Sebastopol OKs CVS settlement

The Sebastopol City Council voted unanimously Monday to conclude a contentious 4½-year debate over plans for a CVS store on a central Sebastopol street corner under a long-awaited, three-way legal settlement between city government, project developers and a local opposition group.

Details of the settlement are scheduled to be released this afternoon, in time for a presentation and public hearing at the regular 6 p.m. City Council meeting.

A tentative agreement, announced in July, included a variety of design concessions intended to appease city leaders and community members who battled relentlessly to prevent CVS and a companion Chase bank branch from taking up residence on one of the city’s busiest crossroads.

The settlement would end two pending lawsuits - one filed by CVS/Longs Drugs against the city for adopting a temporary moratorium on drive-thru windows, and the other filed by the Committee for Small Town Sebastopol, a group of residents who challenged approval of the project design without a full environmental impact report.

“It has been a long and painful process, and it is coming to an end to the benefit of our community as a whole,” Mayor Robert Jacob said Monday. “It is time to move forward and make the best out of the situation.”

The City Council voted 5-0 in closed session Monday to approve the settlement. The vote will not be final until the council approves a formal resolution on the settlement in public session, City Attorney Larry McLaughlin said.

A vote on a resolution to adopt the settlement and approve development plans for the former site of Pellini Chevrolet, though scheduled on today’s agenda, will be postponed until a special council session Thursday to ensure anyone who wants to weigh in on the matter has time to read the proposal, Jacob said.

“I think it’s very important the City Council ensure the public has ample opportunity to voice their perspective,” he said.

The city will release the detailed settlement, as well as revised project plans, to the public this afternoon after all parties are able to get the proper signatures to execute the agreement, McLaughlin said.

CVS and Chase already have long-established businesses in Sebastopol, at separate locations. But the 2008 closure of the downtown Chevy dealership at Highway 12 and Petaluma Avenue presented an opportunity for an updated, more central setting for both.

As proposed by Armstrong Development, the old Pellini dealership would be demolished and replaced with separate buildings for the CVS store, at about 14,000 square feet, and another business. The initial proposal included a Chase bank branch, but CVS has recently informed the city and the Committee for Small Town Sebastopol that Chase bank is no longer slated to be part of the project. It is unclear what other business will share the site with CVS, attorneys said.

But the initial proposal was rejected as incongruent with the character of the city’s downtown, among other issues. The additional traffic it would bring to an already congested area also prompted great concerns, though the City Council ultimately granted design approval after more than two-dozen public meetings, hearings, appeals and plan revisions.

In its lawsuit, the Committee for Small Town Sebastopol argued that the city failed to conduct adequate analysis of the traffic impacts.

A later decision by the council to prevent other developers and businesses from seeking drive-thru windows drew a lawsuit from CVS/Long’s Drugs, which argued the temporary moratorium was aimed at preventing CVS from building.

City officials say closed session negotiations over at least the past year have resulted in substantial changes to the project’s design, including several key items that were made public in July when the city announced a tentative settlement in the cases.

Those items included CVS and Armstrong Development’s agreement to abandon a bid for drive-thru windows at both buildings; to permit left turns into or out of the project site; to install solar roof-top panels on all buildings; to minimize signage and set the buildings back from the street.

In addition, CVS agreed to pay the city and the Committee for Small Town Sebastopol a total of $150,000 to cover a traffic signal synchronization study, mitigation of traffic impacts, and the committee’s legal fees.

Today’s meeting begins at 6 p.m. at the Sebastopol Community Center Youth Annex at 425 Morris St.

Thursday’s special meeting starts at 6 p.m. at the Sebastopol Center for the Arts, 282 South High St.

You can reach Staff Writer Mary Callahan at 521-5249 or mary.callahan@pressdemocrat.com.

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story indicated that Chase bank was still part of the proposed project for the former Pellini Chevrolet site.