15 ATTACHMENT 9 - Laserfiche WebLink

Sarich are here; they bought this property in the year 2000. They have been working continuously since that time to get a project to the point where we could be up here in front of the Planning Commission, talking about this project. The two speakers that are going to follow me are Tom Pico, and he's going to address the key issue of the site location and why this location was shown, and that involves answering issues related to the Specific Plan and the staff report. And then we have the architect, John McInnis, who is right here. There probably are not many homes in Pleasanton that architecture students might come back and study 50 years from now, but we think we have that quality of design and architecture. I've been working with John for several years now, and I know he is a good listener; he is used to Planning Commission workshops, and he's ready to talk about the project but also ready to listen to the Planning Commissioners. So, with that, I'll keep my part of this short, and let Tom Pico be our speaker. Mr. Pico: I wanted to thank you for letting us have this workshop here tonight, and especially~I wanted to thank the three Commissioners that came up to the property: Anne, Jennifer, and Phil. I appreciate you taking time to come out and extend an invitation to Trish and to Brian, and also to Mary and anyone else to come out between now and over the ~ ' `. weekend, because the property will still be staked. I think it helps to see it, and actually to walk it, to understand. I'd like to talk for just a few.niinutes about the Vineyard Corridor Specific Plan Area; and as you are aware, I was among many architects that helped to come up with this plan; and it was a real compromise. The landowners started with 770 homes, and when Becky Dennis and I first met with them, we were talking 75 to' a hundred: Over the years,+vve . came up with 189 or 181, and a real compromise, a plan that will create avineyard = ~ ~ ~' ~ . corridor that will be a gateway into the vineyard areas, oneahat we thought needed some real special attention. I want to say that I'm not going to spend any real time talking about the original staff report that you have that went through and addressed a lot of issues that the 3ariches and I and the rest of the team feel had a lot of responses to it, and we do not necessarily feel that it was as even-handed as perhaps as it could have been. And we feel very thankful that we have had the opportunity to talk to staff about those issues and concerns, to modify the proposal, and to take some of staff and also yourselves out there to visit this. I want to tell you without equivocation that the plan was designed to provide flexibility through the PUD process. And some of the comments about those things in the first staff report, such as the need to do an amendment to the Specific Plan if we want to move that little dot over a little bit, was not the intent. The intent was for this process to be flexible. We included language such as "the site development standards may vary." The guidelines are intended to be flexible. Minor variations may be permitted to the residential development standards, and the hillside residential must be located within the designated development areas as generally depicted on the land use map. And I think your staff addressed this issue pretty adequately earlier. The little round dot on the map 4