What the Colton-Lee high density development means for the residents of
New Crest Oaks and Christine St.

 

• The Colton-Lee Development sets a precedent for allowing the subdivision of property in the county unincorporated areas into smaller and smaller lots— greatly increasing population in under-served and infrastructure poor rural areas. Since the county is unable or not rich enough to provide city-like services and city-like infrastructure, this precedent will lead to the degradation of all unincorporated county communities like the Knolls. Consequently higher density neighborhoods with no supporting county infra-structure will begin to negartively impact nearby communities in unforeseen ways.

• The Colton-Lee Development will add over a hundred car-trips per day to the current flow of traffic from the Knolls into Simi City through New Crest Oaks (a recent neighborhood) and by way of Christine St. (an existing residential street). The Colton-Lee Development traffic study did not analyze the existing traffic flow and the impacts of adding all those extra vehicle trips through that residential street.

• Knolls Park at the west end of Katherine will lose all but 6 parking spaces in front of the little league baseball field.  As all Knolls residents know the little league park has at least 50 car visits every weekend day and most weekday evenings. The Colton-Lee Development’s solution to the park’s loss of 44 parking spaces is to add rules to its new project HOA to allow parking inside their development for people using the park although no spaces will be designated for this purpose. In addition project residents or their guests will be required to park inside the development and not on Katherine Rd. Since there is no practical way to police compliance and county police will only investigate when it receives complaints, the developer’s parking solution is a deception. In the real world the project HOA would never tolerate 44 extra cars to park within its project nearly every day during the little league’s season, project guests will park wherever its convenient and parking will spill over onto adjacent Knolls, New Crest Oaks and Christine neighborhood streets.

• The VC Fire Dept. also maintained at the August 15th Planning Commission hearing that the VCFD will require the new project’s residents to shelter in place in order to help the existing Knolls community during a fire or similar emergency. Will the VCFD actually block Colton-Lee Development project residents from exiting out onto Katherine Rd.? The VC Fire Dept.’s call “to shelter in place” is unrealistic, possibly inhumane, and hardly enforceable. The much better and safer for-all-concerned solution would be for the VCFD to require the Colton-Lee Development to build a secondary access road over the railroad tracks for their emergency evacuations.