Lots to talk about regarding the Planning Board meeting on Monday night, but I’m going to put a pin in that one for now because I wanted to write about the newest name dropped for Alameda Landing given that we had spitballed a few names a few posts ago of what we thought would accompany the Target at Alameda Landing based on this leasing map:
After a lot of meetings, a lot of public comment and a lot of talk, the City is finally moving forward with the long term lease with Greenway Golf. Details of the deal are in the staff report, the nutshell version is that it is a 20 year lease with a five-year option to renew. For the rent portion:
$75 000 per Lease Year (defined as July 1 to June 30) equal monthly payments for years 1-4 plus those number of months in Lease Year 5 equal to the number of months from July 1 , 2012 to the Commencement Date when Greenway takes over the operations.
The greater of Minimum Rent of $300 000 in equal monthly payments or 8% of gross revenues up to $4,000,000 and 12% of gross revenues over $4,000,000 in Lease Years 5-The increase from $75 000 to $300 000 and the payment of percentage rent shall commence in Lease Year 5 after the expiration of the number of months between the beginning of Lease Year 1 and the Commencement Date as described above. In other words , if Greenway takes over operations on September 15 , 2012 , then the increase in the rent will begin in mid-September in Lease Year 5 rather than on July 1 in Lease Year 5.
The greater of Minimum Rent of $350 000 per year in equal monthly payments or 10% of gross revenues, up to 4,000,000 and 12% of gross revenues over $4,000,000 in years 9-20 and in any subsequent option period.
There’s some other stuff about contributing to the Captital Improvement Fund and Tenant Improvements. The big thing is that Greenway will be the body to set green fees from now on. It used to be the Golf Commission, but now it will strictly under Greenway’s control. They have agreed to provide free golf for the high school golf teams though.
A few development-y updates around the island. Lots going on.
First, Habanas which struggled to get their design for an open storefront approved by the Historic Advisory Board has been moving forward with their plans. You probably might have noticed that the storefront has been boarded up for the past few weeks. The boarded cover came down last week and the stacking doors are up. Can’t wait to see the final product. A good ending for a persistent property owner.
Also, I posted this on Twitter last month:
But don’t think I ever got around to posting it here. I have to hat tip this one to the husband since he actually told me about it a week before I posted it on Twitter because I was trying to get verification from the Planning Department before I posted anything about it. Our kids swim at AquaTech — great little program — trust me, those folks need the extra space. Trying to book a time for your kidlings to get classes sometimes is bit of a struggle.
Tonight the Planning Board will be considering some large-ish development related items. The big one, about Alameda Point, has been put on hold for the time being until the City Council meets on June 6 to give direction to staff on how to move forward. Just as an aside, commenter Karen Bey makes a few excellent points that I wanted to call out here regarding Staff’s frustation over feeling discouraged by the discussion last Tuesday night and other misc issues that came up.
Russo’s claim is that there were three presentations and he and his staff were demoralized after having their strategy rejected by council, but this was the first presentation where the council and the public got to see actual numbers, and budgets, and projections.
I thought the Mayor, and Council member Lena Tam raised some valid questions and concerns about John Russo’s strategy. Both the Mayor and Councilmember Tam raised concerns about going into debt or using our reserves to pay to entitle a plan that doesn’t pencil out. The Mayor also raised the question, why should we sign on to a plan where the city takes on all the risk, and the developer takes none? She asked where is the shared risk in this development strategy.
So it’s pretty common for me to ignore the Staff Communications part of most agendas, because that’s where all the boring stuff goes. Of course, ignoring the Staff Communications part of Monday’s Planning Board meeting meant that I missed the part about an update on the Target building, which included a redesign of the building.
So here is a slide of the old design:
Some of the more interesting tidbits about the City news can often be found in the most unexpected places. During the Planning Board meeting on Monday night, during the informational run-through of future agenda items, Planning Services Manager Andrew Thomas let drop that an application would be forthcoming about a potential tenant to fill space at South Shore. The space: the old Borders building. That news alone is pretty awesome because the space is a fairly large one and given the state of the economy it’s been pretty tough to fill some of the smaller spaces at South Shore let alone the biggest space of them all, the old Borders store.
Back on the Planning Board agenda, along with the Inkies application if they don’t withdraw before tonight, is everyone’s favorite hot button item: Target.
Well, the Alameda Landing retail section really. You can click to enlarge.
Tonight, the Planning Board is actually going to be discussing three super exciting topics, the first is the new design for the Alameda Landing site, which I wrote about previously here. Just to recap, the design is much better than the one that Catellus had reproduced for their leasing brochure and is marginally better than the 2007 design but there are a few design issues the accompany big box stores like Target that I hope will be addressed.
The best thing is that the new team from a newly liberated from under the ProLogis umbrella should be present at the meeting so I hope there will be a grilling of timelines and when Catellus intends to break ground on Alameda Landing since this project is literally taking forever.
The Planning Board will also be taking up the topic of the Master Street Tree Plan which the felling of the Park Street trees brought back into the spotlight. My guess is that moving forward, the streetscape exemption will probably be taken of the list of exempted noticing requirements, unless the design review for the streetscape explicitly points out that healthy trees will be removed as part of the streetscape process.
I realize that reporters are pressed for time these days and due to cutting back one reporter has to do the job of multiple reporters, but honestly, that’s really no excuse for truncating basic information about an issue. For example on Friday the Journal had a very short story about about the finalization of the land swap between Catellus and the College of Alameda for the Tinker/Stargell extension. It was a short article, with the new information being that the construction is due to begin in 2009 and be completed about a year later, which probably means late 2010 or early 2011. So this is what I found preplexing about the article:
…Catellus acquired the 25,000 square-foot building for the college in exchange for a right of way to extend Willie Stargell Avenue north of the college campus to Alameda Landing where Catellus will continue to build housing as part of its original agreement with the city…
As mentioned by Michele Ellson yesterday, the Planning Board last night, in addition to discussing the change requested by Warmington Homes for Grand Marina, talked about the proposed amendement to the Alameda Municipal Code to prohibit any large format retail (aka big box stores) over 90K sq ft that had floor area devoted to 10% or more of non-taxable goods, such as food or drugs. This recommendation was discussed on the City Council floors after the Planning Board had sent their initial recommendation about how to define a big box store and what to do about it.
The Planning Board sent to the City Council the recommendation that anything over 30K sq ft. be considered a large format retail store (big box) and would require that any retailer looking to put in a store at that threshold or higher would be required to apply for a Conditional Use Permit. The City Council decided that was not restrictive enough and therefore directed staff to write up a prohibition on anything over the 90K with the 10% non-taxable good element. Basically that would even prohibit simply trying to get around that through a conditional use permit.
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