Teacher Housing Issue - by Joel Paul -Sausalito By the Bay Blog Posting

hot debate at city council meeting
last night in Sausalito. Several spoke against the proposed development including Joel Paul who sent this memo to neighbors, including to Nancy Osborn who forwarded it to me.
Note two things as you read it:
1) The school board and the city council need to hear your questions & opinion. For the city, you could contact planning director, Paul Kermoyan. For the school board here.

2) The school district invited people to their public meeting on Oct. 20th at Bayside.

From Joel Paul:
Subject: Update on Oct. 11 city council meeting

Dear neighbors,

Last night the City Council heard a presentation from the School Board on the workforce housing and it considered a proposal from the staff as to how to proceed on the affordable housing overlay zone (AHOZ).

First, the School Board President George Stratigos and Board Trustee Tom Clark disclosed virtually no information. Stratigos said that the purpose of building workforce housing was to help recruit new teachers to raise average scores to the 900 level. He didn’t explain why housing was necessary or why new teachers were needed.

Stratigos said that the district had not intended to come forward at this time with their plans but they had been “kind of outed by the city council’s AHOZ.” Stratigos also talked about the board’s plans for doing extensive road work, incluiding paving and expanding the fire road and building new roads to the housing project. Difficult to understand how roadwork relates to higher student scores.

Clark said that the Board had issued a request for a proposal (RFP) and had accepted a bid from Thompson/Dorfman, however, they never explained what the bid was for or what contractual obligations the district has undertaken. Clark denied that they had any plans, drawings or even an idea of the number of units to be built or where they would be located.

The developer Thompson then had a brief slide presentation about what they had done for Santa Clara School District. There they built 40 units on two acres of an unoccupied school site for a district with over 700 teachers and 17,000 students. No one explained how the housing construction or the extensive roadwork would be financed

In my comments, I said that I thought the board had failed to dislose details of their plans. For example, the school district offices had displayed renderings of buildings two and three stories high including 24 units in the half-acre eucalyptus grove next to the Bayside parking lot.

I also pointed out that there was no evidence that teachers wanted to live on the school property and that the school board had failed to explain how the construction could raise scores.

There is some reason for concern that the school board plans to tear down the trees and clear away the green space on the pretext of avoiding a fire hazard. I am concerned that if they try to do this, it might be a way of avoiding an environmental impact report. We need to stay vigilant and make sure that they do nothing to disturb the existing green space. If you see any workers cutting trees or clearing brush, let me know. We may need to get a court to enjoin them.

The school board president invited the public to a meeting on October 20 at 7p.m. in the all-purpose room at Bayside. This is a different time and location then they had previously advised us. Please make a note of the new time and place and be sure to attend.

Second, the staff presented its plan to appoint a new housing committee to develop a new AHOZ. The plan would include representatives of each neighborhood plus representatives of outside groups pushing for development, such as developers, affordable housing activists, legal aid attorneys, etc. I objected to the process treating residents the same as outside constituencies and said that it was weighted against our neighborhood and would likely result in the same sites being selected.

Paul Kermoyan, the director of planning, admitted that the state was NOT requiring any overlay zone! He said that the state told him that they city could come up with an alternative that did not identify sites by an overlay zone. It was unclear whether the state would insist on Sausalito identifying any specific sites at all. Paul said that as far as he was concerned the AHOZ was “completely abandoned.” The Mayor said it was “off the table”.

Now, the city could retain the existing housing element (minus the AHOZ) and self-certify it without any state certification, if it wished. The only advantage to getting the state to certify our housing element would be that it creates a presumption (and ONLY a presumption) that it was in compliance with the state’s law and might insulate us from future law suits by affordable housing advocates.

The council discussed the issue and decided that there was NO need for a committee. They directed Kermoyan to come back with an alternative to the AHOZ which may or may not include identifying specific sites and scattering 31 units (the number required by ABAG) around the city’s neighborhoods.

I am very pleased with this outcome. If the city had re-established a new housing committee with unelected residents and outside interest groups, it would be difficult for us to hold the committee accountable, and it would be more likely that the committee would come to the conclusion that the best result is to go back to the original AHOZ targeting our neighborhood. Now, the city council is retaining control of the process, and we’ve shown them that we will hold them accountable for the result.

Kermoyan expects it will take two months before he will have a plan for the council. Now is a good time for people to float alternative ideas with councilmembers and with Paul Kermoyan.

The other interesting development last night was that one of the housing advocates, Michael Rex, brought up the idea again of pushing for live-work lofts in the Marinship for both artists and marine workers.

I am trying to develop the idea of a Marinship Artists Cooperative (MAC). For this purpose, I’ve put Kermoyan in touch with a professor of city planning at UC Berkeley whose class is undertaking the concept as a class project. I plan to include Michael Rex in the process and to try to reach out to the business community as well.

I think that having artists and marine workers living at marinship in small numbers with space to work and exhibit would be consistent with the purposes of the Marinship plan and would help to promote Sausalito as a center for the arts. I was involved in an effort to do something like this to revive the downtown in Hartford, Connecticut It would be good for our downtown tourism, relieve pressure on the neighborhoods to develop low income housing, save green space and increase property values.

Please remember to come to the school board meeting on Oct. 20 at 7pm in the all-purpose room at the Bayside Campus. We’ve turned around the AHOZ; now we’ve got to stop the school board.

Keep the faith,
Joel Paul

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 12th, 2005 at 6:20 pm