Sebastopol council poised to approve new CVS

SEBASTOPOL - After 4½ years of rancor and distrust over plans for a new CVS store at a busy downtown crossroads, three lone voices were raised in opposition Tuesday after city officials announced a negotiated settlement that would move the project forward, with design refinements intended to soften traffic impacts and improve the project aesthetically.

One critic, Eileen Morabito, claimed 800 signatures on a petition calling for a boycott and vowed to proceed with it, saying opponents should refuse to patronize a business that had hired representatives “to bully your way into the heart of our city with no regard for the kind of impacts you’ll have.”

“It just seems like I can’t find the words to say how disappointed I am,” her husband, Thomas Morabito, told the City Council. “The town didn’t want this.”

“I hope that we boycott it and girlcott it, and stop it anyway we can and have nothing to do with it,” said another speaker, who goes only by the name Magick.

Another public meeting on the project is scheduled for Thursday night, but the council appears poised to grant approval of the new design in any case, having voted unanimously in closed session Monday to accept the compromise plan in exchange for the design concessions and an end to litigation.

Even Helen Shane, leader of a citizens group that filed a lawsuit seeking to halt the plan for the former Pellini Chevrolet dealership at Highway 12 and Petaluma Avenue/Highway 116, urged the city to accept the settlement in which she participated.

“I’m satisfied this is the best we could do under the circumstances,” Shane said Tuesday. “The character of a good settlement is compromise. Neither side gets everything they want.”

But all five council members, when asked by a reporter, declined to commit themselves to voting any particular way, saying they would wait to see what, if any, additional argument was made during Thursday’s public hearing.

“Until it’s done, it’s not done,” Vice Mayor Patrick Slayter said.

The CVS project has been a hot potato politically, and proved a major issue in the last council election. Three incumbents seeking election now - Sarah Glade Gurney, Una Glass and Slayter - will likely take that into account.

But the stakes are high, as well, for anyone thinking of voting against the resolution formalizing the negotiated settlement. Its failure to pass would nullify the concessions to which CVS has agreed and would mean the continuation of pending litigation, which already has cost the city more than $336,000.

The latest iteration of the project, already 4½ years in planning, was unveiled at the council’s Tuesday night meeting and includes a more than 14,576-square-foot drug store and a smaller building for an unknown service business that, at one point, was expected to be Chase bank. Chase pulled out of the project at some point, according to parties to recent negotiations, and it’s unclear now who the occupant of that second building will be.

Multiple design refinements include varying roof heights, more and larger windows on the main retail building, and a more generous setback from the street, as well as more detailing on the second building. The 2.45-acre project also includes significant landscaping and sidewalk improvements, roof top solar panels and plug-in stations for electric vehicles.

No left turns will be permitted into or out of the project site.

The changes “are significant” and they have “changed the project much for the better,” said City Manager Larry McLaughlin, who doubles as city attorney.

The settlement resulted from months of closed-door negotiations between the city, developers, CVS/Longs Drugs and the Committee for Small Town Sebastopol, a citizens group that Shane said represents several hundred Sebastopol and west Sonoma County residents opposed to excessive development in the downtown core, in large part because of traffic congestion on highways 12 and 116 that already slows passage through town.

The committee filed a 2011 lawsuit challenging the project on the grounds that the city failed to require a full-scale environmental impact report they say was merited because of the number of vehicle trips it would add to already crowded streets. That case will be dismissed as part of the settlement.

A separate suit filed by CVS against the city for its imposition of a ban on drive-thru windows, interfering with CVS plans for drive-up access at its new store, is to be dismissed, as well, just days before a court date scheduled for next week, McLaughlin said.

The negotiated settlement includes agreements by CVS and its developers to forgo permission for left turns in and out of its parking lot, as well as drive-thru windows. It also includes $150,000 to cover traffic mitigation work and Small Town Sebastopol’s legal costs.

Thursday’s meeting begins at 6 p.m. at the Sebastopol Center for the Arts, 282 S. High St.

You can reach Staff Writer Mary ?Callahan at 521-5249 or mary.callahan@pressdemocrat.com.