considerations are most important to consider in the urban environment? >> if i may for purposes of the prop k analysis, can you explain sort of the process that would be followed whereby if there is a desire to amend the project to be compliant with prop k, if you will, to the extent there is a view that it isn't, where does that happen? how does that work? >> i will ask diego sanchez to answer that question. he is the shadow specialist in our department. >> good afternoon, diego sanchez with planning department staff. we would do an analysis, shadow staff would do an analysis under prop k and realize there is x amount of shadow and find that not only to be significant, but also adverse to the impact and we would ask there to be some sort of sculpting with the building and some other changes and

revisions to the project. while significant because is there is an additional of net new shadow on the park, it would not have an adverse impact given the qualitative standards that the governing memos for prop k provides. >> who has the final say as to any substantive changes that happen at that point? >> that would be the department, would make a recommendation to the planning commission as well potentially to the rec and park commission about whether the project as proposed has an adverse impact on a particular protected practice. >> and does the board of supervisors have a role as well related to that? >> good afternoon, in the case of this project, there is a height rezoning required. so for the purposes of this project, the board of supervisors would have a role

in that. >> thank you. supervisor yee. >> actually, i think supervisor campos' line of questioning may have answered. my experience with these issues are fairly new, but i recall from the community's point of view, there was a project a couple of decades ago, actually; that had shadow affects on portions of the square and that was the federal bank building. i don't know when we were able to push back on the original design, but i do recall at some point the community was able to

get them -- what do you call when you ask them to scale back, to reduce the impact on shadows. so there seems there are ways to do that, whether you lower the height, as suggested by the option. i guess it's a little disappointing that one would have to go through this two-step process to get to that and i'm wondering if some of you smarter people in this chamber can have legislation to maybe put stronger language in having this piece of it, the shadow effect be part -- maybe a bigger part of what is looked at in the eir. but i think your line of questioning has clarified that. there are opportunities for us

, if the shadow issue doesn't get addressed, that we will have an opportunity to question that. >> go do you have a response to that? >> i did, i wanted to emphasize the point that we addressed briefly earlier, which is that in for this particular project's eir, we had alternatives to reduce significant impacts to the project, but we felt it would be important to identify the height of the building at which a shadow impact on union square would be avoided and that is the reason that we included that 351' building. we were trying to provide information that would feed into this prop k and subsequent approval processes. >> thank you. and just one final comment on that issue, and again, for colleagues' education, for those not as familiar as prop

k, passed in the mid-1980sses laid out certain parks in the neighborhoods that have very limited open space and said we need to protect these parks particularly in regard to shadow and i think supervisor yee was referring to the discussions around proposition k to make sure that the parks were protected and what you are hearing from us today, in recent years that has been less of an emphasis for the planning department and i think many of us on the board are interested in that and i think certainly it will become more relevant in terms of project approval. i know we started our questioning before the full presentation was done from planning and i wanted to give back and give remaining times

for the planning department. >> mr. president, 3 minutes and 58 seconds left. >> back to planning. >> the appellants have suggested an alternative setback 40' from jessie square and this alternative was not required to be analyzed since it would not eliminate the considerable contribution to cumulative shadow impact and others would have adversely affected the aaronson building, requiring more fabric to be removed from that structure. the appellant states that transportation analysis was flawed and these issues are the same issues brought up in the nelson/nygaard document.

and those substantial evidence has been provided by appellants to show that the feir responsesed. the pedestrian analysis did not identify significant impacts in this project vicinity. and with upto 215 residential units, the mexico museum and ground floor retail space -- [speaker not understood] i also want to address the letter that was received this afternoon from appellant's

todco and yerba buena and addition the issues that we have heard from the appellant and public today about the poor existing pedestrian conditions. those are encapsulated within the base line for this project and form the pedestrian setting for the analysis of this project. under ceqa the question is whether the project would create significant pedestrian analysis and again, the department does not believe that the project would contribute to cumulative impact and we have not seen substantial evidence that this significant cumlative pedestrian impact exists.

the department uses existing conditions for the area, to present the analysis results clearly. and so regarding -- we wouldn't be using the convention or an event day, just as we wouldn't be using conditions that are not typical because we don't find that this would represent -- that this would fairly characterize the project's impacts or its contributions. we respectfully request that the eir be upheld, because we do believe that the conclusions are adequate and accurate and that we have met the requirements of ceqa, the ceqa guidelines and chapter 31 of the administrative code. thank you.

