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February 11, 2019 Mayor and City Council City of Redwood City 1017 Middlefield Road Redwood City, CA 94063 council a redwoodciYyore Re: Agenda Item 7.C: Public Hearing on the Draft Environmental Impact Report for the Harbor View Project, February 11, 2019 Dear Mayor Bain and Council Members, Redwood City Neighbors United is a local advocacy group that has been involved in a number of Redwood City planning issues since 2011, and we are writing on behalf of our membership. We are in the process of reviewing the Harbor View Project Draft Environmental Impact Report (DEIR). To date, we believe that we have identified a number of inconsistencies and analytical flaws in the report that clearly underestimate potential negative environmental impacts for a number of categories, a few of which we will summarize below. We do plan to detail these issues more fully in a more comprehensive letter to the City by the March 8 review deadline, but it is clear that the "significant and unavoidable" environmental impacts identified in the DEIR already, along with other serious project -related impacts on Redwood City, would make the Council "statement of overriding considerations", which would be required under CEQA, indefensible. Therefore, we urge the City Council to reconsider moving forward with the Jay Paul Company request to amend the Redwood City General Plan for the proposed Harbor View Project. Although we understand that the Council will make no decisions at tonight's meeting, we hope that you will direct staff to work with the developer to withdraw the current proposal and to return with one that develops the site under current General Plan and Zoning regulations. The DEIR Misrepresents the Project's Impact on Jobs/Housing Imbalance Since the General Plan was adopted in 2010, Redwood City's employment and population growth has radically outpaced General Plan projections, while housing growth has merely met projections (ABAG data from 2016). As everyone knows, the Peninsula is experiencing a housing crisis, and the rapid rise in rents and home prices, with the subsequent displacement of Redwood City families, has been severely exacerbated by rapid commercial growth, largely within the tech sector, resulting in an increase in the jobs -housing imbalance. The DEIR does not consider current and proposed housing demand in it's Redwood City Neighbors United, P.O. Box 416, Redwood City, CA • infoa renu.org