Pueblog USa
Monday, May 21, 2007
The [Parkview] Plan (Part 5)
Not So Easy Listening
It’s funny how listening to a meeting and taking notes of it by a recording is such a draining experience. But nevertheless, it is. And hence, I did not get to this until this morning…..
Yesterday, I listned to Parkview’s presentation from last Wednesday evening. Slept on it overnight.
Here are the things that I caught.
First off, the Chieftain reporter did a good job of capturing the gist of the meeting. He brought out the main elements of the discussion.
Here are some additional thoughts of mine on the meeting.
First off, C.W. Smith seems rather ‘defensive’, in an aggressive sort of manner, about Beaumont House.
It’s nice that they’ve found something useful for it since the Child Advocacy group moved into their new digs. Not quite what I recommend, but better than turning it into a fire-trap.
But going over the business of “We’re not going to tear down Beaumont House,” six or so times, and coming across as asking the audience to ‘repeat after me’, “We’re not going to tear down Beaumont House,” struck me as bordering on brain-washing, er, re-education techniques. Something like I see reported in an item on Drudge Report today, where some poor high schooler had to sit through Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth FOUR TIMES. Talk about [re]education….
So, C.W. turns the meeting over to John Cooksey.
John is into explaining why Parkview needs to expand. He talks about the current zoning of R5 for Parkview. He states there is a need to address the campus as one big property instead of multiple different properties. And I can see wisdom in that approach. After all, it is a complete system.
The strongest argument Parkview makes for this expansion of the central hospital unit is that guidelines are driving them to make all their rooms private rooms.
I’d like to see those guidelines. I’d like to know who developed them. I’d like to know who is driving the requirement. As I pointed out earlier, private rooms are a luxury. Not a requirement. If someone is making them a requirement, it sounds to me like someone is raising the bar and thus driving up the cost of medical care.
According to C.W. people are willing to drive 40 miles to have private rooms in hospitals in C’Springs. Something to do with having private conversations with family.
Would family really rather spend two hours driving between Pueblo and C’Springs to see a family member in a hospital? Wouldn’t they rather drive 15 minutes to see them in Parkview or that other hospital? Especially with gas prices steadily marching towards $7 per gallon?
I found it interesting that C.W. said, “The healthcare system is broken.” It seems to me that things like requiring everyone to go into private rooms is helping to break it.
The status of 17th Street seems to be undecided.
The way John sounds, he’d like to see it closed. Jerry Pacheco (City Planning) is heard saying that is not an option. Elsewhere in the discussion, I get the impression they are still talking about it.
Jerry Pacheco comes on and describes the PUD process as this:
[1] Parkview makes a request to have their property rezoned as a PUD.
[2] As part of the request, they include a plan on how they intend to use the PUD designation to the City Planners.
[3] There is discussion between Parkview and the City Planners on what will or will not be acceptable in the PUD.
[4] 15 days prior to when the Planning and Zoning Commission (P&Z) decides on the rezoning, the city with (1) send a mailing to each property owner within 300 feet of Parkview and (2) publish a Public Notice about the rezoning in the Pueblo Chieftain.
[5] P&Z decides for or against the rezoning.
[6] If for the rezoning, City Council votes to approve or disapprove the P&Z decision at their next session.
[7] If City Council agrees, Parkview will submit a site plan for their PUD and exactly how it will look to the City Planners.
[8] The City Planners and Parkview review the plan to make sure it complies with the guidance provided in what the City Council approved.
[9] More notices go out.
[10] P&Z hears the site-plan and decides whether to approve it.
[11] If P&Z approves it, it goes before the City Council.
[12] If the City Council approves it, Parkview starts re-building their campus.
According to Jerry, Parkview has no recourse to the Zoning Board of Appeals (ZBA) to request any variance on their PUD, once approved by the City Council. Furthermore, if Parkview does anything that is not in the PUD, they would be ordered to cease and desist on anything else. That is until the City Council decided they could continue.
That’s the process as I gathered it from listening to the recording. If I am incorrect here, I’d appreciate it if Jerry would disabuse me.
The key points I see here are the P&Z and the City Council. The impacted neighborhood and businesses have an opportunity to offer their ‘suggestions’ at those points. Everything else is between the City Planners and Parkview. And therein I think is something of an issue.
If Parkview and the City Planners have put in hours and hours of work on a project, they might be somewhat resistant to people coming in and telling them there are serious problems with the product of all that work. That they need to go back to square 3 or even 1.
Towards that contingency, someone in the audience suggested that the City Planners put the plan up on their web-site, for public review. I agree with that idea. The time to nip a problem is not when the P&Z is supposed to decide on it, it is best to nip it in the proverbial ‘bud’.
I would suggest that such a document for download should be a PDF document to assure maximum cross-platform usability. Furthermore, if the City Planners want to be REALLY open to comment, they should make that PDF document amenable to mark-up from inside Adobe Reader. Then people could make their comments directly on the copy they download, highlighting the area they are concerned about and adding comments. Then they could send it back to the City Planners for their collection of comments.
Come on, guys. It’s the 21st Century! Let’s get the community involved in their government using the high-tech tools many of us have.
From this point, the discussion devolves into a Question and Answer session. A number of good questions are brought up about other aspects of Parkview’s plans to overhaul their Northside campus. Questions about parking structures. Questions about traffic patterns if 17th Street is closed, between Grand and Greenwood, to traffic. Questions about what other property Parkview owns in the vicinity of the campus described in this PUD.
All of these are very good questions. But more information is needed before they can be addressed thoroughly. We’ll get to them later.
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