Thadeus Greenson/The Times-Standard
Article Launched: 05/03/2008 01:21:16 AM PDT
When Security National entered into the process of getting a draft Environmental Impact Report done with the City of Eureka for its Marina Center Project, word was the process would take about six months.
Two years later, the public hasn’t seen hide nor hair of the draft EIR, but Security National Senior Vice President Brian Morrissey said things could be a lot worse.
”Certainly we would have preferred to have the EIR sooner, but I think it is much more important to have a complete document where the public can see both the positives and the negatives, if there are any, of the Marina Center project,” Morrissey said.
Eureka Senior Planner Sidnie Olson said this week she’s still working on the document with the hopes of getting it out in the coming months. Admitting she never thought the process could be completed in six months, Olson said several things have slowed the process to a crawl, causing it to take far longer than she, or almost anyone else, thought it would.
”At the very beginning of this, the traffic consultant doing the traffic study didn’t really consult well with the city or Caltrans about what we expected from a traffic study,” Olson said, adding that resulted in a study containing inaccurate numbers, incorrect street names and a host of other errors. “The first chunk of time was just getting the traffic study to be accurate.”
Then, the city had to deal with proposed mitigation measures for the
traffic study, which Olson said was no easy task.
”They’re huge — they are millions of dollars of traffic improvements,” Olson said, adding that the city and Caltrans don’t always see eye to eye on what the best mitigation measures would be, as Caltrans’ focus is on getting cars through town and the city is similarly concerned with people getting around town.
Then, Olson said, the environmental report had to be revised several times before being melded into the larger draft, which apparently had its own set of problems.
Olson said that while, under the California Environmental Quality Act, anybody can write a draft EIR, it’s not an EIR until the city signs off on it.
”The draft we received from the consultant was not up to par,” Olson said. “When we got the draft EIR from the consultant, we were disappointed in it.”
This came as a surprise, Olson said, as the consultant has worked with the city before and generally produced solid work. Olson said she expected to receive the draft, give it a quick peer review and make some minor changes before putting it out, but has instead ended up re-writing “huge chunks” of the document.
”Had it been an adequate document, it would have been on the streets months ago,” she said.
The delays come without a price tag. Morrissey said Security National is paying more than $1 million for the process of creating the document, a cost that goes up slightly with each delay. But Morrissey was quick to add that there are more important things than slight cost increases.
”It does go up a little bit over time, but the incremental costs because of delays are far less important than getting the right, fully accurate and complete document out to the public,” he said.
Olson said the city is focused on working toward that goal, and hopes the document will be off her desk in the coming months.
”We’re going to get it done as soon as we possibly can,” she said.
While that can’t come soon enough for Morrissey, he said he never had any illusions that this would be a quick process.
”We knew when we started this project that it would be a long, involved public process where the city and all the various stake holders would have input,” he said. “We certainly look forward to (the draft EIR) coming out, and continuing the dialogue in the community about all aspects of the project.”
Thadeus Greenson can be reached at 441-0509 or tgreenson@times-standard.com
