that he never second guesses the fire or police chiefs (really?).  But he’s always been pleasant and benign, however this is the new Tony Daysog who, I’m guessing, is angling himself for the Mayor’s seat in four more years.   But it’s not a good look on him.

Seriously though people, if this is what to expect from the new Council, I really am not going to run out of content, like ever.