The Shore Drive Community Coalition would like to thank Council Member John Moss and Council Member Aaron Rouse for their leadership and understanding of the community’s concerns. They made their decisions based on citizens input, adverse impact to neighborhoods and violations of existing codes, plans and guidelines. They didn’t let the allure of tax dollars and promises to solve the perceived problem of the approaching silver tsunami of retires influence their opinions. Please remember to thank them for their efforts.
The SDCC would like to thank all the members of the community for their emails, phone calls, letters and for speaking in opposition at hearings. Your dedication and efforts spent the past 10 months fighting this precedent setting project were truly heroic. As we see now, the lack of City civic engagement wasn’t by accident. With more civic engagement, it would have been harder for those that voted in favor to justify their support of a high rise high density project.
The following table shows how each Council Member voted on the application. This information may be helpful for future dealings with City Council.
Red – Voted in favor of the application (Dyer, Wooten, Berlucchi*, Henley, Tower**); Green – Voted against the application (Moss, Rouse); Yellow – Conflict of Interest (Wilson, Wood, Jones); White – Absent from Vote (Abbott)
*-Made motion to approve, **-2nd motion
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Call me cynical, but I am suspicious of Abbott’s absence last night. She knew 3 fellow council members would be recusing themselves. Had she been there there would have been 8 members present and the possibility of a tie vote which would have been a defeat for the developer. I think she would have been pro the developer but not sure about the overall outcome of the vote and so stayed away. Also, I’d like to know if Guy Tower did in fact forward emails of opposition to the WC’s attorney, RJ Nutter.