Which Way, Covina? III

Which Way, Covina? =

Part III

Many in the audience at Covina’s July 5 council meeting came specifically to speak on the Civic Park/Niemann-Polis item and several people turned in speaker cards.

Those monitoring the ascendance of Covina’s cont= roversial Town Center Specific Plan will remember that Olsen Company’s Heritage Walk was the first project approved under its terms. The Heritage Walk site is immediate= ly west of the new MetroLink parking structure at Third= & Geneva. The recent approval required rezoning of 4.4 prime light manufacturing acres, notwithstanding t= he loss of its sales tax revenue potential.&n= bsp; It will be completely residential.&= nbsp; The renderings are, I must confess, charming. Heritage Walk will = be 90 units, in 12 three-story buildings, weighing in at about 21 homes per acre. This approaches Covina’s cur= rent maximum zoning for high density res= idential.

Niemann Properties & Polis Builders (NPPB) have now offered to plop 20,000 square feet (about &fr= ac12; acre) of new retail space under some of their newly proposed 125 condo-hous= ing units. These will be three-story home-overs on about 5.6 acres, right downtown. I have = not yet seen any publicly presented renderings.

As presented in the staff report, the PNB proposal will occupy the city’s Civic Park, displace and demolish most businesses on the block immediately south of the park, and le= vel three private homes. There isn’t any zoning in Covina’s code for that= type of mixed-use development, but if evenly distributed on the 5.6 acres propos= ed, the residential density by itself would be about 23 homes per acre, surpassing Covina’s maximum zoning for residential density.

The sketches show a much smaller ‘replacement= 217; park occupying only part of the business demolition block.

Their proposal also offers to replace the city library reading room with a technology center, in the same potentially hazardous st= ructure that houses the library today. Too, it sacrifices most of the City Hall parking lot, yielding 10 residential units there. That ought to improve attendance at Council Meetings.

Another not-new PNB idea is to move downtown Citrus Avenue’s traditional diagonal parking over to Second Avenue instead, = and park that part of Citrus parallel. <= /span>Why does that sound familiar? Bec= ause it’s been tried here before: 40 years ago in the mid ‘60&#= 8217;s when traffic was much lighter. It was not popular. Even as a on= e-way, northbound-only road, it was too tight.&nb= sp; People don’t like to parallel park = and traffic stops up behind those who don’t do it well. Downtown businesses suffered and protested and that’s why it’s diagon= al now, again.

When Redevelopment Agency Chair Delach convened the Ju= ly 5 Covina Redevelopment Agency (CRA) meeting, she quickly postponed the PNB/Civic Park agenda item and continued it to the next CRA meeting in two weeks, without observing the required open comment period for Oral Communications.

I brought this omission to = the City Clerk’s attention. She notified the city attorney, who then notified Delach of that legal requirem= ent under the Brown Act. While Delach e= vidently acknowledged this, and at that point the CRA mee= ting was still open, she still proceeded to adjourn the CRA meeting without mentioni= ng her gaff.

Swapping for her mayor’s hat, Delach returned to= the Council Agenda immediately, and she withheld the CRA Oral Communications pe= riod until after the Council had heard the entire Council agenda. By that time, much of the audience= had left. Only then did Mayor Del= ach re-convene the CRA to revisit the missed Oral Communications period.

This effectively prevented most speakers from being he= ard during the proper time frame, at the beginning o= f each public meeting. Only one spea= ker got to comment and only because I, having been the o= ne to call attention to the procedural error, had amended my own speaker’s = card to reflect ‘Oral Communications’ rather than the postponed CRA agenda item number. Though ot= her speakers spoke up and asked to be heard before t= he CRA meeting was re-adjourned, Agency Chair Delach refused to allow them to speak because their cards were annotated improperly, and proceeded to adjourn the= CRA meeting.

Weird city politics notwithstanding, there’s a fine new social scene beginning to emerge in this part of town surrounding the preservation movement. Wh= at locals need most is a good grocery, some nightli= fe, and some reliable local restoration contractors. We don’t= need to redesign and rebuild downtown Covina to create a vibrant, walkable city that people want to live in. We already have one, so why not in= vest in making it a trendy and hip historic neighborhood, chock full of shops and services?

Please plan to attend City Council on July 19th at 7:30pm to listen and be heard.

Pat Duff

Covina, CA

(626) 331-4666

= ;

duff@electduff.org=