An astounding 150+ comments have been received by the Planning Department regarding the CityView dormitory apartment complex. The initial comment period closed on May 8th, so the staff could begin preparing its various reports on the application. The planning director has also asked the Planning Commission to consider the application at a public meeting (not a hearing), yet to be scheduled. Public comments will continue to be accepted up to and including the time of the Planning Commission’s public meeting. After the public meeting further comments are likely to end, allowing the planners to make a final decision.
Currently, comments can be viewed on the Comment Tracker, a portion of which can be viewed left. (The full tracker file is at the link at the bottom of this article.) There is also a separate web page on the city’s website, the CityView comment page, that has links to about two dozen of the comments containing attachments, such as photos, graphs, or other material. These have been separated because, unfortunately, the Comment Tracker (an Excel spread sheet - again whose detail is at left) is unable to display those attachments. Compounding the problem, the Comment Tracker itself is difficult to read for several reasons: the font is very small; the formatting on all comments has been stripped, creating paragraphs that are huge, dense blocks of text; numbering, bullet points, bolding, and other features that aid understanding are gone; and as the cells fill with text, comments are cut off in mid-sentence.
As this behemoth of a project lumbers forward, a sister project involving an additional 300 apartment units nearby at the corner of Elwood and Lincoln, called Elwood Edge, is coming out of the fog of development. This two-parcel complex of apartments and commercial storage is not (yet) clearly a student dormitory as is CityView, however, the cumulative effects are enormous, i.e., 600 tenants. (Elwood Edge + CityView = 600)
You can still send comments on CityView to the Planning Department at cityview@cob.org. Elwood Edge is not yet to the point of comment submission.
