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2021-08-03 Rebryna CC1 From:Diane Rebryna Sent:Monday, August 2, 2021 4:31 PM To:City Clerk Mail Subject:WRITTEN COMMENTS CC MEETING August 3, 2021 re: Coral Mountain Resort - Diane Rebryna and Anast Demitt wish to verbally address City Council during the open session. Attachments:PDF FINAL REBRYNA DEMITT August 3 PRESENTATION TO CITY COUNCILand the PLANNING COMMISSION .pdf EXTERNAL: This message originated outside of the City of La Quinta. Please use proper judgement and caution when opening attachments, clicking links or responding to requests for information. Hello again, Further to my email of earlier today, please find the written version of our comments to be presented in the Open Session in front of City Council attached. We wish these to be part of the public record. Thank you again for your assistance with this; again, please feel free to reach out with any questions or comments. Kind regards, Diane On Aug 2, 2021, at 3:36 PM, Diane Rebryna wrote: Hello, My name is Diane Rebryna My husband’s name is Anast Demitt. We reside at , La Quinta CA 92253 Our phone number is . We wish to address City Council during the open session re the Coral Mountain Resort ‐ Diane would like to speak first using her 3 minutes, and to correlate, Anast would like to follow immediately thereafter with his allotted 3 minutes. Thank you for accommodating our request. If there is anything else that you require at this time, please do not hesitate to reach out. Kind regards, Diane CITY COUNCIL MEETING - AUGUST 3, 2021 - WRITTEN PUBLIC COMMENTS BY RESIDENTS DIANE REBRYNA, AND ANAST DEMITT PUBLIC COMMENTS ON MATTERS NOT ON THE AGENDA - OPPOSING THE WAVE PROJECT 2 I will be forwarding a written record of these same comments to your attention tomorrow. CITY COUNCIL MEETING - AUGUST 3, 2021 - WRITTEN PUBLIC COMMENTS BY RESIDENTS DIANE REBRYNA, AND ANAST DEMITT PUBLIC COMMENTS ON MATTERS NOT ON THE AGENDA - OPPOSING THE WAVE PROJECT Good afternoon Honorable Mayor and City Council Members, Thank you for allowing me to speak today regarding Coral Mountain Resort, which I will refer to going forward as “the Project”. My name is Diane Rebryna, and my husband Anast Demitt and I are very blessed to have our winter home here at Trilogy in La Quinta. Please know that we truly love this city, particularly its tranquil and beautiful southeast corner, which is why we chose to settle there. At the outset, I wish to say that we’ve spent an inordinate amount of time reviewing the Draft Environmental Impact Report - which at over 1500 pages was very challenging and intimidating to the average reader to say the least. There were so many topics, with this and that “study” and these and those “mitigating factors” that were covered. Some of the DEIR was formulated with conjectures as evidenced by the statements such as “are not anticipated to”,” would not signiﬁcantly impact”, etc. I certainly felt overwhelmed as I tried to extrapolate all of the potential impacts of this Project on life as we know it in South La Quinta. To help me understand the DEIR, I also reviewed the the 2021 CEQA guidelines - a reference document based on the CA Environmental Quality Act to which is used to develop Environmental Impact Reports. It was here that I had my “eureka” moment ! This document, as part of the DEIR checklist speaks to a topic called “Mandatory Findings of Signiﬁcance” where the following is asked: “Does the Project have environmental effects which will cause substantial adverse effects on human beings, either directly or indirectly”? That is when it hit me ! - this Project, as a result of the request for REZONING to allow for it deﬁnitely has many known and potentially unknown environmental domino type effects on the “human beings” - those being us - the residents of the communities nearby. 1. First of all, the Developer has asked for Sub - Phase Development based on “market and consumer demand”. I am overwhelmed as I think of how plans for our lives will be totally predicated on the fact that the waves and phases of construction noise and trafﬁc could go on for years and years. We may never see the completion of this Project in our time here ! CITY COUNCIL MEETING - AUGUST 3, 2021 - WRITTEN PUBLIC COMMENTS BY RESIDENTS DIANE REBRYNA, AND ANAST DEMITT PUBLIC COMMENTS ON MATTERS NOT ON THE AGENDA - OPPOSING THE WAVE PROJECT 2. As a result of the rezoning change, Special Events asked for by the Developer could be permitted through the use of TUPs. What’s to prevent the 4 that are being asked for from turning into 8, or more, per year ? City noise ordinances will be altered to accommodate these. There will deﬁnitely be access and egress challenges to most of the surrounding communities - this could impact our safety and well being, should there be trafﬁc tie ups both during as well s before and after Special Events to allow for prep and take down days. 3. Finally, I am totally perplexed as to how this Project with its enormous water usage with 18 million gallons of water to ﬁll it from our aquifers would even be considered in our desert environment with its high temperatures, high evaporation rate and winds, especially during a mega-drought. I know of no other “recreational activity’ which would even be considered if there was an equivalent current and potential future threat to the environment as a consequence. There is a global movement under way to conserve water, with good reason, and we must think of our children and grandchildren. —————————————————————————————————————————- My name is Anast Demitt and Diane is my wife. Thank you for allowing me to continue on with our presentation. This topic is of such concern to me that I felt I needed to travel here to speak to Council today and express my concerns on this proposed Development. 