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Health & Fitness

DID YOU KNOW that Redwood City is spending more than $800,000 on consultants for the Inner Harbor plan and yet spent only 250,000 for the Downtown plan?

Most cities have very formal processes for planning and development.   The first step for most cities is to develop a General Plan.  Then from the General Plan they drill down and create area specific plans that conform to the top down General Plan specifications.  

Redwood City last adopted a General Plan in October of 2010.  Since then the City has been involved in various visioning plans to determine the details of various neighborhoods and areas. Back in 2011, the City of Redwood City produced the Downtown plan a plan that cost the residents about $250,000 in consulting fees.  That plan encompassed 183 acres loosely bounded by Brewster Avenue, Veterans Boulevard, Maple Street and El Camino Real.  

Just two years later, we now have the Inner Harbor plan which so far already has planned consultant expenditures of $425,730 for Moore, Iacofano and Goltsman Inc (MIG) and $376,855 for Environmental Science Associates (ESA) for a total for these two contracts alone of $802,585.

Two items are worthy of note. 

First of all the Inner Harbor area is an area of in this context only about 100 waterfront acres bounded by highway 101, Redwood Creek and Seaport Blvd not including the Granite Rock property east of Blomquist (for exact detail see map picture above.)

 In addition, this plan is barely six months into its work with a currently planned completion date of end of 2014.

Simply put:
Downtown Plan  ( 183 acres)  $250,000 complete
Inner Harbor Plan (approximately 100 acres) $802,585 still ongoing

This data gives rise to a lot of questions.  Why is the City willing to spend so much more money on the Inner Harbor then on the Downtown plan?   Is this the most effective use of these funds?  Or are there other services such as police and fire that should instead be the recipients of these funds?

These are your tax dollars are work.  How do you think they should be spent? 

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