South San Francisco, CA February 12, 2016 by Sailesh Mehra, SSF Planning Manager
PREFACE: Last November Everything South City pulled together some of the major projects coming into our City along with some new businesses that are now calling South San Francisco home. We reached out to the City asking for a clearer update and appreciate this latest complication of developments we are seeing, or will be seeing soon. Thank you to Jaime Gonzalez for the share. We will update this information as best we can as time moves forward. Click on each item below for larger view.
For immediate information please contact SSF Building Department at 650/829-6670 during regular business hours.
Projects in Pre-Construction Planning
In addition to the projects listed below, there are several projects (e.g., Sares Regis, Rotary) that do not yet have an approved development agreement or permits. Staff plans to update City Council on these projects separately.
Downtown Construction Coordination
In order to plan ahead for the impending construction activity in Downtown, staff has formed a Downtown Management and Construction Coordination Team (DMCCT). The DMCCT is intended learn from the experiences of Downtown Redwood City, Palo Alto, and other cities – and to adopt best practices in order to reduce disruption as much as possible. The DMCCT will play a crucial role in planning for all construction projects to take place within our downtown. This will include:
- Coordinating staging areas for delivery of construction equipment/materials;
- Street closures;
- Ensuring that construction sites (and adjacent street and sidewalk areas) are properly maintained and kept in an attractive condition;
- Making sure there is appropriate communication and coordination with the Downtown merchants and residents;
- Engaging with the project managers of all the projects to anticipate major milestones during the construction process and other logistics such as construction worker parking and hours of construction; and
- Providing support/guidance in planning for downtown special
Lastly, staff will require all projects have a kick-off pre-construction meeting. The goal of this meeting will include various staff, the applicant, general contractor, subcontractors, architect and other key personal. This will be the ideal opportunity to review conditions of approval attached to the project, pinpoint key milestones during construction, and identify the point-persons during the various stages of the construction process.
All these projects sound really nice, but NO WHERE did I see anything or any project regarding the traffic infrastructure. All these new residents and all these new businesses are going to create a lot of traffic. Maybe no one cares about the traffic or maybe they just forgot. What about parking for all these new living units? Sure, each unit gets one and possible two parking places. What about the family that has 3 or 4 cars? Where are all these extra cars going to park. Correct! In front of your house and my house. Oh, they can’t park in front of my house because most of the neighbors have 3, 4 or more cars, some of which never seem to move, and they already park their cars in front of my house.
Well, there is certainly an opportunity for the City to drop the ball and make life in South City lower quality at higher cost.
All this “co-ordination effort” is surely not coming from the pockets of developers (meaning the future tenants), it will be paid-for by those of us who have made this a community over the past decades. I’m hopeful that City officials recognize early on that their responsibilities to their resident-peers is subject to minute examination when things start going badly.