The agenda for the July 22 Traffic & Safety Commission meeting has been posted on the city website.  Also available is the staff report on the city’s Safeway Store major projects page (attachements referenced in the staff report are on the major projects page).

For vehicle circulation, Safeway proposes three options:

Option A:  Vehicle access for the underground parking garage well down Curtis and Neilson and across from residences (as per previous designs), no Solano access.  Truck access would be via a loading dock high up on Neilson.

Option B:  Vehicle access well down Curtis and Neilson, no Solano access.  Truck access would be via a loading dock located on Solano Ave.

Option B-1:  Truck access via a loading dock located on Solano.  There would also be a vehicle access ramp on Solano adjacent to the loading dock, however there would still be vehicle access on Curtis and Neilson and these access points would be south of the existing parking lot access cuts.

Unfortunately the city engineer has thrown his support behind proposal A, which makes it all the more important that we emphasize how detrimental this proposal is to the neighborhood.  Even option B-1 could use some improvement — the driveways on Curtis/Neilson need to either be removed, or moved north (towards Solano) to their existing locations.

There are two important meetings coming up, both of which will be held at City Hall.  The first is a hearing of the Traffic and Safety Commission on Thursday, July 22 at 7 p.m.  At the time of this post an agenda is not available on the City website, but we know the Safeway project will be discussed.  The purpose of this session is to “review auto and truck circulation plans” associated with the Safeway application.  To provide feedback, send an email to Aleida Andrino-Chavez at achavez@albanyca.org, copy Jeff Bond at jbond@albanyca.org.  As a reminder, please keep your emails on topic (i.e., the Traffic Commission should consider that primary access is being switched to a residential street and that the larger store will push major streets like Solano and Marin past capacity, but they don’t care that the building is annoyingly tall).

Second, the Planning and Zoning Commission will have Safeway on its agenda at its Tuesday, July 27 meeting at 7:30 p.m.

Thanks to all who came out on June 3 to voice their concerns on this project.  A link to the video stream from the meeting can be found here.  I hope to have commentary on the meeting up in the next couple days.

The Planning and Zoning Commission will hold a special study on Thursday, June 3 at 7:00 p.m. to specifically to discuss the Safeway proposal.  My sense is that this is one of the more important early stage meetings, where public comment still has the possibility of influencing the actual design.

The commission scheduled this session at their May 11 regularly scheduled meeting; you can see the discussion here at around the 3:30 mark.

I’ve been updated on the Planning & Zoning Commission meeting tomorrow evening, and the Safeway item is last on the agenda.  The primary purpose of the agenda item will be to allow the commission to determine whether they want to hold another special session to discuss Safeway’s application, or whether to hold further hearings at a normally scheduled meeting.  As always public comment is allowed, but Safeway representatives will likely not be present and the primary purpose of the agenda item isn’t to discuss the proposal.

If you do decide to attend, you may want to show up between 9:00 and 9:30 p.m.

The Planning and Zoning Commission will hold its regularly scheduled twice-monthly meeting this Tuesday, May 11 at 7 p.m. in the Albany City Council chambers.  The agenda indicates that the commission will hold a continuation of the April 27 study session on Safeway’s proposal (report prepared for that session here).  At this time I don’t have knowledge regarding whether there will be an opportunity for public comment at this session; this information should be available by Monday evening, at which time there will be an update.