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| From Pantagraph.com |
The State Farm development at PGBT and Central is even worse than I thought. For anyone who cares about mixed-use, transit-oriented development, it's not just an accident. It's a disaster. Call State Farm and see if we're covered for disasters of our own making. Call FEMA. We're facing State Farmageddon.
More after the jump.
This is supposed to be a mixed-use, transit-oriented development. Look at that photo. More land in this development is going to be taken up by parking garages than by retail. See the DART station in the lower right. In transit-oriented development, it's the train that's supposed to be featured, not the garages for parking cars. Where are passengers getting off those DART trains supposed to walk to? Their cars? Even assuming the DART station is there solely for State Farm's private use, their employees still would have to walk through or at least past the parking garage to get to their offices.
Mayor Maczka, I hope that shovel full of dirt you're holding is meant to bury this project before it gets too far along. But I know it's too late for that. The "groundbreaking" ceremony took place a month after construction was well underway, too late to do anything. Instead, you are burying DART, burying transit-oriented development, burying Richardson's future under acres of parking garages for decades to come. That's not a reason to smile.
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| From Pantagraph.com |
Why would the city council go to so much trouble holding hearings about transit-oriented, mixed-use, form-based codes only to block access to the DART station by acres of parking garages? Were they pulling a fast one on Richardson residents or did KDC play the city council for small town rubes? If there's another explanation for how we ended up with this travesty of mixed-use, transit-oriented development, I'd like to hear it.
A reader suggests that the city council was not duped by KDC; they were complicit. They were so eager to get State Farm that they turned their backs on their vision of transit-oriented development, they tore up their own carefully crafted form-based code, they gave KDC a blank check to build whatever State Farm thought they wanted.
ReplyDeleteYes, they did. Read the TIF 2 documents.
ReplyDeleteThe other part of this is the Cotton Belt was once again shut down by the Legislators after the voters turned it down several years ago.
It will be difficult to privatize something without the development fitting the intention. But that puts us back into the world of Agenda 21 that does not exist.
CDH