I submitted a Right to Know Law request to my City Council representative, Jamie Gauthier, requesting community feedback for another apartment building in West Philly. A developer proposed building a 170-unit apartment building at 50th and Warrington. After receiving community feedback, the developer came back with a much worse proposal: 100 units and 100 parking spots.

I am unhappy with a plan that invites 100 more people/families in our neighborhood to rely on their car because: 1) it contributes to an irresponsible and unnecessary level of carbon emissions, 2) if you put in 100 parking spots, you also apparently get 70 fewer apartments for people to actually live in. I know some people need cars and somewhere to park them. But not everyone in Cedar Park has or needs a car, and definitely not 100 out of 100 families in one apartment building.

What I really want to know is, how do these decisions get made? (A terrible question for a Right to Know lawyer who understands that an agency’s “internal, predecisonal deliberations” are exempt under the RTKL!) What makes a developer drastically scale back a plan this way, cutting 70 apartments to make room for people to store their cars? To what extent can neighborhood groups pressure a developer or a city council member to make these shifts, and how do our elected officials respond to that community feedback? Under the RTKL, I can’t access documents reflecting my Councilmember’s office’s internal discussions and analysis, but I can see what kind of feedback they’re hearing from the community and how they’re communicating with Omni, the developer behind this proposal.

Here is the log of constituent input as a result of my Right to Know Law request. I got this as an excel file, but to make it into one page as a PDF I deleted a few columns with things like agency office zip code, agency office, etc.

And here is the big packet of emails the City produced. If someone reading this knows how to make Issue do a regular PDF that scrolls instead of this flipbook thing please email me about that.

Councilmember Gauthier’s office has a lot of people who are super upset about everything all the time! It looks like they’re doing their best to facilitate community meetings and make sure the community has input with developers trying to get variances. As far as I can tell, this massive change is mostly Omni’s response to community feedback, and Councilmember Gauthier is just going along supporting the people who are yelling the loudest about this, instead of backing the plan that builds the most affordable housing.

Some fun highlights:

*does the councilmember’s office literally just do a tally of what people write in? is that how they make decisions??*

*this person should come back to reality, because shade from a tall building is not going to hurt their property value (see, e.g., 4600 block of Pine?)*

Update (4/21/22): 1) someone appealed the ZBA’s decision to Philly Common Pleas, and 2) I learned to use Scribd instead of Issuu. So here’s the appeal that got filed:

RTK Request: West Philly Zoning pt. 2

Washington Ave, Part I

Right to Know Law Tips for Government Contractors