SACRAMENTO-
Hotter than normal temperatures mean flowers are popping up in east Sacramento near McKinley Park.
Hotter than normal tempers mean certain signs are, as well – ones that say ‘Stop McVillage’ -as homeowners brace for problems from a planned housing development.
“They’ll get in their cars to and go through our neighborhood to get to theirs,” Katie McClean, who’s been in her East sac home since 1967, said Monday.
Congestion concerns – the focus of a meeting planned for Thursday in Midtown.
It’s not the site of McKinley Village, dubiously dubbed McVillage, but it is the place that could absorb 52 percent of the traffic from hundreds of new homes.
Much of that new traffic could be at B and 28th streets.
“Eighteen hundred cars at this intersection. We have a lot of concerns,” Julie Murphy, the co-chair of Midtown’s Marshall School – New Era Park neighborhood association said.
One of her biggest concerns? The trains that zoom through the area just above B Street.
Though the environmental impact report for the project references trains that zip through in seconds.
FOX40 cameras spotted one Monday afternoon that took more than five minutes to pass during the evening commute – a potential disaster for hundreds of drivers trying to turn onto one of only two planned access routes for McKinley Village.
Murphy can’t imagine what might happen if an emergency vehicle was trying to get through.
“This is just a site that cries out for a third access point,” she said.
Murphy believes a tunnel at Alhambra and B now slated for bikes could be the answer.
Homeowners want it widened for cars to take the pressure off of other routes.
Folks in Midtown have also suggested that northbound drivers on B street face a stop sign at 28th and southbound travelers be directed through an industrial area to 29th Street, skipping residential streets.
It’s another solution they’ve offered, but say they can’t get any real dialogue from developer Phil Angelides.
They say all they’ve heard is ‘we’ll get back to you.’
“We’re coming up on the end of this. This is going to council in the middle of April. People don’t want to live with this uncertainty anymore. What is going to happen to our neighborhood,” said Murphy.
The developer has said in the past that they are surprised by homeowners’ complaints because they have maintained an open dialogue.
Thursday’s community meeting on the matter will be held at the Hart Center in Midtown from 6pm – 7:30pm.