The Chula Vista City Manager must be the worst negotiator, with the Baldwin and Sons being the best. The Baldwin and Sons Company, which owns the land to the north of the Otay Ranch Town Center, at the corner of Olympic and Eastlake Parkway, wants to change the land use from freeway commercial to mixed use. This is solely so they can add 600 units of residential property, in the form of condominiums and apartments. To make this more appealing to the City, Baldwin offers to “add-in” a couple of hotels on the property, a supposed “bonus” already allowed under the current commercial distinction. In actuality, this site was offered as an alternative to the land adjacent to the Olympic Training Center when the City thought best to change it use from Visitor/Commercial to residential.
This new change in land use will cost the City a million dollars a year in potential net revenue, but supposedly the City needs more residential. The City and Baldwin have distorted the facts, comparing the baseline without hotels to the new proposal with hotels. Why do they represent the base projections without hotels revenues, when it’s a land use that is already allowed, and the proposal does include them? Maybe the answer is in how one City Council member describes the choice.
Council member Pamela Bensoussan in defending Baldwin as a developer, listing various donations made to the community including: Chula Vista Charitable Foundation, Harbor Festival, and a new dog park. While all worthwhile contributions, they are not related to this proposal and should not be related.
Bensoussan says this is win-win for everyone. If you look at just the proposal, the city loses a million dollars and year in net revenues and developer gets to develop residential units which bring back return solely to the developer. Where is the win-win? I see none, unless you distort the financial facts or include donations that should not be dependent on a company’s future deal success.
Baldwin claims there is not a market for more retail in the area and we need more residential roof tops. Apparently six hundred additional units will make this happen, despite the 7,000 plus residential units already approved but not yet built. If there is no market for retail, then why would Baldwin not sell or lease their land to hotels as they have threatened to do if the City does not allow the residential units. Why do we need more of the same residential land when we haven’t even utilized the land available and already approved in Otay Ranch and the Millennium Projects?
We need time to let the General Plan Develop—it took more than two years to develop the plan and we should not abandon it so early in the process. The original Eastlake developers did not change their land use in their many years of development and the retail has now filled, even despite the recession and subsequent tough economic times.
Doesn’t the Otay Ranch Town Center, a beautiful but slowly developing site, deserve the time to become a shopping destination as good as Fashion Valley or University Town Center? Shouldn’t a Chula Vista resident be afforded the opportunity to spend their dollars in Chula Vista, a more convenient and concrete win-win? Maybe the council’s logic behind this change is the reason Chula Vista is second to last in sales taxes collect per capita, yet annual median income is 61k a year, right in line with the rest of the County. Further, within a 4 mile radius of the Otay Town Center the median household income is 50% higher at 93k a year. People have money, but they choose to shop elsewhere. I think it’s because the shops aren’t here. This is the last site in the city where the shopping area can develop into a regional destination. Give it time and it will. Remember, there is four year universities in the future just down the street.
