Recap of the Domino Sugar Rezoning Public Hearing: Part 1, CPC folk

The hearing began with one of CPC’s land use lawyers giving a summary of CPC’s proposal. He just read straight from the Draft Scope of Work that had already been made available to the public, so it ended up being a dry and uninformative speech. To jog my memory, here are a couple of the key points they touched on: 2400 units at an average of 1,000 sf per unit and LPC is considering land marking the Refinery, which is a group of three buildings that CPC plans to convert to residential space. Next, the urban planners that are conducting a study of the area and preparing the EIS gave a speech that summarized some more stuff on the Draft Scope of Work…more dry uninformative talk. They stressed that the project would be compared at each point with “the future without the project”—the #1 alternative and basis of comparison. Their research seemed pretty extensive, even going as far as to view the site from various bridges, but overall seemed lacking. I kept wondering how they were able to look at the impact without a final design. Their proposal doesn’t explain specific uses, occupancies, or siting of buildings. I know that the impact statement studies the effects of the rezoning, but in this case the rezoning and the proposal are pretty much synonymous. All we know is their general framework, so how can a comprehensive study and EIS really be crafted?


I also found it funny that when he listed all the alternatives he skimmed heavily. He mentioned the “future without the project” and M3-1 as-of-right alternatives (= new manufacturing at site in new structure or existing structure), but that’s it. The point of alternatives is: 1) to find out the good/bad about a project by comparing it to logical alternatives and 2) to try to find an even better plan—find an aspects of alternatives that can be replace or be augmented to the existing proposal. While the alternatives that the planner mentioned might accomplish the first objective, they don’t even make an attempt at the second objective. Peter and I mentioned two alternatives that accomplish both these things—one that did not require special permits to alter FAR/building height/ base height regulations and the other that provided more affordable housing (as stipulated in the community board’s response to the city’s rezoning.) CPC had another alternative in their Draft Scope that the planner didn’t even mention! This other alternative is down-zoning non-CPC-owned surrounding property from M3-1 to a mixed use, as-of-right M1-4/R6A and M1-4/R6B. This awful alternative accomplishes nothing. It adds no valuable information to the study—it just is a realtor’s speculation on how more money could be gained and more people could be displaced from the surrounding area. Maybe if they owned it then it could be a rough concept on the way to building affordable housing, but they don’t even own it! For obvious reasons, the urban planner did not mention this alternative. This curious omission shows that he knows that it provides nothing to the study—he knows it’s unjustifiable and its mention will make some supporters hesitate, so he just mumbled over it.