SU0014674 - Laserfiche WebLink

Home Browse Search

Chairman and Members of the Commission San Joaquin County Planning Commission October 5,2000 Page 6 area are all considered to be part of"mitigation'for which the regional impact fee is assessed, even though these roads are part of the Project infrastructure and are the direct responsibility of the Project proponent. Instead,based on the traffic impact fee system the you adopted as the Mountain Ilouse CSD,the cost to improve these Project road«-ays will come out of the pool of mitigation monies that is created to mitigated the impacts of the project on local and regional roadways.This violates CEQA and standard practice, and will result in traffic fee monies being spent on Project infrastructure instead of mitigating impacts of the Project. The result: even less money available to construct improvements to roadways that are burdened and impacted.by the Project,in violation of CEQA. The"offset"system adds insult to the injury of the"fair share"scheme, since the offset system allows the Proponent and the CSD to determine that only one or two roadway segments need be improved if more than the supposed"fair share"is spent on a particular roadway. Thus, as an example, one roadway for which the Project proponent is allegedly 50%responsible can b fully funded by CSD mitigation fee monies, leaving other direcrly impacted roads unfunded and unimproved, allowing the Project proponent to avoid any fnancial responsibility for a road where it was assigned a fractional 10%responsibility on the notion that "other jurisdictions" would somehow be responsible for the costs of these improvements resulting from the Project. This scheme does not result in the impacts to roads being mitigated, and thus clearly violates CEQA. The prior EIRs prepared for the;Master Plan and Specific Plans in 1993/94 concluded tha the Mountain House development, including the Project,would adversely affect a number of roadways in the vicinity of the Project, including Altamont Pass Road and Grant Line Road in Alameda County, as well as the I-580 interchange at Grant Line Road in Alameda County. Despite knowing that placing close to 20,000 people near a major freeway will have local and regional road impacts, the proposed mitigation plan in the Neighborhood"F"Negative Declaration does not actually provide for a feasi ble means of mitigating these impacts. A claim that"other jurisdictions" will be required to pay a"fair share"of the future unknown cost of roadway improvements at some undetermined point in the future simply cannot withstand scrutiny as a feasible mitigation measure. Your Commission should reject this sham proposal as being in violation of CEQA and against the public interest. The Proposed Project Understates and omits Significant Regional TransportationSystem Impacts- I As noted above,Alameda County objects to the project and the proposed CEQA determinations tinder consideration because direct and indirect regional transportation system impacts and cumulative impacts of the Project have not been considered and assessed in connection with San Joaquin County's previous review of the Mountain House development and the County's current review of the Tri-Mark Project. In the 1992 General Plan Amendment EIR, cumulative traffic impacts were not even mentioned. The January 1993 Supplemental E1R briefly discussed cumulative traffic in general terms,requiring that future Mountain House