Developer’s Amazon pitch fails to sway SVCAC

When Jose McNeill came before the Sonoma Valley Citizens Advisory Commission (SVCAC), on Wednesday, Aug. 25, with his in-all-but-name-only proposal for an Amazon freight terminal at Victory Station, it wasn’t McNeill or even Amazon that drew the most fire: it was the county’s permitting department, known as Permit Sonoma.

Not surprisingly, his updated proposal failed to win the approval of the commission, whose nonbinding votes serve in an advisory capacity to county officials. But it was an uphill battle from the start

McNeill purchased the land in 2014 for $4 million, and built the facility at a cost of $32 million, based on approval being issued by Permit Sonoma’s Design Review Committee in April, 2017. Since the project he proposed was a shipping and storage facility, which fit within the definition of M3 “rural light industrial” zoning, McNeill built Victory Station with little public controversy.

But with the completion of a 250,000-square-foot warehouse at the busy intersection of Eighth Street East and Fremont Drive, public attention – even outrage – has focused on the development, on Amazon, and on the county government for allowing such an industrial use on the outskirts of Sonoma.

“How could a project as big as this wine warehouse have gotten through with just an over-the-counter permit?” wondered Commissioner Ditty Vella after all the voting was over. “Is there something in place to (make sure) that does not happen again?”

Bradley Dunn of Permit Sonoma later told the Index-Tribune that the agency does not issue over-the-counter or “ministerial” permits, and asked project planner Blake Hillegas to document the hearings that led to the permitting.

Initial approval for the then-named Sonoma Valley Business Park came in 2009, with approval by Design Review in 2015 and 2017; a building permit was issued in December, 2016 and closed in March, 2018, when construction ended. Victory Station, at 1194 Fremont Drive and 22801 Eighth St. E., then became available for tenancy, and while McNeill told the Index-Tribune at the time he anticipated strong interest from large winery operations for the facility, it has remained unoccupied since.

After McNeill’s first use permit for the Amazon-associated project was denied by the county’s Board of Zoning Adjustments (BZA) earlier this year, he reworked it to including two adjoining properties in a single bid.

At the SVCAC meeting, McNeill pointed to the county’s relatively routine approval of the Victory Station project – he repeatedly stated that it had been approved by PRMD, and 110 conditions of approval had all been met and signed off.

“It was built as a speculative project to accommodate a variety of uses,” he told the SVCAC. “This project delivers for the County of Sonoma, for the people of Sonoma. It has been approved by the professional staff of Sonoma, and we look forward to having this project completed.”

During the hearing itself – which found all but universal disapproval of the Amazon “last mile” distribution facility during public comment, and resulted in a unanimous commission vote to reject the application – two main themes emerged: Why wasn’t Amazon present for the SVCAC hearing since it was their project? And why did PRMD approve it so casually 10 years ago?

The project’s managing consultant Jean Kapolchok was in attendance via video, and she said several times that their proposal was “a work in progress,” as some compliance requests from Permit Sonoma had yet to be fully answered. “The permit is in the early stages of review, and we look forward to comments from county staff… including yourself,” she told the commission.

Kapolchok filled in some of the blanks on the project: It will run 24 hours a day, seven days a week, though deliveries will be limited to “non-commute” hours to reduce local traffic congestion, a condition in their original winery storage permit. The facility will employ 87 people plus another 87 Amazon van drivers and 24 “flex” drivers, independent contractors with their own deliveries or pickups.

McNeill himself made it a point to emphasize the many mitigation measures he had already completed while constructing the Victory Station, including road sign improvements, the railroad crossing on Highway 121 (Fremont Drive), drainage, etc., adding that “the county now owes us $200,000 in reimbursements for additional improvements we did” above the required mitigations.

Commissioners also wondered about McNeill’s assertion that having an empty warehouse without a tenant cost the county $500,000 in uncollected property taxes. (Tennis Wick, director of Permit Sonoma, later communicated through Dunn that to his knowledge there is no money owed to McNeill for his over-mitigation; and that the agency does not take property tax considerations into permitting decisions.)

But the issue of the projected tenant, Amazon, was also puzzling to commissioners. Commissioner Greg Carr, also a member of the county Planning Commission, said, “The project would be easier to analyze if we knew who the tenant was.” Under direct questioning McNeill did admit that the project proposal was based on information from Amazon, and that they would be the tenant.

Yet McNeill did attempt to distance himself from the exact numbers used in his application, especially on issues of traffic generated by the transshipment operation. Inquiries to McNeill and Kapolchok about any formal involvement of Amazon with the project at this point remained unanswered at press time, and Blake Hillegas said he has not seen such a lease agreement. “We don’t permit tenants, we permit land use,” he said.

While the commissioners themselves were cautiously skeptical in their questioning, but when it came time for public comment such caution was thrown to the wind. At least 15 people spoke, and only one, Cherie Cabral of a labor and construction union, expressed any support whatsoever for the proposed Amazon warehouse. (Chair Tim Freeman related that of the many comments received by email, only two were even remotely supportive.)

Nearly all of the comments brought up the issue of traffic – two-lane Highway 121 is by no means a major transportation corridor by design, though pressures from congestion on Highway 37 is making Fremont Drive an increasingly busy roadway, and the noise of a 24/7 shipment facility was of great concern to many.

How those traffic concerns could affect public safety was also voiced, as the memories of evacuation from fire disasters are still vivid; and Norman Gilroy cited numbers from the California Highway Patrol of 115 accidents in the nearby traffic corridor in a three-year period, which included 160-plus injuries, some of them fatal.

Throughout, Kapolchok and McNeill – and Permit Sonoma – insisted that the permit was being approved for the building, not the tenant, and that such a permit would “run with the land” regardless of who the final tenant was. That prompted Sheila O’Neill – a nearby resident and member of the Sonoma Planning Commission – to make that point sharply.

“The issue is, this is not the place for a major distribution center,” she said. “Once we have that distribution center in there, there’s no going back. it doesn’t matter if it’s Amazon or Walmart.”

That opened some sort of floodgate, and other potential tenants were mentioned by subsequent comments: Target, UPS, Fed Ex — none of them welcomed by the prospective neighbors.

Regardless of McNeill’s reliance on his previous approval by Permit Sonoma – “county professionals,” as he put it – he was unable to sway any members of the SVCAC that the Amazon-style last-mile freight terminal was a good fit for the intersection, southeast Sonoma County or the community as a whole.

The Wednesday night Zoom hearing ended with the commission’s vice chair, Matthew Dickey, offering a motion simply not to recommend the conditional use permit at all. After SVCAC secretary Margaret Spaulding pointed out that since the commission’s role was advisory, some indication of the basis for their disapproval in the motion itself would be useful, it was amended to cite traffic concerns, public safety and the inappropriate location of the project.

That vote passed unanimously.

For now, the applicant still has some questions to answer to complete the Permit Sonoma application, though project planner Hillegas estimated that the next formal step, a hearing by the Board of Zoning Adjustments, was some months away.

“This is not the end of the process,” said Permit Sonoma’s spokesman Dunn. “This is very much the middle of the process.”

Email Christian at christian.kallen@sonomanews.com.