OAKLEY — One of Oakley’s largest planned subdivisions, a nearly 3,000-unit project at the city’s far eastern edge, will now include some senior housing and additional wetland preserves, but plans for an elementary school and commercial space have been dropped.
The new overall plan and two tentative maps for the large-scale Cypress Preserve project, located near the Summer Lake subdivision, were unanimously approved by the Oakley City Council this week.
Design and final approvals for the Lesher and Bethel Island subdivisions will come later before each of the areas is built, which could be sometime in the next four years before the development agreement expires.
The projects were first approved in 2011 and 2015, but needed to be revised after the amount of land available for development was reduced during the environmental permitting process, community development director Joshua McMurray said.
“They had to scale back substantially not only to preserve wetlands but open space for the development and, working with regulators, were left with much less land than they originally envisioned,” he told the City Council during its Tuesday meeting.
Part of the project is located near the Cypress Preserve wetlands area and required approval from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineering, which would only allow filling in of 4.58 acres of the 133.62 acres of wetlands.
The developer was also required to permanently preserve the 255-acre North Preserve and its 76.34 acres of wetlands and create 15 acres of new wetland there.
In addition, it must permanently protect a 23-acre wetland in the project’s southeast corner and permanently protect 162 acres of land to buffer another 43.1 acres of wetlands that are also within the project site but outside of the two preserves.
Original plans called for 2,863 mixed-use units, including houses and townhouses, but that number was reduced to 2,789 to conform to the new restrictions on building in the preserve and wetlands areas. And now, 162 of the units will be designated for people age 55 and over.
As a result of the new configuration with senior units in part of the project area, the developer, John Baayoun of ACD-TI Capital, has removed a plan for an elementary school, which would have been in the Knightsen Elementary School District.
“There were not enough children to justify a new school,”McMurray said, noting the Knightsen Elementary School District will have to sign off on the plan.
Also dropped were plans for commercial development in favor of 277 attached townhouses to allow more housing in the reduced space.
“There were some concerns with converting all the commercial land to residential,” McMurray said, “but we will have a detailed economic feasibility study (before final approval) to ensure the land is not commercially viable.”
The project sits beyond an area in the East Cypress Corridor where a new fire station remains empty because of a lack of funds to staff it. McMurray said the new development will be required to join a community facility district in which residents would help fund fire service operations through a special tax.
A bridge also would eventually be built at Rock Slough to provide another way out in case of another fire like the wind-swept infernos that occurred last year. At that time, many residents in Summer Lake and Bethel Island were stuck on East Cypress Road for more than an hour trying to evacuate.
During public comments, Councilman-elect George Fuller expressed concern about the additional traffic on East Cypress Road and the need to widen it for safety reasons.
“I would like to see that the Oakley government, as the area continues to build out, that we address as best we can … to expand it (East Cypress Road),” he said. “I think it’s something that we need to continue to look at because, as you know, as we are putting a big strain on East Cypress Road,” he said.
Mayor Kevin Romick added that he wants to make sure that everyone in the East Contra Costa Fire Protection District pays to support the fire service and its staffing needs. With the new community facilities district, residents of the proposed Oakley development will be paying a tax in perpetuity to help pay for fire district operations.
“I would strongly recommend that the city of Brentwood follow Oakley’s lead in creating CFDs encouraging developers to pay into the process to make sure we have funding to pay operational support for our beleaguered fire district,” Romick added.
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