Fountaingrove Environmental Impact Report - City of Santa Rosa ...

2.0 LIST OF COMMENTERS AND RESPONSE TO COMMENTS
will be included as a condition of Project approval. The crossing would be a raised
speed table marked as a pedestrian crossing equipped with a pedestrian-activated
flasher, located on Thomas Lake Harris Drive between the Flats Building and
Employee Housing (Lot 3).
38) No specific comment was made. Potential impacts to emergency access are
addressed in Impact 3.7-4, no significant impacts would occur. As noted in
Impact 3.13-4 of the Draft EIR, the installation of a signal at the intersection of
Thomas Lake Harris and Fountaingrove Parkway will improve emergency access to
and from the site.
39) The state of California has published a technical advisory to provide guidance on
addressing climate change in CEQA review (Office of Planning and Research, CEQA
and Climate Change: Addressing Climate Change through California Environmental Quality
Act (CEQA) Review, June 19, 2008). The guidance suggests that a Project’s greenhouse
emissions be quantified and their significance be determined; it does not direct that
climate change effects on water supply or other utilities be evaluated. The Project’s
contribution to cumulative climate change effects is discussed in Section 3.3 Air
Quality in the Draft EIR and in Response to Comment Public Hearing – 58.
Operation of the Project may result in a net positive benefit for operational
greenhouse gas emissions.
Section 15145 of the CEQA Guidelines states that if a lead agency finds that a
particular impact is too speculative for evaluation, this conclusion should be noted
and no further discussions is required. The Climate Action Team Report to Governor
Schwarzenegger and the Legislature (California Environmental Protection Agency,
March 2006) analyzed the effects of potential climate change scenarios on
California’s weather, among other areas. The report states that “There is no clear
trend in precipitation projections for California over the next century. However the
consensus of the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) model
projections, including several models that were not selected for the present study, is
for relatively little change in total precipitation, with a tendency toward a slightly
greater winter and lower spring precipitation” but that “[h]igher temperatures will
result in more precipitation as rain instead of snow and earlier melt of the snow that
does fall…Declining snowpack will aggravate the already overstretched water
resources in California. The snowpack in the Sierra Nevada provides natural water
storage equal to about half the storage capacity in California’s major man-made
reservoirs. The snowpack holds the winter precipitation in the form of snow and,
historically, has released it in the spring and early summer as the snow melts. This
loss in storage could mean more water shortages in the future. However, the full
effect of this storage loss will depend in part on whether reservoirs can be managed
to capture the earlier snowmelt while loosing flood control capacity.” The climate
change scenarios vary widely in their potential consequences on snowpack, and the
ability of water agencies around the state to store greater rainfall quantities will
depend on how much additional storage is constructed and how storage is operated.
Therefore, a reasonable estimate of effects of climate change on the City’s water
supply cannot be made, and no further discussion is required. As described in
Section 3.14 of the Draft EIR, the SCWA provides the City with its potable water
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