Workshop to seek alternatives to Petaluma Lowe's project

<p>A community workshop will be held Saturday morning in Petaluma to discuss an alternate design plan for the planned Lowe's development at Deer Creek Village.</p><p>Sponsors for the meeting include Sonoma County Conservation Action, the Greenbelt Alliance and the California Infill Builders Council, according to a flier advertising the event.</p><p>Deer Creek Village is a proposed 344,000-square-foot retail, commercial and office complex on North McDowell Boulevard that is proposed by developer Merlone Geier Partners. Its anchor tenant is to be a Lowe's home improvement warehouse.</p><p>The project is pending the completion of a final environmental impact report. Once the document is finished it will go before the city's Planning Commission and then City Council, likely this summer or fall.</p><p>Organizers of the workshop bill it as a way for neighbors “to explore options for the project and to express their visions and concerns for the site.”</p><p>It is meant to provide neighbors and the city with “visions for a productive, economically successful and rewarding development consistent with neighbor and neighborhood needs, desires and values.”</p><p>Among the organizers is Lois Fisher, an urban planner who helped design Petaluma's Basin Street Landing, and Terry Watt, an urban planner from San Francisco who represents a Petaluma neighborhood association opposed to the project's current design.</p><p>The event runs from 9:30 a.m. to noon at the Lucchesi Community Center on North McDowell.</p><p>Participants are asked to RSVP to 415-517-9560 or laura_w123@hotmail.com.</p><p>— Lori A. Carter</p>