Warner Jenkins statue in front of Alhambra City Hall (Photos – Frank Qiu, Alhambra General Plan draft).
Have you ever wondered how a city makes planning, transportation, construction and green space decisions? In California, cities make those decisions pursuant to a “General Plan,” which is a state-mandated document intended to guide and influence future public and private land uses and development.
By Melissa Michelson
The City of Alhambra has not updated its General Plan since 1986, but it is now in the final phases of an update to establish the City’s vision for community development through 2040. After nearly three years and five community workshops, Rincon Consultants, the outside consultants hired by the City, is presenting the final draft at formal public hearings.
For such an important document, one would expect Rincon to have gotten comprehensive feedback from Alhambrans (click here). Regrettably, only 760 residents of Alhambra were surveyed for the updated General Plan, and only 400 of the survey responses are considered by Rincon to be statistically valid–a scant 0.05% of the entire population.
In comparison, Monterey Park made its General Plan 2020 opinion survey available to every household and business, reaching 61,000 residents. Pasadena sent a written survey to over 70,000 Pasadena households and businesses and had available an online survey for its General Plan 2015. Pasadena used survey results from 2,893 people (1,848 by mail; 1,045 online). Pasadena’s website states its intent was to get a “broad and diverse set of responses.”
The extremely low number of Alhambrans surveyed was disconcerting to Councilwoman Katherine Lee. At her first Council meeting, she asked that lack of input for the General Plan be a matter put on the agenda for the next City Council meeting on January 28. Lack of input was also a point of contention for members of the public attending the Alhambra Planning Commission meeting on January 22, 2019. Chris Olson, former Alhambra Preservation Group president and a volunteer board member of Grassroots Alhambra said that a poor result was obtained despite the investment of a “shocking amount of the city’s financial and human resources…. I think that there has been inadequate outreach to and sampling of Alhambra residents – especially those whose primary language is not English. Without input from a broad spectrum of stakeholders, the plan is necessarily flawed.”
Residents have questioned Rincon’s process and transparency. One resident noted in a letter that public input at the June 14, 2017 community meeting was “limited to the same general comments” as the January 2017 meeting, and no draft of the General Plan was available for discussion of specifics. Another resident warned that the workshops were ‘disappointing’ and ‘fall short’ because they asked generic questions and relied on extracted vignettes and personal anecdotes from some residents rather than data that could have been derived from meaningful surveys.
Rincon Consultants refers to the community meetings as “input” sessions, but it is questionable as to whether the input from approximately 200 residents is reflected in the document. The General Plan includes a hotel and linear park above the train tracks, even though a majority of Alhambrans responding to the phone survey and the written survey stated their belief that Alhambra has too many and/or the right amounts of hotels. Rincon cited the recommendation for a hotel by an unnamed economist, and the General Plan itself includes outdated and insufficient market data to support the need for a hotel in the area. (Read more here).
Rincon Consultants has charged the City $800,000 to develop the updated General Plan.
Melissa Michelson is an Alhambra taxpaying resident and a voter.
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