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The Draft Elements will be prepared and submitted to the City for review and comment. Upon revision, the Draft Elements will be forwarded to the Committee for review and comment. For budgeting purposes, we assume two rounds of comments (staff and Committee) for the Draft Elements review. When the elements are revised to address comments, they will then be compiled into a single document that comprises the Draft General Plan. Products: . Preliminary Draft Elements - one camera-ready and one electronic file · Draft General Plan - one camera-ready and one electronic file . Draft and Final Technical Memorandum on Traffic Forecasts and Results, for review by City staff and the consultant team. This document will be the primary source of technical information for the General Plan EIR transportation Chapter. Task 8. Environmental Review A typical planning process involves the review of background conditions to define opportunities and constraints for development, the articulation of goals or guiding principles for future development, the development and evaluation of altemative land use and circulation concepts, and the selection of a preferred plan. Following the formulation of the plan, the CEQA process is initiated. CirclePoint, the lead environmental consulting firm, Hogle-Ireland, and the other team members embrace the practice of integrating the two processes, rather than proceeding inalinear sequential fashion. The very purpose of CEQA is to identify potential impacts and to identify alternative ways of accomplishing the project's objectives while minimizing those impacts. Thus, the ideal process calls for an early identification of potential impacts and the use of that knowledge to shape and inform the plan, as the plan is being formulated. A number of the Plan elements have already been drafted by staff; policies within these drafts can be reviewed for potential impacts and mitigation measures. The end product will be a General Plan that has been developed with an environmental consciousness and one that can mitigate through policies and implementation . strategies most potential impacts that would have .otherwise occurred. The environmental document, in turn, need merely point to those same policies and implementation strategies to explain why the General Plan is not expected to result in significant effects. The integration of CEQA and the planning process yields not only an improved plan, but a more efficient CEQA process. Telling the Environmental Story Section 15063(a) of the CEQA Guidelines allows a lead agency to omit preparation of an Initial Study if the lead agency can determine that an EIR will"clearly be required." As the plans and policies of the New General Plan are likely to have significant environmental impacts,including some impl:lCts that are unavoidl:lble, it is reasonable to skip the procedural step of the Initial Study and move directly to preparation of the EIR. At the outset, CirclePoint anticipates that the key impacts evaluated in the EIR will stem from changes to the General Plan land use map -land use changes that will result in changes to the City's population, housing bl:lse, number of jobs, and number of car trips. CirclePoint understands that City planning staff's intention is for the General Plan to be highly self-mitigating, with policies that are intended to avoid, minimize, and/draddressany potential environmental impacts. The General Plan Vision and Guiding PrinciplescaU for a future of living within resources, focusing future growth and change within already developed urban areas, creating SCOPE OF SERVICES Redwood City General Plan January 11, 2008 Page 27