Proposed Elnoka project would add 676 living units near Oakmont in Santa Rosa

Frustrated by years of red tape, rebuffed repeatedly in his attempts to move forward on his pet project in east Santa Rosa, Bill Gallaher vowed to keep fighting.

“I’m too ornery to give up,” the longtime Sonoma County developer told The Press Democrat in July 2009. “They’ve met their match with me.”

Gallaher, the founder of Oakmont Senior Living, was speaking about his plan to develop Elnoka, the 68-acre property bounded to the south by Oakmont Village — the retirement community of about 4,500 residents — and by Highway 12 to the east and Trione-Annadel State Park to the west.

Twelve years later, the battle goes on.

On May 1, the city of Santa Rosa released a 726-page draft environmental impact report for Gallaher’s latest version of the project, the Elnoka Continuing Care Retirement Community, whose 676 residential units would house roughly 1,000 senior citizens.

While it will take city planners most, if not all of the summer, to assess comments and weigh revisions for the report, battle lines are already drawn. Opponents believe the Elnoka project will create far too much traffic on Highway 12 — which would, in turn, make it that much harder for people to evacuate in case of wildfire.

The release of that tome-like report marked the beginning of a 45-day comment period, which ends June 15.

“We have over 75 written comments so far,” Kristinae Toomians, a senior planner for city, said on June 2. Many are from residents of Oakmont, and others who live in the immediate area.

Traffic woes and wildfire evacuations

The vast majority of those emails raise two main concerns. The first is traffic. The main entrance for the complex would require a new traffic light on Highway 12. Adding 1,000 residents to the area will further congest that major artery — especially during commuting hours.

The second major issue being raised is how the Elnoka project affects emergency evacuations, in case of wildfire. Oakmont was evacuated during the fires of 2017 and last September. On both occasions, recalled Oakmont Village Association president Tom Kendrick, it took some people more than two hours just to get from their houses to Highway 12.

“If you drop another 1,000 people in the neighborhood, an already unacceptable situation gets worse,” he said.

Jack Tibbetts, the Santa Rosa councilman whose district includes the Elnoka parcel, was in Oakmont late on the night of Sept. 27, 2020. With the Glass fire encroaching from the north, residents inched along in heavy traffic. “It was insane, bumper to bumper,” he said.

“I’m a pretty pro-housing guy,” Tibbetts added. “I ran on being pro-housing, and I don’t think I’ve ever voted against a housing project. But when it comes to this particular project, what needs to be front and center of our consciousness isn’t housing. It’s safety.”

Regardless of how many housing units the proposal ultimately contains, “whether it’s 600 or 200,” he said, “the questions in my mind are going to be: How are we evacuating those people? And how do we not only avoid increasing the amount of traffic, in the event of an evacuation, but actually reduce it?”

Steve McCullagh, who handles site acquisition and development for Oakmont Senior Living and is managing the Elnoka project, did not respond to requests for comment.

Windsor-based Oakmont Senior Living, founded in 1997 by Bill Gallaher, has planned and developed more than 50 retirement communities in the western United States. It is not affiliated with Oakmont Village, the 1,400-acre planned Santa Rosa retirement community of more than 3,000 homes that dates back to 1963.

At a May 27 meeting of the Santa Rosa Planning Commission, Commissioner Akash Kalia said he and fellow members noted with some concern that sections of the draft environmental impact report dealing with emergency evacuations from the Elnoka area rely on outdated plans, formed by the city before the Tubbs, Nuns and Glass fires scarred much of eastern Santa Rosa and Sonoma Valley. Since then, he noted, the issue of wildfire evacuations in that part of the county has become much more sensitive.

The proposed complex’s 676 residential units include 528 apartments, a 62-unit care center and 12 attached units for employee housing. It also features private and formal dining rooms, a café, swimming pool, pet parks, walking paths, a beauty salon and other amenities.

Zoning limits and 2012 accord

One immediate hurdle facing the developer is that 50 of the 68 acres on which it will stand are now zoned by the city as “very low density, which would be two people per acre,” Kendrick said. As the land is currently zoned, the Elnoka project would be limited to around 300 residents, he estimated.

The alternative, Kalia said, would be to amend the city’s general plan, to “bump up the density” allowed in those areas.

If the project is approved by the city’s planning commission, it is all but certain be appealed, by Oakmont residents and other concerned citizens, to the Santa Rosa City Council, which could rescind that approval, as it did to an earlier, 209-unit version of the Elnoka project in 2011.

Wally Schilpp believes this latest iteration of the project has “no chance” of being approved by the council. Schilpp is a longtime Oakmont resident who sits on the homeowners association’s committee dealing with the Elnoka project, which he’s been alternately battling and monitoring since shortly after 2005, when Gallaher bought the land.

Now 88, he describes himself as an “adviser” on the committee, “’cause I’m the only one left who remembers what the hell happened 15 years ago.”

Schilpp believes Gallaher is doing “what any smart developer would do” — opening negotiations “with something outrageous, and having a lot of room to come down.”

Following their defeat in 2011, Gallaher and Oakmont Senior Living entered into a kind of nonaggression pact with the Oakmont Village Association, Kendrick said. That agreement, signed by both parties, stipulated that the developer would “scale things back,” he said, “in exchange for the homeowners association not doing anything overt to oppose it.”

While that agreement “is still basically out there,” said Kendrick, the developer’s latest proposal, with its nearly 700 residential units, pays it little heed, he said.

Call for project revision

While the homeowners association “doesn’t get a vote” with the Santa Rosa council on whether the Elnoka project survives or not, “we can make it easier or harder,” Kendrick said. If Gallaher doesn’t scale the project down significantly, Oakmont “would have a problem with that.”

At least one Oakmont resident believes it was a mistake to trust the developer. Gallaher and Oakmont Senior Living have used that 2012 agreement “to essentially quiet us,” said Hugh Helm, a retired attorney who chairs Oakmont’s committee on community development.

Through the years, he said, “they induced us to cooperate with them” in exchange for the builder’s willingness to tailor the project to meet certain requirements.

“But they’ve never performed,” Helm said. “My personal opinion is that they never intended to perform. That whole agreement was a method to kind of nullify our opposition.”

“We’ve sort of been snookered.”

You can reach Staff Writer Austin Murphy at 707-521-5214 or austin.murphy@pressdemocrat.com or on Twitter @ausmurph88.