That Public Meeting Was Reassuring & Not Reassuring

The Brockway Collective development team held a public meeting on October 22nd to offer some insights to what they want for their project. We give them kudos for making this effort, as it is not something that they are required to do. According to the town of Truckee, no more than five official public meetings can be held about the project during the planning process. This meeting was a good opportunity for the developers to better assess what sort of opposition they were facing. Hopefully they learned something.

Looking at the setup for the meeting, held in a small portion of The Lift co-working space, they were expecting a much smaller crowd. Up until this meeting, most of their interaction had been with town of Truckee staff, Sierra Meadows HOA Board President Jon Harsch and a few other involved residents. When I sat sat down, I counted roughly 60 attendees and a hurried effort to gather as many extra chairs as possible from other areas of the building. Ultimately, the attendance was probably closer to 70 or more people.

Thinking back to the early days of opposition to the the much larger village expansion project in Olympic Valley, it was huge to see a couple of dozen people show up. It’s reassuring to see such a large turnout from the public for this meeting. We hope that more people continue to get involved as we stand to protect Sierra Meadows, and the Truckee community as a whole.

A Typical Dog & Pony Show

No, I am not calling either one of the developers a dog or a pony, The term “dog and pony show” is a colloquialism that refers to a polished presentation that has a goal of drawing a positive response from the audience. The presenters were prepared. They had a slide deck with about 16 cards projected onto a screen. They had note cards and had obviously practiced the presentation. At this stage of the game, it was a one way conversation, with the presenters just telling one side of the story.

That said, they were not prepared for a large crowd and/or did not have all that much experience in such things. The slide deck had a lot of 14 point type that was probably difficult to read even in the front row. There was not enough contrast between the type and the background to pick out anything but the largest headline. The projector was set up too close to a not very big screen, so the image was pretty small. Again, it felt like they were planning on speaking to a dozen people at a table talk rather than an overflowing crowd in the meeting room.

Making matters worse, while talking about items on the screen, the presenters generally just waved around an invisible cursor on the screen using the computer trackpad. Pointing directly at the items on the screen or using the ubiquitous laser pointer would have made things much more clear. No microphones or other amplification were present so the sound was muffled. Again, they had prepped for a much smaller crowd.

When these issues were noted by the audience, the presenters offered to make the slide deck available to anybody that wanted it. We could have requested that and included it here but we are not. Those of us in the audience that have been involved with the progression of this project noted that the initial presentation seemed to contain a significant amount of misinformation and half truths. We would rather not distribute that for the developer.

If you want deeper details about the project, we encourage you to go to the town of Truckee’s Brockway Collective project page.

Things Took A Turn During The Public Comment Period

Noting the large crowd in the room, the developers asked that people keep their questions or comments to about 30 seconds. That’s barely enough time to get your brain in gear and spit out a sentence for most people. Sierra Meadows HOA Board President Jon Harsch immediately challenged that idea, having prepared something significantly longer. That opener would have been important because a strong opener comment gives the rest of the crowd permission to speak their minds as well. The developers responded by telling Mr. Harsch he could maybe have more time, but only if he spoke after everyone else had spoken. Ouch.

The developers were not as good at fielding people’s commentary. Most questions were ignored or deflected by shifting the blame to the town of Truckee or the state of California policies. As with all developers, there was a strong sense of entitlement. They are planning on building the most they can squeeze onto the property. They often used the trope of “it’s the only way to make this project pencil out”. I want to high five the person that pointed out that were a number of other properties in the area that could be developed to this extent without the issues of evacuation, general traffic, impacts to Shorepine Road neighbors, sensitive wetlands, etc.

Things really took a turn when one person asked about the recently published HAA letter and routing comments from the town of Truckee and other agencies. Those documents note roughly 50 to 80 different issues with project as proposed. That comment seemed to flip a switch in the developers. They immediately were very defensive, explaining that the town had misunderstood their proposal. Once the developer fixed that issue, the density bonus laws would make just about all of those issues go away.

From that point on, the attitude presented by the developers was that they could do just about whatever they want because of the density bonus laws. Ouch.

Major Takeaways

• These developers are no different than any other developer. They want to maximize the profit they can derive from their land purchase. They will make a cursory attempt at gaining public support for the project, but when push comes to shove, they will shove.

• The developers have stated on several occasions that if this project was not going to meet their financial goals, some other developer would come along. They suggested the next developer would push for a maximum of about 200 units that could be built by state calculations. Two things to note, this property had been for sale for quite some time and other developers passed when faced with the numerous problems with this particular Sierra meadow. Opposition to this project has developed rapidly and on a large scale. Any other developer will meet the same, if not more resistance.

• The developers stated several times at this meeting that they would be pushing for more than the currently 17 deed restricted workforce housing units with the town of Truckee. Superficially, that sounds great. But we have to be careful what we ask for, as increasing the percentage of deed restricted units in the development could also unlock additional density bonus enticements such as decreased environmental reviews, bypasses of planning codes or an even greater number of units.

• It’s unfortunate that more of us weren’t paying attention during the Truckee 2040 general plan meetings. I think we all assumed that the parcel was a wetland and somebody would come along and protect them as they did at the other end of Brockway Road. We missed that moment and unfortunately, the town cannot go back and retroactively change that zoning.

• This is the part that was not reassuring, seeing that the developers don’t have all that much interest in being good neighbors to the Sierra Meadows community.

It was requested that the developer continue to hold more meetings to keep us informed. The HOA offered to host such a meeting. The question is what would the developers say? Will they have made adjustments based on the town’s and public commentary? Or will they just inform us about what they can get away with because of density bonus laws?

We keep asking for people to add their own comments to our blog posts. People don’t, worried that somehow they will get in trouble or that someone will disagree. It’s okay. Please share your reflections on the meeting.