Last night's city counci meeting

I couldn’t make it to last night’s city council meeting because my grades were due today. [I just turned them in about twenty minutes ago, over thirty minutes before the deadline! :D].

Jennifer McLain has a very short summary of the meeting here. If anyone else wishes to add to it, I’d appreciate it.

The Wal-Mart noise/transformer issue not mentioned in the summary. I’m sure it was discussed because it was on the agenda, but apparently nothing newsworthy came of it?

Had I been able to attend, there are two of points I would have emphasized. First, that the roof-mounted air conditioning units seem quite clearly to be violating the Rosemead noise ordinance 9at least that's what the latest acoustical study seems to suggest).  And, second, that other noise mitigation steps may be appropriate, because the EIR claimed a mitigated no significant impact for this project. "No significant impact" means that even if the noise were *below* the threshold of the noise ordinance, if it is significantly louder (which Jim has said means five decibels louder) after the building was constructed versus before, the difference needs to be mitigated away.

Mitigation could take the form of a more effective sound wall, the application of a noise-absorbing material to the back wall of the store, a higher parapet wall/roofline, thicker, taller, and/or more noise-absorbing foliage between the store and the street, etc.

The difficulty with proving "no significant impact" is that there was no baseline noise survey done prior to construction. The EIR and the conditions of approval SAID there would be a baseline study done, but none ever was. Someone (The old city council? The old planning commission? The old planning or building department?) dropped the ball on that one. Or maybe they just didn’t really want to know how much additional noise was generated/reflected on to the neighboring properties?