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HomeGateway PlanLetters to the Planning Commission -- June 14, 2022

Letters to the Planning Commission — June 14, 2022

The City needs to set — and keep — their parameters and promises for how letters to the Planning Commission are made available to the public.  This is a very basic area of trust that has been seriously compromised.

At the Planning Commission meeting on July 14, 2022, Community Development Director David Loya absolutely refused to apologize for what clearly had been an error — or multiple errors — on his part.

At the May 24th, 2022, meeting of the Planning Commission, toward the end of the meeting, Community Development Directory said this:

And, again, a reminder to the public.  If you submit your comments on the Thursday before the meeting or earlier you’ll see those comments included in the packet.  If you submit them after that point we’ll forward them on and then incorporate them after into the packet.
(2:50:38 on the video, or seen here.)

Do you see any possibility of ambiguity in that statement?  I don’t.

Letters submitted on Thursday were not included in the June 14th Planning Commission agenda packet.  Letters submitted one and two months ago have somehow never mad their way into the packets.  In other words, in my view, it was a statement that was not based in reality, or, to put it another way, it was a misrepresentation of reality.  The truth was that the City could not put letters submitted on Thursday in the packet — apparently the procedures in place require more time than that.

And that still doesn’t explain how it is that for four meetings — over two months — there hasn’t been a single letter in the agenda packets.

Misplaced and absent from the public record

Letters sent to the Planning Commission are, in theory, forwarded to the Commissioners and also included in the “Agenda Packet” that the Commissioners receive prior to their meeting.  The agenda packet is typically available on-line on the City’s website on the Friday morning prior to a Tuesday meeting.

This way members of the public can read the correspondence sent to the Planning Commission in a timely manner

But it doesn’t always happen like this.  In fact, it does not seem to be happening according to plan very well at all. 

There’s an item on the agendas called “Correspondence / Communications” but that does not mean that there will actually be any correspondence or communications attached to the agenda packet.

Here we are in mid-June 2022, at our 11th Planning Commission meeting of the year, and this matter of putting letters to the Planning Commission in the public record where the public can see them in a timely manner — this seems to have occurred just one time. There were letters included in a timely manner for the first meeting of the year, the January 11th meeting.  These were letters about the motel conversions to temporary residential housing in Valley West. But even though there were already letters received by the City about the recently-released Gateway plan there, those letters weren’t there.

Of the 158-pages of letters that were included “en masse” in the packet for the April 12th meeting, many of those letters were 2 or 3 or almost 4 months old.  Not timely.

 

Unfortunately the letters were not included — again, and again, and again

The City is looking at how the generation of the packet works, the time it takes, and how best to guarantee to the public that their letters will indeed become part of the agenda packet.  The packet is published on the City’s website generally on Friday morning, and the contents can be viewed by all members of the public who wish to see what the Planning Commission is up to and what letters have come in.

There’s also this question:

At the April 12th meeting of the Planning Commission, a 152-page assortment of letters and messages were included in the packet for the Planning Commissioners and the public to view.  Those letters — about 42 of them — can be seen here.  The earliest message included dates from June 21, 2021 and there’s one from November 30, 2021, but all other than are from early December 2021 — when the draft plan was released.  Letters considered as highlights include the message from Nick Lucchesi from January 15, 2022 and the letter from Dr. Andrea Tuttle from February 13, 2022.  And there were lots of other letters, too — 17 in February alone.

When these letters were released by the City, some were over 3 months old.  That is, they had been sitting out of view of the public for over three months.

We can contrast this with how Humboldt County dealt with letters on the McKinleyville Town Center plans.  There, as letters came in they were posted as PDF files on the Humboldt County website, where they can be seen by the public.  See here for more.  Their system = Transparent.  Arcata’s system, not so much.

And since we’ve found a letter that should have been included in the packet for the April 15th meeting — but was left out.  Were there more?  We don’t know.  How would we know if there were more?  We wouldn’t see them and we wouldn’t know.

That was two months ago.  No new letters have been included in the Planning Commission agenda packets for two months.  Not in the April 26th meeting packet, the May 10th, the May 24th, or the June 14th packet (although we do know that at least 3 (from 2 people) were missing from that  packet).

In two months, are we to believe that no one wrote to the Planning Commission?   No one?

And that’s why there no letters in the packets?  Is that possible?

I’ve run across one letter than should have been included in a packet, from May 15.  And I wrote a letter on April 11th that should have been in the packet.  That’s two. The two letters from myself and the letter from Jane Woodward that were meant to be in the packet for the June 14th meeting but were omitted — that’s five.

How many other letters were received by the City and then not forwarded to the Planning Commission and/or not offered to the public?  Perhaps in the coming months we’ll find out.

If you are reading this:  If you or someone you know of sent a letter to the Planning Commission that was not in a packet or is not on this website, please tell me. You can contact me via the Contact Us page.  We will then arrange to have that letter published here and brought forward into the light of day.


 

May 24th, 2022, meeting of the Planning Commission, David Loya:

And, again, a reminder to the public.  If you submit your comments on the Thursday before the meeting or earlier you’ll see those comments included in the packet.  If you submit them after that point we’ll forward them on and then incorporate them after into the packet.
(2:50:38 on the video, or seen here.)

 
 

 

 

Letter from Fred Weis, clearly addressed to the Planning Commission.  Dated April 11, 2022.
A-summary-of-public-input-for-the-4-12-Planning-Commissiom-meeting

 

Letter from Pam Mendolsohn, clearly addressed to the Planning Commission.  Dated February 22, 2022.  Was missing from the messages included in the packet for the April 12, 2022 meeting.
Pam-Mendolsohn-letter-2-22-2022

 

Letter from Danelle Merz, clearly addressed to the Planning Commission.  Dated May 15, 2022.
Danelle-Merz-Gateway-5-15-2022-A

 

Letter from Jane Woodward, clearly addressed to the Planning Commission.  Dated June 9, 2022. Was submitted on the Thursday prior to the June 14th meeting.  According to the announcement at the May 24th meeting, should have been included in the packet but was omitted.
Jane-Woodard-2022-06-09--TO-PlanCo-and-Council-June-9-2022-R1

 

Letter from Fred Weis, clearly addressed to the Planning Commission.  Dated June 9, 2022. Omitted from the Planning Commission packet.
2022-06-09-Plan-misrepsentations-K-L-St-Couplet

 

Letter from Fred Weis, clearly addressed to the Planning Commission.  Dated June 9, 2022. Omitted from the Planning Commission packet.
2022-06-09-Planwest-schedule-Form-Based-code-development