After Domino, Council Seeks To Curb City Development Process
Last week’s news, but I completely missed it:
Council Members Steve Levin, Gale Brewer and Oliver Koppell introduced legislation that would make the preapproval process for development more comprehensive and, theoretically, slower. The bill would require city agencies to provide the Council and community boards with details on the projects’ potential environmental impacts and plans to mitigate them before a development could be approved by Council.
Adding time to the approval process is not a good idea – Domino, for instance, spent years (literally) going through City Planning’s pre-approval process. The problem is that, despite all of the time Domino spent meeting with “the community” (including the community board), at the end of the day, the community gets about 30 days to digest an Environmental Impact Statement that is a few thousand pages long (or at least feels that way).
When that EIS gets dumped in our lap, there are invariably surprises (“Gee, we’re hurting for open space as it is, and now our open space ratio is dropping 6%...”), and it would be nice to have that information sooner in the process so that it can be properly mitigated (“Why not add open here?”).
Having been on the pro side of a lot of development projects, adding time to the approval process is not a good thing.
