On Tuesday night of last week we were pleased to receive a unanimous recommendation for approval from the Eagle Planning and Zoning Commission. The positive recommendation was the result of a lot of hard work and communication with the community by way of focus groups, open houses, meetings with town staff and three months of hearings with the members of the commission. We have continued to listen to the community and it showed with this positive vote. We want to thank all the members of the Planning and Zoning Commission and town staff for their dedication, thoughtful deliberation and positive vote on our application. We understand that a successful project needs to be done cooperatively with the professionals in the community that have been put in a position to oversee the land development process for projects such as this.

The next step will be to take this recommendation of approval to the Eagle Town Board. We will continue to listen to any input as we refine the project to meet the community's needs and bring valuable jobs back to the area. We continue to be excited about Eagle River Station and feel very optimistic that it will be a project that will benefit the town financially as well as being a welcome addition to the community. We anticipate that the first public hearing with the town board will be scheduled in mid November. As always we encourage you to attend those meetings and make your voice heard.

Lastly, I wanted to address a few incorrect statements that have been made in several recent letters about a perceived “lack of phasing” of our project and an “excess of parking.” Both statements couldn't be further from the truth.

The approved ERS Planned Unit Development book stipulates that this project will be built in two distinct phases. In addition, we testified in public testimony and made a commitment that the first of those two phases will be market driven and built in several smaller phases. Retail projects such as this rarely are constructed in a single phase and ERS is no different. We do not build spec buildings and we only construct buildings with signed leases which drives the phasing by its very nature. The only thing built in a single phase is the public infrastructure and utilities.

With regard to the perceived abundance of parking, we are providing parking stalls at a ratio well below the established parking standards in the industry and a lesser ratio than other similar retail uses in the county. To say that we are over parked is not at all accurate. In addition to the reduction in our parking ratio we have modified the plan to lessen the visual impacts of the parking fields. We have designed the parking into much smaller lots and a hidden parking structure that is surrounded by the residential apartments. The at-grade parking is broken up into smaller lots and separated so that they are screened from each other by buildings, landscaping and other amenities.

Again, we thank everyone for their support and continued participation in the process. We look forward to seeing you at the town board hearings.

Jeff McMahon

Managing Partner

Trinity/RED Development