Page 9 - Sonoma County Gazette April 2019

OPED: MEASURE A cont’d from page 8
One other matter that District officials have glided past: Whether granting AAMG an exclusive 10-year management contract with option to purchase last August should have triggered the voter approval requirement. That exclusive arrangement handcuffed the District’s ability to seek competitive offers to manage or purchase the District’s property on the open market, and also compromised the terms of the appraisal on which Resolution 19-10 was based. Again, this is something to air and consider in properly noticed public meetings - prior to the Board making a binding decision.
The work of an open and transparent process to sell the former Palm Drive Hospital property has only just begun. Please join me in asking the District Board to hold duly noticed public meetings on the terms of any proposed sale of this publicly-owned property.
OPINION: Why are new gas stations proliferating in Sonoma County now?
By Jenny Baker
For several months Petaluma residents have been in a David-and-Goliath
battle with Safeway’s, which is trying to build a mega 16-pump gas station adjacent to a residential district near an elementary school, a child care center and fields where children play. The residents are distraught, because a gas station does not mix well with children or bode well for their health, for many reasons.
Meanwhile, another totally unnecessary 16-pump ARCO gas station (including 4 diesel pumps), with a carwash and 24/7 convenience store (selling soda, chips etc.) is now being proposed at Highway 116/Stony Point Road in an unincorporated, semi-rural area of the County, less than 2 miles from Cotati on the way to Sebastopol.
The handful of small, locally owned businesses on the site, including Cali Kind tie-dye clothing shop, the Pond & Garden Nursery and Martin’s Market & Deli would have to go – pushed out by massive, out-of-county corporate developers.
There are already five gas stations within 2 miles of this site, four clustered around the Hwy 116/Hwy 101 intersection, and Bill’s Valero to the north on Hwy 116. There are also two carwashes, a full service and a self-service, less than 2 miles away in Cotati.
Over 10,000 sq. ft. of impervious surfaces would be added. Well water, a septic system, wastewater from the car wash and run off from the gas station would all supposedly be dealt with on site, while ditches from alongside the site run into nearby Gossage and Washoe Creeks, tributaries to the Laguna
de Santa Rosa – a wetland of international significance. Sonoma County is already riddled with Leaking Underground Storage Tanks, including within a few miles away. Underground gas tanks from gas stations almost always leak. One gallon of oil can pollute 1 million gallons of water. One pin-prick size hole in an underground gas tank can leak 400 gallons of fuel a year. And all of this potential trouble lies upstream from the Llano Road water treatment plant.
The site is in a “High Priority Greenbelt” area, on a Scenic Corridor, and surrounded on two sides by a Community Separator, voted in 2 years ago by 81% of the voters to protect green open spaces between cities. The surrounding land consists of seasonal wetlands, and lies within the area of critical habitat for our local endangered species, the California tiger salamander.
Quite apart from local impacts, why would anyone want to build another gas station now, with the climate crisis looming over us, gas stations plummeting, and sales of electric cars rising rapidly? If built, how soon will this one become an obsolete white elephant and who will pay for the clean-up costs?
The project came to preliminary Design Review and was sent back to
the drawing board for a redesign, mainly because it is in a scenic corridor
and not suitable for a rural area. It will come back for a second preliminary Design Review, but we don’t yet know when. The site is zoned for Limited Commercial and development would require a Use permit. You can submit comments to staff at Permit Sonoma, Daniel Hoffman dhoffman@migcom.com and Chelsea.Holup@sonoma-county.org
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