3/1/2006 City Planning Meeting #5
This is a summary email Amandeep Jawa sent to the Better Valencia email list after the 5th City Planning Meeting in March 2006:
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Hi everyone -
Thanks to everyone who carved out time from their lives to come to Wednesday’s City-sponsored Community Meeting about Valencia. After talking to various Better Valencia Project folks who were there the consensus is that the meeting was very useful as a starting point and suggests that the City has a good schedule for moving forward. Obviously, this is very good news! It was clear that while they are perhaps still developing a process for community input on streetscape planning, the City staff was engaged, motivated, and excited and had put a lot of thought and effort into the meeting.
SUMMARY: The City has set up a timetable for a series of community meetings - one every 5 weeks, starting now that will produce a community plan for the Valencia streetscape. The city staff then gave a visual presentation on various possibilities of streestcaping and sidewalk design. The meeting then broke into four tables each of which worked with various street layout elements on representative street cross- sections. The elements used were sidewalk cross-sections of various widths, bike lanes, parking lanes, etc. This excercise seemed most useful for getting the participants from the community comfortable with the trade-offs and possibilities. After this exercise each of the tables presented broad brushtroke points that they agreed upon. Of all of the points made most teams chose fairly significant sidewalk widening and an understanding of considerations needed for parking and delivery issues.
DETAILS: The meeting opened with remarks from Manito Velasco, the MTA project manager explaining the process so far breifly and introducing Marshall Foster, the Mayor’s “greening czar”.
Marshall explained the overview of the project and the timeline and goals. Marshall breifly explained the resurfacing money involved, the Mayor’s greening funds available, and the Octavia Blvd. ancillary funds available. The meeting process will be as follows to achieve an official community approved plan by June 2006: March 1: Workshop 1: Creating a Vision for Valencia St March 25: Informational Walking Tour: Follow up on 3/1 Workshop April 12: Workshop 2: Interactive design May 24: Workshop 3: Final Collaborative Design Concept
After Marshall, Jessica Perez of the DPW landscape architecture staff gave a slideshow presentation showing Valencia as it currently used and giving very useful pictorial examples of various possible design elements, especially various sidewalks widths and possibilities for cafe seating. Additionally, elements such as street lighting and street trees were also featured.
At this point, the meeting was split up into four design teams facilitated by city-staffers. The first part of the exercise was simply to write various descriptive terms about Valencia’s blocks and various types of usage on a large block-by-block photographic map of Valencia. Then the teams were given a cross-sectional view of a typical mid-block of Valencia and was given cut-out elements such as a 10ft sidewalk, a 2ft sidewalk extension, a 4 & 6 ft extension, 9 ft parking lane, 10 ft street lane, and a few others. Each team was to lay the elements out on the cross-section and to come up with a plan for the average midblock. Then the teams did the same exercise for a cross-section of Valencia at the corner as opposed to mid-block. These exercises were very useful to get the participants aware of the various tradeoffs and opportunities involved in laying out the street. They were not very useful for actually presenting options for a real block design mostly because each block would probably have different needs. Additionally our group didn’t often come to a consensus before we ran out of time, though other groups seemed to have fared better.
The final phase of the meeting was brief presentations from each design table with a listing of various items of consensus from each group.