Newest articles on The Sacramento Press tagged as "tom zeidner"

City Council seals billboards deal with Clear Channel

2010-05-12T05:17:56Z

The billboards are going up. And the city of Sacramento will take in a hefty sum.

Clear Channel Outdoor will set up four new digital billboards on property leased from the city. The City Council unanimously approved the deal Tuesday night.

Signing bonuses with Clear Channel will bring in $330,000, according to Tom Zeidner, senior development project manager for the city.

The leases said the city will receive $720,000 in rent from Clear Channel yearly for five years.

The company will put four billboards at the following locations: the north side of Interstate 80 and east of Northgate Boulevard; Business 80 and Fulton Avenue; the west side of Highway 99 and south of Mack Road; the west side of Interstate 5 and south of Richards Boulevard.

Zeidner said the leases would be enacted in June.

The first two billboards will likely be set up this year, Zeidner said, and the other two signs may be ready during the first half of 2011.

Clear Channel’s billboards will remain at the sites for 25 years, according to the lease.

After the first five years of the lease, three of the signs will continue to bring in at least $45,000 per month, according to Zeidner. They could generate even more than that amount per month, he said.

A fourth billboard has different terms for the remaining 20 years, Zeidner said. The city is agreeing to share some of the market risk that Clear Channel is taking in the location of Business 80 and Fulton Avenue, he explained. That’s because Clear Channel is giving free advertising at that location to Mel Rapton Honda, which is a lessee to the city.

"It's certainly in our interest to make sure that (Mel Rapton Honda) succeeds,” Zeidner said in an interview.

Kathleen Haley is a staff reporter for The Sacramento Press.

City Hall updates: Braziel's interview, billboards for dollars

2010-05-08T05:06:49Z

Braziel in Seattle

Police Chief Rick Braziel will be in Seattle on Saturday to interview for a job leading that city’s Police Department, Sacramento Police Department spokesman Norm Leong said Friday. Braziel is competing with 10 other candidates for the job.

Leong added that the city of Seattle is expected to narrow the group of candidates to three on Tuesday.

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Billboards and dollars

The Sacramento City Council will decide Tuesday whether to sign leases with Clear Channel Outdoor for four digital billboards to be placed on city property. The city would garner $330,000 in signing bonuses, according to a report by Tom Zeidner, senior development project manager.

During the first five years of the leases, the city would take in $720,000 in rent each year from the four billboards.

Zeidner’s report said the billboards would be placed at the following spots: the north side of Interstate 80 and east of Northgate Boulevard; Business 80 and Fulton Avenue; the west side of Highway 99 and south of Mack Road; the west side of Interstate 5 and south of Richards Boulevard.

Kathleen Haley is a staff reporter for The Sacramento Press.

Sacramento close to going digital

2010-03-23T07:23:21Z

The City of Sacramento is negotiating a deal with Clear Channel Outdoor (CCO) to install four digital billboards along several freeways within city limits.

The four proposed digital billboards would be located at Interstate 80 at Northgate, Interstate 5 at Richards Blvd., Capital City Freeway at Fulton Ave., and Highway 99 at Mack Road.

The city’s goals for installing the digital billboards are to diversify and increase city funds.

According to Tom Zeidner, the senior economic development project manager, the financial terms between the city and CCO are still being negotiated, and he is not able to discuss the specifics.

The revenue the city is expected to earn and how it will be distributed among districts is still tentative.

The current city code does not allow for new digital billboards to be constructed unless the city enters into a ‘relocation agreement,’ which requires sign owners to remove a billboard if another is built.

When this deal was first being hatched, Zeidner proposed that for every digital billboard built, three traditional billboards would be taken down.

The zoning requirements to build a digital billboard need to fall under either a commercial or industrial zoned area. One of the proposed billboards would be located in an agricultural zone, soon to be rezoned to allow for the construction of the billboard.

Concerns have been raised by community groups about the dangers and the carbon emissions the digital billboards will pose. The McKinley East Sacramento Neighborhood Association (MENA) has been active in opposing the billboards.

MENA recently sent a letter to the city’s planning department breaking down the energy use and the emissions from one digital billboard. It states that “a standard digital billboard consumes 397,486 kWh/year. One digital billboard is responsible for 108.41 tons/year of carbon dioxide.”

In other words, the greenhouse gas emissions are equal to just fewer than 14 homes or 18 cars.

An environmental impact report done by the city used SMUD’s emissions to factor how much energy the billboards will use.

The environmental impact report took into account the dangers billboards pose, distraction to the driver, how the intensity of the light may interfere with the drivers’ vision and possible reflection the signs
pose.

Several mitigation measures have been put in place in accordance Caltrans that include no special effects that include moving or flashing lights.

From the looks of things, the city and CCO are close to sealing this deal.

