There are a few details to catch everyone up on after a rather eventful, and frankly stressful, weekend with the fire.

First I hope all of you and your properties are safe. It got pretty nerve wracking there for a moment.

As for the meeting on Thursday. As you saw from my previous email, the meeting was canceled last second. Apparently someone missed a notification to someone. Holding the meeting would’ve been in violation of the Brown Act. They are currently trying to figure out the re-schedule date, but are tied up with the aftermath of the fire. I am in direct contact with Sarah Tone and she will let me know first thing.

I also wanted to clarify that the Citizen Advisory Board meeting is not a meeting held by the local committee I represent. This is an official meeting on the development held by the county for residents to be able to bring comments and concerns forward. There seemed to be some confusion on that with some that showed up.

We need as many residents as possible to come to the re-scheduled meeting. Please pass the word along and talk to your neighbors. Thank you! Have a great week and keep an eye out for updates.

apparently, without warning, the CAB meeting has been cancelled! We will post updates.

Hello dear neighbors, our little committee has been pouring over the Ascente plans in the time since its submission as I’m sure many of you have as well. Next week the submission goes in front of the Citizen’s Advisory Board, and then the County Planning Commission on November 1st.

There are many many details to be concerned about, much of which we have already anticipated. The issues surrounding traffic, environmental, water, schools, safety and impact on our our community’s way of life are simply too numerous and large to ignore. Now comes the time where we must all come together to fight against this inappropriate development and have our voice heard!

WHAT CAN YOU DO?

We are calling on EVERYBODY to attend the Citizen’s Advisory Board meeting on Thursday October 13th at 6pm at the South Valley’s Library to voice your opposition. Experts and residents from our area have come forward to present the issues concerning key concerns.

Kris Hemline, professional environmental engineer and geochemist, will discuss issues presented by the geological make up in the area including fault lines and potential lead contamination.

Bryan Raydon, Marmot Properties, will discuss traffic and issues concerning the forest service plan

Todd Mihevc, retired hydrologist/hydrogeologist, will discuss concerns over water and water rights.

Chuck Price, administrative faculty at UNR, will discuss the threat to to our local schools.

Ken Allen will be discussing safety and the negative impacts on our community’s way of life.

Of course you can feel free to step up and give your input if you feel we have missed anything. But be prepared that you will only have 3 minutes to talk. We hope to cover everything that we have leverage over in short and to the point presentations so that we can make the whole process run smoothly. If you have an questions for our committee on any specific issue prior to the meeting, feel free to contact us through the website and we will connect you with the appropriate member.

Tuesday November 1st, we will need to make our presence felt once again at the County Planning Commission meeting.

Members of our committee will be putting up signs and handing out flyers about the CAB meeting this week. If anyone is available to help, please contact us.

You will also be receiving a mailer in the next week that will have a postcard attachment for you to send you concerns to our commissioners.

We hope to see you all very soon!

Ladies and gentleman, Ascente has been submitted. And here are the official plans:

Click to access TM16-009_SW16-003_ap.pdf

Everyone on the committee is scouring through the submission. We will take some time to review and game plan some next steps and we will get back to you.

When the time comes, it will be important to have as many people from the community as possible come together to voice any dissents we may have.

I’m sure many of you have been waiting to hear from us. We were in a bit of a hold pattern waiting for the plans to be submitted. I just wanted to let everyone know that they have been submitted and the committee is currently working on getting together to review them and figure out our next steps.

I have been away on business a lot of this month so I haven’t been able to attend to this site, but we will know more very soon and as always I will keep you updated. I hope school is going well for all the kiddos and the start of fall is treating everyone well!

Hello neighbors!

First, we know many of you have been asked into private meetings with the developers. Of course you are free to tell them any concerns you wish but we want to remind everyone that we are all stronger together. This development impacts all of us and we share the common goal of keeping it from affecting our roads, our schools and our general way of life out here in the Galena area.

As I posted last week we met with the Washoe County Planning department on the 10^th. We came away feeling very good about the meeting. The flow of traffic and everything involved with it seems to be the strongest issue we have on our side. They shared our concerns for our little roads and our way of life, as well as other complications the current plan presents such as emergency access. They were also concerned about potential environmental hazards posed by the old Galena lead mines. If you would like to know more about this, one of our committee members wrote an op-ed you can read here:
http://www.rgj.com/story/opinion/voices/2016/08/15/one-view-south-reno-development-may-disturb-toxic-materials/88806308/

Everything else, as we already knew, many of the issues raised will boil down the results of impact studies and what the developer has to do to meet the requirements asked for by the county. This process will not move forward until the project is submitted.

We are not sure when it will be submitted. But we do know it was not submitted in time for this month, so the next time they will be able to submit is September 15^th. We are not sure why they delayed their submission. When the plan is submitted you will be able to view it at https://www.washoecounty.us/csd/planning_and_development/ under “applications commission District 2”.

We had originally planned for a meeting with the developers on Friday, but after the info we gathered from the planning department, and learning of their one on one meetings with other residents, we felt there was nothing more to add or learn from a meeting.

