Council selects company for environmental report

FORT BRAGG, CA » On April 25, the city council approved an agreement with De Novo Planning Group to prepare an Environmental Impact Report for the proposed Grocery Outlet site. Best Development Group, the developer of the Grocery Outlet site, will be funding the EIR.

Three companies submitted proposals to conduct the EIR: De Novo, Helix, and M-Group. Three staff members and a contractor reviewed the proposals. Associate Planner Heather Gurewitz stated that while De Novo and Helix were the top two candidates, they chose De Novo since the City has recently contracted other projects with Helix and wanted to ensure those projects went well before contracting any more.

However, De Novo’s application did create some suspicions. BDG had already started the process of completing an EIR and had hired De Novo to do the work. However, that process was halted when the City told BDG they had to go through the bidding process. As a result, De Novo has already started some of the work for BDG, so their quoted price was significantly less than Helix the other companies.

Michael Schwerin, the CEO of Helix, sent a letter to the City requesting full disclosure of how much work De Novo had previously completed with BDG. Their main concern was that De Novo was planning to “prepare a Project Description, Initial Study, and full and complete administrative draft Environmental Impact Report and conduct a public scoping meeting, using only 21 hours of staff time.”

Steve McMurtry, the representative from De Novo, defended the price difference. According to him, even though some of the work was previously done when BDG contracted them, the EIR still would have to be up to the City’s standards. According to him, the City will get a full EIR with the quoted price.

Those weren’t the only concerns, however. De Novo’s proposal stated that they would be reusing old studies used for the previous MND, such as the biological studies and the traffic studies. A few members of the public felt as though this was unacceptable.

However, according to Steve McMurtry, this was simply poor wording in the proposal. “As a

biologist, what I do is I take all literature that’s available. It could be past studies, or the Department of Fish and Wildlife has records. I gather all those records and start to do a desktop review before I ever go out to the site to try to understand the type of habitat and what other people have seen out there.”

The city council approved De Novo unanimously, with Mayor Bernie Norvell recusing himself.