Recent Update via Email:

Hi Everyone,

Recently, we sent you the guidelines we hope will be adopted for the draft Ordinance for ED 1. 

Our goal is to get guidelines into the Ordinance that will protect our communities from some of the more outrageous projects seeking ED 1 approval.

Last Friday we had another meeting with the mayor’s office regarding these guidelines.  This week the Planning Department and the mayor’s office are meeting to finalize the draft ordinance which will then go to the PLUM committee of the City Council. PLUM will probably see this draft by mid March.

We are currently reaching out to PLUM committee staff members to discuss our guidelines.  We want to emphasize that we want all ED 1 projects that have merit to have this easy approval process so they can be successful but we want the more problematic projects to go through regular discretionary approval. 

Depending on what gets presented to and approved by the PLUM committee, we might need all of you to send letters to your council members requesting their support on any guidelines that might not have been approved by PLUM.  If you remember the success of our letter writing campaign to the mayor, we will again send all of you a “click and send” letter that will be available to send to both your councilmember and the mayor. If we work collaboratively and get a lot of letters sent out, we could be successful again.

One further update:

Several members of our Westside coalition worked collaboratively to get a bill introduced in the State Senate, SB 834, that will prevent developers who use the minimum parking criteria of SB 2097 from being able to get preferential parking passes for their tenants. 

Big congratulations and thank you to Sheida Ashley, Barbara Broide, Barbara Gallen for crafting this bill, getting support and approaching Senator Portintino to carry it.  We all need to get behind this bill as it goes through the legislature. We will send out instructions again on how to get your organization’s letter of support  posted on the Legislative portal.   

Thank you all,

Best,

Maria