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Home My WebLink About11-14-23 Public Comment - B. Antonopulos - FW_ Feedback on the Left Hand parking proposalFrom:Susan Gregory To:Stewart Mohr; Agenda Subject:FW: Feedback on the Left Hand parking proposal Date:Tuesday, November 14, 2023 11:31:24 AM Attachments:Library Parking Letter.pdf Hi, Beth, Thank you very much for your letter and your important feedback. I’ve shared this with our Library Board Chair, Stew Mohr, and our City Clerk’s office so that it will be documented as public comment. Thank you for supporting the Library! Susan Susan F. Gregory Director Bozeman Public Library Bozeman, MT 59715 sgregory@bozeman.net (406) 582-2401 From: Susan Gregory Sent: Sunday, November 12, 2023 6:15 PM To: Stewart Mohr <smohr1029@charter.net> Subject: Feedback on the Left Hand parking proposal Sent from my iPhone Begin forwarded message: From: Susan Gregory <SGregory@bozeman.net>Date: November 12, 2023 at 6:14:38 PM MSTTo: Beth Antonopulos <antonopulos@gmail.com>Subject: Re: [EXTERNAL]Feedback on the Left Hand parking proposal Thank you for your important input, Beth! I will send this to our Library BoardChair right now. Susan Sent from my iPhone On Nov 11, 2023, at 6:57 PM, Beth Antonopulos<antonopulos@gmail.com> wrote: CAUTION: This email originated from outside of the organization. Do not click links or open attachments unless you recognize the sender and know the content is safe. Dear Ms. Gregory, After reading about the upcoming proposal on Wednesday's agenda,I've attached a letter with my thoughts as a concerned citizen. Please share this with the library board members before the meeting. Icouldn't find a place online to submit it other than your email! Thanks so much, Beth Antonopulos1020 S 3rd Ave, Bozeman, MT 59715 Dear Bozeman Library Board Members, I am writing to express my dismay with the Left Lane proposal you must consider at Wednesday’s meeting. After reading the proposal as attached to your agenda, my husband and I went down to the library to look around think about what it would mean for library patrons and staff. We can only conclude that the solution makes sense on paper to the investment group proposing it, but makes no real- world sense, and offers Bozeman citizens nothing but trouble. I urge you to quickly and vehemently say “no” to this proposal and to discourage anything like this from wasting your time in the future! Here are some detailed objections: • All of the beautiful trees and practical drainage remediation landscaping will be removed. Any new landscaping happens way above ground-level where library patrons won’t be able to enjoy it easily. Presumably, its purpose is to hide ugly parking from hotel guests looking down from their luxury rooms. Access to citizens will be so limited by the hotel’s escort requirements as to be a very bad joke. • A presumed benefit is additional parking spots for the library. However, most of the close parking will be under the covered area, so those spaces will be reserved for hotel guests, not library patrons. Most patrons and employees will need to walk farther to reach the entrance than in the current setup. Added parking is jammed in at the cost of the existing roundabout which currently allows patrons an easy way to exit either to Main Street or to the south end of the library and back to Wallace. The lot will likely be icy and hard to clear of snow due to the height of the new buildings blocking winter sun from the west and the loss of green space for moving snow off of spaces. The hotel is proposing it has access to the library’s parking spaces too, so really the library will lose spaces when the hotel is full, when the restaurant is busy, when the ballroom hosts events,…basically, most of the time. In general, the parking experience for library users will be much worse than it is today regardless of the number of spaces on paper. • This proposal replaces free patron parking with paid parking (Parking Access and Revenue Controls system – PARCS – is mentioned repeatedly). For example, families attending daytime programming would have to pay to park, meaning that some would no longer be able to attend. Why do we need to charge for library parking? • Construction will make access to the library a nightmare for years. Eventual regular traffic will increase due to the physical layout of the surrounding streets. Having just attended a Western Transportation Institute session on the importance of considering community health in making planning decisions, I’d like to ask whether this proposal has a positive or negative impact on the health and well-being of Bozeman residents? I see no positive impacts offered by the developers’ proposal. Perhaps if this project were providing workforce housing or some other needed resource, it would be worth the negative trade-offs mentioned above. However, this project just locks up prime real estate for 75 years. Perhaps the tax revenues over that time would offset the nightmare of asbestos remediation costs the city will pay under this plan? No numbers are provided, so this aspect is hard to weigh. The $350,000 offset Left Hand has offered seems highly unlikely to be more than a fraction of the eventual cost. In any case, we shouldn’t be trading potential future tax dollars for degraded access to a beloved public resource in many ways. I’d like to close by pointing out that our city does not need to give concessions to developers and businesses in order for them to locate here. If anything, they should be eager to show citizens how they will contribute to the city’s pressing needs if they want to join our community. Do not set a precedent by approving this arrogant and self-serving proposal that sacrifices public resources for yet another luxury development project. Sincerely, Beth Antonopulos