>> thank you. supervisor kim. >> thank you. this is actually the section of the eir that i was most frustrated by and so actually i wanted to have a better understanding of how planning defined "cumulative impact study." so ceqa does require cumulative impact study and i know that planning interprets that in a certain way. and we choose to use the area plan lens and i was hoping that you could talk about that a little bit more. >> in general the department used a plan-based approach, but includes gross projections in the assumptions that are used. where we feel that there would be some localized effects, we do look at what is going on in the area and we do discuss that.

we did discuss what is going on in the vicinity of the projects. >> what did you discuss? >> it depends on the topic. >> for pedestrian safety. >> the analysis did look at the sf moma expansion is occurring >> did you look at the new meterone project? >> i'm sorry >> it's the same building,

but it's been reconceptualized and it's great and, by the way, it looks wonderful and it's attracting a new volume of pedestrians, particularly with it being the only target in the city. and also the westfield mall. >> yes. i am going to ask that greg reiskin, the transportation planner address this. >> good evening, members of the board, greg reiskin, transportation planner for the project and we did look for a qualitative assessment. so we did look at the meterone, because when we established preparation for this project, the meterone was existing at that time. the target was not in there at that time. so that was not

part of the cumulatives because it wasn't in the nop right? my apologies it was in there. the target was in there, yes >> could you talk a little bit how you established the base line, the pedestrian activity? >> yes, so as my colleague deborah was saying that we look at typical pedestrian activities and a number of questions were raised why don't you look at a peak event during moscone and why isn't that the baseline? the reason for that we look at typical conditions and not maximums. any analysis we're looking at peak representative conditions. so typically, in the case of this project that would be the pm peak hour during the week day. because that is the peak of activity time in the downtown

area. >> i believe that you looked at both midday and peak pm. >> yes. so for pedestrian condition we also look at midday -because people go to lunch. >> why do we not study the weekend because this project in and of itself is a museum and moma and moscone and the meterone? >> because there project was generating trips in the pm hours. it's

relatively small museum compared to moma. >> the development in and of itself may not have a impact because of the size the mexican museum, but ceqa state law says we have to study cumulative impacts and we know it's the moma and it's expanding and i could keep going over the list over and over again. why didn't we look at the weekends? the cumulative impact kind of lens? >> what ceqa requires is that you look at the cumulative impacts, such as they are relevant to the impacts that the project is creating and resulting in? the project's contributions to the cumulative impacts to the conditions on

weekends would be -- would not be something that would rise to a level of significance. just on the basis of understanding the number of pedestrians in the area and the increase -- the incremental increase from the project, it's clear from the analysis that this project in no way has the ability to create a considerable contribution to that cumulative context. it's just going to be a little bit of a drop there. so given that, but what ceqa provides for is that we look at the cumulative conditions, as i said, such that they are affected by the project. the situations in which we look at weekend transportation conditions are those where the project itself is generating a lot of weekend activity. we have looked at cumulative transportation conditions, for example, for grocery stores,

also for the recent beach soccer fields project is one where we expected a lot of weekend activity generated by the project. so what we're focusing on is the impacts of the project. relative to the environment, both as it exists and in the cumulative condition. >> so i think this comes back then to kind of my overall concern of how where we do environmental impact review, particularly for a neighborhood as dense as this is and expected to absorb even more population growth and density. so there the way that you have articulated that, kind of brings back miss brandt-hawley's analogy, which is that you can just have a glass of water and pour a little bit in at a time and it will never be considered significant because of the increment and it came up last summer with the at&t light box

question and at what number do we hit and say it's significant; right? and clearly there was an answer to that. with each individual project we tend to do eirs for each individual development project and at what point do we say it's significant, where the project spills over? so i guess my broader question is at what point do we say that we are really impacting a neighborhood and not thinking about the mitigations for it? >>well, i will start by answering how we make that decision in the context of our cumulative analysis and then i'm going turn it over to city attorney marlena burn to talk about the case law around that issue. we do consider that issue very closely as to at what point does the scale of the impact of

a project result in a significant impact on a cumulative condition? for example, in air quality, we have the evidence to support the fact that when we are talking about a setting in which there are already severely degraded air quality conditions, that is a situation in which the incremental effect of a single project does have the potential to create unacceptable conditions and therefore, requires mitigation. so i think air quality is a good example of an area where we have differentiated that out. in terms of this project, what is happening with this project, we did do a side level of service in the area and found that the levels of service as they exist now are around the -- really around better levels

actually, around b and c. so it would take a lot, substantially more than what this project could do to result in unacceptable levels of service based on the various metricks that we look at for pedestrians. i can identify a situation in which are we did feel that this -- that we really did need to look at what any one project was doing to tip it, which again was the transit center district plan and in that we found several cumulative pedestrian impacts, but the transit tower itself, which is a couple million-square-feet of office space was only significantly contributing to one of those. so i think that we applied our expertise and understanding of how these various transportation impacts work and concluded that the