1. Trafﬁc - Once the Tourist Commercial aspect of Coral Mountain Resort is “up and running” there will trafﬁc changes that will signiﬁcantly impact our day to day lives as we know them. The trafﬁc study included in the DEIR is ﬂawed in my opinion as it was conducted during COVID when many seasonal residents chose not to return to the valley. The base trafﬁc volumes used in the analysis are therefore an underestimation of the actual volumes. The study shows that levels of service in some of the affected areas will be reduced to level F, the lowest possible level of service in trafﬁc engineering. That means long delays at intersections and increased commute times regulating in more GHG emissions. The DEIR recommends that changes be implemented to reduce the impacts on the level of service. The developer indicates that they will pay for “their proportional share”. The citizens of LQ Quinta are then stuck with the remainder of the costs. This does not seem to be a fair trade off as we the citizens are subsidizing a private development that we will not see any beneﬁt from. CITY COUNCIL MEETING - AUGUST 3, 2021 - WRITTEN PUBLIC COMMENTS BY RESIDENTS DIANE REBRYNA, AND ANAST DEMITT PUBLIC COMMENTS ON MATTERS NOT ON THE AGENDA - OPPOSING THE WAVE PROJECT 2. Lighting - The Developer proposes seventeen 80 foot tall light towers and lighting with variances in parking lots and visitor areas. The effect of this lighting is another unknown that cannot be quantiﬁed at this location. The proposed development will be similar to what I see when I drive by the Indian Wells Tennis Gardens at night. Furthermore, from the proposed project site, the illumination from a public park in Coachella is clearly visible in our skies. This project, with its seventeen light towers and commercial glare, is not the place that I would choose to observe the beautiful dark skies that our desert is known for. We will say good bye to that here as well. 3. Short Term Vacation Rentals - One of the biggest concerns that I have relates to the potential approval of over 700 STVR’s for the site, should rezoning occur. Every room in the hotel and casitas and every house will be approved as an STVR. The proposed $2.5M dollar homes - AND UP - will have multiple bedrooms with multiple people sharing a house. Add in a full hotel for one of the Special Events or even for Coachella or Stagecoach, and this development rapidly becomes nothing more than a large scale B&B with a rotating door. That could mean literally 5 to 6 thousand additional transient visitors in and out of the Project each day. Is this the type of intrusive commercial development that we want “inserted” amongst the established communities of the Quarry, Trilogy, PGA West, Andalusia and Santerra, to name a few residential districts close by ? All for the sake of the TOTS that will be collected on the STVRs? What happened to the highly touted goals for quality of life in the LA Quinta 2035 plan? Is this development and all that it brings along with it really worth the adverse impact it creates on the residents and citizens of South La Quinta? I’m respectfully asking you today to to please “stick to the plan”, that is, the 2035 La Quinta General Plan - particularly the component that speaks to the “livable community” which addresses the “long- term quality of life of its residents.” CITY COUNCIL MEETING - AUGUST 3, 2021 - WRITTEN PUBLIC COMMENTS BY RESIDENTS DIANE REBRYNA, AND ANAST DEMITT PUBLIC COMMENTS ON MATTERS NOT ON THE AGENDA - OPPOSING THE WAVE PROJECT This PROJECT is a square peg in a round hole! I encourage you to do as we did and please read the entire 1500 plus page DEIR. You will see that there is not enough certainty from the information presented to allow for rezoning with conﬁdence, and to ensure that there will not be long term life impacting consequences for we, those residents - ‘those human beings” - who live nearby. Thank you for allowing us to provide our perspective today to you. Please say no to the rezoning of this Parcel of land to Tourist Commercial. Respectfully submitted on August 2, 2021 by: Diane Rebryna & Anast Demitt , La Quinta, CA 92253 CITY COUNCIL MEETING - AUGUST 3, 2021 - WRITTEN PUBLIC COMMENTS BY RESIDENTS DIANE REBRYNA, AND ANAST DEMITT PUBLIC COMMENTS ON MATTERS NOT ON THE AGENDA - OPPOSING THE WAVE PROJECT