Downtown Dublin Specific Plan Inches Closer to Reality
The City of Dublin hosted a Downtown Dublin environmental impact scoping meeting this past Thursday to provide a quick overview of the Specific Plan, share environmental impact considerations, and obtain community feedback. The Dublin Downtown District is generally considered to be the area bound by San Ramon Road to the west, Village Parkway to the east, I-580 to the south, and Amador Valley Boulevard to the north. The main thrust of the Downtown Dublin Specific Plan is that the area will be split into three districts: transit, Village Parkway, and retail. The primary objectives of this Specific Plan are to provide property owners with more development flexibility than what they current have and to also unify all of the other plans that cover sections of the downtown area: Dublin Downtown, Downtown Core, Dublin Village Historic, San Ramon Road, Village Parkway, and West Dublin BART.
The transit district is the area south of Dublin Boulevard that is adjacent to the future West Dublin BART Station. The City will be encouraging property owners to build more density than what is already planned and to have “24/7 uses” for the retail and commercial properties in this district. Buildings will be up to eight stories tall in the transit district. The Village Parkway district is the area east of I-680 that runs along Village Parkway. While the city does not envision increasing the density in this area, they would like to encourage more renovations, residential redevelopment, and bring shops closer to the street. The retail district will include everything else in the Downtown Dublin area including the Target shopping center, Shamrock Village, Almond Plaza, and the businesses along San Ramon Road. The City has no plans to significantly redevelop or renovate this area in the near future.
Here are the significant upcoming milestones for the Downtown Dublin planning process:
- March 3, 2010 – comment period for environmental impact report scoping process ended
- Spring 2010 – Draft Specific Plan and Environmental Impact Report provided
- Summer 2010 – Final Specific Plan and Environmental Impact Report provided
- Late Summer 2010 – public review and adoption of Specific Plan
While no current project is in the pipeline for the Downtown Dublin area, the City has worked diligently to attract larger retailers through programs such as the Sales Tax Reimbursement Program. Additionally, Essex’s purchase of the former Windstar land parcel in the transit district for $5M could be an omen for development in the near future now that the bar to achieve project profitability has been lowered so much.
9:31 PM on March 18th, 2010
Why does the City of Dublin provide sales tax reimbursement to large companies? There are only a handful of visible small businesses in the city, and they are well overshadowed by the presence of huge chain stores. The sales tax reimbursement is essentially a subsidy to big business and has helped the city to become a place with no character and no uniqueness, especially compared to the towns around it.
11:27 PM on March 18th, 2010
I like the downtown Dublin plan. It will separate us from our neighboring cities as far as attracting businesses
11:47 PM on March 18th, 2010
I agree that the downtown Dublin plan will put our city at a better advantage to compete for commercial retail and office tenants. I have been a strong advocate of implementing a broadband network in our city. Exhibited by implementation done through some major cities like Philadelphia, Baltimore and other metro cities. FCC just announced a broader country wide plan this week. The same vision I saw 3 – 2 years ago. Broadband is revolutionizing the way of business life and will continue to dominate every one of us. Broadband is bringing to reality video conferencing, faster file retrieval for imaging (paperless environment) and a myriad of cannot do’s in the past. Working from home will be the future and we will see less commuting to work. Managers and supervisors can monitor their employees through video. Documents can be displayed at every employees home computer much quicker. Video conferencing between clients and companies will be much cleaner and crispier. Business decisions are made much quicker. The advantage to it all is the environment with less commuters. Lesser office footprint for companies resulting in less overhead. I stood in front of the council about broadband and presented the advantages of this technology a year ago. We need to be in the forefront of this technology and what more better start than the Downtown Dublin area.
11:39 PM on March 27th, 2010
Broadband sounds a good idea. How much will it cost to the city? If we can get some good corporate sponsor like Google, it’ll be be much easier since our city has limited resource.
11:52 PM on March 27th, 2010
Did I get the downtown plan right? Seems the only major part is the transit area, which is very uncertain right now.
The retail area and village parkway area seems only getting a facelift? That is far from enough to make Dublin downtown competitive.
It needs to some more dramatic changes. Like a walkable downtown with attractive dining/shopping choices (like Pleasanton or Danville), and high end high rise office or retail towers (like Walnut Creek).
I think we can have a 2 part downtown. Let’s make the current downtown plan to be an attractive, walkable, pedestrian friendly environment. To do this, we need to have more small boutique restaurants and shops, provide people a place to enjoy and relax.
The second part of downtown can be in Camp parks or the area adjacent to east bart Station. This area already has modern and shining office buildings and already host some well-known corporates like Sybase. Let’s make this area more like Walnut Creek. There are very few cities which has the luxury of such a large piece of prime vacant land, Dublin has to make this land worth its value and bring high paying jobs and prosperity to our residents of the new century.
5:59 AM on April 13th, 2010
I completely agree. Dublin needs to balance out what “Dublin” really is, the small close-nit community it is as well as the up-in-coming community. Dublin sorely lacks a presence of small locally owned businesses and a walk-able downtown that shows this off, like Pleasanton, Livermore, Danville have, but creating a newer downtown area such as Walnut Creek and Livermore have. Dublin just needs to make up it’s mind as to where it wants this at (Waterford/Ulferts area, Hacienda area, new West Dublin Bart area).