context in that area did notice have the potential to rise to the level of this being a cumulative impact. but i am now going to ask marlena burns >> deputy city attorney, marlena burns. so sort of synthesize the case law around cumulative impacts, the law analyzing the statute require a two-step process, which is what the department went through here, when you look at cumulative impacts first you have to analyze whether a cumulative impact exists in the first place? and you look at, you know, past projects, current projects and reasonably foreseeable future projects. usually, or you can do the plan-based approach that looks at growth projections for the area. and sometime it's appropriate to do kind of a mix of the two, where you look at especially if you are talking about a relatively compact geographic area you may look at what the

plan says, but also what projects you know are come online in a particular area. so off and once you have identified that, in fact, a cumulative impact exists, then you look at whether the projects that you are examining contributes to that impact. so you could have a project level impact with no cumulative impact and conversely, you could have no project level impact and cumulative impact if you have an existing bad situation and existing cumulative impacted a. then your project does contribute and the legal terminology is whether that contribution is cumulative considerable? clearly it's a judgement call. is there cumulative impact and

does the project contributing in a cumulative considerably matter? you look back at the standards of significance and here we look at pedestrian impact and the things that the board and the department considered around the eir are issued around safety and access, et cetera. >> actually, i really appreciated that and i think that helps to clarify a number of things personally. i think on a broader level, though, it still doesn't get to how wes as a city think about that. because i wouldn't say "never, but we'll rarely have that level of impact on cumulative impact study, and what i am

saying is that this neighborhood is heavily impacted and i'm curious -- and i will quote this from the planning department's response , how do we define "acceptable level?" as a pedestrian walking down 3rd street on any given weekend evening, it is -- it can be almost an infuriating experience, the numbers of cars and people and those who may not obey the law and it may not be an environmental impact itself, but it's incredibly frustrating not to be able to cross the street and have cars constantly coming at you and i get worried when we say analytically it's

acceptable and we will never as a city make the downtown area a place that people want to live. >> gregory the transportation planner. how do we quantify that impact? we specifically look at sidewalks corners and crosswalks. so for this project we looked at all the crosswalks, all the sidewalks and all the corners, mission and 3rd street and along the 3rd street sidewalk, along mission street sidewalks. so we'll go identity out, and take counts and take the real width of the sidewalks. and figure out the level of

services from a to f, just like the traffic. we talked about what is your baseline condition? so on a typical day, which is what we studied, when there is an average event at moscone, but not a big event. level of service, on the sidewalks and crosswalks and corners is in the b to c range. good to okay. certainly during a big event, it's congested and what we established our baseline on a typical day, that is when we take the counts. so that is why you are seeing acceptable operations. >> i wanted to talk about special events. what would make a special event more typical? how often would it have to happen in a year? >> that is a good question. again, a judgment call. i think when we were deciding this, there are a handful of really large events at moscone event, for example, the oracle

open world or auto show and those are both twice a year. oracle is a weeklong. but once or twice a year we feel is not typical of conditions. so we look forward the average-sized event at moscone. they come in all flavors of size from large, multi-day, huge events with up to 40,000 attendees. down to much smaller and occupying only a fraction of the size. >> how long was the oracle event? >> a week long. >> when you say once a year, you are talking about events that may last 5-7 days and twice a year, you go up to 10-14 days. so again i guess the question is at what point do you start to examine that as a base line? what number would we have to get to for us to examine these special events as a base line? >> i don't think of we have

defined an exact event or an amount. again it's a judgment call on the part of staff and ultimately the environmental review officer. >> i understand that and that is what i'm trying to get at. for me, pedestrian safety is a huge concern and i think the qualitative experience, not just the quantitative, which you are talking to and i think it's interesting, when planning decides to go quantitative analysis versus qualitative analysis. if you were to do a survey of most pedestrians in the area at 6:00 p.m., probably would speak to a very negative experience of walking in that area and would say that they feel very unsafe, that they feel that cars are always trying to come even during the pedestrian crossing light and i'm not going to ask for an answer, because there clearly isn't one, but we need to ask at what

point does this need a baseline target, to have an event of that size? and i don't think we should say it's a judge call and we'll be able to tell when we see it and it reminds me of the definition of "porn," i know it when i see it. again, i feel like i represent an you are that is very dense and compacted and i want to know that the planning department is looking about the future production of this neighborhood and how to make it both a complete neighborhood and really a livable neighborhood. >> good afternoon, i do want to point out that in this eir, we were considering very closely and this is an issue that we have been paying more and more attention to in areas like this. the issues of the immediate effects of the site arrangement of a project on pedestrian

conditions. what is interesting about this project is that since they are using an existing garage, and there are fewer residential in and out trips than visitor in and out trips, the conversion of these spaces to residential spaces actually reduces some of the conflicts that exist at this time related to that driveway. that issue of driveway related conflicts and other site-related pedestrian conflicts created are one that we pay very close attention to in our focus on pedestrian issues. we also in the case of this project while we did not find that the project would have significant impacts, we did identify in the eir a number of measures to improve the pedestrian environment in this area in terms of