March 12, 2005 Meeting

Agenda Items:

Preparation

The meeting flyer was distributed by volunteers to each residence in the neighborhood starting on March 8, 2005.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Rhonda Stone, Pasadena City Council District 4 field representative, for getting the meeting room at Victory Park for us and for arranging for Pasadena Planning and Development staff to attend.

Thanks to city staffers Fred Jones and Brian Yanuaria for coming in on their weekend.

Thanks to Sandeep Baweja for lending his support in our park renaming efforts.

Attendees

12 residents attended the meeting. Laura Ellersieck, president, presided. Susan Chu, vice-president, assisted.

Meeting

The meeting was held starting at 1 pm at Victory Park.

Agenda Items included:
New park name decision
Ice Rink – project negative declaration discussion, response
Nomination of intersections for traffic problem study
Rhonda Stone made a few announcements to start out. She announced the “Field Trip” for Seniors to the Senior Center to be held on April 6. She announced the walk/bike event to be held on May 14th starting at Victory Park between 9 and 11 am. She noted there would be an East Pasadena leadership breakfast meeting with Councilman Haderlein on March 18.

The first topic was deciding what new name we would like for Eaton Wash park. The list of names proposed up to that point was reviewed. In the discussion of the problem with La Viña and the possible alternative of La Viña Vieja, Vivian Perez suggested removing the La from La Viña Vieja, making it shorter and more distinctive. A vote was taken of the 11 association members present at that time, with each member able to vote for up to two choices, the idea being that the second choice would be held as an alternative if the first choice was rejected by the city. Viña Vieja had 9 votes, Vineyard had 4 votes, La Viña Vieja had 1 vote.

The second topic was the nomination of intersections and/or street segments for inclusion in the Transportation Advisory Commission (TAC) annual “report card”. Most of the discussion was about problems on Sierra Madre Villa. Speeding cars, difficulty of pedestrians getting across without going all the way up to Orange Grove or down to Foothill, cars coming out of the Hastings Village development and either turning left illegally, or turning right initially but then using Mataro or La Tierra to turn south again. We discussed nominating Sierra Madre Villa/Electronic or Sierra Madre Villa / Estado as a way to make sure the speeding on Sierra Madre Villa is caught in the gathering of statistics. There was some discussion of getting a pedestrian on-demand signal at Electronic or Alameda.
Rhonda Stone mentioned a East Pasadena leadership meeting to be held the following Friday morning that would have traffic as a topic.
The end result in terms of TAC nominations is to be sure Sierra Madre Villa between Foothill and Rosemead is included. If only intersections can be nominated, then Sierra Madre Villa and one of Electronic, Alameda, or Estado.
Also: Sierra Madre Villa / Foothill, Foothill / PCC-CEC driveway, Foothill / Santa Paula Ave.

The last topic was the ice rink proposal. Two representatives from the city’s Planning and Development Department attended: Brian Yanuaria, Assistant Planner, and Fred Jones, Senior Planner. This time, they brought an annotated image of the project site which was big enough to be seen, plus page sized hand-out versions for everyone. Fred Jones started out with the same presentation all but one of the attendees heard at our Feb 12 meeting. So he was shortly interrupted with questions to try to get some more detail about exactly what is happening and might happen.

Mr. Jones would not admit that the 143 city required parking spaces was inadequate for occasions when the 400-500 spectator seats are full. He stated no additional parking was needed. But he also mentioned the possibility of additional parking in the Edison right-of-way and/or a parking share agreement with PCC. New information we had not heard before included that PCC was discussing putting a large warehouse and/or additional parking in the Edison right-of-way north of their current parking lot.

Other bits of new information were:

The management agreement with the ice center operating company (Pasadena Ice Center) will include some on-site security requirement (no details however).
No alcohol will be served and the eating facility is expected to be small and very limited, hot dogs and the like
Completion is now being estimated about March 2007
Expect to bring 4 items to the city council’s March 28 meeting
Budget for the development is expected to be 8.4 to 10.4 million.
Expect annual revenue of 2.1 million.
Traffic study was done which included studying the existing situation, what it would be with the proposed project, and what it would be with the proposed project plus other projects proposed in the area. Supposedly it showed no problem. We were told we could get a copy of the study.