By Khalida Sarwari
A proposed two-story commercial building on Saratoga Sunnyvale Road is no longer in the works. The applicant scrapped a plan last month to build a facility that would house medical offices and a daycare center.
In a July 5 email to members of the city council and planning staff, Yorke Lee of TimeSpace Square LLC said his company intended to withdraw the plan for a new 25,081-square-foot building on the property at 12250 Saratoga Sunnyvale Road.
“This is a difficult decision for us since it has been worked for over two years, and we have already spent a lot of money and energy in it,” Lee said in the email.
He added that TimeSpace intends to switch to a new plan that “should be compliant with all city code and should have no variance and traffic concerns.”
The email was sent ahead of a scheduled mid-July study session with the council and planning commission to review and discuss details regarding the facility’s daycare use and the height and bulk of the building. The council had decided to schedule the study session at a June 19 meeting following hours of deliberation over a resolution to uphold or deny TimeSpace’s appeal of the planning commission’s denial of the project.
The planning commission denied the proposed project after determining that “there are no special circumstances applicable to the property” to grant TimeSpace a variance to allow the building to exceed the 20-foot height limit by 4 feet, and also citing concerns that the parking was insufficient for the planned use.
At the June 19 meeting, about a dozen people–including several members of the Restore Saratoga group–voiced their opposition to the project, raising concerns about increased traffic, noise, loss of hillside views and parking challenges.
Councilman Chuck Page worried that those concerns may have been too much to handle for Lee, who may have felt that the project would no longer work for him with all the compromises he’d have to make.
“I just feel in essence he was tired of the process,” Page said. “He was trying to accommodate so many people and had made so many changes and modifications to make it work, and in the end to have it delayed, even though it was by two weeks. … At some point everybody has their breaking point.”
An email to Lee seeking comment received no response.
TimeSpace will now have to go back to the drawing board to design and draft a new plan and then restart the process of submitting it to the planning commission for consideration. Page speculated the new plan may call for a higher building and one that may be mixed use, with retail in the front and housing in the back.
He indicated that the city should try to be more receptive to entities that want to invest in Saratoga.
“You can’t deny everything,” said Page. “Pretty soon, we’re either going to be told what to do by the state or somebody is going to hold a project and we’re going to get something we don’t like. And to me, that’s a shame.”
Developer scraps plans to build medical offices, daycare center in Saratoga
