Hotels Downtown: Delivered to City Council on 12/4

Here is the text of my contribution to the public comments section of the recent work session held by the City Council on Hotel C.U.Ps (conditional use permits) on 12/4/17.

The Healdsburg General Plan says,

“Downtown, including Healdsburg’s plaza at the heart of the community, is the City’s primary activity node and center of commerce, serving residents and visitors as well as the surrounding region. Efforts to enhance the downtown’s pedestrian orientation, collection of unique, locally-owned businesses and its historic character and charm will continue. Residential uses will continue to be allowed in the downtown to promote its vitality “

Healdsburg is counting on you to uphold this guiding principle and guard our downtown against outside interests that would turn it into nothing more than a tourist playground. Clearly, an excess of hotels, tasting rooms or any other indication of encroaching commercial monoculture, bear strongly against these oft-repeated goals -which, dare I say, figured prominently in all of your own campaign literature.

It is foolish to leave open the door for more hotels until we really know how we are going to deal with the expansion of hotel rooms that are being built now and in the next few years. The impacts could be tremendous.

Additionally, there is no specific need to include more hotels in the downtown area. Visitors staying on Dry Creek Road will inevitably visit downtown to shop and dine. If more hotels come downtown, the help they will lend to our parking problem will be imperceptible.

A popular suggestion is to permit hotels downtown, but insist upon ground-level retail. This a compromise position that addresses the very real threat of hotels crowding out small, diverse retail businesses, but it rests on a presumed need for more hotels!

And what do CUP’s and similar compromise strategies gain us? They leave the door open for the city to green-light projects with unique auxiliary benefits to the city. But do you really think a plaza area hotel could give us anything like a convention center or increased affordable housing? Nope -me neither. So why leave the door open for the impossible?

Finally, I strongly believe that businesses that locals love can flourish downtown. Some tourist-centric businesses are solid, but plenty just come and go.  And on the other hand, we have a long list of local-serving businesses that have thrived near the plaza. Let’s leave room for other, similar entrepreneurs to serve residents and visitors downtown. And let’s make sure that our city government supports these businesses as strongly as we support our tourist economy.

Please consider a limit on new hotels within the 3 x 4 block area around the plaza. You’ve all walked door to door listening to what voters want. Most people are suspicious of compromises, and they want you to honor your commitment to preserving our small-town character. Given that many people are opposed to new hotels in general, I think a cap on downtown hotels is both moderate and uncontroversial. It will not threaten growth in the tourist sector. I want us to decisively steer towards the kind of downtown that residents want for themselves -and that visitors come from around the world to experience.