Workshop Summary | Get Involved | Review the Process | See the Vision | Read the Guidelines

On January 4, approximately 85 people attended the sixth community workshop of the San Carlos Downtown Visualization Project. The workshop was held in the Library, at 610 Elm Street.

The goals of this workshop were to discuss the relationship between land use and village character, review the building height section of the proposed Urban Design Guidelines, and review current proposed projects as rendered into the computer model.

Interactive Exercise: Where Do You Live?

After people registered, they were asked to find their house on a large map and place a tiny yellow dot sticker on it. This showed instantly both the geographic distribution of participants as well as whether this was the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, or sixth meeting that participants attended. At each workshop, participants will locate their houses with a different color dot so that the workshop attendance can be tracked over time.

Land Use and Village Character

Tom Richman began the meeting by reminding participants of the role of Tom Richman & Associates, as Urban Design and Community Facilitation consultants to the City:

• To accurately ascertain and report the community's sentiment on a variety of urban design issues as expressed through the workshop process, and,
• To prepare a set of design guidelines that will help to realize the citizen's vision for their downtown.

He noted that his firm's role was not to propose particular projects or promote a certain agenda, but to facilitate the process and help the community educate itself.

Throughout the process there has been general agreement that citizens want to preserve the "village" or "small town" character of San Carlos, though people may have different definitions of exactly what that means. Read more about the Land Use and Village Character discussion.

Urban Design Guidelines/Building Height

At the workshop in December there was general agreement that, if there is to be development in San Carlos, it needs to be of high quality. Tom Richman explained that the Urban Design Guidelines will cover the key elements that help achieve high quality architecture. Read more about the discussion of the Urban Design Guidelines.

Current Development Projects

Tom then presented a summary of two potential development projects in various stages of planning: the Railroad Property Right-of-Way Study and Salvatore's Restaurant project. This was the second presentation of the Railroad Property Right-of-Way Study being prepared by SamTrans and the first of Salvatore's being prepared by a private developer. Both projects are subject to the standard City review and approval process required of any new development project (i.e., environmental reports, public hearings, etc.). They were brought forth in this Visioning workshop to foster discussion about general development and planning issues. Read more about the presentation of these Development Projects.

The meeting adjourned at approximately 9:10 p.m.