36 homes OK’d for parcel across from Casa Grande High, near Adobe Creek

A single-family home development across from Casa Grande High School collected enough approvals from City Council to move forward this week, despite objections over its location within the 100-year floodplain and concerns over parking allotments.

The 5-2 vote Monday night, with Mayor Teresa Barrett and Vice Mayor D’Lynda Fischer opposing, propels the site plans toward its final stages. Now all that’s left for the 36-unit project is a final trip to the Planning Commission, where it will receive input on architectural and design elements.

The single-family project proposal on the southeast side of town is headed by the firm Steven J Lafranchi & Associates Inc. The Petaluma-based business has its hands in more than a dozen local projects, including Brody Ranch off Corona Road and the recently-approved midtown Riverbend project along Madison Street.

Plans call for two-story homes and roughly a dozen 300-square-foot granny units, along with a new public street that will connect Casa Grande Road with Del Rancho Way. Five of the units will be affordable, as required under the city’s inclusionary housing ordinance.

According to Senior Planner Aaron Hollister, 2.8 of the site’s 4.5 acres are within the floodplain boundary skirting Adobe Creek, which cuts through the rear of the property.

Recent development proposals in different corners of Petaluma, especially those near the Petaluma River, have increasingly raised alarm bells with residents and environmental activists who consistently argue that the city builds too close to its rivers and tributaries. Floodplain development in particular has become a leading hot-button issue in recent years, which city staff recognized in their Monday night presentation.

Hollister said moving housing units outside of the floodplain area, which occupies a significant swath of the entire parcel, would likely result in a multi-story cluster of homes – exactly what some neighbors in the area have told city staff that they do not want to see.

“In recognition of the single family housing in the area and the comments we’ve received, we are recommending the single-family subdivision would be fine in this location within the floodplain,” he told council Monday. “This is largely to keep with the same built environment in the project area right now.”

To meet current city standards, the first floors of homes within the floodplain boundary must be raised by at least a foot above the base flood elevation levels. Additionally, a bioretention basin measuring 4,000 square feet in surface area will be constructed along the eastern portion of the land, about 50 feet from the Adobe Creek bank.

The two residents who dialed in to the virtual meeting’s public commenting section, which opened more than five hours into the council meeting, raised concerns over flooding and parking availability along the neighboring residential streets.

One resident who lives next to the property, identifying herself as Sara G, implored the council to not whittle down the project’s allotment of two spaces per household, as planning commissioners suggested late October.

“I am worried about the impact in the existing Del Oro neighborhood in terms of overflow parking,” she said, speaking as the clock turned past midnight. “If you drove through this neighborhood on any given day, you’d see there’s already a considerable number of residents with extra work vehicles, vehicles of older children living at home and of visitors, to see how much people on this side of town still use vehicles.”

Council ultimately heeded these concerns and approved the project with two-car garages per unit, but not without strong pushback from Vice Mayor D’Lynda Fischer, who issued the most searing rebuke of the entire proposal.

Shortly before voting against the development alongside the mayor, Fischer zeroed in on its location within the 100-year floodplain and on the metric “VMT” that measures the amount of car travel and traffic congestion it would create.

“I won’t be supporting this project because it is exactly the opposite of what we need to be developing and what we need to be doing in order to meet our climate goals,” Fischer said at the Monday night meeting. “It flies in the face of our climate emergency ordinance. Building in the floodplain and creating two car garages? If you look at our VMT analysis and what the state says they don’t want us to do, it’s this sort of project.”

(Contact Kathryn Palmer at kathryn.palmer@arguscourier.com, on Twitter @KathrynPlmr.)