“We expect to come back to Council with the financials for the deal as well as the language for the updated sign ordinance in April,” wrote Daniel Roth, the district director, in an e-mail.

Nestle wants Sac's water

2009-09-29T06:59:26Z

Sacramento residents are taking first steps into the water justice movement in an effort to stop Swiss company Nestle from bottling and selling city tap water.

About 60 people and one dog packed a tiny Quaker church in a Midtown office suite Monday night to discuss growing concerns over Nestle's plans to open a water-bottling plant in Sacramento and to bottle an estimated 82 million gallons of water from the American River every year.

One of the group's biggest worries is that Nestle's use of the water would not be regulated or limited in any way. While city employee and Nestle's public relations team estimates are tens of millions of gallons apart, the actual amount of water Nestle may bottle each year would be unchecked, according to city staff and activists.

"It's clearly ridiculous to give someone unlimited access to our water in the third year of a drought," said Sacramento resident Evan Tucker. "We could stop it."

The water would be taken directly from the municipal water system. The bottled water would then be trucked to stores and sold to consumers, including those in Sacramento and elsewhere in Northern California.

The group also expressed concerns with the lack of transparency they say has accompanied plans for Nestle's bottled water division, known as Nestle Water, to begin operations at a Florin Fruitridge Industrial Park site early next year. The city has not sought public input or performed an environmental analysis of the plan's expected impact.

"The city and Nestle have tried to keep this a secret," said Tucker, who led the meeting. "We're trying to do what we can to get the word out."

The group, which has organized under the name Save Our Water Sacramento, includes people who have worked for social justice, human and civil rights and the environment. Monday night, they discussed the initial steps they're taking to seek a Sacramento City Council moratorium on beverage bottling plants in Sacramento.

Save Our Water Sacramento and its allies are also working to bring the new movie, "Tapped," to the city, Mt. Shasta and Orland, where another water-bottling fight is raging, in the next few weeks, said Nancy Price of Davis, who has helped community residents fight bottled-water battles in other states as a social and environmental justice issue. Price works with Alliance for Democracy's Water for Life campaign.

Nestle is planning to open a plant in Sacramento after a failed, six-year battle to bottle spring water in McCloud near Mt. Shasta. Nestle had sought to open a plant a few miles from water-bottling plants operated by Coca-Cola and Crystal Geyser, owned by a Japanese pharmaceutical company. That effort failed after Attorney General Jerry Brown threatened to sue Nestle over an inadequate environmental review in the summer of 2008.

Nestle's attempts to build water-bottling plants have been fought from McCloud to Denver and Maine. Residents of Shingletown, a mountain community outside Lassen National Park, are currently fighting a water battle involving an unidentified bottling company they suspect is Nestle, said Dick Rullman, president of Local Water Stays Local.

They've hired San Francisco attorney Rachel Hooper of Shute, Mihaly and Weinberger — the same attorney who successfully fought Nestle in McCloud.

Nestle's stated plans for Sacramento include bottling 20 million gallons of spring water from an unidentified source, Tucker said.

As such an old city, Sacramento has "very, very senior water rights" in California, said Carmichael resident Betsy Weiland, who has worked on other water issues such as protecting the American River.

When asked whether city employees have given Nestle permission to bottle and sell the city's water, Tom Zeidner, a senior development project manager with the Economic Development Department, said, "Nestle's is setting up its plant in an existing building in an area that's zoned industrial or manufacturing. They have satisfied zoning standards. As such, they are going in there and establishing a plant under 'development by right.' "

The area is zoned for industrial use of water, he later added.

The permits they need to install equipment and do work on an existing building are "minor enough" that Nestle doesn't need to go through any other regulatory body, such as the planning commission, Zeidner said.

Nestle has told the city about 250 acre feet — or nearly 82 million gallons — of city-treated American River water would be bottled each year. That represents .02 percent of the city's current water demands, he said, adding the city does not regulate how much water an industrial water customer uses except to impose drought restrictions when needed.

There are no current drought restrictions on industrial users, although there are outdoor irrigation restrictions, he added.

Nestle would pay the industrial rate, said Zeidner, who didn't know what that rate is.

The city determined that the California Environmental Quality act doesn't apply to the project, he said, based on CEQA guidelines, section 15002i, which state:

(i) Discretionary Action. CEQA applies in situations where a governmental agency can use its judgment in deciding whether and how to carry out or approve a project. A project subject to such judgmental controls is called a "discretionary project."

(1) Where the law requires a governmental agency to act on a project in a set way without allowing the agency to use its own judgment, the project is called "ministerial," and CEQA does not apply.

(2) Whether an agency has discretionary or ministerial controls over a project depends on the authority granted by the law providing the controls over the activity. Similar projects may be subject to discretionary controls in one city or county and only ministerial controls in another.

Suzanne Hurt is a staff reporter for The Sacramento Press.