City Council Speech 2/20/18

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Good Evening Mayor and City Council,

This debate is not about whether there should be more hotels in Healdsburg -because plenty more hotels are already coming.  This debate is about impacts and unintended consequences. The difficult fact we must accept is that we are in the dark about how all these new rooms downtown and elsewhere will affect livability and business in town. We don't know if more hotels will increase or decrease our ability to market Healdsburg as a get-away from crowded city life. Both tourism and local’s interests are at stake.

If we want to be empirical, if we want to lean on the facts, and if we do not want to make irreversible mistakes, then we need to find a way to effectively safeguard our iconic downtown while we find out what will happen after this new wave of hotels is built.

Protecting the downtown area during the upcoming period of growth reflects our town's core values and is supported by numerous points in the General Plan. It represents the values of thoughtful planners, of residents and of business people who want Healdsburg to move forward intelligently, not just hap-hazardly following an open-ended enthusiasm for more growth.

A modest change to the zoning, limiting new hotels downtown, can help accomplish this protection. I know some of you are entertaining the CUP option as the method best suited to accomplish this. To you I offer two related questions that I hope you can address tonight:

1) Is a concern for maintaining retail balance that serves both local and tourist interests the reason why CUPs should be adopted? Are CUPS a stronger tool for helping to achieve this (rather than limiting new hotels downtown altogether) or is it weaker?

2)   Will CUP’s consistently safeguard our downtown against the potentially aggressive legal tactics of developers whose portfolio interests outweigh the legitimate needs of our town? Do they leave a window of opportunity for inappropriate projects where there should be no window?

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