Neighbors, developer wrestle over Curtis Park railyard project
July 26, 2009
By Jim Wasserman, Sacramento Bee Reporter
"We're roughly four to six weeks from the Planning Commission and five weeks from the City Council after that," said Sacramento Planning Director David Kwong.
The proposed Curtis Park Village development of nearly 500 residences and 256,000 square feet of retail and small office space sits directly east of Sacramento City College. While the Curtis Park railyard represents a major effort in its own right, it is small by comparison with the 240-acre downtown railyard, the biggest railyard redevelopment project in the United States.
The plan for downtown includes 10,000 or more residences, offices, cultural and entertainment venues on the spot where laborers once built trains for the transcontinental railroad.
Nineteen months after the Sacramento City Council approved that railyard project, steered by Georgia-based Thomas Enterprises, council members face a difficult sequel in Curtis Park Village.
Directly east of the proposed development sits Curtis Park, a well-established neighborhood of older homes where residents are on high alert to any change that could affect their quality of life. The neighborhood association has voiced various objections to developer Petrovich's plan.
To the west sits Land Park, another active, affluent neighborhood, but one that has been less vocal about the future of the Curtis Park railyard, from which it is separated by freight and light-rail lines.
In this project, as in downtown, much is at stake for how the city and region meet their goals to put more people into less space better served by public transit.
"This is a very large infill development," said Councilwoman Lauren Hammond, who represents the area. "If there isn't support for this size of infill development, that's going to be it for infill development. I don't see how anybody else can succeed."
Leaders of the 2,400-home Curtis Park neighborhood say they want the railyard developed. The battle, they say, is about how. Some in the neighborhood, home to attorneys, upper-level state employees and land-use planners, are fretting over a design concept they consider too suburban in character, too auto-oriented and with too much commercial space for a part of town built from 1890 to 1930.
Neighborhood leaders want the retail portion of the development trimmed to 125,000 square feet and focused on specialty retailers, not big national stores that draw in outside traffic. They also want housing above some of the stores.
"There's a lot of people that don't want chain stores," said Kathleen Ave, who chairs a neighborhood concerns committee for the Sierra Curtis Neighborhood Association.
Rosanna Herber, SCNA president, said, "We don't support the project as it's been submitted." She and her fellow activists asked the city to pull its environmental study and start over by analyzing alternatives to "trying to squeeze a suburban development between two traditional neighborhoods."
Petrovich, who bought the railyard in 2003 from Union Pacific and has spent $14 million so far cleaning up and hauling away its toxic legacy, said his critics have it wrong.
Curtis Park Village, he said, "would have the character of Curtis Park and Land Park – built to modern standards."
Petrovich said houses would be constructed from patterns that copy the neighborhood. He defended the lack of housing above stores, saying he tried that concept at his R Street Safeway development in midtown Sacramento, and it hasn't pulled in the rent to make it work economically.
The developer also defended the size of the retail space, saying it is needed to make the development pay for itself.
Earlier this month, the state awarded the project $9 million in Proposition 1C transit-oriented development funds to stimulate growth near transit stops. The site is near two South Line light-rail stops and many, including council member Hammond, are pushing for a pedestrian bridge connecting the site to the Sacramento City College rail station. It remains unclear, however, how that would be funded.
Petrovich, who said he developed $440 million in property in 2007 and 2008, is the force behind many Sacramento-area suburban shopping centers and urban infill projects. But he said Curtis Park Village is by far his biggest challenge. The 49-year-old former commercial real estate broker calls it "the opportunity to do something big. I want to do it right," he said. "This is going to be here long after me."
His plan envisions housing for about 1,200 people – a combination of 178 single-family detached houses, 212 apartments and 90 affordable-rate senior citizen apartments. The homes would have Curtis Park-style rear garages, many with so-called "granny flats" for lower-cost renting.
The plan also contains a standard 50,000-square-foot grocery store and numerous smaller stores served by 983 parking spaces. Petrovich said buildings and design features near the street would prevent the "sea of parking" look common to suburban shopping centers.
The concept also features a 4.5-acre zone that could house entertainment features such as a bowling alley or athletic club. Finally, there is a 7.5-acre park that would also serve as the solution to one of the project's thorniest issues, its toxic dirt.
Petrovich said he would dig a hole 20 feet deep across the entire park acreage and fill it in with contaminated dirt left behind by decades of shop work. That would be capped with a thick layer of clean dirt, he said.
The California Department of Toxic Substances Control, which has long investigated and monitored the site for contaminants, called the park plan an adequate remedy.
"The contaminated soil that may be buried under a park area would not contaminate groundwater and would be covered by clean fill to eliminate direct human exposure," said Thomas Tse, a hazardous substances engineer for the department.
Petrovich said that in the time he has owned the railyard, he has dug up and shipped 80,000 cubic yards of tainted dirt to a landfill in Utah. Another 25,000 cubic yards of soil now sits in mounds under tarps in the yard. "You're going to see three times that by the end of the year," he said.
When Petrovich took over the railyard, he told neighbors he would clean the entire property to residential standards. But once his crews started digging, they found that the contamination was much more extensive than they expected.
Tse said new cleanup plans will address the newly found contamination. But he said plans and technologies presented in environmental studies to the city are "generally acceptable" to the state.
In the meantime, as hearings approach, Curtis Park neighborhood leaders and Petrovich have engaged in occasional new battles of words.
Herber, asked if the Sierra Curtis Neighborhood Association would sue if the city approved the environmental study, the project and new zoning, said, "I think it's too soon to tell about a lawsuit. We don't want to sue. We want the development to go forward. But we're not going to be ramrodded."
City Hall's Kwong said, "We feel our draft environmental impact report will be adequate to meet CEQA (California Environmental Quality Act) and will be defensible."
Petrovich warned that if opponents prevent him from gaining approval for too long, he'll instead seek permits to build 1.2 million square feet of industrial buildings and warehouses on the site. That's allowed under its current zoning, he said.
Herber called the threat "ludicrous."
If the City Council approves Curtis Park Village, the developer's timetable is to finish the toxic cleanup next spring, start street work and utilities in a year and sell houses in about two years. The project would fill a toxic hole in the neighborhood left nearly three decades ago when the railroad pulled out.
Petrovich explained, "Our goal is to knit this thing together as if the railyard never existed."