Dixon City Council Green Lights Affordable Housing Allotments

The decision to allocate 59 Measure B allotments to developer Richland Communities for affordable housing was not popular with the residents who attended last night’s Dixon City Council meeting.

In fact, many of them felt that their arguments against the Valley Glen Apartments were ignored by the council.

The beef with the affordable housing apartment complex boils down to the prospect of 59 or more additional cars traveling along South First Street, adding to the traffic problems along South First Street from vehicles traveling to or downtown. It’s a problem that many residents say has always been part of living along Highway 113.

Old Town residents Cliff Costello and Terry Doane told the council that the amount of traffic, especially during the mornings, makes it unsafe for children to cross the street. They said the city should try putting in a stop sign or traffic light along South First Street at West or East Chestnut streets to mitigate the traffic issues.

“We want every child that walks across the street, we want them to be safe,” Doane said.

“The thing is that there are no crosswalks,” Costello added.

Old Town resident Ginger Emerson said she felt ignored by the council’s decision. She spoke to the council and told them that last night’s public hearing was not providing due process.

She told them that a letter dated Jan .13, 2012, written by attorney Mark Pollock, who is representing Emerson and six other Old Town residents, was not included in their agenda packets.

“I am concerned that this meeting, this hearing is inadequate in that it is not providing due process,” she told the council. “Members of the public did not have the opportunity to review beforehand and comment on ... Mr. Pollock’s letter.”

She told the council that it failed to implement the traffic mitigation measures outlined in an Environmental Impact Report, completed in 2002 at the time that the then council approved the project.

When the EIR was completed in 2002, which included traffic mitigation components, Dixon High School had not yet been built at its current College Way location. Ever since DHS was built, neighbors such as Doane, Emerson and Costello said that the traffic situation along South First Street has gotten worse.

The exclusion of the traffic problems brought on by new Dixon High is enough to halt the project while the city orders a new EIR or at least a traffic report according to the Old Town neighbors.

But city staff saw it differently.

“Once the City has certified an EIR for an approved project, subsequent environmental review is not required for that project unless and until the project seeks further discretionary approvals from the city, “ read a staff report prepared by Community Development Director David Dowswell.

The staff report outlined three triggers that would merit a new EIR including:

• Substantial changes are proposed in the project, which will require major revisions of the EIR
• Substantial changes occur to the circumstances surrounding the project, which will require major revisions to the EIR
• New information became available which was not known and could not have been known at the time that the EIR was certified.

In a letter to the council, the attorney for the Old Town neighbors Mark Pollock contends that a new EIR is warranted because the traffic impacts of new Dixon High were not included in the 2002 EIR.

But Dowswell said that the 2002 EIR states that the environmental analysis of the high school’s traffic impacts would be conducted prior to the school district’s approval of the new location. That analysis was conducted in the draft EIR prepared for the high school.

Subsequent EIRs conducted in 2005 for the Brookfield Homes Project and again in 2010 when Brookfield homes requested approval to expand from 401 units to 451 units, included the Valley Glen project as well as the failed Dixon Downs project, negating the new information claim that Pollock spoke of in his letter, Dowswell stated in his report.

“Thus the EIRs over stated traffic impacts in the cumulative condition to a greater extent than the traffic this 59-unit project will contribute,” the report read.  

Pollock’s letter to the council also stated that the 2002 EIR does not mention that the homes would be used to house farmworkers.  The developers of the Valley Glen Apartments applied for a federal grant that stipulates the homes be rented to families who work in the farming industry and meet low-income requirements.

“The 2002 EIR does not did not consider the transportation impacts of the agricultural vehicles which such farm worker tenants would drive up the public roads,” Pollock's letter stated according to the report.

But Dowswell counters Pollock’s claim and said that there is no evidence that the families living the in apartment complex would be driving farm equipment to and from work.

The voices of the many individuals who spoke during last night’s hearing however raised concerns among the council members.

“To sit up here and say that we are going to ignore … (the people) I think is doing a disservice to the community,” Councilman Michael Ceremello said.

Ceremello said the city needs to find a way to mitigate the traffic problem before moving forward with the project.

“Why would you add to the problem?” he asked.

Councilman Thom Bogue said that the developers called him to talk about the project and Bogue told them to meet him in Dixon in the afternoon, right about the time that school lets out.

“I wanted him to experience what a lot of the residents go through,” he said.

Bogue called for the council to bring in the developers to help them mitigate the traffic problems.

“I am wondering why we don’t look at some EIR changes, especially dealing with traffic,” Councilman Rick Fuller said.

At the same time, Fuller said that the apartment project is good for Dixon – it will create jobs in Dixon and help satisfy the city’s need for low-income housing.

Vice Mayor Dane Besneatte said that by halting the project because of traffic, it could open up the city to a lawsuit by the developers.

“I have a concern about us not honoring our development agreements,” he said. “I actually have a concern about the economic impact of this project not going forward.”

“Dixon is a city of 18,000 people, and somewhere we have to put affordable housing,” he added.

He also noted that when the city was looking at other sites for affordable housing in Dixon – sites included near Safeway, Hometown Market and Old Town – neighbors were opposed to it, saying that they had too many apartments in the area.

“It begs the question ‘If not here, where? If not now, when?’” he said.

“I want to make this perfectly clear, this project has merit,” Mayor Jack Batchelor said. “I think we need to have affordable housing, I think we have an obligation.”

He asked Dowswell if he could perform another traffic study, but Dowswell said it would be the same information that has already been presented to the council in previous traffic studies.

The council voted in favor of project with the amendment that the developer would seek a Community Development Block Grant to help mitigate traffic issues that may arise from the building of the Valley Glen Apartments. Emerson declined to say if she and the rest of the Old Town residents would seek litigation against the city.