So now it’s a waiting game. Knowing that we have the planning department’s ear on a few issues, and the support of a few members of the planning commission, we are feeling a lot stronger. We will let you know if there are any new developments or when we know more about the submitted plan.

As always, if you’d like to know more detail about specific issues we are discussing as a committee, or would like to add some input you feel is being overlooked, please feel free to contact us.

Hello Neighbors!

First a quick correction note. We had posted on the website that Hunsberger Elementary would be triggered for double sessions once they hit 120% capacity. In reality it will trigger a Multi-track calendar. They will switch to double session once they hit 120% capacity while on multi-track. The correction has been made.

There are a few important updates for you today. First, at the most recent open house held by the developer, they unveiled a few more details to the project as well changes made to the access points. This change lowers traffic through Callahan by 25%, but increases traffic to Fawn Ln. I will not be able to address updates to the website in a timely manner, but you can look at the updates on their website ascentenevada.com.

I have heard from Fawn Ln residents who are upset about this change. Please know that this change was not made based off anything that our committee has done. Any input they have received so far has come from their open meetings held at the south valleys library. We will continue to fight the impacts for ALL area residents.

We also have a few important meetings coming up. We have scheduled a meeting with the Washoe County Planning department on Wednesday. We are going to be talking to them about Ascente’s access points and the traffic studies. We also want to question them about the zoning change in 2010 to find out why it was switched to medium density and see if there is anything we can do to affect this decision.

Most importantly we are in process of scheduling a meeting with the developers on Friday. At this meeting we will present a list of requests as they make their final plans before submitting to the planning department. At this early stage in the process, this is really our only option to see if they’d be willing to mitigate some of our concerns of their own volition. Once submitted, the county will do their impact studies and we will know more about what the developer can and cannot do to get approval. If we are not happy with the changes made, it is at this point that we’ll know more about what we can do to fight further.

Because we want to properly represent the community as a whole, I want to give a chance for feedback before our meeting. Our formal requests will include:

1. Lowering the density of the development. Fewer houses would help to alleviate all issues across the board.
2. Gain their own private access directly to Mt Rose to alleviate traffic through Callahan and Fawn Ln. This one is especially tricky as they would have to purchase the forest service plots to build that road. This could take up to 2 years. To accomplish this we would have to find a way to delay the project as a whole to allow time for this to happen.
3. Donate to the school district to help in the building of a new school. This school would be a middle school built on forest service land adjacent to Hunsberger. It would take on the 6 grade class from Hunsberger addressing overcrowding at both Hunsberger Elementary and Pine middle schools.

If any of you in the community have any input to add, or have any concerns about this list of requests, please contact me. Not everyone will have their needs met, and in all reality the developer doesn’t need to meet any of this demands to move forward with their plans. But I want to make sure we take everyone concerns into account and stay together as a community.

I hope you all have a lovely weekend and good luck with the first week of school for those with children!

Just a quick reminder that the developer is holding a public meeting tomorrow (Thursday) at 5:30 at the south valley libraries.

As for our committee, we weren’t able to put together a private meeting prior with such short notice, but we hope to see you all at this community meeting and will continue to gather information. See you soon!

Hello Galena neighbors! Its great to see that so many of you have signed up for updates. It just so happens I have one for you now. The committee of community residents has been assembled and we have had our first meeting to discuss our plans. I’m excited to be working with such a smart and dedicated group. We have everything from developers and engineers, to an ex general manager of Sun Valley Water and Sanitation District and former board member of the Washoe County Water Planning committee. We’re even set up with our own printing company and an Emmy winning journalist. Its like somebody hand picked the perfect team. We are very lucky to live in an area rich with such knowledge and power!

We have compiled a list of concerns and questions from all of you and have reached out to the developer to request a one on one meeting. I will keep you all posted if anything comes from that. Thank you everyone for your interest in keeping our area awesome! Hope you had a good weekend.

Thank you all for such a great turn out at our first community meeting! We had a lot of great information shared and had informative presentations from the WCSD and TMWA. I know we still have a lot of questions, and not everything has been answered, but its all a process. So here’s what’s next…

First and foremost, sign up to receive updates from this site by submitting your email address on the homepage (I promise I got nothin to sell, will limit the posts, and its all over when this whole deal with Ascente is over).

Also, please please please, if you have concerns or comments that have not been addressed, or find inaccuracies on the site, use the contact page. I need all the information gatherers I can get!

There are updates coming for the website to reflect the meeting, but I’ll be out of town for the weekend, so it will be delayed. This is why signing up for the email list will be helpful, you’ll get an email when there are any updates or changes.

THE NEXT STEP

We are formulating a committee of residents to organize all the information we have put together, and formulate a set of well researched questions to take to a meeting with the county planning office, and eventually the developers at their next planned meeting. With the names I have so far, it looks like our committee will be filled with smart, talented and passionate community members. If you want to join the ranks, please use the contact page to send me your name and how you can add to the Galena brain trust.

Thank you all again, and have a wonderful weekend!