The Concord City Council, at the end of a more-than-nine-hour meeting on January 7, decided it will postpone making a decision about the Concord reuse project until 9 AM on Saturday, January 28.
Our main ask is simple: Drop Seeno now! The council should let the Exclusive Negotiating Agreement they currently have with Seeno/Discovery Builders and their partners expire.
(It currently expires on the last day of this month.) We’ll have to wait until January 28 to see what happens.
On January 7, city staff and Seeno and their partners presented to the council, the council asked questions, and the public made comments.
We turned in a petition signed by more than 1,700 people (more than 1,200 Concord residents) asking the Concord City Council to drop Seeno and their partners as Master Developer.
Save Mount Diablo Senior Land Use Manager Juan Pablo Galván Martínez turning in the petition with 1,700 signatures at the special city council meeting
About 80 speakers made comments to the council in-person and on Zoom.
Environmental, affordable housing, and other kinds of grassroots organizations; and Concord residents of a variety of backgrounds, spoke out.
They asked the council to let the Exclusive Negotiating Agreement with Seeno and their partners expire, or fix the major shortcomings in the Term Sheet before agreeing to anything.
Nearly everyone who was in favor of the Term Sheet was affiliated with labor unions.
Attendees at the special city council meeting. Photo by Juan Pablo Galván Martínez
Putting aside the long, well-documented history of controversy and law-breaking by Seeno companies and their partners, the Term Sheet is deeply flawed and should be rejected.
It proposes 3,300 additional housing units more than was accepted for the project in the Area Reuse Plan approved by the council and community in 2012. It fails to live up to green space and affordable housing commitments that the public were guaranteed in the Area Reuse Plan.
It increases car dependence and traffic by failing to take advantage of the North Concord BART Station in the first phase of the project. And it offers Seeno and their partners the entire project site at once rather than seeing how they do with a first piece and going from there.
Why are Concord residents being asked to make a huge project even more gigantic in exchange for fewer community benefits than what they were already promised? For example, Concord is being shorted about eight Todos Santos Plazas worth of green space in the current Term Sheet.
Please go to the January 28 meeting and show your support: the Concord City Council should let the Exclusive Negotiating Agreement with Seeno and their partners expire!
It’s best if you attend the meeting in person, but if you can’t make it, you can email the Concord City Council instead.
Concord City Council. Photo by Juan Pablo Galván Martínez
Top photo by Cooper Ogden
