Page One

After four hours of sometimes emotional public testimony from a packed City Council chambers, a divided Alameda City Council voted in the early hours Wednesday morning to move forward with the Historic Alameda Theater Rehabilitation Project. 

Seventy-one speakers spoke against either the parking garage or the cineplex portion of the project, or both, while 11 speakers spoke in favor. 

Opponents of the project said they turned in some 3,000 signatures opposing the garage and multiplex. Both opponents and proponents of the project support the rehabilitation of the original Alameda Theater, but opponents are objecting to the multiplex and parking garage portion of the project. 

And while opponents of the project said they were “disappointed” by the 3-2 council decision, they said their fight to try to kill the controversial project was by no means over. 

“We have the opportunity to do this,” said Alameda Mayor Beverly Johnson, announcing her support for the project. “We have a developer who is willing to do this. There have been suggestions that we simply open one to three screens at the old theater, but that theater has been sitting there vacant for twenty years, and nobody has done that.” 

Johnson said that the council needed to move forward with a decision “because there will be people who are going to be mad with us either way we vote.” 

And Vice Mayor Marie Gilmore, who also voted for the project, noted that “people have said clearly that they want to restore the theater, but restoring the theater does not come cheaply.” She called the theater a “public amenity.” 

But Councilmember Doug deHaan, who voted against the garage and cineplex, called the design “butt-ugly,” and said that the total number of screens approved for the theater complex would probably not be enough for the project to break even. 

“So are we just chasing our tail on this?” he asked. DeHaan said he opposed the garage project “because it appears that we are putting too much building on too small a parcel.” 

The vote was on a citizen appeal of a decision last June by the Alameda City Planning Board to approve the multiplex and parking garage design. The financial design of the project has been approved by the Council for several months. 

Alameda has now committed itself to a $23.7 million downtown project that will rehabilitate the 77-year-old Alameda Theater as a one to three-screen venue, as well as build an adjacent seven-screen multiplex movie theater that will share the lobby with the original theater. 

A third component of the rehabilitation project is the construction, next door, of a six-level parking garage. When and if it is finally constructed, the entire project is projected to take up a third of a block on the corner of Central Avenue and Oak Street in the heart of Alameda’s Park Street downtown area, a block from City Hall. 

Both the original theater and the multiplex will be owned by the City of Alameda, but will be operated by developer Kyle Conner of Santa Rosa under lease from the city. The original Alameda Theater has not operated as a movie venue since 1979, although the building has supported other business operations since that time, including a roller rink and a gymnastics center. 

Following the City Council meeting, which did not decide the theater project issue until 2:15 a.m., an emotionally and physically exhausted Conner shook hands in the corridor outside council chambers. 

Saying that while he was “pleased with the council decision,” he wanted to caution that “there are still more hurdles to clear.” 

Conner said that architects must return to the city with details of minor design changes suggested by councilmembers during the deliberations, with the permitting process to follow. Conner estimated that “if all goes smoothly from this point,” completed construction of the three building complex was at least two years away. 

Opponents Ani Dimusheva and Valeria Ruma, who organized the Citizens for a Megaplex-Free Alameda that is leading the fight against the multiplex and garage and filed the appeal against the Planning Board decision, said they hope that does not happen. 

Both said that while they had not yet decided what next steps to take in reaction, they said those steps might range from further intervention as the project goes through the city’s permitting process, as well as, according to Ruma, “maybe making changes in the makeup of the city government itself. We haven’t made any conclusions yet.” 

“The democratic process was absent during the hearing,” Dimusheva said by telephone. “If public opinion doesn’t matter, what does?”  

And Ruma added that “we really feel that there is some higher power driving this initiative.” 

The 200-person-capacity council chambers could not hold the audience at Tuesday’s hearing, and the city set up overflow rooms, one in City Hall and one at the Elks Club, where the hearing was simulcast. Mayor Johnson said the city chose that solution rather than moving the hearing to a larger venue so that the hearing could be televised live to residents over cable. 

The hearing had the electrically-charged aspects of a political convention, with opponents wearing red T-shirts proclaiming “Listen To The People” and proponents wearing badges reading “We Support The Project.” Just before the hearing began, a project opponent with badges in her hands walked through the crowd asking “are you for the project or against it?” while handing them out. 

One man who identified himself as a project supporter surveyed the anti-project crowd and said that the Alameda Theater in its abandoned form “has been a real blight on downtown. If this doesn’t pass, the council should just tear it down and put up a bank. Maybe then these people will be happy.” 

Several opponents said they did not want a downtown Alameda project to look like projects in other areas, many citing Oakland’s Jack London Cinema and parking garage complex as an example of what they did not want. Alameda resident Michael Carvalho said “you might as well call us San Leandro West if you build this.” 

Others, like Mary Fambrough, said they doubted the economic feasibility of the project, saying the cineplex would not attract the needed patrons from other areas. 

“How many people are going to come to the island to go to a movie when they have Emeryville and Jack London Square?” she asked. 

Fambrough also expressed worries that the cineplex would change the small town character of Alameda, saying that “cineplexes tend to bring problems with them such as crime and vandalism.” 

The meeting itself grew testy as it went into the early morning hours and it became clear how the vote would go, with project opponents at one point exchanging heated words from the audience with Mayor Johnson.u