Dixon City Council approves amended agreement for innovation center
The first Dixon City Council meeting of 2023 marked the start of a new era, with Councilman Thom Bogue sworn in as the representative for District 2, but it was not one of the more action item-oriented meetings.
Apart from determining committee assignments for the new council, the item that turned out to provoke the most discussion was one off the consent calendar: an amendment to the city’s professional services agreement with DKS Associates to complete travel demand modeling and traffic impact analysis review services for a project dubbed the “Dixon Innovation Center Development Project” located off Pedrick Road near the TEC Equipment dealership.
Back in July 2021, the council had authorized the execution of a PSA with DKS — a transportation planning and engineering firm based out of Portland, Oregon with an office in Sacramento — for engineering services related to completing traffic impact analysis on a project reimbursement basis for vehicle miles traveled analysis for ongoing and future developments, according to a staff report by City Engineer Deborah Barr. The agreement term expired on Dec. 31, 2021 and was extended through June 30 of this year.
The item before the council was an amendment that would allow for preliminary traffic engineering, traffic demand modeling support and services to complete a peer review of the project traffic impact analysis. The costs for these consulting services would not exceed $11,885 and would be funded by the developer through reimbursement accounts.
The item was on the consent calendar, which is reserved for typically routine items and approved in one motion unless a council member or member of the audience requests an item to be pulled. In this case, Councilman Jim Ernest requested pulling the item after a constituent asked for more clarification on what the item entailed. Barr said the agreement was not for a specific project at this point, but the proposed site was off Pedrick Road, south of the TEC dealership and north of Vaughn Road.
“What this particular agreement is is in support of the development and extension of staff,” she said. “We have an on-call contract with DKS who does the traffic modeling as well as review of the transportation impact analysis that gets submitted by the developer, so what we have been doing standardly to help support the developers is to work with our on-call, they provide us with a proposal, we run that by the developer, the developer approves that proposal before we bring that to you and then that gets paid through a funding agreement that we have in place.”
Barr said the funding agreement deposit may vary, depending on how large the project is, but once a development agreement is in place, the city will work along those terms, with services refunded on a monthly basis or as needed.
In a public comment, Michael Ceremello asked if the project had been previously approved.
“I haven’t heard anything about this thing,” he said. “I don’t know what the details are…I don’t understand why we’re doing a traffic study when we don’t even have a project that’s been defined for the public so they can review it and say yea or nay.”
Barr said the project was in its preliminary stages, and developers would still need to bring a preliminary application and work with staff on the environmental components, which she said Community Development Director Raffia Boloyan was doing.
“You’re seeing it a little earlier than maybe we have done in the past because we have a lot more new development and things moving faster than all of us staff can do ourselves,” she said.
City Manager Jim Lindley said staff was “ceding to the request of the developer to expedite this in any way possible.”
“It’s just to show that we’re moving forward with the project,” he said. “They named it an innovation center. We’ve only seen one rendering of two buildings on it, so we’re not quite sure what it is. They’re testing to see what kind of utilities they’re gonna need, drainage, what traffic impacts look like before they complete their supplement to the application. There isn’t really anything there other than they’re trying to see what they can build there.”
The council voted 4-0 to approve the amended agreement. Don Hendershot was absent.
In other business, the council unanimously elected Hendershot to serve as vice mayor for a one-year term. Police Chief Robert Thompson also swore in new community service officers Juan Cardenas and Valerie Hogg and police officers Jake Curry and Aaron Goodenough.